Dear diary,
A couple things I forgot to tell myself in yesterday's Twin Peaks post. (If you don't care about that show, just skip this first paragraph. And, by the way, I wrote the following before episode six of the series was released, which occurred mere minutes ago; so I was thinking about Diane prior to the revelation that she's played by Laura as well.) I find it interesting that there's not just the positive charge cancelling out the negative, or the two on either side of a boundary balancing each other, but there's a third party (neutral?) that enters the equation and allows for a defiance of the expected result: In the movie Mulholland Drive, Betty and Rita are (to speak loosely) the plus and minus, whose would-be balance (whether that's friendship or rivalry) is twisted into a conundrum by Diane. (If you object that there's also Camilla and therefore a balance again, no lopsidedness, then I'll bring up Sylvia North and let THAT be the wildcard; but I'd rather keep Diane for the sake of the name, as she's Dale Cooper's microcassette addressee.) Now in Twin Peaks: The Return, we have the good Dale and the bad Dale, one in and one out of the surreal 'Lodge'; and yet the introduction of (infestation of? sacrifice of?) a new character named Dougie seems to have allowed for a bending of the binary system that kept the two Dales separated.
Also I forgot to mention that when we rented a device to help us remove the (count 'em) FOUR layers of vinyl and underlayment that were glued to our kitchen subfloor, we filled the power steamer too full at first, and we used cold water instead of hot, so it took more than an hour (instead of the advertised "5 min!") to begin to heat, and once it started to crackle and boil, steam came shooting out of the fill cap, and then HOT water began to gush onto the carpet where the device was sitting. This scared me. I didn't know if it was safe to move the steamer; yet I assumed that if I didn't get it out of the house, it would flood the room and we'd all die and go to hell. Plus I remember that my father (also named Dougie), when he was about my current age, had his car's engine overheat while he was driving my baby sister to a wholesale tire store, and he pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car and popped the hood and saw that the radiator was steaming, so he instinctively began to unscrew the cap, whereon the cap blew off from the intense pressure, and burning hot fluid blasted out and drenched my father's chest: so he ran down the ditch to his left where there happened to be a swamp, and despite the slimy green algae pervading its surface, my dad walked right in up to his neck, to cool the white-hot pain. Then for a long time after that, he had to use salves and ointments on his chest to heal the burns. And my sister was left alone in the vehicle, in her car seat (she was only an infant), the entire time my dad was down in the swamp. So I remembered this fiasco when I was eyeing the smoking cap of the power steamer; and I kept repeating to myself: Don't touch it! But I was able to pick the thing up by its handles and gently set it outside the house. It leaked on the concrete for a while, after we shut off the power and unplugged it; and the instruction booklet said to wait twelve minutes before removing the cap, so that the unit could have time to cool down; thus I waited thirty-three minutes, just to be safe. ("Careful! Careful!" —that's a quote from the intro narration to Guy Maddin's 1992 film Careful, screenplay co-written by George Toles.)
I hate bass-mobiles (like Batman's "batmobile" with bass for bats), those vehicles with the big bass woofers that vibrate your whole apartment when they drive by. They're stupid: If you play your bass super loud, stop doing that: When you turn the bass up beyond a certain level, you cannot even tell the difference from within your vehicle; it only affects the people outside of your car: All you're indicating is that you want everyone to pay attention to you; that's bratty; it's like a little kid whining at its mother: "Mommy, mommy, look at me!" It's just annoying. I'm a huge fan of rap music. I loved the so-called Miami Bass genre when I was young. But I never had a bass car nor did I want one. Just listen to your music and enjoy it privately. I'm happy with everyone who wears headphones. Which reminds me of that scene from Wrong Cops (2013), where Ruth's husband stumbles upon his wife and Officer Rough leaving the police car after a 'quickie', and Ruth nervously asks her husband if he knows Rough, who is their neighbor, and the husband says yeah he hears him working on his music ("The walls are so thin!") and Rough apologizes and says he'll use headphones from now on; but the husband says it's OK and that he likes Rough's music – it's Ruth who has the problem with it. ...My point is that I am like Ruth, when it comes to bass-mobiles.
We went to a really beautiful park today. In the morning, it stormed so violently that the wind blew a lot of branches off of the trees, and there was hail hitting the windows. There's leaves everywhere now. But the afternoon was calm, and that's when we walked: all the verdure was healthy robust dark green, and the tall grass and weeds were bent over with the weight of countless water beads that looked even prettier than gems. I've got to remember to take bug repellent with me though, because at one point I felt a tickle on my elbow, and I swatted at it: now I don't know what kind of insect was aiming to attack me, but it was big; it felt like a fuzzy marble or a marshmallow when I smacked it, and it left a streak of bright red blood on my arm.
P.S.
Do you have this problem at your house? Is all of your medicine outdated? Every time I want to use some aid or pills, the expiration date is more than three years ago.
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