Hermes i3000

Dueling Typewriters / kinda storta. We are typing there Typing here, in Portland, Oregon. Across the table. That is what we are up to. Got a TK or three or more, or so I hope.

What? You may be asking. What is going on here? We are doing typing duels, like Piano Duels. Two of us typing across from each other. Typing at a dining table. No desks, no working places, it is the dining table, where we So recently had dinner ( Typing to have ideas and get Mac and Cheese) And here we are. getting them written down before they are forgotten. Forgotten again.

The last time I appeared here I was confessing about my lust, my glut of books, so many of and they stack up and wait forlorn for me. the kind I get and I have them ready to read, and they wait to pick them up and read them.

So there I was and here I am and I have a pile of TK ideas. Have you ever tried to research TKs? I found it to be incredibly hard. There was not too much, well two items, but not too much on what TK means. (It is a proofing thing where you write TK for To Come for an idea you have or a page reference, or a thing to write about right now, anything that you do not have time for and it will come. TK because the letters because they do not appear close to each other, so you can search for TK and find them and nothing else. See The Magic of TK, from Steven Pressfield a part of his Writing Wednesdays series, that should be enough to find)

So I have a lot of TK things, things to write/type about the big difference being that today I am actually typing one or more of items. By the way, the other duelist is Kent Peterson who is visiting for a couple of days. Yep, 1t took some gentle “You can type something” (not a Quote, but it sounded good, so I typed it.)

Remember the first of the month?, as In April Fool’s day? I was going to appear here and talk, write about being there all the time for awhile. You know where that Idea went. There was a Slap, which I thought deserved no attention. I have said enough on that matter. Do you, might you have an idea for getting out and exercising? I need encouragement on that matter, I need to get out more. Only I prefer to read and write and not get out and exercise.

Boy I hope you could decipher the typing here. I am pretty sure it is not close to being spelled or typed or anything else (as in a train of thought) Kent had finished typing his file so this has become a solo typewriter sound.

More thoughts tomorrow.

— MichaelRpdx :: ih3k :: 2022-04-07

(lots of spelling cleaned up here)

There is a crow to watch. It is eating rice we had put out for them to enjoy. It seems to be enjoying the rice. It is early in the afternoon and you can see the definitions of its feathers. The striations move back and forth. Standing in the sunlight. It distracts me from the rest of the world.

Joe Van Cleave popped up a short video about paper. This stuff he and you and I type on. He has an assortment of papers for typing on, when he can bring himself to type on them. Most of them, it makes me think of a stationary store or shelves in a big box, Staples or Office Deport, dedicated to stationary. He saves them for letters to people or final drafts. It loaks to be quite a collection he has there. Enough for years of nice destinations of writing.

Then there is a cheaper, in cost, in quality, in all things that make a paper, brand of paper he has. It is something he can let go of for typing the first drafts, the place where he can strick out (strick??) what he has found to be misspelled or just not what he wants to write.

I noted that his, like many of of yours, has a finished quality to them. So I wonder:

Do you type a draft and then re-type it for OTP?

I certainly do not. I can see it for some of you. But others their prose is clean and error free and nice. Do you type a draft and then a final for submission to One Typed Page?

I hear a ukulele calling me, calling my name, for me to play on it. There are hours and hours of playing to do.

— MichaelRpdx

Just read the One Typed Page for today and now have a PS

“Know that as long as I am here there will always be someone who is below your status.” Uh, I do not know about that. I will compete with you on that status. Manu Chao is great, who I just heard about for the first time today, less than an hour ago. And I like the 100% cotton Almond Linen Sothworth it seems to have come to a great place to rest.

Hang on folks, who knows where we are going with this one.
Hmmm, that did not get me to a start. No ideas yet.

Do you think of apostrophes much or often or at all?
I have been obsessed with them lately. You will, maybe on a day filled with boredom, might have noticed I do not use them. I try to write “I am” instead of “I’m” or “do not” instead of “don’t” and other contracts like those. It seems I have written (not I’ve written!) about this topic earlier. So I will wander off to a different topic.

We are seeing quite a bit of people writing in the margins or signing their names. I am one of the people who have illegible handwriting – at normal speeds. If I slow down and take my time to write letters instead of words that I scribble it does get to be legible. Or legible. It would be good to read what I wrote years ago. I know there are times when I wrote as quickly as I could so I could keep up with my thoughts or thoughts. A lot of good those hurried writing did for me. A little later, the next day in extreme cases, I could not read what I wrote.

What good is that? I imagine there are some people who need, who must, write something, write something right now so that daemon is out of the brain and in a safe place for burning. For the rest of us, there is some inkling that you might, just maybe, want to go back to whatever was scribbled in a hurry and come up with something better to be readable perhaps to nudge your brain and have it be written in a way that means something and you can share it.

I have slowed down on my handwriting. Now, whoop dee do, it takes me 15 minutes instead of tweleve. or tweleve. I had never realized how little time I saved by scribbling along. I do not always succeed in making the handwriting legible sometimes the memory of my hands injects the scribble. But less and less and all the time I have time to think of what I was attempting to say and write it down for the future.

That is where we went. Now I am off to play some ukulele.
There is no recording there and my wife likes it. We all win.

— MichaelRpdx

Next time A4, letter, ledger and more.

April is complete. April was a month for flying kites. Tissue paper and balsa ribs made up the kites for us kids. It was always windy and we loved getting a kite up in the air as high as we could get it. And then just watching it. That was all we required on a spring day. Getting a kite up and watching it. Living on one of the first streets in the suburban neighborhood gave up a lot of free space. Less each year. But there was plenty each year.

April brought different joys this year. One of them came with a promise. If I practiced every day then I could buy myself one of my own. The month was spent with my wife’s ukuleles. They were presents from her parents. For years she put off learning and playing them. I picked them up and started. It is a tenor. Which, somehow, were never purchased for my wife. Concert, soprano, and baritone were in her collection.

Playing a ukulele has a couple of advantages. One being it is a good time. Even if you are like me and have very little aptitude for it. It is still fun. The other fun element is my wife likes to listen to it. Even the most rudimentary bits of effort I put out, she still likes it. This is in opposition to when I was playing a clarinet. Even when I got to be OK with it, she really did not like listening to me and it. Yep, with a ukulele, she likes what I play and so I do.

Tomorrow May starts with a new thing to try, to do every day. You will find out about that exploration at the end of the month.

— MichaelRpdx

The feeling comes daily. The waiting for it. Seeing it ready for injection. Watching the needle pierce the skin. Yes, I am, at least for now, a junkie.

I did not expect to be telling you this. I did not expect to be telling anyone this. But here I am. Ready for another injection.

Every night about eight-thirty or so I have another hit. I inject it. I go lay down on the couch. I am done for the night. Just me and the feeling brought on by the needle. You can call me a junkie. It fits. Well, kinda sorta.

I normally take warfarin. (My gateway drug.) But when I am going in for something that is going to cut or snip or take a risk for those things they, my doctor and the nurses, take me off the warfarin and switch to an injected formulation. The pill form takes some time to build up and taper off. The needle drug goes away in a day. The drug is an anticoagulant, aka a blood thinner. I had to switch it out because of (the favorite of every person over 50) a colonoscopy.

I thought I would be off of the injectable version. Maybe tomorrow. In truth, I do not understand how someone takes a needle drug for recreation. Damn, it is a pain. Injecting yourself is a pain.

Maybe tomorrow. I hope so. The month will end. So will my junkie behavior

— MichaelRpdx

A year or two after I graduated and was reading an art journal. (sorry, I do not recall the name) they ran an article well a photo essay on heroin users. Then I turned a page and there she was, one of my classmates. Being the naive person that I was I had no idea.

There were birds outside today. In the yard. Tiny little things. They were doing us a favor. They were on, gripping on, the dandelions. The ones that had gone to seed. Yes, there they were. Gripping on the stalk of a dandelion. Picking at the seeds the little thing at some lightweight things. Ready to be blown away. You have seen them. The dandelion seeds drifting to a new home. But today little birds, little birds with yellow breasts were perched on the stalk of the dandelions and picking off the seeds. Tiny, little birds with their yellow breasts and snacking on the seedés of dandelions. We watched them. Such little tiny things perched on a dandelion stem. We enjoyed watching them. Who would not? Such little light things perched on the stems.

Any excuse will do. I did not mow the lawn. How could I? All the dandelions would be obliterated. What could the tiny, little yellow-breasted birds eat then? No, I can wait a day or two. A day or two more of watching the birds perching on the stems of dandelions. Yes, I will leave them for the birds.

§      §      §

As soon as I type the above, add the bits for separating the sections, we look outside and see hummingbirds. The first ones spotted this year. Nice small birds day here.

And for the record, I will not be committing to an entry of the day here. I am not like Catherine or Kent. They have something to say every day. Every Day. Wow. But, I do realize that there has to be something to write about and writing to do about it. Connecting my experiences to this, or any of my, typewriter and express it. Perhaps that is the answer to John Prine’s question, “How the hell can a person/ Go to work in the morning/ Come home in the evening/ And have nothing to say?” I used to ask that question and I asked it often. Now I get bits and pieces of the answer more often than I would like.

Day two of vaccination number two. Outside of being a mite tired and having a sore arm I feel pretty good. This is good.

— MichaelRpdx

PS, maybe, perhaps, I do not need to have something to write about when I sit down with the typewriter. I just need to sit down and type a word or two and let it go from there.

Today was the day. THE DAY. The day when I got my second Covid vaccination. Now I just play it safe for it to take effect and I am fully covered. My wife got her first vaccination on Sunday. Her second is scheduled and by Memorial Day we will both have full coverage. And in the world of full coverage, the Southwest Gentalmens Association will all be fully covered by mid-month. We will meet in person on the 20th. Meeting with a group of people? Lord what a change in our lives.

I have a series of things to do each month. Each August is a blog item every day. Last February was international correspondence month. March was a watercolor month with a panting each day. This month has a theme. Which I will reveal on Friday. Do it, then talk about it. I am pretty big on talking about something that I want to do. The whole thing of “tell people about it and then you will be committed to doing it” just does not work for me. I am much better off doing it and then talking about it. Friday. I will let you know then.

— MichaelRpdx

A week is a man-made construct. There is not a natural, organic lapse of time that corresponds to a week. A day? Rise and set of the sun. A month? Watch the moon to come and go. A quarter? Feel the seasons come and go. A year? Feel the combination of how long the days last, how the seasons are much the same. If you want a really fine piece of time, take your pulse. But the week, it has no organic measurement. So when I say, “Oh man, I had a tough week,” I am referring to a man-made construct of time.

What a tough week I have had. And I am glad it is over.

It started with laying on my back and holding my breath. They warned me about a feeling of warmth flooding my body. It ended with a day of fasting, a warning that I would be unconscious and come back to life where I was getting the warning. From a CT scan to a colonoscopy it was a week of medical joys. And the dietary restrictions led me to days of reflection.

I like vegetables way too much to go three days without them. Where “vegetables” means things that are barely cooked, never canned, and delicious. All the meat I want? Keep it. I do not yearn for it the way I do for beans and fruits and all those tasty things.

The artificial time period is over. I am eating again. Yay!

The Art of Noticing has arrived. I decided to get copies of both books, the other bein Dunce, perhaps I will read them cover to cover now.

Spring has returned. In Oregon, in the Willamette Vally portion of Oregon, that means rain has returned. I do not get to mow the lawn that needs mowing. Shucky darn. I do not get to mow it for a while. I really like spring in Oregon.

— MichaelRpdx

You walk into a room. You stand there. You ask yourself, “why am I here?” Not in the sense of why you have lived a life that brought you to that place. No, it is the much more mundane reason. Why have I walked into this room now? Did I want something? Was I there to do something, or to not do something? But whatever the motivation was, well, it is lost. For now at least. Maybe you could remember the reason. Given enough time and doing whatever to jostle your memory you might remember why you are there now at that time.

Recently there was a similar puzzle. What have I done with the two library books? Dunce, from Mary Ruele and The Art of Noticing from Rob Walker were the two books I have been looking for and looking for until today. There is something appropriate in the titles for them. I did not notice what I could have done with them. And I was a bit of a dunce is losing them in that manner. Or maybe it was a hint from the cosmos that I really should have copies of them.

Where were they found? In a box of stuff, including three other books, that was filled with watercoloring supplies and other things I needed to have cleaned out of the living room. We were both going to have visitors and needed to clean up the house. This occurred right as our winter storm hit.
I guess it is time to move the box contents to permanent homes. As soon as I clean up some area to store things in.

What can I lose then?

— MichaelRpdx

Vote: should I buy these books so I have permanent copies?

How does one do this or something like this? Understanding a difference of opinion, that is healthy. Understanding something that leads a person to their conclusion, to their stand on an issue, that is healthy.

Take saving for retirement as an example. One person saves quite a bit, they, as some say, pay themselves first. Another person saves less being sure they will be covered by Social Security or a government pension. Or perhaps buying a car. To one a new car is reliable. To another, a car without 60,000 miles on it is just getting broken in and it is a great time to buy a car and use it for years. Largely which decision is made is a personal decision. When they talk about it both ways of making a choice, which one is “better” well, they can disagree and they can agree to disagree. In fact, they probably do disagree on the two.

In truth, I do not understand things that are big things to decide on. Take the elections of Obama and Trump, we did not disagree on those races, we agreed on the matter. I am referring to my wife here, we agreed on these issues and cannot understand agreeing to disagree. On something important. Something of less important, like what food to consume as an example, we do disagree.

If you are in a situation where you are in the position of having to agree to disagree, can you explain it to me? The only explanation I have is one person asserting, well they do not wish to talk about it anymore, they cannot get an agreement and a “agree to disagree” is a way of avoiding the discussion.

I am truly curious about this issue. See the stamp below to send me a letter rather than explaining it here.

-— MichaelRpdx
[a stamp with the address]