Vinnie had to wear one of those cones for a couple of weeks. Thankfully that time is past. Too often in that troubled period his head, encumbered by that infernal apparatus, would blunder blindly too close the raised leg of Boris.

Suffice it to say that a cone is just another kind of funnel, and of such dual-use menace that anti-dog terrorists would gladly prescribe its constant use.

The view off our front porch:

I call them azaleas.  If they’re not, well this picture was carefully taken so as not to betray the amount of yardwork I need to do out front.  “Yardwork” being a synonym for “senseless butchery” as I apply it.

I was in a lousy mood most of Monday.  Just felt like shouting at everyone, and was gripped further by a sense of anxiety and grief, and something deeper inside me.  Like a mold of despond on my bones.

Anyway, the next day I was having a phone conversation with a colleague and I said enthusiastically “Yes, exactly!” despite not understanding what the hell she was talking about.  It’ll all sort itself out, just like my mood.  Which was dissipated somewhat from the prior day, as evidenced by my ability to dissemble with co-workers.

What helped begin to ease the black mood on Monday was mopping the kitchen and downstairs bathroom floors.  What caused the mood I don’t know, but it wasn’t the Virginia Tech murders, as I avoided reading anything about that until the next day.  And then I was most struck by the sense of shame expressed by so many South Koreans, and their apprehension of a backlash.  I want to wave these concerns away as illogical but realise theirs is a cultural reaction worth noting next time they air grievances with us.

UPDATE: To be clear, by “next time they air grievances with us”, I do not mean that we should throw this incident in their faces, but recognize that what we might consider an unjustified demand for an official national response to their grievances might be, from their perspective, a correct manner of assuaging their pain.

There is a scrap metal buyer who has opened up shop recently about a ten minute walk from our house.  When I take the dogs past it the parking lot is usually full of crappy old cars overloaded with ancient appliances and tangles of scrap and wire.  The prospective sellers tend to overflow onto the sidewalk, so I ease the dogs, on short leashes, past these folk yanking jagged sheets of metal siding from the backseats of their station wagons or a household’s worth of ducting from the bed of their pickup trucks.

A concommitant sight now is that of a tweaker pedaling his stolen mountain bike, holding onto the handlebars with one hand, towing with the other a shopping cart full of hubcaps, fenceposts, and other scrap to peddle.  I know where they’re going but where did it all come from?  Recycling is noble and a car denuded of hub caps is not thus rendered inutile but somewhere a balance has been upset.  If property is theft, what is theft itself? 

We come across this obscure store on our walks sometimes:

What the fuck, parents?  Who names their son “Adolf”?

Apparently this Adolf is not bothered by his parents’ choice.  He may even have embraced it; the “Adolf’s Office” is somehow endearing, if also creepy.

According to iTunes, I have 10 hours, 3 minutes, and 29 seconds of Napalm Death songs in my collection.  I could fly from here to London and listen to Napalm Death the whole time.  And there’s a similar amount of Napalm Death albums I don’t yet have, so if I complete the collection, there’s my round trip covered.

I also have 5 days, 5 hours, 5 minutes, and 27 seconds of AC/DC in my collection, and there’s little to add to that but some live bootlegs I don’t yet have of the Bon Scott era.  At least I can get through the work week with what I have.

This is a black day.  Cathy Seipp is a wonderful writer whose blog I’ve followed for years, even if I wouldn’t consider myself entirely on her side of the political divide.  Alas, it seems now that she is leaving us.  If I prayed, now would be the time to solicit a miracle.

As seen on Tim Pratt’s website:

“The work-in-progress meme.  Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.”

So, from p. 123 of my wip:

      I was not disappointed, nor pleasantly surprised by the product that drizzled from a nozzle in an alcove of that cracked cabin.  The station moved past the gaps and tears in the hull; we disengaged from its embrace and fell back down to the Earth.  I was too busy to worry about the state of the ship or our destination; I concentrated on slurping up the ripe slurry the Consul had provided for our supper.  I had been awake for hours beyond count — beyond the possibility of cramming their number into a frame of reference, having no timepiece and having bounced from land to orbit.  I slumped back into one of the premolded seats, having found one that fit my ass, and blearily watched the haze of the planet’s atmosphere as it twinkled in and out of view past the dreadful portholes.
 

I am posting from Newark airport, which has added the middle name of “Liberty” since I last was here, shortly after 9-11. I arrived here on Monday and instantly laid down to sleep until Tuesday, as you do in New Jersey. When I woke up my mother’s house was snowed in:

So I took some pictures of the snow on the fields in back of the property.  Also the trees:

Trust the Hum-Dinger brand:

After a few days of being snow-bound, we finally we able to get on the road.  We chose to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art:

We looked at art:

I inserted myself (artistically) in this portion of an installation by Georges Adéagbo:

I also bought a book of paintings of Mary Cassatt, because a couple of her paintings in this museum capitivated me.  I also took a picture of downtown Philly, which was as close as I got:

Yesterday we went to Bethlehm, Pennsylvania.  That town was formerly dominated physically and economically by the steel mills; these pictures don’t do justice to their presence:

In a local bookstore I bought a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in order to express the solidarity
with the working man that this town inspires.

On our way home we avoided Butztown, as you do:

In the song “Extradition”, off the album War & Peace Volume 1 (The War Disc), Ice Cube begins with a soliloquy to his mother explaining that “If some people came by the house lookin for me/I’m innocent of anything they say I done,” and promising to see her in the future.

How does he sign off on this message to his mama?  “Your son, Ice-mutherfucking-Cube.”  There is no entry between comprise and comptroller in the man’s dictionary.

I don’t know what’s up with spelling mother with a u.  Must be a g thang.