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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

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   Indian Winter
Tuesday, April 10 2007
I was on the phone with a client this afternoon when Gretchen appeared in the other half of whatever a call-waiting-enabled phone line is. I don't normally attempt a call waiting switch, since I'm all thumbs when it comes to phone technology, but whenever Gretchen calls I assume there's a matter of urgency or things are afoot that are about to have a disproportionate impact on me. So I answered. I could hear the background roar of a car and then her voice, which was that of a disappointingly easy-to-impress drunken white girl. It was the only voice appropriate for introducing the song on the radio, Foreigner's "Hot Blooded." For those of you born after 1975, it goes like this:

Well, I'm hot blooded, check it and see
I got a fever of a hundred and three
Come on baby, do you do more than dance?
I'm hot blooded, I'm hot blooded

You don't have to read my mind, to know what I have in mind
Honey you oughta know
Now you move so fine, let me lay it on the line
I wanna know what you're doin' after the show

It's a lean mid-tempo number, all swagger, sweat, guitars and drums, as straight ahead as rock and roll gets. You can catch gonorrhea just by listening to it. The reason Gretchen had called me to have me hear it was that Foreigner crops up with surprising frequency in our conversations, and not just when we're listening to 92.9 FM, the station catering to our generation's musical nostalgia. Foreigner is sort of a touchstone of idiotic white boy grubbiness, and the need to go there is not infrequent, even for someone who likes to believe he's mostly transcended it and moved on to gourmet world views rich with nuance. By the way, the last time Gretchen sang me this particular Foreigner song was back in March when she was suffering from the flu. She'd just just taken her temperature and found that it was a hundred and three. Despite her discomfort, she'd still been able to belt out a few bars.

I'd yet to pull the cord on the chainsaw Gretchen bought me on March 28th, but today, in anticipation of a continuation of the ongoing Indian Winter, I decided to go into the woods and cut up some downed trees for firewood. I'm glad I didn't venture very far, because the saw refused to start. There's nothing more useless than a chainsaw that won't start. I did absolutely everything according to the book, and both the oil and gas tank were full, but I wore out my arm on fruitless pulls. Sally sat there watching me the whole time, wondering when things would get interesting. She wouldn't have been too happy had I managed to get that saw to burst into terrible nature-destroying life, but at least it would have been a change from the dull silent chill of the lifeless woods around us.
A week ago the spring peepers could be heard near the Woodstock synagogue and at the wetland up the farm road, and despite the cold they marshall on even still. But their peeps are lethargic when temperatures are in the 30s, coming only every five seconds or so. It's a forlorn sound, and I should hold it in my head as a beautiful memory, one for which the hot Aprils of my global-warming-enhanced future will make me nostalgic.


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