Tuesday, August 31, 2004

It's that week. The normally vacant highways all around are thronged with burningmen and -women en route to the new city under construction at the Black Rock Desert. Discovering a corner of the state they didn't know existed before. Thrilling the chambers of commerce; annoying local residents. I've arrived at Norris's house while he's out to fetch home my G4, where I expect a dial tone on my phone before 5. I seem to have solved the upstreaming problem (some kind of corruption in IE, it turns out; all has been well since I switched to Netscape for blogging purposes, although figuring out how to do that took me a month). Things are looking up. Except that over this past weekend my ex-Housemate visited feral for the first time, and sent me a Radio Userland E-mail ("nice little blog") just to let me know. That was a stunner. Bound to happen, though, I guess. I'd wondered whether this would affect what I post here, but I don't think it will, really. Yesterday morning, while 513 E-mails downloaded from my three-and-a-half-weeks-inaccessible Frontiernet account, I climbed the steep, shallow steps in Norris's cabin to try on a pair of his work jeans (he has 50 pairs, I have two, and--guess what!--we're exactly the same size) and on the way back down I fell--all the way, OW OW OW OW OW--and off the landing, even, OW, and down the last couple of steps, there went the grape ivy plant, and there I lay, stupid and in pain, sprawled in a sea of potting soil, on Norris's living room floor. He works every weekday building miles of fence at some ranch--finished putting in posts yesterday, starts bracing today--so I was alone. I was surprised to feel so shaken and helpless. I cleaned up the mess the best I could and finished up the chores remaining on my Monday list (a drive to Alturas for oil in the car, a drive to Lakeview to pay the llama vet) and sat finally on my sofa at home--leaned, really--in my flannel pants and T-shirt, listing to the left, with a black bruise and a welt the size of a fist on my hindquarters, and napped sort of pathetically through All Things Considered. I'd left Norris a note, and he actually drove over here last night to comfort me. And brought me a pair of his work jeans to wear. So that's one way to do it. I'm sore this morning from the base of my neck to the tip of my vestigial tail. It's time to attend to the physical world, I guess. 10:36:25 AM    comment []