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Tuesday, June 26, 2007
This is not about acquiring a new toy
(although I did, but it’s not a toy;
it’s a necessity).
When I got my new DVD player set up,
I suddenly realized that I’ve been living for weeks,
maybe months
with a defective DVD player,
and watching movies and listening to music
assuming there was something wrong with every disc I played.
The first DVD I put in was a movie from 1968 and not even in stereo
(if..., from when Malcolm McDowell was a fascinatingly intense young actor,
before he played a version of himself in most of his roles
(not that he isn’t still fascinating and intense, of course).
I was profoundly affected by this movie
when I saw it at the Magic Lantern Theatre in Isla Vista
when I was a sophomore at a college
where the smell of teargas was not unknown).
So then I played Merle Haggard’s Unforgettable,
and if you don’t already know how soulful his voice is,
you should hear how he melts into the great American standards
with a mixture of honey and blended whiskey.
And then I put in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking,
and it’s the first time I’ve played anything from the audio book club I joined
without having to listen to snorts and skips all the way through,
and it just goes to show you,
and besides that,
I was thinking of dropping out of the club
and demanding my membership fee back,
but now I’m all about keeping my queue
(I think they call it a “bookshelf”)
filled.
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I’m still not working outside every night,
but last night I had a mission.
When I got my new DVD player set up,
I suddenly realized that I’ve been living for weeks,
maybe months
with a defective DVD player,
and watching movies and listening to music
assuming there was something wrong with every disc I played.
I cleared away all the brush and brambles from the back porch,
because somehow I envisioned myself
reading on the porch,
which I did,
until the bugs came around
and the light started to dim.
What I’m reading now is
A Place of Hiding,
which I know means I’m two full already-published novels behind
in the Elizabeth George canon,
but I lost track of this one on the top shelf of my bookshelf
(my actual bookshelf),
and I do have the one after it
but not the one after that,
and I’ll cross that bridge after reading this one and the next one,
and probably the new Harry Potter and A Thousand Splendid Suns,
all of which I intend to make time to read in July,
despite the fact that I will have little or no time to do anything but work
during that overly populated month.
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Schoolgrounds. |
Today, being payroll day,
and horribly crowded with “need,”
meant I had to make a “want” choice at the end of the day
between reading and working in the yard.
My goal is still to fill the yard waste container each week by Thursday night,
but I think I can come up with a way to do that quickly
if I should fall behind,
because there’s plenty of loose dead straw-like grass
lying around on the ground
that if I wanted to
(which I don’t)
I could fill up the container for the next 52 weeks
on that alone
(although some time in November
it would turn to something muddy
that I would no longer care to handle,
leather gardening gloves or not).
So today I chose to read instead.
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