“This Mess We’re In”(Part Two)
“The sunrise/ Over the river/ The freeway/ Reminding/ Of this mess we're in/ and/ (Oh) The city sun sets over me.”
This Mess We’re In -P.J. Harvey
We are currently in the middle of the mercurial period of Spring that features ever-fluctuating cold and hot temperatures, so I ordered us a thirty dollar fan from Amazon a couple of weeks ago, which was just slightly larger than half the standard 20’x 20’ “box” size to avoid putting in the AC ridiculously early.
And when it arrived, this fan simply didn’t work. Of course, neither of us could wrap our minds around this fact in real time.
So we tried plugging it into multiple outlets, toggling between neutral and the two presumptive settings where it would become a fan in practice, rather than a fan in theory, but this work was absolutely in vain.
We’ve ordered things before that could have worked better, but we’ve never ordered something that absolutely failed to function even glancingly.
The Decorative descriptor on the manual I would eventually forget to return to Amazon with the lemon fan should have perhaps been a warning, but presumably it was originally manufactured to function as a fan. Adding insult to injury, this mishegoss also interrupted our essential weekly viewing of “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney,” but we did eventually bend to the shape of circumstances, and just plugged in our old super-dusty desk fan, stuck it in the window, and cranked up the ceiling fan.
Our new AC works beautifully, but it was another online purchase, and it is too heavy for me to install myself, and my desire to drop an AC on one of our neighbors or kiss fifty bucks goodbye right now to get our building super to install it just isn’t there this early in the year; It’s often still cold at night.
2.
However, in other news, the two puppies across the street are growing up fast. George full-grown is about the size of Odon when he first arrived, but Odon’s turning into a big Rottweiler boy, and they are friends. I watched George happily loppiting towards his apartment before I left for work the other day and it made me very happy.
3.
I share my Father’s disdain for conversations hinging on a recitation of ailments, which is of course fairly common among folks his age, much to his chagrin, but the post-forties body breakdown, especially as someone whose labor is predominantly physical, is quite something.
After an afternoon street fair two weeks ago, I was commiserating with a new friend my age, as we both detailed the physical toll just walking around on asphalt had wreaked upon us in the course of a few hours.
Putting away large orders of wine and heaving those boxes around has given me unexpected middle-age biceps I could never develop lifting, but I quite literally looked at the last box to be moved the Tuesday before last, and optimistically thought “perhaps I will again possess the strength to move this in a few hours…” Happily I did.
Our Executive Chef at work loves my snail decal on my black denim jacket I wear at the change of seasons.
It is a mantra I am trying to live by these days. It is especially salient as I embark on my first book project in two decades. The first never found a home, but I feel hopeful this one will, if I can slog through a couple of years of interview work, and pull enough strands together to tell a coherent story.
I am fortunate that I genuinely like both my jobs, that I am really inspired creatively right now, and the best time of year in Chicago is fast upon us, but I also worry that I am once again doing the most, and quite willingly throwing more plates into the air than I can catch, to the detriment of my own equilibrium.., but the , when I got off the bus to work earlier today, with the end of “Transatlanticism” playing on my headphones, with its chorus of “So, come, come on, come on” playing, (at about 6.47 in this live recording)
with cool gentle raindrops falling, and a very fluffy golden retriever standing next to me on the sidewalk looking up at me—suddenly, despite a very frustrating afternoon, I felt like I was being borne up in water by invisible arms and shot to the surface just before drowning, and it felt like, “despite everything,” the world currently contains, it could also contain this: an immersive moment of so many good things all at once, and I was right in the middle of it all, even if it was just for that one electrifying, brief moment.