mallorys_camera | Rain and Momos

It was only ten inches of rain total but it felt like more. It felt, in fact, like Days 1 and 3 of the storm that launched Noah. Day 2 it didn’t actually rain but the sky glowered — the Old Guy in the nightgown with the long white beard shaking his fist angrily from the heavens.

Behold the once tranquil and well dammed Empire of the Beaves… Of course, Beaves don’t mind floods. They know floods create jobs! The unemployment rate is close to zero in Beaver Land.

A tree came crashing down in my backyard. A perfectly healthy maple tree – the ground was just too saturated to support its shallow root system:

Wednesday was the remains of Tropical Storm Lee. God knows what Monday was – some barometric depression so obscure that meteorologists didn’t even bother to anthropomorphize it.

Me, I just holed up in the cement bungalow with the Petsers and tried to work. Behind on the Stegner stories. Way behind on the Stegner stories. Behind on the novel too. And behind on the paying gigs too, because it is actually very hard to write huge volumes of verbiage for pennies on the word I actually doubled my earnings last month and hope to increase them again in the next two weeks, but the paycheck after the current one is always the flat edge of the world that you’re careening off, you know?

I tried explaining this to Max who is one of the many people who called during the rainstorms. So many people called, in fact that I felt a bit like the protagonist of that morbid E.M.Forster story The Machine Stops who considers himself very sociable because he has all sorts of machine-mediated communications with dozens of people, even though all he does essentially is sit in a small room alone by himself.

“See the thing about the most recent recession,” I explained to Max, “is that it made approximately 20 % of the population economically obsolete. There are no jobs for us. There will never be jobs for us. Because this wasn't a readjustment at all -- it was... surgery... For the rest of you, life goes on as usual – you go to work, you buy cars, you go to the movies, you root for the Steelers. It wasn’t an equal hit so for most people, it’s kind of a puzzlement.”

“I’ve never heard it put that way,” Max said. “Honestly, you should write about that.”

Right! Poverty Porn: The Reader’s Digest Edition could be bundled with Barbara Erenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed.

On Tuesday, I did go into town to meet up with Balorma. “Aren’t you hungry?” she kept asking. “You look hungry!” Finally about the eighth time she said this, the light bulb over my head went off: She’s hungry. So she took me to a Tibetan Momo bar, momos being a rather delicious savory dumpling filled with meat, and wouldn’t let me pay for anything, “No, no – they my friend, they my friend,” and then we went window shopping at Trader K’s where I had to physically restrain her from buying me things. On Saturday, she announced, she is going to cook me a huge vat of momos because hers are better.

Here are the goldenrods that have been assembling as stealthily as guerilla soldiers in the field in back of my house all summer long. It’s supposed to be a bucket year for goldenrod – no one’s exactly sure why. They’re like the final volley in summer’s fireworks, the end of the season show. And they’re beautiful in their way but I dread seeing them because they mean winter’s coming and I’m so very, very, very dreading winter.

Did I mention I’m dreading winter?

Dreading it.