Overdue

I keep tripping over the fan that I've got on the floor (positioned so it will blow directly at Sluggo's brain pan.) The fan also makes my toes cold. It does less for Sluggo, alas. I have also discovered something as a result of using the fans. The plugs of both have one prong wider than the other. When I plug them into the socket on the west wall, the wider prong must go on the right side. When I plug them into the socket on the south wall, the wider prong must go on the left side. I don't know which way is standard, and apparently neither did the person who did the wiring in this house. One or the other of those sockets must have been installed upside down. I've never liked this house.

Much of the night was computerless. I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to catch up anytime soon. The mail will go unsorted and unanswered, the spam will remain undeleted, the pictures will not be uploaded, the planned journal entries will languish in my brain, festering. Summer begins . . . tomorrow? I can't remember. I've suppressed it, I think. Oh, the horror!

( Sunday Verse )

Passage

The air conditioner cycles off, and the growing heat of the still air takes me to dusty days of sunburn and doldrums. The thin clouds that whiten the afternoon sky glow like sultry alabaster, and all the day becomes weight, crushing the air, making each breath a labor. It is like being in the hot schoolroom, enduring the slow passage of time that has been captured and imprisoned in the big clock, which doles it out with painful slowness from behind its bland yet malevolent glass eye.

The air conditioner cycles on, and its cool draft is like that which flowed from the opened doors of the refrigerators at Leo's Market where we stopped to buy cold drinks. Across the boulevard and behind the row of ratty motels and auto salvage yards lining it, the trains ran, great rumbling diesel engines straining with weighted boxcars full of goods from the factories and packing plants of Los Angeles. I stood on the market's covered porch and watched the names roll by; Frisco, Southern Pacific, Great Northern, D&RG, Western Pacific, Pennsylvania, Norfolk & Western . . . . There were birds perched on the telephone lines like notes of music on a page.

The air conditioner cycles off, and the sound of the train engine stops abruptly, the rumble of traffic is gone, the birds of memory scatter in a flutter of real wings, and I see through my window an acorn woodpecker on a mulberry twig still bobbing from the force of his landing. The white clouds are yellowing toward the evening of spring's final day. The still air of the quiet room grows warm again. I wonder where it will drag me this time?