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in one particular pancreas
Friday, September 18 2020
My boss Alex told me today that he is selling his Victorian house in Tivoli in hopes of benefitting from the ongoing Covid-19 real estate bubble in the Hudson Valley. He said this would probably distract him for some weeks, which seemed likely. I asked what he hoped to get for his house, and he said "one million dollars." He also said he and his wife were hoping to move to somewhere in Greene County, where real estate prices won't be so inflated.
Gretchen went on a long walk in the late morning and early afternoon with Kacey, her new friend from directly across the street. It's atrounding that another child-free vegan just happened to move into our neighborhood, perhaps into the least-likely house They walked all the way out past the abandoned go-cart track to the abandoned bluestone mine.
Last night, a little after dinner time (after Gretchen and I had already sort of improvised meals), Powerful had gone out to get Chinese food after dinner time, and we browsed on this throughout the day.
In the early evening, some asshole started shooting down at the bus turnaround, so I grabbed my megaphone and headed down the Stick and Gullies Trails, continously shouting "FUCK YOU, GO HOME!" as I went. I did this for nearly half the distance, which got to be a bit exhausting. The shooting had slowed down a bit by then, though there were a few more bursts. I could also hear, far off in the distance, someone shouting back at me. Since that person was never closer than about 500 feet and down at the base of a steep escarpment, it wss impossible to tell what he was saying. By then I was shouting things like, "SQUEAL LIKE A PIG, MOTHERFUCKER!" Before I'd even drunk an entire imperial IPA, I'd managed to drive the shooter away. When I returned to the house, Gretchen and Powerful were out on the east deck chuckling about it, having heard the whole thing.
Later Gretchen and I watched a couple episodes of the second season of Barry, and at this point I was in agreement with Gretchen that we had somehow watched this all before. A search of my online journal showed that we actually had watched the second season of Barry a year and a half ago, or at least the first episode of it, though, based on what I wrote, I'd been a bit too drunk to remember much of what we'd been watching.
When we were done watching Barry, Gretchen suddenly appeared in the door of the laboratory to ask if I'd heard what had happened to Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I hadn't checked the news, so I didn't know. "She's dead!" Gretchen exclaimed in absolute horror. It would be hard to imagine any worse news; we'd heard all the reports of Ginsberg's various health problems but had held out the hope that she could somehow manage to stay alive until January. Now, of course, Donald Trump, the worst president ever, would maybe have enough time left in office to appoint her successor, some horrible person interested in comforting the comfortable and suppressing the suppressed. With respect to a lot of things in society (such as economics, demographics, the environment, and even societal trends), change depends on the gradual concentration or dilution of things across vast populations. But with the American Supreme Court, what happens in one particular pancreas (Ginsberg died of pancreatic cancer) can cause the immediate redirection of history. It's still possible to hope for the best even in the face of such terrible news, but my usual pattern in the face of such things is to take a break from the news until I've absorbed the damage. I don't think I've ever experienced such anguish from any death, and that includes my own father and the untimely death of Janet the Cat.
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