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Vintage Season
Jul. 17th, 2006 08:19 amI think C.L. Moore wrote it – Vintage Season, classic sci fi story about time-traveling tourists who show up at the scene of various armegeddon-style catastrophes. Anyway, I kept flashing on that story all weekend long. Latest conflict in the Middle East feels very end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-ish to me. Or maybe it's just the convergence of so many end of the world scenarios – bloodshed, global warming, bird flu. War, famine, pestilence. All that's missing is the big guy with the hood who likes to play chess.
Withal the Little Store had a boffo weekend racking up the Benjamins and some lovely people came in to buy things. The cutest Lesbian couple in the world spent fifteen minutes telling me about their pets (three cats, two dogs, a rabbit, three guinea pigs); a gorgeous pair of newly weds, expatriates from New Orleans, described the devastation in the Ninth Ward.
"Our house survived Katrina," said the guy. "Barely. But then we came out here to work because there aren't no jobs there. And at Christmas it burned down."
Weather was perfect. Here on the quaint and scenic central coast where the hot air from the valley meets the cool Pacific, our mornings are cosseted in thick ghost fog. By eleven o'clock, it burns off; a gentle sun shines down. Around sunset the fog returns – a thick linear ridge like a fast-moving glacier coming down over the mountains.
Anyway, I keep my doom-saying to myself in the store. It's not good for sales. Over the years I've learned. Once whenever anyone would ask me, "How's business?" I would treat them to a ten-minute discourse on the trials and tribulations of the tourism economy. Now I just smile and say, "Business is great." I've got the various patters down – the "How did you come up with an idea like this?" patter; the "They're all the same product under different labels, right?" patter. Keep it entertaining; keep it short – it should never clock in at over 90 seconds. The object is to get them to give me their money, not become their New Best Friend.
And it wasn't exactly that I was having a hard time doing this last weekend. It was more – I don't know. I wanted to slap them. I wanted to tell them, "The world is changing very fast and not for the better." I wanted to scream at them, "Do something about it right now!"
My Cassandra complex.
In the evening I took the dogs to the beach, and ran into Heidi and Bill. Awkward encounter. Right after Ben left, I was so freaked out about having to leave Robin alone in the house on weekends that I'd called Bill. Bill mentors a kid about Robin's age who lives in Salinas, and I thought maybe he'd be willing to do something similar with a kid he actually knows. Asking meant having to divulge the details of our separation. Big Mistake. Bill prides himself on his altruism but he doesn't actually like to be asked to do things – what he likes to do is give parties where Heidi serves inedible food and the guests are forced to listen to Bill get out his instruments and play music.
It's not that Bill is a bad musician exactly; it's that I don't like to be highjacked that way.
At the end of these evenings, Bill is always just drunk enough to clutch your hand, "If you ever need anything…"
Of course offers like that are not meant to be taken seriously and of course once again, I'd misread the social cues.
Desperation will do that to you.
Anyway, after this phone conversation, things got awkward and tense. Heidi waddled around once to leave off a home-made pizza and an inedible noodle salad and I called Bill once for carpentry advice – which he refused to give until we'd – ahem! – cleared the air.
"It's your pride, isn't it?" he said, and I agreed cheerfully until I realized cheerfulness wasn't what he was looking for here. He wanted some muffled sob action before he was going to tell me how to load that bit into the drill.
Anyway, at the beach we waved and smiled but it freaked me out so much that I left the dogs' leashes at the beach and will now have to – money, money, money, money! – buy new ones.
Withal the Little Store had a boffo weekend racking up the Benjamins and some lovely people came in to buy things. The cutest Lesbian couple in the world spent fifteen minutes telling me about their pets (three cats, two dogs, a rabbit, three guinea pigs); a gorgeous pair of newly weds, expatriates from New Orleans, described the devastation in the Ninth Ward.
"Our house survived Katrina," said the guy. "Barely. But then we came out here to work because there aren't no jobs there. And at Christmas it burned down."
Weather was perfect. Here on the quaint and scenic central coast where the hot air from the valley meets the cool Pacific, our mornings are cosseted in thick ghost fog. By eleven o'clock, it burns off; a gentle sun shines down. Around sunset the fog returns – a thick linear ridge like a fast-moving glacier coming down over the mountains.
Anyway, I keep my doom-saying to myself in the store. It's not good for sales. Over the years I've learned. Once whenever anyone would ask me, "How's business?" I would treat them to a ten-minute discourse on the trials and tribulations of the tourism economy. Now I just smile and say, "Business is great." I've got the various patters down – the "How did you come up with an idea like this?" patter; the "They're all the same product under different labels, right?" patter. Keep it entertaining; keep it short – it should never clock in at over 90 seconds. The object is to get them to give me their money, not become their New Best Friend.
And it wasn't exactly that I was having a hard time doing this last weekend. It was more – I don't know. I wanted to slap them. I wanted to tell them, "The world is changing very fast and not for the better." I wanted to scream at them, "Do something about it right now!"
My Cassandra complex.
In the evening I took the dogs to the beach, and ran into Heidi and Bill. Awkward encounter. Right after Ben left, I was so freaked out about having to leave Robin alone in the house on weekends that I'd called Bill. Bill mentors a kid about Robin's age who lives in Salinas, and I thought maybe he'd be willing to do something similar with a kid he actually knows. Asking meant having to divulge the details of our separation. Big Mistake. Bill prides himself on his altruism but he doesn't actually like to be asked to do things – what he likes to do is give parties where Heidi serves inedible food and the guests are forced to listen to Bill get out his instruments and play music.
It's not that Bill is a bad musician exactly; it's that I don't like to be highjacked that way.
At the end of these evenings, Bill is always just drunk enough to clutch your hand, "If you ever need anything…"
Of course offers like that are not meant to be taken seriously and of course once again, I'd misread the social cues.
Desperation will do that to you.
Anyway, after this phone conversation, things got awkward and tense. Heidi waddled around once to leave off a home-made pizza and an inedible noodle salad and I called Bill once for carpentry advice – which he refused to give until we'd – ahem! – cleared the air.
"It's your pride, isn't it?" he said, and I agreed cheerfully until I realized cheerfulness wasn't what he was looking for here. He wanted some muffled sob action before he was going to tell me how to load that bit into the drill.
Anyway, at the beach we waved and smiled but it freaked me out so much that I left the dogs' leashes at the beach and will now have to – money, money, money, money! – buy new ones.
