--Kaldar Moonflower
Today we arose reasonably early to go have breakfast with my aunt, uncle, and first and second cousins. We enjoyed having a last moment of visiting, and we all left with promises of more frequent contacts. I felt, as I always feel in such settings, that I managed to say more tactless things in any given five minutes than I typically say in any given five days, but that kind of self-consciousness is, like the common cold, inoperable and yet not fatal.
After all the human interaction of the past few days, my wife and I decided to take Saturday as a kind of solitude day. I pulled out three CD's and a cane fishing pole, and headed back to Park Hill Prairie. On the way to the park, a tad more than an hour away, I listened to
the_outsider's ambient album. It's dark ambient, in the sense that it is not based on those light space melodies (though not, arguably in the sense that it abandons western melodic structures altogether), and the individual pieces together comprise a kind of concept album, quite well thought out. I really enjoyed it, as I do each time I listen. I marvel that a home recording set-up can produce something so complex. I next put on Ros Bandt's "Stacks" CD.
androkles turned me onto her work--intricate created music from "found instruments"--in this case the huge pipes leading from a subway tunnel in Australia. It's got an appealing melodic listenability in what is essentially a percussion CD. I love the sound of the mallets echoing off the metal. I see now so many ways in which my own home-made CD, "Vibrating Electric Fields", should have veered much further into the territory of the fields-as-esoterically-rocking-noise rather than some of the attempts at traditional songs on the CD. The songs that work the best on the CD are either pure field or excursions with the kazoo or other offbeat instruments. I had been thinking that it would be fun to sing simple folk songs next go 'round, but now I'm leaning towards finding an instrumental place in which to "live" my particular desire to escape. I do love the sound of a simple, even flawed voice takikng on a lyric over an unadorned song, though, so the jury is still out. It's all a hobby, so I could do both or neither or nothing at all.
I saw a roadrunner as I turned down the county road to the park. Two roadrunners in two days, or one twice, I've now seen.
I got to the ponds by 12:15 p.m., assembled my cane pole and began to fish. As with yesterday, sunfish began pulling my line under.
At first, I was catching "keeper" sunfish, with orange coloration on their breasts. Thankfully, I was using a huge hook they could not swallow, so I could catch and release with minimum harm. I did not catch any pumpkinseed sunfish, but even the more standard sunfish in Spring mating colors can be bright orange.
I caught some 35 fish, although the last 15 or so were largely smaller, non-keeper sunfish, including the green sunfish that are never really large enough to keep.
I drove back on a rural way, down gravel roads into the middle of nowhere. I passed farmhouses and fields. I saw goats and signs for businesses which customize drag race 'rods, and I thought about the scrub-board solo on "When Electricity Came to Arkansas", and the ambient wash of thimble against board, while Diatonis' music played.
I stopped off for a snowcone (grape) in small Princeton. I drove home by Lake Lavon.
When I arrived home, I begged off the going away party for our vet, which I almost feel guilty about because I find our vet to be a charming and caring person whom I hate to see leave. I meant to make up a "100 Reasons why You should not Move to California", but I missed my chance at a good joke. My wife handled the going away function, though, and I do not think I was sorely missed. It's an advantage we shy people have, you know--we always like people far more than we think they like us. We'll miss our vet, though--and my dogs now have to go to a new vet. But I still wish our vet godspeed, and a wonderful new life back closer to her original home.
I fell asleep, wakened only when a friend called to say where she'd left our key. I was too groggy to even ask if she was still in our area, and would like a soft drink. I called my parents, and we recapped together some of this week's events.
My sister in law IM'ed me the URL of my nephew's weblog, as well as the memorial weblog his friedns created. I wrote a little memorial and posted it there. It was too many words about how there are not really any words.
I need to work a bit tomorrow, but I also need more rest and exercise. This sad week ended Friday, though, and today marked a new week's beginning.