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cycling / IU / music / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on And it is only Tuesday, somehow
23
Aug 22

And it is only Tuesday, somehow

Yesterday, the rear wheel on my bike started rubbing on my brake. I didn’t notice it during my ride from office to the house, but when I walked my bike inside. The wheel wouldn’t make a complete rotation. When the wheel isn’t true, there’s only one thing to do.

Drove to the office today, then, and carried around a bike wheel. So I braced myself for having to find a bike shop that wanted to take on the job. Fortunately there’s one just across the street from our office. And when they opened, at noon, I walked my wheel into the shop. Ran into someone I knew, who noticed that I seemed to be missing part of my bike.

That was a keen diagnosis of the problem. My colleague was not, however, interested in fixing the problem, or hearing my considerable repertoire of bicycle puns. But the bike shop was willing to take on the job. (This isn’t always a given.) The young man at the front desk warned it might take a while. They are busy. Start of the school year and all of that. But they had the thing fixed before the day was done. It just needed a new spoke and to be re-trued.

It was a spoke they put on a few years ago. I remember then that the shop manager gave me a line about how long spokes last. This is going to happen, so don’t be so hard on yourself or your wheels, basically. All but two of the spokes are original, though, and today he had to repair his own work.

I assume I hit a bump awfully hard. So he’s having to repair my damage to his work. Most importantly, and happily, the problem is fixed and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. I can ride my bike again tomorrow.

Quitters.

Their raising their efforts at razing the Poplars Building. Suddenly, they’re getting close to being halfway through of pulling down the apartment-turned-dorm-turned-administration building.

At least on the top. There’s an impressive mound of rubble just out of our view here, and it seems the destruction of the lower part of the building will be done separately. But earlier today someone was on the roof hosing down the debris. Talk about drawing the short straw.

This Spin Doctors record came out in the summer of 1996. It was their third record. The first one had the songs you got sick of from heavy radio play. The second flopped — it only sold two million records. This one was a return to form, and provided a nice bridge of their pop sound and their blue eyed funk.

“Pocket Full of Kryptonite” was quintuple-platinum in the early 90s. And that form comes up here in songs like this, even if the record was never going reach that kind of prominence.

Here’s another example from the same Spin Doctors vein. But, hey, by this point they could make music and go to the mall (I remember reading that somewhere) which was impossible for them just a few years before.

Maybe a little anonymity isn’t a bad thing, musically speaking. One track here became a sitcom theme, and featured in a few commercials, but the project as a whole got a lukewarm reception from contemporary reviewers. It also received precious little airplay — probably why I picked this up as a radio station giveaway — but there’s some fine musicianship here. Bassist Mark White and drummer Aaron Comess have always made this whole band come together, whether you were listening or not.

I played that song a lot. It’s one of their old live show staples, with a weird ambiance when you consider the band, but I think I lived in a house made of magnetic tape and vinyl when this came out. Probably no one I knew liked this record, so it didn’t get much play around people, but I enjoyed it for what it was. And it had a bit of attitude, in a suburban, blue-eyed funk sort of way.

This is the not-so-hidden track, and it gets panned, but only because we hadn’t reached the Biz Markie renaissance yet. Biz sounds perfectly natural and happy in this mix, and anything that makes him happy should make most people who listen to music happy, so give this one a spin if you’re still here.

They also put out three more records after this, the last one in 2013. They’re still performing, as a three-piece. There are eight shows through early November on their website as of this writing, and their social media is still active. And, I bet if you run across them on a 90s station you’ll still sing along.

books / cycling / IU / Monday / photo / Twitter / video — Comments Off on First day of classes
22
Aug 22

First day of classes

My legs were tired on Saturday, so I took a bike ride on Saturday. They felt better on Sunday, so I let my legs rest. Today my legs feel only medium, who can figure any of this out? It’s a two-stairs-at-a-time day. Anyway, here’s a little bit of that Saturday ride. I like this portion of the route, because it is easy, and there are trees.

This morning I rode to campus and achieved a goal I’ve had for the last week or so. I wanted to make the trip without having to clip out of the pedals. There are a few tricky intersections to get through, and I benefited this morning from a school bus stopping behind me, and holding up traffic through the first one, a round-about. The second is a busy little intersection for a bicycle, and I timed it right, with a lull in the traffic. Later, I had a red light and a four-lane road to cross. Rather than try to track stand for the whole cycle (which I can’t do for that long) or I wheeled into an empty parking lot and did three donuts at the cell phone store until the light turned green. After that it was easy, a few hills, a left turn, a stop sign, and then … where did all of these people come from?

Oh yeah, classes. Today’s the first day of classes.

This did not sneak up on me. I am sure it snuck on some.

Oh, look, the itchy and scratchy crew are back for more work on the Poplars Building. They’re making good progress, too. You write one thing about them on Friday, and they’re pulling down more mid-20th century … whatever style of building that is all day Monday.

That 1960s dust and debris is probably what the big curtain is for, though today I’ve come to think that the crew is shielding the Poplars Garage from having to see what’s happening to the Poplars Building.

The parking deck will stay. It is currently closed, but — and here I will once again try flexing the power of this blog — we need it to re-open sooner than later.

Hear that, everybody?

It is time once again for the biggest hit of the site, the weekly visit with the kitties. They’re doing great. They just want all the pets. At least they take turns demanding attention, I’m not sure how they schedule that, but it is fairly considerate of them, alternating their neediness.

Phoebe will not share her toys.

Poseidon, meanwhile wants to come outside. Or wants me to come inside. Probably the former, but he’ll begrudgingly accept the latter.

It’s a funny thing, watching that loudmouth meow without being able to hear him because of the glass between. He will be heard, but I will not hear him.

I read Cartman Gareth’s We Rode All Day this weekend. It was a quick read, two short sittings got the job done. It’s about the 1919 Tour de France, the first Tour after the Great War. I don’t know anything of substance about the racing of the era, and then along came this most unconventional book.

It’s told in the first person. Gareth is writing for the voices of four racers and two organizers.

It isn’t my style of book, generally, but I found it growing on me because he kept it moving. Mostly, I want to learn more about those old races — this one was the second longest Tour ever, if I’m not mistaken. It was a different type of racing than the modern version, and in this book Gareth twice makes a point of saying the 1919 race was also altogether different than the rougher in the 19-oughts. An Englishmen writing, in English, for French cyclists using modern English colloquialisms. This must drive the French and Francophiles crazy.

It is interesting, and maybe worth reading, but I’m not sure if it was entirely satisfying.

Last night I started Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. After Rome fell came the Middle Ages. And in this pop history book we’re going to study some of the crossover between those times. Should be fun because, as Cahill points out, historians are experts in a period, but not in the transitions.

The idea is that some people on an island off Ireland saved literacy, the church, western culture and so on. Monks with silly haircuts living in stone huts, not too long after they’d figured out the written word themselves, really. It’s a part of the Irish mythos, but not talked about in the wider world, so here’s Cahill.

To understand what happened in the fifth century, and why Rome fell, he asks why the Romans didn’t notice the problems. What were they doing? To answer that series of questions, Cahill goes back a further century, introducing us to the poet and teacher Decimius Magnus Ausonious for reasons that aren’t yet clear to me. He says his verse is no more fresh than the modern day sympathy card. I’m not sure why it is important to pick apart a man that’s been dead for 16 centuries, but he’s having fun doing it.

So it’s a personal anecdote as microcosm. They did because they could. Resources and needs and distractions and all of that. Cultivation of crops allows for a social evolution, rather than foraging and hunting for your every meal. Cultures can emerge and can flourish and, apparently, write bad poetry.

Ausonious winds up tutoring the heirs to power, and that increasing his status a bit, as well. In times past, being named to one of the two consulships positions was a huge and important honor. By his time, though, it was all coming undone. It was civics, not suddenness.

At least so far. I’ll learn more tonight. Cahill has made this great point about Rome’s notable historians — Augustine, Petrarch, Machiavelli and Gibbon specifically — tending to view things through the lens of their time. (All different, all correct insofar as they go, proving once again that there aren’t often simple answers to complex longitudinal questions.) With that in mind it should be no surprise that something written at the end of the 20th century would see the fall of Rome as taking place with not a little ennui.

Which is precisely when you need some Irish people to show up. And I’m sure they will arrive in this book this evening.

Friday / IU / photo / Twitter — Comments Off on Smelling the last weekend of the summer break
19
Aug 22

Smelling the last weekend of the summer break

This roly poly was wondering around on this same piece of cement when I left the office yesterday. It’s a few feet off the ground. There’s an unused, but soil-filled planter on the one side. And off the other, it’s just a wall toward the ground. The planter itself helps frame in an ancient set of stairs. The stairs an artifact of one of the building’s two previous uses. Our building was once the library, and then an administrative building, and now a haunt for crustaceans.

Also a bunch of people work inside, and students build their dreams there, of course. But this guy was wondering around yesterday evening, looking for some food. He was there when I arrived early this morning. Breakfast time for bugs.

I stop by that planter to fish a mask out of my bag, to find my keys in another pocket, to enjoy a few more seconds without florescent lights.

Today I had to be in the office early because of an early event. My presence was requested at this event so that I might say hello, smile behind my mask and point. I also, as tradition would have it, opened a door for someone.

T-shirts were passed out, because t-shirts are still currency on the inside.

My story is giggling at watching everyone wonder about that inverted question mark.

Everyone wonders about that inverted question mark.

I’ve stopped questioning such things. My questions are now directed as this building. You know, I’ve got an opportunity to run a nice little feature and then they stop doing the most obvious work on it a week ago yesterday.

The crew working on it have been doing some stuff at the ground level, and the building’s footprint is surrounded by streets on three sides, and then an alley and a parking deck in the back. There’s most assuredly a good and practical reason for pausing the destruction, if it’s only the debris-management version of moving around the vegetables on your plate.

This is a better drone view of the building, by the way.

At any rate, we’ll put this on pause until they start pulling down more of the building. Someone has to find the lost keys to that orange machine again before long, after all.

I had to stay on campus after hours today as well. Funny how that works. Nothing like a good 10-plus hour Friday to set the stage for the semester. (The semester begins next Monday.) But, with that done, I did leave just before 6:30. I’ve been taking a slightly different bike route this week, and the almost-90 minute difference changed the light to a nice warm golden hue. Some of the smells were different, as well.

At the place where the campus and the residential housing meet there was a vague burnt Texas toast smell in the air, and then some low quality fabric softener. After passing through those two neighborhoods, you cross a big road, and then cut across a strip mall, where you can easily pick up notes of bad marinara. That sticks in your mind until you ride back into the woods. There, the seasons are beginning to change, and your nose is the first to tell you so. There’s the tiniest bit of old leaf and soil in the air. If you had a fire burning, for some reason (it was in the 80s today) you’d have the entire cozy fall feeling.

Back home, the August lily is in bloom. They’ve gotten tall in the last few weeks, and now their long buds have unwrapped, showing a white, sparkling flower. Because the flowers are so top heavy that they’ll droop if someone doesn’t stake them. That clove-like smell turns into something sweetly fragrant to compete with the rose bushes, which are likewise still going strong — ours, here, has done its work for the year — and people that care about blackberry are cutting back the old canes. Even dealing with the blackberry you feel like summer will last forever, and it very surely might.

Me? Here? I’m just watching the trees, willing their leaves to stay green, and spraying water on things on the ground. Maybe I’ll meet some more roly polies.

books / IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on An early night, a long tomorrow
18
Aug 22

An early night, a long tomorrow

It is official. This building has sort of pox. They haven’t torn down any more of the Poplars Building within the last week. Though work is going on at the rubble level, today.

I’m sure there’s a reason. I’m sure it makes sense right away, but I can only see the cost of non-working heavy machinery. (Where they really make their money!) Perhaps next week they’ll be back at it. Maybe the big crane operator is on vacation this week. Whatever it is, this is slowing down the reopening of the parking deck, which is going to be a problem starting Monday.

And that eyesore will still be here on Monday, as well.

Elvis stayed there once, you know, in the dilapidated administration building’s first life as a hotel. He was booked for two nights. He skipped out on the joint.

Maybe the work crews have, too.

I am contemplating the undertaking of a new project at the house. Here is a hint.

If it all works out it should probably take about two hours. Which means it would take me two weeks, because these things never go to plan.

And just when you have built a rhythm, you make some foolish mistake that makes you second-guess everything. And there might not even be enough of this project to build a rhythm anyway. Many utterances will be uttered. Oaths may be taken. No new skills will be learned. Pride will not be established.

Splinters may be avoided.

That’s worth two weeks, if you ask me.

Watering the flowers. I did this just after dinner.

Dinner tonight was one of those nights where you push up the routine, because I was hungry, and then making a deal with yourself. “OK, 6:30, we heat up dinner.”

And then, “Hey, look, 6:27. Close enough. And then you’re going to eat and go to sleep.”

So I’m that old now.

Oh, look at how that salvia holds on to the water droplets! So long as you have the wonder of small things, how old you are, or how old you feel, might not matter all that much.

That’s what I say, out loud, to drown out the sound my knees can make.

I finished this book this evening. Lighter fare, but I read slowly, savoring words and sentence structures, especially of talented writers.

May Sarton wrote 50-something books, 34 of them were novels or nonfiction, 17 were poetry. This one, if you’ve been here the last few days, is about when she bought her home. Her parents had just died. She decided on a remote lifestyle so she could concentrate on her work, and she settled on a place in a small New Hampshire village. And over the course of the 188 pages of this book she looks back on her first eight years in the home, taming the property, meeting her neighbors, constructing her gardens. She goes on at some length about her gardens. The book is about the people, and the work, and from that she’s drawing the lessons and points she wants to make. She has an incredibly compact style, a great economy of words.

Here she’s talking about a winter of drought, when she was simultaneously being dismissed from a teaching job, and getting a book rejection from a publisher. Then, all on the same day, the artesian well diggers finally hit water, she got a letter with another job offer, and a letter getting that book accepted.

She celebrated by taking a nap.

That nap made a lot of sense today. It’ll take some time to figure out the part about making myths of our lives.

The book concludes a chapter or two later. She talks about the two days of the year that the whole community comes together. Once in March, and again in August. The first is for the big meeting to manage the village, the second is Old Home Day. It looks exactly as you’d imagine. People who have at any time been connected with the village come back. There’s a band, speeches, games. There’s a dance at the end of the evening.

Over the course of the book she has shared her friends, and now she’s showing them at play. And then, in the last two pages, after this admiration for her new neighbors, she shares an anecdote that sours the place. It’s two paragraphs. It seems obvious to anyone that’s ever been a visitor or a transplant to a place and, thus, the complaint is petty. Somehow, though, May Sarton manages to turn that into a part of her love letter. That’s a writer for you.

IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Plant a fortune cookie
17
Aug 22

Plant a fortune cookie

We had Chinese late last week, and late last night I ate the last of the fortune cookies. For one thing, they don’t keep very long. The plastic doesn’t seal in the freshness. You’d think, for people that purport to tell you the future, they’d be on to that little problem. For another thing, the cookies that I had last week, two of them, had no fortunes. They were just … cookies.

This happened to my great aunt one time and the family members she was dining with convinced her that this was an ominous way to end her meal. No fortune, no future, and all that. It was very upsetting and they all laughed.

Well, I wanted fortunes. And to get these cookies out of the rice drawer.

We have a rice drawer. We also have a tea cabinet, what about it?

Anyway, we had three cookies remaining, and these all had the important little paper bits inside. One of these is more important than the other.

The solution is my philtrum? Then what is the problem? The fortune says “a problem.” Not “the problem” or “all of your problems” or “your most recent problem,” just “a problem.” What is the problem!?

Maybe I was better off not having those fortunes the other day. I was certainly better off with the other cookies. Less than a week later and these were already going stale.

I wonder how that works. They all came from the same box. (I’ve seen the backstage magic at our local restaurant. You used to think there was someone back there hammering out these fortunes for each person, somehow they knew what you need. But, no. It’s just a guy reaching into a big box, knowing the fortune you need, and pulling it from the middle or, for special, hard luck cases, the back left corner. “This is definitely a back left corner sort,” is probably a thing that guy thinks once or twice a shift. I am forever jaded and ruined by the mysticism of the fortune cookie process.)

Let’s turn to the Poplars Building.

Yes, please turn to the Poplars Building, said the peanut gallery.

Not sure that was necessary …

Anyway, the failed dorm turned failed sorority house turned failed hotel turned longtime administrative building for the university is coming down. Eventually. The big crane hasn’t done much in a few days now, as you can tell.

I wonder how long that small piece can hang on so precariously. Of course, it’s probably eight feet tall, and securely held in place by the best adhesives the 1960s could muster … (Back when men were men and who knew what was really in the chemicals!)

Anyway, Elvis stayed there one night. He did two nights worth of concerts and skipped town on the hotel on his second night. It was not fit for a king.

And, today, yes, a carrion bird was circling overhead.

I watered the flowers this evening, just to show you some flowers. These are things my lovely bride has planted in the yard. These are in the front. I did not photograph the side yard, for they were in the shade of the evening by then. Photography is all about timing.

Look at those delicate little water drops on those delicate little flowers. I even kept the water on low, so the mists would fall delicately.

I suppose I was just so with them, because annuals already have a curious mix of the next few months. First, the trim of beauty! Then, the grim reality of their demise.

This wasn’t intentional, but just now I discovered in the final third of May Sarton’s “Plant Dreaming Deep” she is discussing mortality, and toiling in her gardens, and the two are at once alike, and dissimilar.

That is what the gardener often forgets. To the flowers, we never have to say good-bye forever. We grow older every year, but not the garden; it is reborn every spring.

That overstates the case for annuals, anyway. Some of the things in our little flower beds will grow back. Some will bring extra weeds from far away lands we know not how. But those little flowers, well, it’s hard to think about frost in August, but this is how I annoy myself and it’s been a mild August, besides.

Those little petals don’t know it, but they’ll flash their brilliance until the browning edges become all I can see and even the water droplets — when you remove all the books or training or years of experience or directions on the seed packet, it so often comes down to just good, simple water — won’t be able to distract my eye.

It is an odd thing to contemplate mid-August, I’ll grant you, but sometimes the moment is overlooked. This moment, being fleeting, winter always being on the horizon. Sure, the grass was cut just the other day, and I’m a little warm even as I type this, but it is in my mind, winter, even if it wasn’t in my fortune cookie.

Especially because it wasn’t in my fortune cookie. Those things are never accurate. They just grabbed by the handful from a box.

But that one in the middle, though …

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