Author: marginnotes_m4x28l

1.
So that I can use numbered sections and it won’t look as if the title and ellipsis are leading into all of them. Numbered sections seem to be all the rage these days, with Sven Lindqvist taking it to an extreme that might be a little too cute for its own good, but which I found intriguing. (Read about it here.) Plus they eliminate the need for transitions. Plus they fit the way my mind works.

Is that sort of like admitting my mind isn’t working very well these days at all?

2.
The problem with needing proper titles is having to dream them up, though. The safe thing is just to list a couple of the things that the post is about. Safe, but boring. The dangerous thing is to try for something evocative, witty. There is a decided risk of grand overstatement, of suggesting that it all means something, like an NPR radio essay. (“I learned everything I need to know about world affairs by watching my three-year-old finger painting…”) Maybe I’ll just use the day of the week.

3.
Work is a challenge these days. I just hope it is giving me character or hair on my chest or something.

4.
Last night, I left work slightly early so that my brother, father and I could make a six p.m. dinner reservation at Pazo, a “mediterranean” tapas restaurant on Aliceanna, down in the former dead zone between the harbor and Fell’s Point. According to the restaurant’s web site, the building is a former warehouse and machine shop dating to the 1880s, with exposed brick and massive steel joists visible below the ceiling. A mezzanine, where we sat, overlooks the main floor, and the place has a massive feeling of open space. We shared a sea bass and each ordered a couple of tapas plates, and everyone seemed well pleased, once I stopped complaining about my day, that is.

After dinner, we walked down Caroline Street to the Living Classrooms Foundation’s new Frederick Douglass/Isaac Myers Maritime Park, which I’d never seen close up, as they were only just starting work on it the last time I was employed by LCF. (Although I was working there at just the right point in time to get to pick up syringes and toxic waste and massive pieces of drift wood that floated into the construction site due to Hurricane Isabelle.) You probably know a little about Frederick Douglass, but Isaac Myers is more obscure. He was a free black in Baltimore during the 1800s who was trained as a ship caulker, a very important skilled trade in the days of commercial wooden ships. After encountering prejudice in the caulking trades, he and some other caulkers and investors (black and white, although LCF’s web site prefers to mention only the blacks) started their own shipyard (after emancipation, for what it’s worth). I don’t know if the little brick complex was directly associated with him or not. It’s a nice set-up, although it’s strange that they won’t let you out on their little pier. But the more strollable, non-Inner Harbor waterfront the city has, the better, in my opinion.

And a note: while it’s inspiring to look back and feel good about how far we’ve come since the days when someone like Isaac Myers could be chased out of his first job by white caulkers, last night there was a broken-down-looking black homeless man huddled on the promenade by the building bearing Myers’s name. Considering that the years immediately following the Civil War saw amazing advances for African-Americans (advances that were quickly undone a few decades later as the country entered the Jim Crow era) someone from Myers’s day might be surprised by how little we’ve really managed to fix regarding race relations since his time. Our schools are still de facto segregated, and whether or not you get an actual education still depends on accidents of birth. Back in Myers’s day, there was a rule against educating blacks, free or not, but it’s hard to argue that today’s poor, black Baltimore residents get much of an education in the city schools. Or rather, they get an education, but it’s not in reading, writing and arithmetic, it’s in how a society like ours can talk a grand game of equal opportunity with its back firmly turned on little children condemned to ignorance and squalor.

5.
The Office. What can I say? Not much. A. reads this, and I don’t want to give anything away. I think she’ll enjoy last night’s episode, though. Although the brilliance of the writers came through in that last little 30-second clip of Ryan. As my brother put it, if Karen had gotten the job, the show would have to be over, or it would turn into a happily-ever-after fairy tale. Now, as satisfying and heart-warming as certain developments were, it’s clear that there is still plenty of fodder for the emotional horror we all tune in for.

1.
…didn’t go to the gym this morning. Running, it seems, I can manage, but there is something about a gruesomely lit gym full of people (even an hour before dawn!) that just keeps me in bed these days. This is despite the fact that – speaking of gruesome – I would at least no longer have to look at Don Imus’s face – pinched and turd like under that ill-advised cowboy hat – on the televisions along one wall of the gym, but that doesn’t turn out to be incentive enough. I guess I’ve always just hated these places. The only gym I ever enjoyed going to was on the Coast Guard base in Miami Beach. Really, it was more of a weight room, and that might be the important difference: a dim room, cluttered with weight plates and dumbbells, the standing leg-press rack looming dark and ominous like a guillotine. Actually, there are two additional and probably more important qualities that contributed to my love of this room: hardly anyone was ever in it, at least when I went in, and I was allowed to go “on the clock,” whatever that term means during a multi-year stretch best described in a t-shirt I once saw in a store in Rehobeth: “This t-shirt belongs to me but my ass belongs to Uncle Sam.”

On my patrol boat, the command allowed the crew to spend the first hour of each work day on PT (physical training). In practice, this only applied to the two-man Operations Department, since everyone else had what you might call work to do. My supervisor, Fred, the senior quartermaster (navigator, in the naval services), was a fitness freak and highly encouraged me to be one too, although he spent his hour running. I did my running in the afternoons after I got home from work; mornings, I engaged in the closest I’ve ever come to a program of grotesque physical overdevelopment (not very close, but still, it was something). There was always a certain amount of resentment against the “bridge queens,” as quartermasters were sometimes fondly referred to by the crew members who had to actually get dirt under their fingernails, and our religious use of the PT hour when everyone else was already turning wrenches or chipping rust didn’t help. Our philosophy was that no one had forced these guys to become grease monkeys or deck apes. Fred and I had had a similar take on our early, entry-level experience as seamen and had chosen our specialty carefully. Call us bridge queens if you want, we thought, but at least the bridge has air conditioning.

Every weekday afternoon that the boat was in port, I ran about 4 miles along the streets near the pastel apartment complex where the Coast Guard had assigned me to live. I was running for my life. In Miami, I was very lonely and depressed, not having found anything like the camaraderie and social network I’d had at my previous station, a much larger ship based in the much friendlier city of Seattle. That ship had had a crew of 180, but the patrol boat had only 16, and the luck of the draw was against me. I got along with everyone on the patrol boat, and I respected them all, I just never felt like calling any of them up to go out on the town when we were in home port. (Obviously, it was a different story when we made foreign port calls on various Caribbean islands.) When I started actually considering having a few drinks before work to dull the pain, I knew I needed to try something different. Exercise became something I buried myself in, as a distraction from the numbness and emptiness of the rest of my existence. My program reached its apogee on the weekend. On Saturdays, I would go to a yoga class first thing in the morning, then hit the base weight room, then go for a run. But I would leave from the base, not from my apartment, meaning that within a half mile of starting out I was on the white, white sand of Miami Beach, running past sapphire blue water and topless super models walking leopards on leashes (OK, that only happened once, but it’s true: Miami Beach is a strange, strange place – and so easy to get to from the U.S.!). By the time I was getting around to the running portion of my Saturday program, it was usually noon or one p.m., which meant that it was hot, sometimes dangerously so. I even ran on code red days, the ozone punching holes in my lungs, my brain almost boiling in 104-degree heat. I was never the only one, but there were never very many of us pushing ourselves this way. The hotter it was, the crazier I felt and the more I wanted to do it.

The other thing that saved me was reading Thank You and Okay: An American Zen Failure in Japan. I didn’t exactly become a Zen Buddhist, but it was something of a revelation to see the possibility of understanding physical, menial work as a meditative activity. As I thought about it some more, I realized that the often nonsensical orders given by my supervisors, especially the executive officer, could be seen as similar to the koans offered by Zen monks to their acolytes as a way of preparing their minds for enlightenment. A koan, according to Wikipedia, is “a story, dialogue, question, or statement… containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet that may be accessible to intuition.” The classic example is “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” As an example of the kind of orders I’m talking about, the command at one point decided that our boat was not generally clean enough, so – in addition to the end-of-day cleanups we performed – we were ordered to spend the first part of every day cleaning as well. We weren’t cleaning our berthing areas, mind you, but our work spaces, meaning that – before, say, commencing a day of sanding and painting – we had to give the area where we would be working a really good sweeping and wipe down. I don’t know what in this was available to my “intuition,” but I certainly couldn’t bring any “rational understanding” to bear on such things. But keeping the Buddhists in mind, I was sometimes able to simply relinquish my need for any of this stuff to make sense and to lose myself in the physical pleasure of using my body and watching my paint brush turn great long expanses of the superstructure gleaming white under the fierce sub-tropical sun. (See, I got dirt under my fingernails, too, sometimes.)

2.
Yesterday’s visits from the electrician and the prospective property manager went well. The porch light is now wired to code and the smoke detector is hard-wired, with battery backup. And I’ll probably hire the manager who stopped by, although I’m going to check her references first. Working on the porch light, the electrician observed that, though the previous installation had not been done the way a professional electrician would have done it, “for amateur, they were pretty good. Definitely, they were trying to do good work here. They caulked from above, use pretty good wire. Not code, but pretty good…” He laughed and observed that there seemed to have been two different amateurs at work on the wiring in the house, “the drunk monkey” and this one, who seemed to actually know the principles and safety steps, if not the exact gauge and style of wire that will satisfy the city safety inspector. So good, work: you know who you are.

The property manager was a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting unpleasant, but she turned out to know so much about this type of house and, apparently, the rental business, that I could feel myself relaxing into the prospect of having someone take care of all this stuff as she talked. Another pleasant surprise was her guess that replacing the tub liner (including replacing the drywall behind it with green board) was only going to cost about $600, a job that I – knowing nothing about this stuff – was worried would be more in the several thousand dollar range. $600 makes my rental-accounting/startup-costs spreadsheets very happy, indeed. (She also seemed to think that we had guessed exactly right about what an appropriate rent for this place might be, which is nice.)

The other thing I liked about the property manager was that she didn’t try to make a hard sell. She explained her services and then left the contract with me, saying she wanted me to review it on my own and then get back to her in a few days. This is the way to do it, of course: there is something about someone who doesn’t seem desperate for your business that makes you want to give it to them. Of course, any good scam artist knows this, too, but I see this company’s signs all over the city now that I know the name, and, as I said, I’m going to be calling a few of her references before taking any further steps. I’d say that all indications point to “yes,” so far.

3.
In the evening, my father and I were sitting around in the living room when A. called. I went upstairs to take the call. She was at the Rim and in a hurry to get back to camp, so we didn’t get a chance to talk long. I expect we’ll talk some more in the next couple of days, so I’ll gather up the details and do a Bird Camp dispatch later, but basically she has been really busy lately. The professor who runs the Bird Camp research project is visiting the camp, which means A. has to take the opportunity to get trained by him on some tasks that she hasn’t otherwise learned yet, in addition to attending evening meetings/classes he gives, in addition to planning schedules and constantly driving back and forth to Flagstaff on various errands. She says she doesn’t get a minute to herself until she lies down in her tent each night, and lord only knows what time that is. So, as easy as it is to fantasize about doing her job while I’m stuck behind my computer at work, it’s hard work and certainly no vacation in the woods. That said, she and I do fantasize, somewhat more realistically, about my joining the seasonal staff at Bird Camp next summer to take on the errand-driving job/managing the vehicles (they constantly need new tires and little repairs to the undercarriage) and a few other minor tasks, which I would love to do, and, in addition to the company, I think A. also likes the idea of my hanging around camp in a grease-stained t-shirt. I’d love to do it this season, right now, honestly, but we can’t afford the pay cut until someone else is paying the mortgage on this house.

I was upstairs on the phone with A. when my father shouted up to me that Kirk, the lawn guy, was at the door. Kirk recently realized that this house has cuttable grass in back as well as the front, and a few days back I gave him the go-ahead to cut that, too. He did it while I wasn’t at home and has been stopping by for a few nights in a row to collect his fee, but I haven’t yet been home when he has knocked and my father has had to tell him to come back later. I got off the phone with A. and came down to find Kirk swaying drunkenly on the door step in the dusk. What with his 25 percent increase over last year’s fee for the front yard (from $4 to $5), and the $3 he is apparently going to be charging for the back, this lawn care stuff is suddenly becoming a noticeable little chunk of change. It remains to be seen how often he’s going to be pestering me to do this work, now that I’m probably one of his better revenue streams on this block (having one of the only back yards, for one thing), but this is the kind of thing I was originally worried about and which inspired me to turn him away when we first moved in. I respect the guy’s work and the fact that he’s trying to make an honest go of it, but I don’t want to be his ATM every time he feels like buying a pint of rotgut. We’ll see how it goes.

And so will you.

…the kind of guy who asks permission to take his blazer off in a hot, air-conditioned room full of people whose own dress ranges from suits (a very few) to the haphazard, semi-casual (but what does casual even mean anymore) standard modern work attire of people who are not required to wear, well, suits. He also knows a lot about typefaces and how to correctly deploy footnote abbreviations like “cf.” Those of you who know me well can immediately see how weirdly appropriate it is that I fell into working for someone like this…

But that’s about all I’m going to say, kids. That’s how it’s done on the internets. When writing about your job on a web site that is the second result in a Google search for your name, you want to walk up to the edge, maybe look over to see what’s down there, and then just turn away. But god the work can mount up sometimes, in a job like mine. A week that seemed manageable on Monday can turn into what feels like overload late on a Tuesday afternoon, with an evening meeting that will run until 10 p.m., new proposals to write, clients who sometimes seem to be trying to make it difficult to do the job they’ve hired the company for, and your wife off gallivanting around the wilds of Arizona. A.’s job is just a job, too, of course. I’m sure it has its frustrations and moments of overload. But in the view from my desk it looks damn appealing.

On two different occasions in the last week, the woman who is always working the counter at Sam’s Bagels has covered me when I’ve been short on cash. They only take cash, in one of those business decisions that probably looks like a good idea when the proprietor is considering only the cost of processing the transactions, but I wonder if he or she realizes how many people carry no cash these days. With other semi-comparable take-out places only a block away, I wonder how many people sort of want a bagel but not enough to go to a cash machine first. Anyway, yesterday I was running late and decided to get a bagel on my way in. After the woman rang me up, I told her to keep an additional three dollars of the change from the twenty I handed her, in an effort to settle up my unofficial tab. It was at first difficult to get my meaning across, as she speaks mainly bagel-ordering English. I’m not going to try to guess if she is Korean or Chinese, though I do think it’s one of those. She and a man her age – so maybe her husband, but let’s stick to what we know are facts – seem to run the shop (he is always in the back room, I guess making the bagels but maybe smoking opium, you never know), and younger woman about the right age to be their daughter is often to be found filling the orders. When the older woman finally grasped my meaning, she smiled a huge smile and turned to the younger woman, saying something relatively lengthy in her native tongue. (Or some tongue. Certainly not mine, at any rate.) The older woman acted impressed by my action, although the younger woman didn’t seem to care. What do you want from her? She had bagels to toast.

I waited at the counter by the window as they made my egg sandwich. Suddenly the older woman appeared at my elbow with my bag. Peeking from the top was a bag of Utz potato chips that I hadn’t ordered. (Obviously. Remember, this was breakfast time.) Couldn’t have cost her much but it was a nice touch. Come to think of it, they are often pushing free items on me, but usually to get me to sample some item off of the ethnic/lunch side of the menu. One time it was a small bowl of some kind of spicy soup brought out as a sort of appetizer while I waited for my eat-in breakfast order one weekend. On another Sunday, it was a small plate of some kind of shredded and very spicy meat. Very good stuff, although I’ve never been back for anything but a bagel. Maybe I should give the rest of the menu a try sometime.

Yes, so then: work. Enough said about that. Except my day also involved meeting with a computer programmer. That can be surreal. But I’m sworn to secrecy. By myself.

As I type this, my brother and my father are off at one of his appointments in Silver Spring. This will no doubt be a low point in his week, but there will be some better times on Friday, I hope. Last fall, through random chance, I happened to learn that a Baltimore city employee was looking for information about a brass tablet commemorating my great-grandfather, a Baltimore City Health Department public-health doctor who was infected and died in 1930 while investigating a parrot fever outbreak, of all things. The department dedicated this tablet soon after his death, and presumably it hung in some place of honor for a while. The email I received about the tablet was forwarded from a friend of mine who works at BCHD; apparently a general services administrator who had come into possession of the tablet (when I called, he told me it was in his office, behind his door) was actually trying to convince the health department to rehang the thing and was looking for information to support his case. My father, a family history enthusiast (to put it mildly – he’s more like a family history public relations spokesperson), supplied some photocopies from his extensive collection of newspaper clippings and relevant books. But the administrator changed departments, perhaps related to the new mayor taking office in the meantime, and I learned last Friday that the tablet now resides in the storage “cage” in the BCHD facilities department. I spoke to a very helpful and friendly woman in that department named Gwen, though, and she says it’s no problem for us to come take a look at the thing. We’re planning to go early Friday morning (early morning is when “the guys” are around the cage and will be able to carry it out for us, said Gwen). There will be pictures. For the heck of it, we’ll also bring a letter to the commissioner suggesting that he rehang this thing. It’s easy to imagine how this could end up being the opposite of a priority for him, but we’ll see. I’ll have done my part for good old great-granddad, at least.

Now I have to get the house ready for part three of the thrilling serial Electrician, Take All of My Money, Please, with a cameo appearance by a potential property manager who is stopping by to see if this is the kind of house her company cares to get involved with.

Details, of course, to follow, and maybe a Bird Camp dispatch soon.

Oh, and I went running this morning. Go me.

…go to the gym (supposedly a regular Tuesday/Thursday morning thing). Yesterday I didn’t go running (supposedly a regular Monday/Wednesday/Friday thing). But at least I’m here, writing this. Discipline and publish, baby, discipline and publish. The problem is the earliness. To write this and fit in some exercise requires getting up at five a.m. Some days that’s easier than others. Last week I stuck to the routine perfectly, but this week it didn’t work out (and so, therefore, neither did I).

I go to a YMCA about two blocks from my house. (I know, could this be any easier?) It had opened only a year or so before A. and I moved to this house and so is a rather modern facility. Heck, it even has a climbing wall. One of this Y’s features is a system of touch screen computers on each weight machine that keeps track of how much weight you lifted last time and how many times; it only counts a “complete” repetition, meaning that, if you were doing a chest press, you would need to push the handles all the way away from your chest before the machine registers the exercise. A trainer takes you around the first time to set the things up, programming in a reasonable initial weight for you to work up from and also calibrating the machine so it can register your movements. That is, you perform one repetition of the exercise in question and the trainer programs in your start and stop point. You can imagine that a 6′ 9″ basketball player would push the chest press handles a lot further than a 4′ 9″ jockey; if the jockey used a machine that was expecting the basketball player, the machine would never recognize that he had pushed the weight far enough, and so it would never register any of the jockey’s repetitions. With all of that set up, you just sign in at every workout at a computer terminal in the corner and then punch your user number into each screen as you arrive at your scheduled machines.

It’s a nifty system, because it means you don’t have to carry a little notebook with you to keep track of your program of grotesque physical over-development, but recently it has started to go wrong. Least among the problems that have cropped up is the fact that so many of the screens are so often dead or frozen. The worst problem is that something seems to have gone wrong with the movement calibration sensors, such that some of the machines are starting to seem as if they have been reprogrammed for someone much larger than me. This is a problem because, in order to take advantage of the system and have it tell you, next time, that you did 10 repetitions of 100 lbs this time, you need to do 10 complete repetitions, meaning – in the case of our chest press example – pushing those handles all the way out. But if the machine seems to be expecting someone bigger than you, you have to push the handles even further out by lunging forward in your seat, or pop the leg press a little further by going on tip-toe and flirting with hyperextension, or stand slightly for a down angle so that you can depress the triceps-machine handles even lower. Obviously, it’s not safe to do any of these things, although the temptation is strong: if you don’t, you won’t see the number of repetitions you’re doing being counted.

It’s quite a dilemma.

I think I’ll just start sleeping in, instead.

The last issue of Family Handyman came a few weeks ago. I subscribed A. to this as a present a year or two back and it’s been a great resource, but I think we’ll just let the subscription run out for now and maybe start up again in Montana, although if we’re renting we won’t be embarking on any household projects for a while. A. is the handy one, or maybe I should say “the motivated one,” but I enjoy the magazine, too, if more for its entertainment value than for any likelihood that I will independently decide to undertake one of the projects it details. I like the optimism that wafts off of its pages. Better than perfume ads, anyway. “Backyard Makeover,” the cover screams. “7 ways to shade your deck.” “Big-spender bathroom on a tightwad budget.” It’s interesting to think about the market for a magazine like this one. My protestations that “A. is the handy one” may sound unusual (it’s only unstereotypical, actually, which is a different thing altogether: our local Home Depot holds regular women-only classes on home improvement skills), but Family Handyman clearly doesn’t think so. As often as not, the models used in the how-to features are female, or a couple is shown working together. Still, the magazine plays a little on stereotypes: a project like the “curved garden arbor” (“carve out a new, shaded garden retreat in less than two weekends”) opens with a photo spread of the finished project. A barefoot woman with blonde, windblown hair is seated on the bench, smiling, with downcast eyes. To one side is her ceramic coffee mug; to the other, the basket of wildflowers she has just picked. No doubt her eyes are downcast because she is lost in thought, a reverie of her handy husband who created this beautiful thing for her. I guess that’s what the husbands are supposed to see, anyway.

Yesterday the latest Believer magazine arrived as well. This is an entirely different publication, a literary magazine that allegedly has a policy against giving negative reviews. This doesn’t mean that it finds nice things to say about any book, it just means that the only books chosen for review are books that the reviewer can honestly recommend. This conceit sounds overly precious when it’s explained like this, but I don’t think you’d ever notice it just from reading the magazine, although it might occur to you that the “reviews” are occasionally of books that came out years or even decades ago. The reviews are a small part of the magazine, anyway; the rest consists of essays, occasional travel writing, and – my least favorite – interviews with writers, artists, musicians, etc. I’ve always found magazine Q&A-style interview features lazy. Aren’t they just talking and transcribing a tape later? I like to see something with some structure to it, that required some effort, a forming intelligence. I haven’t been keeping count issue to issue, so I don’t know if this is usual, but the latest issue has four of these interviews, which means that about 25 percent of the magazine is of no use to me. What was of use to me was an article by Rick Moody about the W.G. Sebald book The Rings of Saturn that reminded me of my goal from last fall to read as much Sebald as I can. I actually have read the book in question, but a copy of The Natural History of Destruction has been gathering dust on my shelf for months now, and I hope to hoist it down soon.

I actually haven’t been reading a lot lately, which probably explains some of my recent twitchiness and mild discontent. I’m currently carrying around a copy of The Vigilantes of Montana, “Montana’s first book” (I’ll tell you about it some other time) but haven’t gotten very far into it. I’m just off my stride. Reading is an ongoing, living thing, a plant that needs watering, otherwise it dries up and you need a new seed and you need to wait for the first shoot to poke up out of the dirt before you know if you’re on the right track again. I experienced this kind of drying up recently with a cultural-history binge I had planned for myself. I almost but didn’t quite finish Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia a month or so back, and this meant I couldn’t move on to Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence as I’d hoped. There were a few novels tucked in around the point that it all jumped the rails, but nothing steady for a while now. In two more days, according to a record I keep in my pocket notebook, it will have been a month since I started a new book (which I still haven’t finished). It’s White Noise, and what’s supposed to be so great about this book again? I figured that someone like DeLillo would be one of those fun important writers, but I can’t seem to get into this book at all.

On my walk to work yesterday, I had what’s becoming the usual problem of finding a mailbox for a letter I needed to send. The things keep disappearing. There used to be four along my route to work. Now there is one, and that one keeps moving, and I really don’t think it’s my imagination. Maybe the USPS is studying and finetuning assumptions about the best place for the one mailbox in Charles Village. It’s disconcerting, though, especially in the morning on my way to work when I’m a little befuddled anyway.

I was running late and didn’t feel like having breakfast, so I decided to stop on my way to work for a cup of coffee. I almost went into the new Starbuck’s on St. Paul but caught myself and walked a little further to Sam’s. Lucky I did, because I turned out to be 6 cents short for a small coffee there (which I’m guessing is cheaper than it would have been at SB’s) and the woman at the cash register told me to go ahead and get my coffee anyway. I changed my mind about breakfast once I was at work and went out to look for a place where I could get some kind of egg sandwich. I wandered several blocks west on 25th before I confirmed for myself that there really is no such establishment anywhere near where I work. I ended up buying a turkey and havarti panini from Safeway, an unconventional but tasty breakfast. In the checkout line, I was behind a young woman in hemp overalls with a mullet haircut that ended in what we used to call a “tail” (shades of my brother in middle school), except the tail consisted of a couple of long dreadlocks. I record this here simply for the interest of future hairstyle historians.

Belly full, bland Sam’s coffee perched next to my keyboard, I turned to the day’s work. I’m still working on some procedure writing, the bylaws of a local regulatory body. This is, as I’ve mentioned, a little more fun than it sounds. It lets me exercise some sort of lawyerly instinct I didn’t know I had, thinking very precisely about word choice and sentence structure so as to make each rule as uncontestable – and “un-gameable” – as possible. I don’t fool myself that I’m doing an actual lawyer’s work, because that would involve using certain Latinate code words and other eccentricities, but I do enjoy the logic of it. Still, as it was Monday, it was sometimes hard to focus. I found myself checking CNN.com a lot. I don’t know why I bother, since it so rarely changes throughout the day and there are usually only two or three articles I find interesting. I guess it’s because of the way that, if anything major is happening, they splash the red “Breaking News” banner across the top of the screen. I’m always expecting a disaster, whenever I click to their homepage. This is true of any news outlet that feels up-to-the-minute; I feel the same thrill whenever I hear the various radio voices say, “from NPR news in Washington…” Is this it, I wonder? Has “the end” already begun? Is that why I haven’t heard any traffic for a while?

In the evening, my parents were over, my mom dropping off my dad for another week’s visit while he attends to some medical appointments down at his old doctor in Silver Spring. The plan was to go out for dinner for a belated Mother’s Day celebration, but every place we could think of turned out to be closed (as it was a Monday, which, if a restaurant is going to take one day off in a week, that’s the best one). Finally we made some frozen ravioli and steamed some broccoli and ate in, which gave the evening an improvised, “bearing up” sort of feel that was probably a lot more fun than being waited on in a restaurant, something I seem to have gotten my fill of for a while. Somehow the thought of sitting and waiting while someone does everything for you – and also tries to ingratiate themselves to you for additional financial compensation – can be an exhausting prospect, sometimes.

Later, after my mom had left for the drive back to Silver Spring (again, she’s staying in a little guest room at a friend’s house while she finishes out the year at her school, even though she and my dad have officially “moved” to West Virginia, and there’s no room for my dad there, so he stays up here in Baltimore when he needs to return to “the area” for these appointments), my father, brother and I made sport of conspiracy theorists for a while (my dad was just reading a review of the new Kennedy book), but it was too easy, and the hour had grown late.

And five a.m. comes early.

Via Kottke.org:

Mother’s day is the most important Sunday on the organized crime calendar.

…lazy Sunday, but this break from tradition allowed me to accomplish a thing or two, such as finishing the freelance project I’ve mentioned here before. This was after my crack-of-dawn drive to see Promise, which I mentioned yesterday. In the late afternoon I drove to Fells Point to meet Erin and Greg, who had asked me if I would take a few pictures of them. They had originally planned to do some sort of “engagement announcement” and were going to have semi-professional assistance taking a picture for it. Then their photographer friend fell through on her one weekend in town, plus the concept changed from “engagement announcement” to “picture we can blow up and have people sign at the wedding instead of a guest book that we’ll never look at again anyway.” (Indeed. Of course, A. and I neglected to get very aggressive about having people sign our guest book, so there wouldn’t be much to look at if we did get it out.) In other words, the bar was a little lower, which I guess is why they asked me. I can compose an interesting shot, mind you, I just don’t know what all those dials and buttons on my camera are for. I asked my brother for the most basic hints he could give me, which boiled down to using the “aperture priority” setting and using low f stops, so that my subjects would stand out while the foreground and background would be blurred, which I guess is the basic idea behind portrait photography. Whenever I find myself learning a little about this stuff I can feel the urge to learn more, it’s just a matter of taking the time to get down to it. So obviously it’ll never happen. I just need a simple, simple book about using an SLR. I should look for a children’s book on the subject.

We set out from “the bed and breakfast” (Erin’s and Greg’s comfy, comfy house, tucked away on an alley in eastern Fells Point) about 4:30 p.m., with lots of sunlight left, and poked around the waterfront and the Waterfront, with a visit to the Bond Street Wharf and to Slainte (which I guess means “cheers” or “prost” in Gaelic, but even so, this seems an overly precious name for a bar, especially since no one who doesn’t speak Gaelic has any idea how to pronounce it). While we tried different poses and spots on the Bond Street Wharf, a plume of black smoke became visible on the horizon, from the far side of Federal Hill. Looking at a map now, I can’t quite get the angles to look exactly right, but I suppose it must have been yesterday’s “inferno on the highway,” caused when a tanker truck full of ethanol overturned on a ramp to I-95 over South Hanover Street and burst into flames. (The time is right, anyway; on Flickr, though the time a photo was taken is not automatically displayed, you can see it if you click “more information” in that little list of data down on the lower right, depending on the preferences set by the owner of the account; the newspaper has it as “the six p.m. accident,” while my photo was taken at 5:57.) According to the Sun, firefighters fought the blaze for three hours, with the driver’s body still inside the truck’s cab. As usual, witnesses thought that the initial accident was “like something in the movies.” I guess if it weren’t for the movies, people would say something like “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Now, though, we’ve all seen something like everything, although it must have been pretty dramatic for the bystanders who were forced to watch as burning ethanol ran down the gutter and ignited their parked cars.

We finished up with dinner at the Waterfront. Sometimes I am an object of fun for always wanting to return to this spot, but why mess with a good thing? There’s always a table, the food is good, the building was built in the 1700s. What’s not to love? There’s this fetish for always trying something/some place new, as if we are showing ourselves to be bad, uninteresting people by doing something we’ve done before. I’m for the pleasures of being a regular, personally, and the Waterfront has exactly what I’m looking for in a pub-style establishment after a few hours’ wandering the cobblestoned streets of Fells Point.

…of a weekend day are the virtuous ones. You can commit acts of outright evil and still praise yourself for at least not lazing around in bed all day. But speaking of acts of outright evil, who mows his lawn at 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday? I saw a man tinkering with his lawnmower just now as I returned from a little errand I’ll tell you about in a few paragraphs. I didn’t think he was really about to fire it up, but it just roared to life. We are a far cry, I suppose, from Proust’s hometown of Combray, where “three streets away, a tradesman who had to hammer nails into a packing case would send first to… make sure that my aunt was not ‘resting.'”

On Saturday I was up with the sun and puttering around the house with every hope of ticking off each item on my index-card to-do list. (There is still a chance even now, although Sunday is a great day for reexamination of these kinds of things, I find.) One item that I wanted to get to: I’d heard last week from Sinker, the current owner of my old boat, the S/V Promise, that she was to be hauled out for cleaning and maintenance on Friday. Never having seen her out of the water myself, I was curious to get this unusual view of my old craft.

The haul-out facility was the marina attached to Nick’s Fish House, a recently revived south Baltimore institution in the shadow of the Hannover Street Bridge. I arrived around 10 a.m. but couldn’t find any sign of Promise. The marina has seen better days: the planks in the docks are sun-baked and warped, and there appears to be a homeless encampment under the bridge. I was looking around in a small lot where about a dozen boats were up on stilts when a potbellied, shirtless man asked if he could help me. I explained the situation.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That boat is next in line after mine. We’re just going to haul mine and then we’ll get to that one.”

“Promise?” I asked, just to be sure we were talking about the same boat.

“Swear to god, man,” he answered.

I retired to Nick’s, which wasn’t quite open yet but where an old friend, Terri, from my bartending days at Regi’s, turned out to be working as a manager. She didn’t mind if I waited. She even handed me a bottle of beer without my having to ask. Budweiser, if you must know, which does indeed turn out to be a good breakfast beer (despite the “extended footnotes,” I had to try it for myself).

From my seat at the bar, I had a clear view of Promise’s slip, so I would be able to see if she started moving toward the ramp. Meanwhile I sat back, sipped my beer, and enjoyed the titillating feeling of seeing behind the scenes in a high-volume waterfront restaurant about to open on a sunny Saturday. At such moments in a restaurant there is something of the thrill that comes for actors in the last half hour before the curtain goes up. The cadre of athletic-looking young waiters and waitresses, in khaki shorts and black “Nick’s” t-shirts, unstacked chairs and tied on aprons, stocking up on pens and jotting specials in their order pads. Two stools down from me, a hopeful future employee filled out an application. Sunlight beat down on the wooden deck outside, and my beer tasted like summer.

Terri had been the one to hand me my beer because the bartender was late. She excused herself to give him a call. “Says his alarm clock didn’t go off,” she smirked as she folded the phone back into her pocket. Do people who make these kinds of excuses understand that no one believes them, ever, whether they’re true or not? We all just shake our heads and think back to when we’ve told similar lies. He was there about 20 minutes later, squinting through an obvious hangover, his face still pinched from sleep. He got right to work, though, preparing a huge container of bloody Mary mix. Terri discreetly tapped him on the back to let him know that his shirt was on backwards.

When I finished my beer, the bartender offered me another one, and when I say “offer,” I mean he popped the top off and held it out to me. This wasn’t the tone I’d wanted to set for the day, but there was still no sign of activity at Promise’s slip, so I accepted. This one tasted less like summer and more like bubbly spoiled rice water. When an hour had passed with no movement from Promise, I settled up and wandered back down to the marina to see how things were going with the first boat scheduled for haul out. I expected to see it up in the slings but it was still bobbing in the water in front of the ramp. At this rate, it would be another hour at least before they got around to Promise, so I left.

But this morning I found that I couldn’t sleep anymore after about 6:00 a.m. and decided to give it another try. Success:

…has to say can’t be said any other way.

The tablecloth is sticky and there are only two menus for the four of us. I make my selection and pass off the menu. I glance up at the television and see a beautiful young woman being helped into her prosthetic legs by a military doctor. She looks young enough to have been wondering who her prom date would be only a couple of years ago. Before the camera cuts away, the young woman smiles at something one of the doctors says. She is a “CNN Hero.” A commercial begins.

Dr. Robert Jarvik invented the mechanical heart. Now he hawks the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor. He pleads with the viewer to give it a try. “You just need a simple blood test… don’t wait.” His eyes are wet. He looks hungry.

A doughy father informs his children that he has enrolled the family in a new cell-phone plan that will allow them to talk as much and send as many text messages as they want. “We do that already,” the kids reply with obvious contempt. “Yes, but now your mother can quit her second job.” Enter the mother, stage right, dressed as an enormous plush taco. She throws her keys on the counter. For we are a self-sacrificing people.

News breaks feature the Boston Pops dustup. The take-home lesson seems to be always wear an undershirt to the symphony hall.

As an “analyst” who will be looking for new work soon, the sky’s the limit, as I learned in this New York Times article about the increasingly dangerous problem of idiots tying bulky items to the roof of their cars with little more than chewing gum and shoelaces.

Where “deliberate” litter used to reign – those blithely tossed fast-food wrappers and the like – “unintentional” or “negligent” litter from poorly secured loads is making its presence felt. Steven R. Stein, a litter analyst for R. W. Beck, a waste-consulting firm in Maryland, attributes the change to more trash-hauling vehicles, including recycling trucks, and the ubiquity of pickup trucks on the country’s highways. In 1986, Mr. Stein said, two-thirds of the debris was deliberate, but surveys now show the litter seesaw balanced.

(I’m glad this problem is starting to attract some attention, meanwhile.)

A. called from the Rim yesterday, on her way back from “checking on a nest.” Her predecessor had just departed, meaning that A. is now in charge and can institute what she is calling “a new order” in the camp. This will involve having her crew cover their faces with chalky war paint and wear necklaces of squirrel teeth, while A. surrounds her hut with chipmunk skulls impaled on spears stuck in the ground. Although I guess she’ll have to build a hut first.

Any day now, I’m expecting the call from her supervisor.

“Her methods have become.. unsound,” he’ll say, before sending me up the river after her.

I just hope I’ll be up to the challenge.