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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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   Goldfinches and Chicory
Thursday, August 13 2015
This morning I went on a loop similar to yesterday's, and I stopped again at the place I'd stopped at for the past two days. Today I bucked the remains of the tree I felled two days ago all the way out to the thin bits of its skeletal branches and loaded all of it, including what I'd failed to bring home in past days, onto my backpack. It was a heavy load and I had difficulty getting to my feet (even though I've gotten really good at that lately). When I got home, I found the load weighed 141 pounds. That wasn't a record, but it was more than I'd expected.
Back at the house, it was cool enough for me to take a bath in broad daylight. I took a few hits from my vaporizer and relaxed into the tub, letting very hot water flow over the space between my pinkie toe and ring toe (if such a thing can be said to exist). I've been troubled by athlete's foot there since shortly after the Adirondacks trip, and in the past I've found that hot water seems to help. As I let the water nearly scald me, it occurred to me that tissues in the extremities of the body are much less sensitive to heat and cold than, say, tissues belonging to the brain. A little 106 degree fever can cause permanent brain damage, but here I was drenching my foot in water that was probably 115 degrees without any concern about the future of my foot cells. It suggested to me that it wouldn't be difficult for an animal to evolve extreme heat tolerance in all of its cells; the feature would merely have to be extended from the cell lines in the body where it already exists.
As I dried off, I completely caught myself up on Rectify, leaving myself the season 3 finalé to be watched with Gretchen once it gets broadcast later tonight. (Gretchen had been watching it all along.) Afterwards, I stepped out of the house into the blazing sun of August summer, and I felt for a moment as if I was in one of the many seemingly slow-motion scenes in Rectify, ones where dandy lion parachutes leisurely take flight, glint for a moment in the sun, and are carried away in the wind. With his moody silences and bumbling good intentions tainted by accidental selfishness, Daniel Holden is an easy protagonist for me to relate to, and it took me a good half hour to shake the feeling that perhaps I actually had turned into him. I walked to the mailbox to get the mail, scaring up a flock of male Goldfinches that had come to peck at the spent Chicory blossoms on the shoulder of Dug Hill Road.

This evening I drove with the dogs down to New Paltz and arrived at the Thruway park & ride only two or three minutes before Gretchen's bus arrived from Port Authority. She'd said it would be 20 minutes late, and it was almost exactly that. All day I'd been anticipating what would come next: dinner at the Plaza Diner. We ordered the usual: vegetable soup, spaghetti with marinara sauce, and an order of fries. My stomach had been acting unsettled all day, so I ordered a lemonade, which conditioned me perfectly for gluttony. Gretchen told me of her experience in the City with both a month-old baby (unexpectedly, she almost sounded like she wanted to have one of her own) and her aunt and regression-to-the-mean second cousins (such relatives tend to make her feel lucky to have such good friends: the family she has chosen). Our waitress asked us how we'd liked our spaghetti, and I volunteered that it was the best in the Hudson Valley, praise she clearly hadn't expected.


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