wideeyedfunk

Category: Life

Always so surprising.

  • Numb.

    The leaves on the ground are red and orange and gold and wet in the rain. The air stinks of fall, of soil going to sleep and grasses falling into dormancy. The squirrels stash nuts on my hose reel, on the little ledges of decorative trim all over the house, in the compost heap. Hamish the Corgi races smiling through the fluttering heaps of leaves at top speed, he thinks the rustling noises make it seem like he is going faster, faster, faster. Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog stands at the back door testing the temperature with her nose, holding one dainty foot above the rain-wet stoop. Maybe, maybe not. She can’t decide if she really wants to go outside.

    I should feel something when I look at all this charm but for the next day or three or four I’m numb. Numb at best. A many-months long project finished up this morning when the grant proposal was submitted. I balanced working on it with other writing projects, other lab work, the start of archery season, and the rest of the WideEyedLife.

    Consequently, the life isn’t feeling WideEyed. It feels more like dragging the self with shattered nails and scraped raw nerves up splintered steps to the office and chaining the hands with rusty, clattering blood soaked manacles to desk and keyboard, moving fingers up and down and hoping something useful comes from the hacking and clacking while paired hounds of leftover stress and residual anxiety howl in my cold and shivering emptiness.

    Nice.

    Tomorrow’s a new day. I’ll practice smiling in preparation.

  • My work colleagues are dogs. And no, I’m not a sheepherder.

    Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog and Hamish the Corgi work with me all the day long. And they work hard on their dog chores. Miss Tibbit holds the cushion down on the chair. Hamish holds the chair in position. They sigh and stretch and mumble over their tasks. Every now and again, Hamish has to squirm into a better holding position, Miss Tibbit must squeeze herself tighter into her little dog-round position.

    Today Miss Tibbit worked in the window seat in the front parlor. Hamish occupied himself with holding down the old red settee.

    Dogs

    I was so lonely. The keys wouldn’t type right on the keyboard. The words wouldn’t come in my careful writing. The day was bleak.

    DogcolleaguesNow we’re back up here for the evening round of work. Sweet Tibbit is snoring and twitching with her full post-dinner belly and Hamish looks like he may have actually passed out. And, sure, the WideEyedSpouse is across the room, sighing and creaking around in his chair doing mysterious Spouse office things.  But he’s with me in here only a couple of hours a day. My real work colleagues are over there on the floor and in the corner chair.

    Sometimes I think it might be smart to haul myself up to the University to work. There are people there. It is just barely possible that I would benefit from some human interaction in my puzzling life.

  • …time is passing at an accelerated rate –

    I looked out my office window this morning and saw yellow maple leaves scattered all over the yard. The borage in the garden is barely clinging to abundant life. The bees are a little less busy in the blooms. It isn’t summer anymore.

    Time is passing.

    Normally I don’t think much about the seasons changing, except to contemplate on the untidy lack of straightness in our planet’s axis relative to the orbital plane. That bothers me kind of a lot. Things should be straight, not at weird angles making everything all tilty and awkward and winter and summer.

    But I keep noticing – time is passing.

    Yesterday was trash day. Our junky old dishwasher didn’t last even an hour out on the curb. And that’s fine, except that I would be willing to swear that it just was trash day the day before that. It only comes once a week so if every day is trash day in my mind, what is happening to the days in between?

    Time is passing in a blur of researching and writing and analyzing ancient tools and remnants of dinners eaten thousands of years past. There’s joy in the accelerated time phase. I’m confused a lot and rely on daily lists written in a little purple Moleskine. When the lists fail to direct my actions, I stand and pat my pockets, “where am I going?” I ask WideEyedResearchAssistant B. “Upstairs to the talk,” she tells me. I stagger out of the lab to find the seminar room.

    I sort of wonder how long this superquick passage of time will last.

    What day is this?

  • When deadlines physically manifest.

    BusyDeskWhen some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall deadline grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the office wall, and she looks you crooked in the eye and she asks if you finished your draft yet, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ WideEyedFunk always says at a time like that: “Is your draft done yet, WEF?” “Yes ma’am, it’s uploaded to dropbox.”

    Misquote adapted from Big Trouble in Little China. 1986. Director John Carpenter. Twentieth Century Fox.

  • Chickens three ways.

    Chickens. The WideEyedSpouse won’t let me have any. We have the space for a microflock and someone has to eat all of those extra worms in the worm bin. Which, if you recall, was also forbidden by the Spouse. He believes he has some power over the goings on of the WideEyedHousehold. Funny.

    Chickens were in my life three ways today.

    Chicken1The Caribbean chicken spends most days with me. I carried that one from his home rolled in a tube. I took the Caribbean chicken to a frame shop here in Buffalo and I’m pretty sure that when we unrolled the canvas, sunshine and cheer glowed out at us. The framer laughed, couldn’t help herself. Sometimes I worry that I brought only one Caribbean chicken home. There were a dozen or more – we were left in the back room of a little gallery to flip through the canvases and pick which chicken would be moving to Buffalo with us. Do the others miss our little red chicken? Have they moved to homes in Paris, Kansas, Toronto, Heidelberg?

    The next chicken in my life today simultaneously was glorious and wretched. Chicken 2, yeah we’ll call it Chicken 2, was a well-picked over carcass reeking of Myron Mixon’s smoked chicken rub. Except that that happy delicious reek which originated in our backyard smoker was overlain by the stink of rotting meat. And visually, I can’t even begin to explain the nightmare of the appearance of Chicken 2. See, Chicken 2 currently resides in the flesh eating dermestid beetle colony in the lab at the university. We’ve taken to roasting whole chickens around here so that I have food for the little beetle guys when our road kill supply runs low. They ate the Canada Goose and we haven’t skinned the raccoon yet, so bony little carcass Chicken 2 is squatting in the tank under a shroud of moving black beetle carapaces. Looking at it is mesmerizing, like watching the tide but less comfortable than that. You can really feel them creeping around on your own person, a gift that keeps giving for hours of psychological twitches. So that was Chicken 2.

    Probably the last chicken in my day, Chicken 3, arrived just before dinner. I sort of hope this is the last chicken of the day, because otherwise we are moving into weird territory. Chicken 3 is printed on a chair in the Anthropologie catalog. I instantly wanted it. If I can’t HAVE chickens, I should be able to SIT AMONG chickens, right? This makes perfect sense to me and perhaps you can understand why the WideEyedSpouse’s life is made complicated sometimes. Chicken 3 is going to haunt me and there’s a good chance that when I have the new yard sale settee recovered, it’s getting chickens.

    Settee

    Yeah, chickens.

  • what is now and what will be..

    My dream self is a deadly street fighter. My dream self can speak 4 languages fluently. My dream self has several published books, can fence (with a sword, not stolen merchandise), and has a Nobel Prize.

    She has a tattoo of a stately oak (Quercus coccinea Muenchhausen) scribed on her back and joie de vivre on her arm. My dream self can drive race cars and ski the triple black diamond trails. My dream self is smart, she is confident, she never eats too many potato chips in one sitting.

    She is perpetually 35 years old, young, fit, lovely, and doesn’t need reading glasses. My dream self is kind, mature, and gracious. She never has too much or too little to say and never, ever makes a fool of herself. She has never disappointed people, or been disappointed by them. She doesn’t fail or falter.

    I have, I do. I’m old. Accomplishments are things past. Regrets, disappointments live long in my heart.

    But Dream-Self reminds Me-Self: dreams are not what was. Dreams are what is now and what will be.

    …

    You’ll have to excuse me now. I have some things to do.

  • Dark energy and love.

    Yesterday evening I was reading about the form of the visible universe in my new backyard astronomy book. The WideEyedSpouse was doing something involving dinner while I sat at the awesome vintage kitchen table. Wiggins the Ancient Cat kept trying to put his butt on the page. Tibbit the Useless rested her chin on my knee. She was bound for disappointment, as I was reading not eating. Hamish the Corgi sat looking at me, learning about the universe through our mental link.

    Stars. Planets. Constellations. Yeah, yeah. Nothing new there. (Except that I discovered that I should be able to see the Milky Way directly above my house right now and all I can see is the glare of my neighbors’ anti-thief lights. Annoying, but what can do you? Cities are creepy.)

    Then, I looked at a photograph from the Hubble that captured hundreds of whirling galaxies. They face every which way. They are different colors. Big ones, little ones. Galaxies all over the place in every direction. There are billions of them. I felt a weird nerve rush.

    I didn’t know there were so many. Did you? Sure ok, the astronomers and physicists know but. I never realized. Did you know a little one is running into ours over on the other side? Holy cats.

    I looked at a depiction of the distribution of galaxies in the known universe. They cluster in strings and clots. They look like rumples of ocean foam on the incoming tide.  I sort of wondered what was in between. The astronomy book said there was nothing in between. That seemed weird but ok with me. I like a tidy universe. I guess it isn’t so simple.

    Evidently there is dark matter.

    Evidently there is dark matter-energy and it is abundant.

    Evidently we, the universe, are expanding because of this hypothesized dark energy and eventually all will be diffuse. All will be isolated and alone, beyond each other’s detection – unable to even know that anything else is out there.

    The WideEyedSpouse and I have been married for 19 years and 40 minutes as the clock looks at this moment. I’m sitting here at the desk worried about deadlines and dark energy. The WideEyedSpouse is 30 feet and 2 stories away worried about getting the racing stripes placed correctly on the Mini Cooper S. Our little bit of the universe isn’t expanding too quickly for us. I don’t think it can.

  • A Stranger At Home

    The WideEyedSpouse and I grew up with tens of thousands of strangers joining our city every summer. For years I served them, working jobs at the drugstore, a campground, doling out aloe vera and firewood to heal sizzled skin and provide happy vacation memories. It never occurred to me to wonder what they thought about, what they talked about, what they were like. They were just people filling cars, filling the roads I needed to travel, filling lines at Wawa where I bought my coffee and American cheese with mustard and mayo on white bread sandwiches.

    Now Spouse and I have joined them. We left town by 1990, we didn’t know it was forever. College, grad school, jobs here and there. We’ve walked beaches far away – other shores on continents on other oceans. In places where no one has heard or will hear of our home town and few people speak our language. Yet, when we think of going to the beach, The Beach is the north end of our home island. Everywhere else is just beach. Somehow inferior, not infused with Home.

    Today, for the first time in 25 years, the Spouse and I were Going to The Beach. We flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flopped our way down 1st Street from our parking spot on Ocean Rd. Our out of state plates were an embarrassment.  Our gleaming white skin, an affront. “Now we’re on my turf,” the Spouse said, swinging his new ShopRite beach chair. “PAID,” said the red sticker pasted to the side. “I logged a lot miles on these streets,” he told me.

    We climbed the steps to the boardwalk and headed for the bathroom/life guard first aid station. “They fixed my knee up when I was like, five,” The Spouse looked at the grey building. “I threw myself into the surf and went down right on a broken clam shell.” Flip-flop, flip-flop. “Still have the scar to this day,” he said. (He’s showing it to me now – “that’s where I first learned about butterfly bandages.”)

    The sand was too hot for my feet and I endured the flipping shower of sand around me from my flip-flops while we walked around looking for our spot among the sand castles and family compounds. The people over there Do Not have control over their umbrella. Those folks are acting crazy with their food – there’s gonna be a seagull problem. Find a spot, apply the sunscreen, listen to the noise of vacation.

    WEF at Beach

    “It’s a careful use of language,” the man near us explained to his wife’s friend’s husband – this was clearly a husband playdate – “telling the workers they need to give more to the job without giving them any indication they’ll be paid for the extra hours.”  “It is about always asking what Jesus would expect,” a bronzed, muscled, tattooed man told his wife’s girlfriend. “Why didn’t you get the regular flavor ice cream?” a mom asked her son – he didn’t like his birthday-cake-flavored popsicle (it looked horrible, like a complex of mold species cultured together on a stick.) “I wanted to try something new,” he said, sad, the world ending, vacation no longer fun. I waited to learn if he would be punished for his taste bravery. “Ok,” she told him sweetly, “I’m sure the ice cream man will be back.”

    For hours they talked, changed position, applied sun screen, cooking themselves into a salt water and sun nirvana. I looked at the Spouse, startled to see a mid 40s man instead of the teenager who sat next to me in Latin Class in the high school just up the road. I realized that we were them, the tens of thousands invading town, clogging roads and lines at the store, and relying on the local kids to serve our food, life guard our swimming, sell us the aloe vera. I am rootless, disconnected, cut free from home. Am I free or am I lost?

  • Ten reasons not to buy a used car.

    The plan was simple. Hop in the car. Scoot over the Canadian border to hit the closest Costco and back home for lunch. What? Why Costco specifically? Because friends, they sell Kirkland Signature peanut butter filled pretzel nuggets. And our laboriously imported supply from an Alaskan Costco ran out. Needs must. No other peanut butter stuffed pretzel nugget will do.

    As the mighty Pathfinder heaved itself up and over the arc of the Peace Bridge, the WideEyedSpouse and I witnessed our doom. Cars. Cars as far as the eye could see gleaming in the summer sun, filled with hopeless dead-eyed passengers, lined up in two endless highway lanes out of Canada. On our side the border lines were short, but leaving…leaving was going to be bad. Once you are on the Bridge there is no turning back, no way home that doesn’t include two border crossings. I looked at the Spouse. “Well,” I said, “I guess we can take our time putzing in Costco.”

    What we didn’t know? Saturday marked the start of a major Canadian holiday weekend. I haven’t seen the stats but Ontario was evacuating on Saturday. And after the Costco run we would be evacuating with them, We’d be ok though because after Costco, we would have The Stuffed Nuggets. That’s what we figured anyway.

    What else we didn’t know? The St. Catharine, Ontario Costco does not carry the Kirkland Signature peanut butter stuffed pretzel nuggets.

    Depressed. Hungry. And surrounded by angry and frustrated Canadians, the Spouse and I joined the egress. The Niagara Falls Rainbow Bridge was supposed to be quicker. The line for the Peace Bridge extended for miles on the Canada side. We saw people walking along the traffic for something to do. Car doors were open. “Oh man,” I head the Spouse mutter as I piloted the Pathfinder off of that apocalyptic highway and headed for the Rainbow Bridge, “this is going to be bad.”

    Then we traveled 1.5 miles in 117 minutes of helplessly close people watching before we made it back into the U.S.

    We saw things.  Awful things. Wretched things. The Top 10 reasons to NOT buy a used car, ever again:

    10. shirtless hairy backs

    The summer sun sizzled on the asphalt. Superheated car exhaust blew from thousands of idling engines. It was hot. Some gained comfort by sitting shirtless and sweaty, cradled by their absorbent car seats.

    9. blood soaked gauze

    I watched an ancient man carefully pluck a wad of drooled-up, blood matted gauze from inside his lower lip. He inspected it closely and then it disappeared into the car depths. I watched for a long time and edged closer. I couldn’t see where he put it.

    8. hair follicles

    Wafts of hairs blew from car windows as we sat on the Rainbow Bridge, looking out at the Falls.

    1. sneezes

    So many splashy sneezes.

    6. farted up seats

    And oh, the aromas. Hot asphalt. Exhaust. Digestive gases oozing from nearby cars. “No, you go ahead,” I gestured to a car who wanted the space between me and the fart-mobile ahead in line.

    5. kid residues

    Snot. Drool. Cheerios. Vomit. So many toddlers in the vacation evacuation line, so many kinds of kid residues.

    1. skin scurf

    Dandruff. Eczema. Big heavy flakes like warm greasy snow.

    3. butt sweat

    Please.

    2. scabs

    Pick. Pick. Pick. Brush off.

    1. boogers

    Pick. Flick. Wipe.

    No more used cars. No more summer Saturday trips to Canada.

  • I dreamed of flesh eating beetles.

    I dreamed of flesh eating beetles and mortifying tissue and woke with the sense memory of the smell of decay.

    I blame the Turdus migratorius from yesterday. It wasn’t his fault, poor little robin, that one of the students found him dead on the road and collected him for the lab. It certainly wasn’t his fault that a skilled graduate student showed me how to skin and eviscerate a little songbird using his carcass. We recorded data for science and the permits, and plucked and skinned and removed blobs from inside him using forceps. We wrapped him in cheesecloth (did the cheesecloth company ever imagine such a use?) and put him in the lab fridge to dry out for a couple of days. It made me think of dry aging a nice roast. Might have to hit the butcher later.

    The dermestid tank, the flesh eating beetle habitat, was right next to us while we worked on the bird. Did they watch us prepare their supper? The larvae will creep through the cheesecloth and snack like crazy when we put the robin in there on Saturday. Just think, while you are enjoying your Saturday morning coffee and pastries before tackling the weekend chores, the dermestid larvae will be tying on bibs and settling in for the smorgasborg.

    We’ll have a nice clean skeleton in a week or so. That American Robin, number UBZA-002, will contribute to federally funded research about mutually impactful human and environmental relationships for generations. He’ll visit schools as part of a science class lecture about archaeology. He’ll teach graduate students about bird skeletons. He is transforming from performing flight with wings through physical space to causing flights of mind through ideas and hypotheses.  Is that some kind of bird rapture?

    The WideEyedSpouse won’t let me keep the dermestid tank here in the WideEyedHousehold. He says keeping flesh eating beetles in the basement is like housing a zombie. “If I fall down or something when I’m working out, next thing you know my leg is gone,” he argues. “Er…” I have no response.