project 365 #166: child with hailstones

project 365 #166: child with hailstones
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

So there I am, cracking geodes on Pack Square, hanging out with my coworkers, smokin' cigarettes and takin' pictures for my job, when the temperature begins to drop. We're under one of those funky little pop up carnival tents with the geodes and some of the roughly 300 signs I've spent the last week making in Illustrator (which signs have gotten progressively funkier, but that's neither here nor there.) So. It's getting colder and the wind picks up. Then, this very cool hippie lady (one of those super uber hippies who live around here, the kind who have seen everything and done everything and now are living at Earthhaven and yet have maintained a certain modicum of sanity?) comes running over to us and she says, "This tent is gonna go." And we say, "Oh, no, thank you, but we're fine." "Oh yes it is," she says firmly, grasping one of the poles, "I was at a Rainbow Gathering in Colorado one time with one of these and. . . " And just as she said that, the wind began to switch, the house to pitch, and suddenly the hinges started to unhitch.

Then the rain kicked in. I said, "If we get it in further towards the building it'll block some of the wind!" as three people, a tent and two buckets of rocks were lifted skyward. Somehow, with the help of another magical materializing guy, we got it in towards Pack Place JUST as the hail began to really hit. This is when I booked for the door and left the three of them there. Not because I'm an abject coward (although I am, and the hailstones PLUS the lightning PLUS the wind PLUS the thunder PLUS the river that was washing around our feet got to me a bit) but because I am a Photographer. Goddamnit. And I took pictures. And it was all very exciting and kind of felt like a 70s Sci Fi movie as people flocked around the windows and it was all lit up inside while outside some kind of wacked out weather apocalypse was going on and all our other coworkers came dashing up from the museum downstairs to see if we were still alive and/or to bring the tents in and we watched the one stranded volunteer near the flume wait patiently and I bummed a cigarette from a friend of mine and her little girl, pictured here, dashed in and out collecting hailstones.

High drama at work. I don't get a weekend for another seven days, so stuff like this must sustain me. Which isn't hard, since it was AWESOME. Also awesome is coming home to an empty house, putting on sweats, sitting back with a smoke and just, thank the gods, not having to talk to anyone or do anything for anyone or anything at all but just be. Right now at work I have to be nice all day to tons of people and run around and be helpful and stuff. I'm actually very good at this but it takes a toll and when I get home? I simply cannot be around homo sapiens at all, and since I don't have to right now, it's glorious. Oh, and when I got home? The deck was dry. No rain, no hail here in West Asheville, maybe five odd (very odd) miles from downtown.

project 365 #47: ice

project 365 #47: ice
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

The ice that somebody dumped in the Rhino courtyard after an event isn't going anywhere. No, those cubes are sitting happily, fully formed and almost sentient, like they're about to take on some kind of creepy ersatz life, like Frosty, only more debauched. Ice Cube Guy, a demented creature built of cubed ice, lurching around looking for a nice rum drink to bury itself in. No luck, Icey, no, sorry, Ice, Ice, baby - we're drinking hot toddies and rum and hot chocolate, curling up on the couch under a sleeping bag, spending the majority of our paychecks on heating oil (fuck, that hurt too) and in general hoping something resembling spring hits soon.

Fuck February. Fuck days where it's 24 degrees when I get to work and 20 when I leave. I don't recall signing on for the Yukon.

However, Ashevillains are getting out. N & I tried to go see Casino Royale at the Brew N' View and it was sold out & the place was packed. Then we went to Burgermeister, which was great, but also jammed full of people. Why aren't they all at home huddled around a blow dryer like sane folk?

project 365 #44: coming home in the rain

project 365 #44: coming home in the rain
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

The rain started coming down hard as I was on my way home from work and it matches my mood perfectly. I've been on some kind of crazy emotional roller coaster the last few days and I'm tired of it and sad and blue and wishing I was someone else, somewhere else and that I didn't get like this occasionally - off balance, out of the flow, non Tao.

But I do. And then I get better again. Which is sometimes hard to remember, in the rain.

Fog

There's been lovely fog in the mornings lately, as there often is in Asheville in October, and here's a charming little foggy slide show of fog images for you to mistily enjoy. You will probably notice, as I have noticed, that I actually used to take better pictures with my old point & shoot 3.2 megapixel camera than I do with my large, impressive, bells & whistles & manual stuff 5 megapixel newish camera. This has been kind of depressing me, as I have also noticed that I seem incapable of holding a camera straight. There's always a list to port on my horizon, and yes, I know, that lends itself to commentary right there, except I don't like port. I had port once, by mistake, when I was so young that we couldn't tell the difference between it and the sophisticated beverage we actually desired, wine that was not Strawberry Hill, and it was quite gruesome.

A week from tomorrow I'm driving to Atlanta to try out for Jeopardy, yikes, and alas, somehow time has gotten away from me and I'm not smart or thin yet, the two things I blithely assumed I would be by now. Damn. Oh well. I'm just going to go and wing it and if I blow it, I blow it: such is life. My family, particularly my mother, disapproves of this attitude. My mother told me sniffily not to let my children hear me talk like that, in case they started acting that way. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was far, far, far too late for that.

Things Were Great and Then

fogandwires
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I was in a good mood this morning when I walked Theo in the fog and took a bunch of foggy pictures and even when I went off to work I still felt pretty cheerful despite a bit of a hangover and so on. And then all hell broke loose and he who shall not be blogged about got into some fairly serious trouble and she who loves to be blogged about's car finally gave up the ghost and just died on the edge of Fairview. That's two bad things and so now I'm anxiously waiting for the third shoe to drop which is a rotten, rotten feeling. Argh.

I have been all cheerful for the past couple of weeks and in fact on Monday my Zen therapist and I called it quits because, you see, I am just so sane and stuff and there I was, smugly enjoying my life and feeling gratitude and so on and now, fuck, it's all gone to shit again.

So A says to me that the problem with M is that he needs a very strict and unvarying routine and I said, "That is impossible. We don't live on Camazotz." which is true, and I guess I am glad we don't but sheesh. Sometimes an all knowing brain taking care of all these pesky details would be nice, you know? And when you ground a kid you essentially ground yourself, so if you're wondering where I am, I'm at home, being grounded.

In a complete nonsequitur, I just googled Camazotz, which as you probably know is the evil totalitarian planet of A Wrinkle in Time, which I in my 12 year old wisdom always assumed was a thinly veiled reference to Soviet Russia - in Soviet Russia, brain thinks you! - but it turns out that Camazotz is a Mayan bat god. Cool.

Rain and the Fair's Coming Up

It's raining, which is

DAMNIT! I was going to write a nice post about the rain, and the fair, and reminisce a little about the hurricanes of two years ago and then, if you got really fucking lucky, I was going to talk about this cardinal family in the Rhino Courtyard I've been watching. I mean, imagine that shit. Cute Birds, OMG LOLZORS!

BUT INSTEAD, my phone just rang and it looks like young M has missed the school bus AGAIN which AGAIN fouls up my plans for a useful and a leisurely morning. This is getting really old, this driving frantically to Asheville High School every morning and then frantically back home and then frantically getting ready to work where, of course, everything is set on high frantic. And I'm TIRED, DAMN IT, and oh yeah, I have also just discovered the work of John Cheever, which I know is pathetic, but I was supposed to read him in high school or college and somehow took umbrage at the

JEEZUS! Now he says he's taking the city bus and that means he'll be fucking late again and the new draconian attendance policies at Asheville High make that not good.

AAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH! Imagine a cogent and delightful essay here, musing on Cheever and nature, the changing tides of 50 years and a little more, illustrated perhaps with a thoughtful metaphor or two. Imagine words like little jewels, prose that twinkles and fizzes with intelligence and wit. Okay, good. I'm going to try to fucking track down my errant son and drive him to school AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGG

Heat Wave

So, I don't have air conditioning. Big surprise, you know, since I barely have heat in the winter: obviously I'm not going to have air conditioning either. Most of the time I'm okay with this - in fact, let's be honest, I'm downright obnoxious about it, since I like to make snarky comments about pollutants, and living the simple life, and other self satisfied Asheville hippie shit like that. It's great when poverty can make you snobbish and look, we poor people have to have something to feel superior about, besides our gas efficient compact beaters. Honestly, though, the lack of AC hasn't been all that bad, for two simple reasons: 1) more or less freezing to death every day last winter makes one realize just how precious and fleeting, not to mention cheap, 85 degree heat really is, and 2) I've been "working" at home for a year and thus, you see, I'm fully acclimated. A measly window fan feels fine to me and I pull a down comforter on at midnight when the temperature drops to 70.

That is, until today. Today I started my New Job, which I'm very pleased about and enjoying already, plus feeling useful and all that, and. . . get ready. . . it's air conditioned. It's so air conditioned, in fact, that I need a sweater and possibly some long johns and maybe a parka and a sherpa guide or two. All good, right? Finally, I get to experience how the other half, the air conditioned half, lives and works. No more sitting here sweating over a computer that overheats every 15 minutes, right? Yeah, right. Except it only took a day for me to lose my acclimitization, and now, sitting in the kitchen, this 89 degree heat feels like 103. I think this is what they mean by Heat Index - it's heat labeling for the air conditioning impaired, for those who are used to icy cold indoors and sweltering outdoors. It kind of bites. No wonder everyone has been complaining so loudly.

A Few Vague Unrelated Things

First, the Computer
My computer is fucking up all over the place and I'm scared. I was working a couple of hours ago (working on one thrice damned .jpg, pixel by fucking pixel, mind you) when my computer just suddenly completely shut itself off, blam, kaboom, no warning. And my cable internet has been erratic at best lately; it seems like I have to reboot the modem every single time I turn on the computer and sometimes it just goes off randomly in the middle of what I'm doing. During this cable internet down time, by the way, the lights on the modem flash madly, which worries me. Add to this the fact that in the last three weeks my printer AND my monitor both died and signs point to ominous. I'm scared. I need computer help. My computer is 3 years old and I know, that's 90 in human years (similar to dog years, computer years are set at a 30:1 ratio with human years) but I neeeeeeeed it to keep on working. Argh.

Some Random Notes On Photography and Dreams
My camera, as we know, is something of an obsession. I like to take it everywhere, but alas, this is just not possible, since it's big and bulky and not necessarily easy to carry without either a) looking like a complete touristic doofus or b) worrying the entire time that it's going to get scrunched or smushed or, gods forbid, stolen. Sometimes both a and b apply. So I don't always take it with me. Inevitably, when I don't have it, photogenic things happen all around me. Yesterday, for example, when on my way home from my mothers I got caught up in one of those oh so Asheville mountain microclimate events: to wit, there was a huge and very local thunderstorm over Biltmore Village and Biltmore Forest. The sky was utterly amazing and driving along Swannanoa River Road (wait, I don't think that's what it's called there, the portion of it on the other side of Biltmore Avenue that goes past all those concrete factories and trainyards and Victoria Road, the part that gets flooded when it rains) was even more amazing, since it was pouring sheets of rain behind the trains and over the woods that border the estate, but sunny and bright where I was, some 500 yards away. I love it when that happens. At any rate, this wishing for the camera thing must have struck deep into my subconscious, because that night I dreamt about constantly walking into places that were unbearably perfect to photograph: perfect shadows, great contrasts, amazing colors, remarkable circumstances - and, you guessed it, I didn't have the camera and it caused me much grief. Wailing and gnashing of teeth, as PG Wodehouse so famously said.

Book Review! Whee!
The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, by Alexander McCall Smith, are the literary equivalent of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light (who I will not dignify with a link) and I find it wildly weird and offensive that they were shortlisted for the Booker.

Wait. Stop the presses. I based the above Booker information on a vaguely remembered blurb on the jacket of the first book. Googling reveals that in fact they were NOT shortlisted for the Booker prize. Doesn't look like they were long-listed either. So what were they? Well, let's google a little more. The jacket copy is: "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency received two Booker Judges' Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement." Hmm. Interesting. WTF, exactly, is a Booker Judges' Special Recommendation? Googling that turns up. . . that book and that quote. Over and over again, repeated ad nauseum in every magazine and paper that reviewed it, which was a lot. Nothing else. No other book in the history of the world, apparently, has won this recommendation. Which could mean that these books are just, you know, uniquely incredible, or it could mean that Booker Judges' Special Recommendation means exactly NOTHING. Nada, zip, or possibly a couple of people who once served as Booker judges said something like "Well, yes, I do specially recommend that book - to the feebleminded." Ah advertising, PR and the endless marketing campaign. It never fails to surprise me, although not, probably, everyone else.

I wondered about this recommendation because frankly, the books SUCK. I know this because I read the first five. Why? So you won't have to! Also because my brother gave them to my mother to read during her hospitalization and I can't help myself: I'll read anything, especially when it's free for the borrowing. It is true that they have much in common with crack cocaine: you can't put them down, even when your better self is screaming Stop! Stop now!, you know how bad they are for you and they may leave some residual brain damage. I learned a lot from these books, I must say. For example, did you know that most everyone in Botswana is happy, particularly those who hew to traditional values? And that they express their values in simple sentences because, you know, they're natives and natives are so cute! Eeeurrgh. They remind me of those gruesome Jan Karon books. Warning: more Thomas Kinkade horriblity awaits you if you click that link, "gentle reader", within the Mitford books, which are not recommended for those with diabetes, since the sugar content is approximately that of a tanker truck full of coca cola syrup. The Ladies Detective Agency books are very similar, but with a creepy added overlay of colonialist paternalism. Bleck. I read them and now I wish I could scrub them off my brain.