My Typed Page

I slept today.
Yesterday I walked for two and a half miles.
Today I woke early. 4:00 or so I woke and could not sleep. I came home from the hospital, chilled, wrapped up in a blanket. Wrapped up in a blanket until l slept.

Now I have a night of sleepiness and not a mind of thoughts. Thoughts that mill around. Around and around they deem to a night of nothing. Nothing emerges from my mind of an evening. Evening is a night of reaching out into the emptiness. Emptiness pursues its steadfast pursuit of trying to find release. Release of its help with this game. Game of creation. Creation of discrete sentences. Sentences that swim like fish in a pond, laziness of chasing itself. Itself chasing the words of creation. Creation repeating in its pursuit of continuing. Continuing through sentences of nonsense. Nonsense picking up from our bit of a wait. Wait, what is this? This, a bit Of a wait. Wait, what do we have here in these revolving pursuits of what, where are we? We gather up another chase. Chase another sleepiness hoping to catch it. It is right there beckoning. Beckoning my pursuit. Pursuit of my start, where today slept I.

I will play that game again tomorrow or another day. Not today.

— MichaelRpdx. :: ih3k

Her brow became furrowed. How could I not want my activities to be unobtrusive and tactful? I tried to explain how I needed to have distinct items to keep them apart. I could take, for instance, a group of 12 photos of our former dog, Fritzi, and make a calander. Then I have a thing, something complete. I did not do that. I just kept doing this and that and I did not do anything complete. I needed to make discrete things. To make them into complete bits, which is not something I had ever done. “I need to make discrete projects.” What? She wondered why I needed to make my projects so discreet?

Discrete or discreet? They are both pronounced /diss kréet/.
As we talked I was describing a need for discrete projects. She did not understand how that would make my projects any easier or more difficult. I was describing a need for discrete projects. She thought I was describing a need for discreet work. As it turned out we were both using discrete/discreet at the same time and not really understanding why we did not understand each other.

As it turns out I really do not care for discreetness. But I feel a great need for discrete projects. We pulled out a dictionary to determine the difference between the words.

Which variance of discrete or discreet do you prefer?

I need to have discrete things that I am working on. I have been reminded that I need to have more discreet references, to have some filters in what I do, what I present.

I had been advised “narrow your scope” at least when I start a project. Start small, build from there. I never did that. That lead to our conversation. I need to make discrete things.

For those of you that read this in the morning, I am having a barium swallow imaging this now time. It will be a first. I will be in the presence of other people without a mask on. This was originally scheduled for April.

— MichaelRpdx :: ih3k

Congratulations! You have made it! As I type this and when you read it the northern hemisphere you will have endured the earliest setting of the sun. For the next few days the earth will seemingly pause with sunset happening at the same time each transition to night, but be assured, each day the sun sets a little later each day. On its way to March when the days lengthen by so much it will seem like summer is right around the corner.

Some of you may be protesting, “wait, winter solstice does not happen until the 2lst or 22nd, that shortest day.” Yes, that is true. Because the sun rising happens later each day. This later and later continues until the 26th of December. This turning around, these shortest days of the winter actually starts on December 3, From then until the 16th the change is just a few seconds all labeled as 4:27 for Portland, Oregon. After that time the sun sets later and later. The sunrise takes until 7:50 in Portland. So shortest day overall is on the 21st the latest sunrise is on January 3 (until the 7th before it makes it into the next minute) earliest sunset on December 7th and everything is getting longer and longer on January 7.

Good thing Daniel accepts pieces shorter than a full page. I am off to watch the sun set for a day in which we can.
Rain is on its way.

— MichaelRpdx :: ih3k

There is this thing I have. I live in a foodie city. There is great food of so many varieties. Mexican, Chinese, pizzas, Thai, BBQ (include Vegan there), New Orleans style, Indian, the list goes on. Most all of it comes in vegetarian and vegan variants. I took my wife to a vegan Isralian place for her last birthday. This come to mind because we had Neapolitan pizza tonight. It was a night to eat food with someone else cooking. (Look up Otto’s Pizza in Portland, Oregon – not Maine – to get some flavors) To get to Otto’s I had to break my thing. “Don’t pass more than a couple of places with the same kind of food.” Tonight to get our pizzas I had to drive by three other pizza places. OK, they were not Neapolitan style pizza places, but still, they were all good pizza places ALL of them. We have had pizzas from all of them. But Otto’s is so good and we have not had one from them in, well, forever. The other Otto’s is up on Sandy. We have been there and greatly enjoyed their pizzas. But to get there, too many pizza places to pass. So I stretched my rule about where to go for food out. Now I am thinking about Bahn Mi. Ah, num num num. It makes for a great place to live.

Covid is one of those things with no end in sight. You have to keep going. And going and going and … well there is a ultra marathon race with a similarity. The BIG DOG BACKYARD ULTRA.

Like any other ultra race it attracts really fit runners. But in this race there is no defined distance. There is also people who hold the honor of being in first place. If your in your in first place. Until you quit. Then you are a DNF. Those two classifications are all they have. DNF or First. And that is the goal of the race, to keep going. Alert: I am of not the type of person who will or would do this thing. But watching people do this thing, to keep going until you cannot go again, that is something I would do. Watch these people who will keep running until they cannot is fascinating. They do not sleep. They eat when they get to the end of the loop. What motivates these people? So this October I will be watching them. The current record is 75 loops, over three days of running. Wow.

Keep you masks up dears.

— MichaelRpdx :: ih3k

Oh dear. Oh my, oh dear. Oh dear, oh my, oh this is silly.
I should be able to come up with something to say.

A few days ago I had mentioned BORDERTOWN, a Finnish/Russian drama. The Netflix one that my wife did not care for because of the teenage nudity featured in the first episode and an opening of episode two with a rave, dance party with scads of teenagers doing a pool dance. I hung on and was rewarded with changes to the plot. I convinced my wife to try it again and Yep, she liked it also. We especially admire the crisp endings to the trilogies (triologies? trigologys?) We recommend it. Warnings: the dubbing is bad and they do not offer an option to listento it in Finnish: it is a Netflix thing; backstories are close to non-existent so you will need to watch a lot.

Isaac Asimov typed for six hours a day. He sat down and typed knowing that if he kept it up he could not type a bunch of drivel That he would produce good stuff. What is this? He was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University? (aside, my niece was an electronic engineer there.) As we or I was doing here he sat down and typed for six hours. Yet I am having problems getting a One Typed Page. Perhaps I need to do more work than one piece, to keep going. Instead I type out my page and quit. Then I go on to baking bread, mailing a letter, walk a mile or two, watch YouTube “Fountain Pens 101” (24 episodes and that is the theme of the day) marvel at the chilliness, and those things do not bring me any closer to what I need to write about.

Take a break, grill some cheese sandwiches, At least we have dome dinner. Yes, they were great.

Keep your masks on, dear.

— MichaelRpdx
mlr:ih3k

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