I am at a loss. Last night I finished the e-mail for this week. Clever opening, some fun Kids in the Hall references, a fun paragraph about dogs, updates on our local happenings, and of course, the weekly sale. It was sunny and cheerful. And then I made the mistake of updating the OS on this Mac, which quickly went from a sleek folding machine with which I was relatively simpatico to a stranger who hates me, showing no record of any new documents for the last six days. The new operating system also doesn’t seem to want to talk to my Time Machine back-up. And since the update, Microsoft Office no longer exists, and I went to update to Microsoft 365, which says that my e-mail already exists in their system, so I clicked through to recover/reset the password, and went to the new version of mail to retrieve it. Mail wouldn’t load new messages, and didn’t accept my password. So now I have a pile of missing docs and no access to my e-mail. I know that I write a lot, and in the grand scheme the e-mail copy I lost is drip in my written bucket, body of work-wise, but it hurts. Like I was stolen from, lied to, betrayed, and mocked all wrapped up into one fantastical shit sandwich. It’s 3:18am, do you know where my brain is?
So, the paragraph about dogs started with a mention of Fred the terrier (my spirit animal and therapist), some discussion of oxytocin, and of the otherwise friendly Husky mix whose excitement mistook the pad of my ring finger for the Scooby Snack in my outstretched palm. Pretty sure that tooth hit bone, and the pain was real, but I get it. When you’re a dog, without opposable thumbs, or access to the pantry, a cookie and some ear scratches can be pretty exciting. And the doggie interlude culminated with a story about a local friend of ours who fosters dogs, and lately has been brightening our days with her current four legged foster friend. Duna is a sweet, smiley, energetic, wiggly Lab/Whippet mix, whose profile page is here. If you’d like to contact her foster doggie momma about potentially adopting her, you can do that here: shruti@alrcares.com.
And I was going to make myself feel better by cutting and pasting an old short story here, before half-assedly re-writing the weekly sale bit (which I assure you was much more cohesive in the original). But the only version of my Word docs to which I have access are read-only, and I can’t even tell you when I originally wrote this one, as all the created on dates are blank. So I’m going transcribe that page now, from said read-only doc. It’s all I can do to stave off a full meltdown. The following is original fiction, from some years ago. It’s never been published, and was written as a companion piece to another longer short story, also never published. Please forgive any typos.
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7 Pages into the Great Northwest
He didn’t regret a minute of it, though there was much he would have done differently if he could have had it all back, but she was the one he never should have called. That didn’t change the fact that the faintest taste of her on the wind still ignited visceral response beyond will and impossible to ignore. Upon contact, the book in his hand that she had left behind seemed hard-wried to the top of his stomach lining. He both reviled and relished this and opened the book to read it anyway. Sometimes a great notion indeed: “that sick forboding is spreading from stomach up through lungs and heart like an icy flame.”
Reflex wrist-tossed the book into the fire before the thought could fully occur to the otherwise conscious man who could now only raise an eyebrow and half a grin. 7 pages. He was sure another copy of that book would fall into his lap at some point, but at this moment he had nothing else to read. He stood, circled the mellowing flames and constructed another teepee of branches over the smoldering hardback, amongst the coals, which rose to greet them.
A tinge of dyslexia made opening a book of more than 350 pages a daunting task. He had done so with the self-agreement that he would call her when he reached the page where the receipt for her dental work had been inexplicably wedged. He couldn’t be sure what sort of procedure a vital pulpotomy might be, but would have gladly wagered his few remaining unburnt possessions that it sucked real bad. Must have. The root canal came next, two of them, actually. Rough day.
When he reached that page that held the intimate details of a long unpleasant day in and adjustable pleather chair, he would contact her once more, or try to anyway. He would either thank her for leaving the book behind or tell her to go fuck herself. Now all he could do was laugh and watch the flames lick away the shelf-like strata of the great tome. He wrapped himself around his sleeping bag, on top of his pole-less un-pitched tent, pulled his wool hat down around his ears and curled his back, grinning madly upward toward where he supposed the sky must be. All of these barking branches overhead must be attached to the ones above, attached again to massive rooted swaying beings, all pointing at something. These thoughts met the deep purple that snapped into frigid morning with unwelcome acidity.
He sat up with a grunt, stretched his back, and tilted his head to one side and then the other, with a wholly satisfying xylophonic crackle. He stood up, stretched his legs, shoveled the mass of tent parts and sleeping bag into the trunk, and shoveled some cool earth over the remaining coals. He nudged around the rounded dog-eared stratified mass, in the center of the earthen grey pile, which fell in two at the split where uniformed basalt layers were separated by sediment. A lot of books have their page numbers dangling precariously near the exposed bottom corner, but not this one. Dead center, at the top of the page, millimeters from the body of these few leaves of undestroyed text, it winked at him with one wild eye; page 281.
He didn’t know entirely where he was, but it was difficult to get too lost here if one has any sense of the physical world. The water was on his right which meant that the Seattle skyline lay dead ahead, somewhere through the thick grey morning. There are a lot of bookstore in Seattle.
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So, boxed wine. There’s a lot of high quality wine in alternative formats, though many still think of Three dollar boxes of paint thinner that used to pass for boxed wine. The first to really take the box (or bag in box, as they are often now marketed) to the next level was Wineberry, whose attractive wood boxes are meant to evoke the image of wood wine crates in which so many Bordeaux are packaged by the 12-pack for shipping and storage. This week’s online only sale is on classic white and red Bordeaux in eco-friendly Wineberry boxes. 3 liters is the equivalent of 4 bottles, and once opened, the bag in boxes stay good for many weeks in the fridge. See below for the official sale numbers.
