Not much of an arc, not very dramatic

Here a picture that I took with an x-ray machine so that you can only see the bones inside of the glove.

Dear diary,

Yesterday marked my first time experiencing a burning desire for a visit from our trash truck. My mother, every single week of her life, would worry about the garbage – how much stuff she and my dad could fit in it; and whether they filled it full enough; and how they could balance one last bit of trash on top of the heap without violating the commandments of the waste management company so the load cannot be rejected and thus will surely be hauled off to the outer darkness. Hoping to avoid inheriting my parents' obsession, I myself try to keep my care for garbage at zero. But yesterday was different because our trash bin contained several hundred bags of old flooring and underlayment that I removed from the kitchen and slew my right foot doing so. So the night before garbage day, as we were getting ready for bed, I confessed to my sweetheart that this is the first time in my life that I'm actually excited for the trash to be collected. I've finally walked a mile in my mother's shoes.

So that's the exposition of this episode; now here's the rising action: Only half of the garbage got emptied. My sweetheart was going to bring the bin back into the shed before she left for work, yet she noticed that it still felt heavy. (You should have seen it when it was FULL – it was the heaviest garbage you've ever felt in your life: it was a miracle of God.) So she called the waste removal company and cried foul, and they said sorry we'll come again.

So they came again, as Jesus will someday, and—here's the episode's climax—this time the big robotic arm shook the bin overhead for an extended interval, to make sure that it emptied out every last atom.

And the falling action of this farce is that after the bin was taken back into the supply shed, I went out there to fill it up with more debris, and one of the pieces of junk that I wanted to get rid of is a makeshift workbench that the place's previous residents cobbled together: it consists of sharp rusty metal replete with cobwebs and dead spiders and weird other bugs unknown to science, plus vacated moth cocoons all over its frame. I began unfastening the screws that held the thing together, but in the process I ended up cutting my hand in two places. Now when you nick your hand on something clean and sanitary, you merely need to wash the cut and bandage it; but when you slice open your hand on rusty metal infested with creatures that not even Hieronymus Bosch would paint to populate Hell, you must pour isopropyl alcohol over the wound, after thoroughly washing it, and then apply antibiotics like bacitracin to the affected area. Then you bandage it. Well I think I explained in a recent entry here that the medical supplies in our apartment have all obediently expired; so the ointment that I found was two months past its date, and even the bottle of rubbing alcohol said "Good until 2014." That's three years ago; or five, if you're reading this after the world burnt up. But we had nothing else in our first-aid cabinet; so reluctantly I used these ancient unguents, while praying to myself to save myself from the tyranny of Nature's shelf-life.

And the denouement of the situation is that after 48 hours I'm still half-alive. Writing angry blogs criticizing political adversaries and complaining about my favorite TV show.

So the latest episode of Twin Peaks, which aired last Sunday, was barely passable. The show used to be magic, now it's humdrum. But I still stand by my praise of the third thru fourth hours of the show. If every new airing offered us stuff like THAT to look at, I'd be a less sad camper.

And my verdict, after finishing the entirety of The Putin Interviews, is that it exceeded my expectations: I love that film. Oliver Stone is my hero.

P.S.

Now here's some good news: As soon as I finished re-reading Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree (with HUGE pleasure – it was unexpectedly rewarding on the second time around), on the very same day, I received in the mail the book that I had planned on reading next (at long last, the B&N gift card has been spent). I've lately been in the mood to absorb the stories of alcoholic wastrels, so after Suttree I decided to return to Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry.

I'll end this with a detail of the receipt for the package that just now arrived. These will all serve as part of our stack of books that we bring in a backpack to read aloud daily at local parks. They're pretty much what I listed in a recent post here. "Poems" refers to Elizabeth Bishop, which we'll read after finishing Geoffrey Hill's collected work (from 1952–2012) in Broken Hierarchies.