It is late here, ridiculously late almost to the point of being early. It is raining outside.
In the distance is a siren, slowly fading in the distance, but taking a long time to go. They can’t be trying too hard to go fast or they would be long gone by now. There is thunder. Rumbly distant thunder and the sharper intermediate distance sort. The thunder takes a long time to build and just as long to fade away. Cool air is rushing through the window – maybe I should close it before John’s electronics get wet.
But the smell, the smell. John just passed through, so I’m off the hook for the safety of his toys.
Went to do some bar writing tonight, and that went well. I was at a look-at-the-cieling point when a guy at the next table asked, “You writing the great american novel over there?” I was working on The Fish, so I said, “I can’t say whether it’s going to be great or not.” One of the girls at that table was very excited – she’s studying history and literature so she can write historical fiction. I ended up turned around and talking to her about the process of keeping your brain out of the way while you write. Finally I joined their table. There were three women and two men. As soon as I sat down, the two men left. Cowabunga.
It turns out I was in the midst of a low-key bachelorette party. The one studying to be a writer had had a quickie marriage with her boyfriend who was in the Air Force a couple years back, but they finally had the chance to do it right. (“Do it” is a euphemism for getting married.) I was sharing the table with the bride, the mother-in-law, and the sister-in-law. After the menfolk left I kind of felt like I was crashing the party, but they were all drunk enough to welcome me. For the most part they talked books, specifically chick-porn, and I listened and learned. I managed to participate when the conversation took a wild swing to Homer via that movie Troy. Apparently the wrong people survive in the movie. LitBride was quite in agreement when I said “The story’s been working for people for thousands of years; there’s not much point in changing it now.” LitBride and I found a great deal of common ground over the thesis that most of the best stories do not have happy endings.
Had I worked at it, I might have gotten somewhere with Mother-in-Law of LitBride. She made a point of mentioning that she was single, and she seemed fun and happy. (*BAM!* a nice sharp thunderclap.) Let’s face it. I’m not interested in working at anything like that right now. Better to walk away “the most interesting guy they met that night”, walk away clean, walk away before anything got complicated. Just Walk away. When closing time was called, MiLoLB was extra-friendly, but they were all together and nothing was going to change that. I’m just a shadow here anyway.
Isn’t that smell fantastic? There is absloutely NOTHING that beats a mountain rainstorm, especially if there’s been a long dry spell.
Unfortunately, today’s storm was more noise than rain, and there was a power failure, and then after the power came back on, not only the doorbell but also the smoke detectors started going crazy. The smoke detectors keep beeping just as if they think the power is still off, and the doorbell, which I thought I’d fixed yesterday, is now worse than ever — it will get to ringing and not stop.
Thought: if both types of devices are on stepped-down power circuits, might they be on the same circuit? They’re all on the same wall, the one that runs down the middle of the house where the two halves were put together. And the doorbell is designed to ring when the button is released, not when it is pressed, so it’s supposed to ring when power is cut off.
Or is it just that the squirrels have found an especially diabolical way to make Five O’Clock Somewhere uninhabitable?