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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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   Phoebe curse continues
Friday, July 10 2009
With the exception of holidays, the Hurley dump is open four days each week. Today was the first day of its being open since Gretchen had forgotten to unload the broken windshield from the Subaru roof rack, and it was still there. So today I loaded up more trash, including the kitchen's original microwave oven, a cathode ray tube, and whatever beer bottles had accumulated since Tuesday.
At the dump, I saw that a new place had been set up for the return of deposit bottles, as separate from the other glass recycling. Here, though, there is no actual refund paid for returned bottles; it's just a way for making the dump less of a money-sink for the township. Still, if I'm going to sort out all my deposit bottles from my salsa jars, it's more likely I'll take them to Hannaford and get the nickel each is worth.
It turns out that cathode ray tubes cost more to take to the dump than other trash owing to their lead content. But the microwave was considered entirely recyclable and cost me nothing. These things were all explained to me by the ever-helpful, ever-cheerful guy working there, who (as always) took a special joy in giving multiple treats to Sally and Eleanor as they wandered around sniffing the many smells (few of which are actually apparent to the human nose; it's not an unpleasant place).
While I was out, I bought some groceries at the Hannaford in Uptown Kingston. There's a municipal bus station near the entrance to the store and there's usually a motley crew of people waiting. These are the people who must use the city bus to get to and from the grocery store. Perhaps they're too poor to afford a car or lost their drivers' licenses after being caught drunk driving. (I've heard that the drunk driver bicyclist demographic in Kingston is enormous.) Often what one sees here is a collection of sometimes-surprising human outliers. Today was no exception, with various people muttering to themselves, missing teeth, having excessively-spaced eyes, or seeming suspiciously brown (too much sun? tanning bed addiction?) given other indications of their ethnicities. These people always look up from whatever they're doing (usually not much) to watch me as I walk past and I wonder what they imagine my world is like.
I always use my own grocery bags if I have them, and I've noticed that even in a relatively low-rent place like Hannaford an increasing fraction of the shoppers are bringing their own bags too, though nearly all the people doing so would not look out of place at Adam's Fairacre Farms. (This cannot be said of the average Hannaford shopper.)
On the way home, I stopped to harvest my customary 25 gallons of Esopus Creek floodplain soil from the levee across Wynkoop from the Hurley Mountain Inn. There were two other cars parked on the muddy floodplain when I arrived, and being cheap muscle cars, indicated the presence of gainfully-employed teenage boys (none of whom were nearby).
Gretchen went out this evening, leaving me by myself to do what I like to do when she's away: watching my non-fictional television shows and sipping my liquor. Eventually I was moved to go downstairs and play the piano. This time I had presence of mind to record myself with my little MP3 recorder, and that means you can listen. It's a variant of the one piano improvisation I've been doing since circa 1988, which has at its heart Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, but mostly keeps to a Philip Glass kind of minimalism. Sometimes I play in various non-major keys, but tonight I played entirely in C-major (occasionally just using a subset of that and then breaking out into the full scale for tonal drama).

When I was done with playing the piano, I went upstairs to the laboratory and was doing various things in there when Julius the cat (aka Stripey) walked in with a limp Phoebe in his mouth. Horrified, I got it away from him (he didn't seem too interested in it once he'd shown it to me). Though it was still warm, it was clearly already dead. I flung it out the laboratory window in despair. How could a cat who adores me so much do something so malicious?
Later I went out to look at the Phoebe nest above the lights between the garage doors to see if there was a bird in it. At night a functioning bird nest is always occupied, but this one was empty. Stripey had killed the mother Phoebe even before her eggs had hatched. Nothing good ever happens to the Phoebes attempting to use that cursed location. Either they die before their babies fledge, or they succeed in being cuckolded by a Cowbird.
After I went to bed, I kept waking up and hoping the image of Stripey proudly carrying the dead mother Phoebe had been a dream, but neither he nor I was getting off so easily.


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