Or Maybe Never

Very long and labyrinthine dream but at the end of it, I was a teacher at some sort of school for gifted students. The students were doing art projects. My favorite student wanted to do a very earnest, un-ironic fan portrait of Tom Cruise, which I knew was going to be a complete disaster because fan portraits of Tom Cruise—ugh. But I didn’t know how to stop him.

I was sitting at some sort of meeting with the other teachers. We were discussing how we were going to critique the students’ art projects. It’s going to be like when we critiqued their singing, said one of the teachers—They are so good, there will be nothing to criticize.

And I thought of my favorite student, anticipating all the derision and hostility he was going to incur with his un-ironic portrait of Tom Cruise. And felt bad for him.



Does this house look like it’s occupied?

Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler!

It's not!

Yesterday’s National Counting Project adventures took me on a tour of the abandoned properties up and down Crum Elbow Road, which at one time—not so very long ago—was a vast marsh.

Then—maybe 30 years ago?—the younger brother of one of the men I garden with ran his car off the road and was so drunk that he actually drowned in about four inches of water.

He was the scion of a locally famous restaurant family, and the restaurant family actually paid to have the marshes drained. Now, up and down Crum Elbow Road, there are signs: In memory of Claudio C______.

Cooler than a headstone, I guess.

###

One address, which took me half an hour to track down, finally turned out to be on the other side of this one-quarter-mile-long dirt path off Violet Avenue. You would never in a million years find it if you didn’t know to look.

When I finally tracked it down, there was another vehicle there—a shiny new truck with ginormous wheels. Two guys with multiple tattoos and really bad teeth were nosing around the structure, which turned out to be an abandoned golf clubhouse: Rusting signs, overgrown by strange flowering weeds—Reserved for the World’s Best Golfer!— lined what had once been a parking lot.

The two guys were perfectly civil to me, but I had the idea they were scouting locations for their next meth lab.

###

What else?

In the middle of a boring Hyde Park housing development, I discovered a “Potter’s Lane” with a Poughkeepsie address.

A little piece of Poughkeepsie in the middle of Hyde Park!

It reminded me of how for the 40 years of so just after the Revolutionary War, this part of New York was filled with non-contiguous bits of Massachusetts and Connecticut.

However suburban and boring it looked now, I thought, Potter’s Lane must be a really old address. There was probably a ceramics factory here once upon a time. In the early 19th century, maybe.

###

Also, I ran into a wedding. It was at a rare upscale apartment complex on E. Market: 30 or so people, happily getting drunk together sans masks or social distance.

That one gave me some pause.

I never thought lockdown was sustainable, but I do think wearing masks is sustainable.

If I could wear one all day yesterday, a 68-year old woman tramping around in 95° heat, anyone can wear them.

I don’t think masks make a single bit of difference when you’re 10 or more feet away from other people. For example—I think they’re ridiculous when I’m tromping around the Vanderbilt Park though I always have one slung around my neck so I can hike it up in case I run into anyone who’s sensitive on that point.

But when you’re literally rubbing shoulders with other people whom you do not know…

Anyway, I expect to see a peak in Hyde Park covid stats within the next 14 days.

###

What else?

This purports to be an unretouched photo of last night’s sunset in San Francisco:



I have my doubts about the “unretouched” part, but there’s no denying that things are very, very bad in the Greater SF Bay Area—which ranges from the wine country in Napa and Sonoma counties to the beaches of Santa Cruz.

Spoke with Annie and Stew.

Stew is a smart cookie: He packed Annie up and whisked her away to a friend’s acreage near Watsonville.

The fires are still a good five miles away from the house, and no evacuation orders have been issued, but I had been thinking, She has a broken hip; you are gonna have a real issue if you have to evacuate in a hurry.

So, I was relieved that they were out plus now he can spend his time emptying the house of valuables like Annie’s violin collection, his Martin guitar collection, the equipment in his recording studio.

Terrible, terrible, terrible times these.

I do my Scarlett O’Hara schtick: I will think about it tomorrow.

Or maybe next week.

Or maybe never,.