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trails and travails
Thursday, May 23 2002setting: five miles south of Staunton, VirginiaI found myself under the White Pines of Horizon Field this afternoon enjoying the soft needles under my bare feet. I planted those pines and I have something of a father's pride about them. I'll never have to send any of them to college, though many of them stand a chance of living to be a hundred years old.
I have a fussy compulsion to break off the dead branches on the boles of young pines. On Pitch Pines this is very easy, whereas on Virginia Pines and Junipers (Red Cedars) it is much less so. With White Pines, the branches seem to break off nearly as easily as those of Pitch Pines, partly because the dead branches on White Pines tend to be exceptionally slender. I found myself clearing a simple trail perpendicular to the Horizon Field contours, extending from the mid-Horizon Field trail down to the powerlines near the road. I used only my hands to do this clearing, simply snapping off the dead branches as I went. Occasionally the branches would snap with a sudden powerful jolt and I'd either hurt the inner-workings of my hand or slice a cut into my skin. On one occasion a sharp fragment of dried wood bounced harmlessly (but alarmingly) off my eyelid. It took me only an hour or two to clear a reasonable trail. It must have been about 800 feet long.
My mother's computer was working pretty well today when the replacement CPU came. Strangely, though, the moment I replaced the old one with the new one, I began noticing strange bout of unreliability. At first I thought this might be due to heat (the machine's power supply fan had seized up), but even after replacing the power supply fan with a powerful AC monster and installing makeshift styrofoam air baffles, the troubles continued. By evening I was despairing to realized that I was going to have to reinstall the operating system all over again. What had gone wrong? What the hell was making this computer so fucking unreliable? Since I was working on the guts of the computer that had served as my MP3 player, I was forced to rely on older technology to satisfy my musical needs. I soon found the radio a completely unacceptable option; the only rock station I could get, WBOP, seems to specialize entirely in idiot rock these days: the worst of Van Halen and tight rotations of the horrible song "Once Bitten Twice Shy." I got the distinct impression that they don't even play Nirvana and Metallica anymore, although they do play my least favorite Pink Floyd song, "Money." To give you an idea of how stale and blah WBOP is these days, they somehow find a way to make Creed sound refreshing.
I also tried listening to one of the local public radio stations during its Classical music programming, but I was appalled by all the militaristic marching tunes and wretched patriotica they played.
Looking around at my old tapes, I found precious little worth listening to, so I popped in a warbling old copy of The Scorpions' Love Drive, which Josh Furr gave me years ago. For some reason it was exactly what I wanted to hear.
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