Month: December 2020

I used to have some skills. Basic skills that enabled me to get by in the world. Skills to pass as a literate person. Chief among these skills was spelling. Yes, I used to be able to spell. Well, you can see many words here that are spelled correctly (or so l believe) but every one in awhile my brain runs amok and I cannot spell. You, I hope, spotted my misspelling of “plague” a fairly common word that I had to look up to reassure myself that I had typed it correctly. I seem to have regained the skill of spelling plague correctly. In another piece for One Typed Daily, I misspelled “dumb”. I am resting assured that most people can spell dumb correctly. I don’t mean “dum” as the misspelling. I had started typing the word as “bum….” As I realized something was wrong with it. But the correct spelling? l struggle with it. Well, at least I know it was wrong. Getting it correct, getting it right was tough. For some reason I could not sound it out. Dumb is pretty easy to sound out, provided you can.

I am reasonably sure about the cause for this problem. It is not related to computers and the highlighting of misspellings, alerting you to a mistake. That brings its own set of problems. What with people accepting the correction but never committing a word to memory. People with that affliction never have a cure for it, unless they are committed to getting it right and jot the word down for review.

I am reasonably sure that my problem is related to my inability to remember some words. it is related to that. There I am talking along and I stop. Because I cannot remember the word for whatever it is that 1 need to say. 1 would give an example now except the cause is self evident, I cannot recall that words that I cannot remember. This is a (side??) effect of the stroke I had. It used to be much worse. We talked about it in therapy. We talked about stratifies for working around the problem. Now 1 have an occasional problem with spelling. Hopefully the reader can figure out what I am attempting to get right. Until then I keep trying to get it.

— MichaelRpdx :: ih3k

There are so many things in the future. Mostly waiting for the plague to pass by and leave us back in normal times. Some people don’t really believe in it. Until it arrives. Even then, some people do not believe in it. It must be cancer. It cannot be some virus spread by people. No. It cannot be the plague. But they do not believe in it even as their last breathes comes to them.

The rest of us believe in it. In the months since February we wear masks in public. We wear masks when with friends, the few we have seen in person, even the sister we have seen in public and in our house, we wear masks in their presence. There have been seven people that have come to our house. Seven people in the last 10 months.

This living still takes some adjustment. We partition our things we do. Coffee is a highlight a special time in the morning. A walk in the afternoon. Some thing I do for work or entertainment. I part them out too, even as there are more things I need to get done. But I want them to last no matter how long it takes the plague to last, to pass along again.

I commit to One Page Daily. As I do to Morning Pages, to Duolingo, to meditation. I do not include walking on the 1 list. I do not include drawing or watercolors or letters to friends or playing piano. There is so much to do. But I obsess on “the news” of the progress in the plague.

I wander about like a dog sniffing the air searching for a future.

— MichaelRpdx :: ih3k

Games, but not games. I forgot my telescope. I was a on a plane packing up for an international trip. Argentina? I am not sure. I was on the plane packing things up when I realized I had forgotten my telescope. It was a dream. It does not make scene. But there I was. pulling the cushions out to check. No change there, lots of crumbs and rubber bands and all the stuff that accumulates in a couch. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. My telescope? Someplace where we had been. I had not packed it up. Wow, what a dream.

Games, we played a lot when I was a kid. Monopoly, 500 (the card game), chess, hide and seek all the things that kids played. Cribbage too. Poker for that matter. All the things that I remember and can pick up again and I remember how to play them. Now my wife, she did not play any games. None of them make sense to her. We have tried to play a couple of games. Bridge and other couple games. We visited my boss and me his wife with an afternoon of playing cards. It did not work out. She just did not get it. We explained the rules. We quit trying. No cribbage for us eventually.

Last night we tried dominoes. She said she would try that. I unwrapped the set, it was a new set with cellophane still holding the dominoes clean and ready. While she baked shortbread I arranged the tiles from 0-0 to 6-6. She came and I pointed out how there was one of each type of domino. The rules of block and draw. We started with block. The very first game with the tiles face up so I could explain how it works. It was a good game. I had the 6-6 so I went first. But quickly I was blocked. So she won that one. We played a game with tiles up. She got it. We also toasted each other with Wild Turkey, the Thanksgiving drink of vegetarians. She downed hers quickly. We played quickly. She laughed. It was fun, with Christmas music playing, each round going quickly. At the end I told her that next time we would play with Cuban music and toast each other with rum. She laughed.

— MichaelRpdx :: ih3k

It is actually the first of December. I have been up watching a Netflix imported from Finland, badly dubbed, called “Bordertown”. I have watched it by myself. My wife Mostly because the first trilogy doesn’t, does not, like it. It is around “Doll House”, involving drugged teenage women and who needs to see the naked women for the plot? The second trilogy started with a rave party. “Oh, great, it is all about teenagers again.” I continued to watch it to find out that was bookends for a much more involved and deeper story line. Sorry, I will not talk about it. I could give away too much too easily. Watch it, you don’t need to read subtitles.

But I am typing. I did not want to wake my wife. She insisted that it was OK. The sound of typing was nice. It was not like the irritation of a power saw or a router. It was nice. So here I am typing in the middle of the night.

I type and get the story out. My One Typed Page. It is not as nice as, as she puts it, “it is not as nice as a Korean whispering to her” she likes that sound. Whispering Korean to lull someone to sleep. But the typing sounds nice, it is a sound that is good and it is something to listen to in the night when you are trying to sleep.

I am going to get, or try, to get her to see the second trilogy of Bordertown. If she does not like it I will type some more to help her sleep.

— MichaelRpdx :: ih3k