Der Bau
In this part of California there are too few rooms and too many owns. That said, I can’t actually blame California for all the moves back and forth, with the thousands of books and the small orchestra section of guitars, pianos, celli; every new place—and there have been so many—starts out as a Rubik’s cube of wall segments, to be shuffled in the mind till it locks into optimum shelf space, guitars and tiny tables in the corner, philosophy and anthropology butting up against the kitchen microwave… it’s a problem now more than ever, what with the precious caches of toys and picture books accreting everywhere. Not that I’d trade them away. All the same there are too few rooms. J. had a fit of ingenuity and with the help of a rug, bamboo screen and leaning desk turned the basement laundry into a garden outbuilding of an office. It’s much in the spirit of the burrow fort I constructed in my parents’ box-choked garage when I was ten, but more useful, since these days I have a better idea what to do in such spaces.
Of course there are spiders, but the Pholcidae have never bothered me as much as their cousins. I’m not sure why. It might be that their extreme gangliness makes them into abstractions, sketches of spiders. Ceteris paribus you’d try to help them outside, but there’s a raised shelf at the door that defeats the broom method, so the individual that was hiding on the desk behind Can Xue and the Earl of Surrey got incompletely shooed and ended up establishing a court in exile in an upper corner, into which defenses a smaller spider of the same family came wandering. I became aware of them while coding some utterly tedious aspect of a Mac app; they had taken up positions in opposite corners of the web and were feinting like boxers. For minutes at a time they would hold the same positions, then the equilibrium would tip and they would suddenly assume new stances, never approaching too near. I suppose it might have been a courtship rather than a question of territory, but surely that made the calculus no less lethal. After thirty minutes I finished my job and went out to the yard, relieved not to be staying for the fifth act. Noninterference is well and defensible, but sometimes one needs a blind eye with bugs.
The rug, the pillows, the hiragana curtains and silk-shaded lamp are all preserved from our old living room in Berkeley, and when I flip the light on at night they spring self-enclosed from the dark, as the rooms of memory do.
On a different sort of blog I’d talk about the boutique effects pedals I’ve been buying, and how they helped turn a household that briefly had money back into a household that has none. Maybe I will talk about that, if I run out of patter. Anyhow the fancy rig is now in the living room and the old solid-state Fender 85 has gone down into the basement with all my Boss pedals from college, which get along just fine; sometimes you want the sound of transistors. There’s a headphone jack too for the dark nights of the soul. And rare as it is these days for the dark nights of the soul to go past eleven, we still need those hours.
