Today is the 15th of April, which in more normal years is the day that federal income taxes are due in the United States, but owing to the chaos of the pandemic the deadline has been pushed back a month. Last year, they pushed it back six months. This year, tax preparers were promised the deadline was firm. And it was, until it wasn’t.
And no matter who said it, taxes and death are still inevitable.
I’ve got nothing specific to say today, which creates an abstractly hairy problem for me, since I am more practiced in the Art of Not Writing than I am in the Art of Writing. Not Writing was something I started doing in earnest in the mid-1980s, and gave up for stretches of time, and resumed in 2013, 2014, 2019 and 2020, but am trying to avoid now.
Shall I list my pandemic accomplishments for you?
One is, I have at this point surrendered to household dust and muddy dog footprints.
Another is, my cat is now a complete attention hog.
Three: my hair is really, really long and I pretty much hate it, but maybe not enough to do anything about it.
4: We exacted a repair on a long broken vacuum cleaner brush head. Replacement parts cannot be found (by anyone, including you, no matter how good you think your monopoly-search-engine-that-is-now-a-verb search engine skills are) online unless I am willing to pay $30 to a Guy on Ebay for two small pieces of special plastic and just eat it if the parts don’t actually fit. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to be doing any more vacuuming than I was doing before. This repair is temporary, because there was a spinning part and some plastic involved, and the friction of the jammed thing that was supposed to spin but couldn’t actually melted the plastic. So when the melted piece fails, it goes back to being a vacuum cleaner without a sucky rotating brush head thingy.
Five): I dropped my iron, the one that hadn’t been dropped yet, and a chunk of plastic broke out of it, as another reminder to me and you and everyone else that plastic is bad and we have entirely too much of it in our lives. Also, possibly that ironing is terrible. Unless it isn’t.
6- [redacted for boringness]
SEVEN, I am keeping track of the days and/but learning little from it. Most years, as spring gets underway, I start feeling abstract dread around the middle of March, and count down the days until the 13th of April, which is the anniversary of my mother’s death. This year, being the second of our pandemic, I was so over-focused on what day it was I failed to remember what day it was, and I only remembered when my brother texted me about it late in the evening. I went on to have hospital nightmares. Or one, long, hospital nightmare. One in which I was there with a lot of dogs, all vizslas, and they got away from me (of course), into the hospital, and I had to try to find them and catch them. And in my search I came upon every hospital room I have in my memory, including some recent ones where I visited sick people, some old ones, like where I saw my father in the ICU, and the corridor where I spoke to my mother before her first brain surgery, and also a room where Home Alone 2 is on the TV, where we spent a late 1990s Xmas eve in the pediatric ER, the rooms where I recovered after foot surgery, and all with those curtains and the LED-paneled equipment, and the pale-colored, forgettable walls, and also dream vizslas under all the beds and drinking from the toilets and galloping the halls and getting tangled in the mops in the janitors’ closets.
- I have a list of titles for future posts; if I were feeling accomplished, I might call these things essays. I mean, “blog” is really sort of –you know– kind of an unappealing, little made-up word, a cutesy clip of a portmanteau, and I’m not ready to like it. No, not even after a dozen years. Maybe I’ll stick with “post.” Anyway, good for me for dipping into the list of topics a couple of times so far, but this time everything on it is either not ready yet (looking at you, “Pandemic Quilt Number Two”), or rather mundane (ahem, look alive, “The Quest for Clear Ice”), or just not enough of an idea to get me going (yeah, get your shit together, “Pencils”).
Nine. In addition to watercolors, I have remembered how much I love to cut things out and glue them to paper. And, in a stroke of improbable luck, I found a stack of labelled boxes in my basement that contain the loosely organized papers I was using to make collages before I had kids. These boxes survived seven moves, some short and others across the country, over thirty years, their contents preserved where other more valuable boxes (thinking of some high end audio speakers and all my cookbooks) vanished. Yesterday, I spent two hours in the morning and perhaps eight more interrupted hours in the afternoon and evening cutting out letters and numbers and gluing them down and making a satisfying mess.
Almost Every Thursday 