rejectomorph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rejectomorph) wrote2023-07-18 07:33 am
rejectomorph) wrote2023-07-18 07:33 am
Reset Forty-Nine, Day Fifty-Five
Monday was eventful, and brought unexpected, though probably inevitable, and yet perhaps not lasting, change (criminy Dutch, did I just turn into a Regency period British epistolarian? I hope not. There's enough on my cracked, unwashed plate as it is.) But that to which I allude (aka the bush I'm beating around) is that the small homeless camp along the bike path behind my apartment vanished, and when I awoke about ten o'clock in the morning it was to the noise of machinery, which continued into the early afternoon hours. Large pieces of equipment went up and down the vacated path several times, the last of them a slow-moving sweeper that sent up quite a cloud of dust which mostly drifted west into the neighborhood the other side of the path. I don't know why the sweeper didn't have, or at least (if it did have) didn't use, any sort of spray system to keep the dust down (i.e. dampen it.)
But anyway the homeless camp is gone. I had begun to think of it as a conveniently nearby place to move myself if I should run out of money, but now that option is gone, at least for the time being. I guess I'll have to change my (admittedly infirm) plans. And I guess I'll be hearing fewer loud "fuck you"s hurled by and at concealed unfortunates, which occasionally was a thing. As neighbors they always remained strangers, but I suppose I'll miss them, as their mostly innocuous presence had become familiar to me, and I usually miss familiar things once they've gone, even if they meant little to me when they were there.
Of course the whole change could prove temporary, perhaps even quite soon. I have no idea where the campers were moved to, though the County does have a facility of sorts a couple of miles north, adjacent to the airport, which I believe (I've never actually seen it) is a jerry-built sort of open concentration camp meant to keep what is mostly out of sight mostly out of mind, thus allowing polite society to pretend (for a while, intermittently) that it has not developed intractable problems for which it is incapable of providing a solution. It would not surprise me were the campers back next week, enjoying the newly swept asphalt ribbon they might or might not call whatever the unhoused call home. I mean how the hell would I know? I just reside here.
Anyway, life, such as it is, goes sort of on, and I got another fairly long sleep Monday night, waking up shortly before dawn today, and I've drunk my orange juice and my tea and eaten my donut and must soon give some thought to what to do with this day which, the forecast informs me, will top out at a mere 99 degrees. Were I to venture a guess, I'd say it will most likely end up pretty much the same as Monday, full of Idernet. Much of it I spent listening to "The Very Thought of You," Ray Noble's 1934 ballad, as recorded in 1994 by Kenny Rankin. Quick calculations in my head tell me that almost half the span of sixty years between Noble's original recording of the song with vocalist Al Bowlly and Rankin's version has passed since Rankin's release, and Kenny Rankin is now as dead as Noble and Bowlly were (and still are) when he was in the studio. I haven't dug up the original 1934 recording yet, though I'm sure its on YouTube and I'll probably listen to it today, but I do love Rankin's version as much now as I did when I first heard it going on thirty years ago. One thing for sure is that both recordings are bound to outlive me.
But anyway the homeless camp is gone. I had begun to think of it as a conveniently nearby place to move myself if I should run out of money, but now that option is gone, at least for the time being. I guess I'll have to change my (admittedly infirm) plans. And I guess I'll be hearing fewer loud "fuck you"s hurled by and at concealed unfortunates, which occasionally was a thing. As neighbors they always remained strangers, but I suppose I'll miss them, as their mostly innocuous presence had become familiar to me, and I usually miss familiar things once they've gone, even if they meant little to me when they were there.
Of course the whole change could prove temporary, perhaps even quite soon. I have no idea where the campers were moved to, though the County does have a facility of sorts a couple of miles north, adjacent to the airport, which I believe (I've never actually seen it) is a jerry-built sort of open concentration camp meant to keep what is mostly out of sight mostly out of mind, thus allowing polite society to pretend (for a while, intermittently) that it has not developed intractable problems for which it is incapable of providing a solution. It would not surprise me were the campers back next week, enjoying the newly swept asphalt ribbon they might or might not call whatever the unhoused call home. I mean how the hell would I know? I just reside here.
Anyway, life, such as it is, goes sort of on, and I got another fairly long sleep Monday night, waking up shortly before dawn today, and I've drunk my orange juice and my tea and eaten my donut and must soon give some thought to what to do with this day which, the forecast informs me, will top out at a mere 99 degrees. Were I to venture a guess, I'd say it will most likely end up pretty much the same as Monday, full of Idernet. Much of it I spent listening to "The Very Thought of You," Ray Noble's 1934 ballad, as recorded in 1994 by Kenny Rankin. Quick calculations in my head tell me that almost half the span of sixty years between Noble's original recording of the song with vocalist Al Bowlly and Rankin's version has passed since Rankin's release, and Kenny Rankin is now as dead as Noble and Bowlly were (and still are) when he was in the studio. I haven't dug up the original 1934 recording yet, though I'm sure its on YouTube and I'll probably listen to it today, but I do love Rankin's version as much now as I did when I first heard it going on thirty years ago. One thing for sure is that both recordings are bound to outlive me.