Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 299

Hi.

Coffee: Organic Dark Roast, Don Pablo’s

A goose gaggle had taken over the parking lot outside Trader Joe’s. They were everywhere, and it was hard to drive.

I heard this story from M about how kids in an art project at her museum were asked to think of objects that they used everyday and 99% of them said their smartphone. And when she tried to poke and prod for other answers, there were blank faces, incredible stares, like ‘what else is there?’ These were first graders.

I took my cactus, Herbert, from the old office because no-one was watering him. He doesn’t need much, but he does need some, and now he’s sitting in my bedroom window drinking up the sun. I watered him yesterday and liked the way the dirt clumped around his narrow roots. I liked the idea of touching something, remotely, through a simple act of benevolence, it made me feel like a Messiah, in my own way, the best sort of full-of-yourself. Because the fact is, this cactus needs me, and another fact is, I need him.

What objects do I use everyday? It’s a long list, smartphone’s certainly up there. Then there’s the desk, and chair, and water glasses, the first and the second (I always forget the first glass and pour another before I come to my senses), computer keys. I don’t know what I’d do without any of it. Modern comfort. The first world.

The geese are headed south. They’re only here for a stopover, I don’t know how far they’re going. Geese like to eat and sleep as I do, and they like the company of other geese. They’re a million miles high sometimes, and others they’re on the ground. In a few months they’ll hatch their eggs, New life, new birth. What will the goslings says coming into this world?

‘Mom, where’s my iphone?’

Currently Reading: Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

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Suddenly there they are (the geese), a wavering V headed directly over the hilltop, quite low, beating southward down the central flyway and talking as they pass. We stay quiet suspending our human conversation until their garulity fades and their wavering lines are invisible in the sky.
They have passed over us like an eraser over a blackboard, wiping away whatever was there before they came.

Wallace Stegner

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 84

Hi.

Coffee: Americano, Caribou Coffee; I thought about going inside the shop but when I drove by the parking lot was filled; so I got my coffee from the drive-through; even treated myself to a slice of lemon cake; the woman at the window had deep green lacquer on her fingernails; it reminded me of mountainsides in the early morning; I told her I liked the color, she said ‘thanks’; later, drinking the coffee, I thought I could taste a bit of wood-bark, pine-sap, morning dew

A hot day. Now that we’ve passed mid-may, summer’s taken it’s gloves off, spit out the tobacco, and is squatting wide-legged in the fields ready to take on all comers. I went out around five to pick up a few things from the pharmacy and got socked in the face. One hit of that humidity and I was walking like I had the weight of the world on me. All the thermostats were reading 90. Like I said, a hot day.

Nevertheless, I spent a lot of the day outside.

I’ve been re-reading After Dark by Murakami. I finished my re-read today. The last time I let my eyes on the book, I was 17 and wading through another hot summer. I was away at an academic camp and within the first week had torn my ACL (a particularly vigorous game of ping-pong was what did me in). So there I was, young and dumb and largely alone, limping around a college campus on crutches, trying to keep up with the world as it whipped by. Because of that, coming back to After Dark has been like finding all those boxes in your parents’ basement full of family photos – you squint at the pictures and try to make them look familiar without getting too embarrassed. Then, in the end, you stare so long so you forget they’re even photos of you.

I was reading on the porch with a cup of peppermint tea beside me. The hot day matched the tea so that you couldn’t tell which was making all that steam. I sweated out my journey into old, semi-blank memory albums, and when the tea was gone and the book was almost over, I had a beer. Finally, soaked to the bone, I finished what I’d come there to do. I closed the book. I put down the bottle. About to go inside, I heard a clapping sound off the balcony. I looked over and saw a family of geese. They were huddled together, pecking through the clover, hunting for bugs. Some of them were so young their adult feathers hadn’t come in. I didn’t know what to make of them – these beautiful, surprising, cuddly creatures walking by – and I still don’t. But I think they’ll be one of those memories I’ll open up fifteen years from now and hardly recognize, no matter how much I might want to.

Currently Reading: NOTHING! Couldn’t get back into Bourdain, no matter how much I tried; will pick a new book soon

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A giant motherboard of geese,
unruffled by the state
police, swarmed in unison

Kristen Henderson, Of My Maiden Smoking

Coffee Log, Day 71

Hi.

Coffee: Organic Bolivian Blend, Trader Joe’s brand

Power went out in Fuquay. Our bank closed down and the stores closed down, I watched the people trickle out the Food Lion behind us. Cars are backed up under dead streetlights and the city feels like a lifeless model, the kind you see in small-townhall museums.

People depend on a lot of artifice to live their lives. First thing I did this morning was flick the lights on.

Currently Reading:
The Pardoner’s Tale, by John Wain

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I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor? – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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