Idle essays

Hideous  news out of the rustic little plateau town of Yarnell, where we love to hang out. Nineteen Hotshot firefighters died in a brushfire trying to protect homes. They were dropped into an area near the fire but the wind shifted and blew them off-course, so they were surrounded by a wall of flames.

We’re told half the town has already burned: 250 homes. On Twitter, where the most immediate news is appearing, they’re saying the area called Glen Isla is burning. La Maya and La Bethulia’s place is in another section, so there’s still a little hope. But it looks like a pretty remote one.

It took a while to get ahold of them. Mercifully, they were both here in the Valley — at a movie, far from the lurid news. So it was good to know they’re OK.

Sort of. La Maya has been using the Yarnell house as a writing retreat this summer, spending the weeks up there working on a monograph that she needs to finish before she goes up for full professor. She has a lot of research materials stashed there, much of it from archives here and in Ohio. That will be a very serious loss, if their house burns. Hope she brought her laptop down here, at least.

The A-frame house they show going up in flames looks very much like one SDXB and I looked at some years ago. We decided against it, he being highly skeptical about the construction in the outlying counties, where building codes are most often honored in the breach. That was one of three houses up there that I’ve seriously thought I could live in. But the prospect of abandoning what little social life I have in the sixth-largest city in America to move to a small town was just a bit too daunting. And the prospect of taking care of two houses was too much to contemplate.

Thank goodness! I’m sooo glad I don’t own property up there.

Once a fire gets started in that chaparral up there, it can move extremely fast, especially at this time of year when everything is tinder-dry and winds can really whip around. The town is built right up into the chaparral, many of the houses nestled among the huge, picturesque boulders. Really, as I think about it, just about every house has trees and brush growing right up to the walls. There’s a tree in direct contact with La M & La B’s deck, and the house I coveted the last time we were up there had a large, flammable-looking tree towering over it. A fast fire in a fast wind would be almost impossible to stop.

So I’ve spent the past two or three days working on a prospectus for the adjunct teaching rant book and this morning sent it off to the acquisitions editor at the desired press. Soon we should be hearing peals of laughter from the direction of Maryland echoing merrily across the land.

LOL! I’ll be surprised if this guy goes for it. But strange things happen. Occasionally.

The project morphed into a fair amount of work. I reworked and added to the introduction; rewrote some of the Adjunctorium material and added a bunch of essays to the recycled posts, bringing the number of entries to 45. Planned additions and revisions to the afterword. Wrote a proposal, table of contents, and chapter outline, put them together with the spiffed-up introduction and a short-form CV, and made the introduction’s citation & documentation conform to Chicago 16’s author-date format. Converted this mound of paper into a PDF and shipped it off, under an e-cover letter.

This little chore has been a mighty distraction from the dieting and exercising enterprise.

But then along came another, much more onerous, distraction: more pain!

The back was feeling more or less better — sometimes down as low as a .25 on a scale of 10. But over the past several days the pain gauge has risen to a definite 7. Down the tailbone and into the hip: my god it hurts!

I can barely walk around the house — it feels, weirdly, like one leg is somehow longer than the other, creating a bizarre limp — and really shouldn’t be driving the car, because I’m having a hard time lifting my foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal.

Obviously, this brought a screeching halt to the weight-loss scheme. Actually, it was in hiatus, anyway: after 12½ pounds, I hit a plateau, so over the past four or five days haven’t been losing weight. But when the fat was burning away, what was working was 3½ miles of brisk walking and a half-mile of swimming. Right now just kicking my legs in the pool hurts.

That’s kaput. I can barely crawl from the back of the house to the kitchen, though I was able to bicycle the 3 1/2 miles this morning.

Had to bring the bike in the house so Gerardo could blower out the garage, and by the time all that was done there was no way I could roll the thing back out there. {sigh}

Decided to try a glass of wine, since alcohol often dulls the back pain. Naturally, this required a steak and potatoes, eh?

Naturally, the grill wouldn’t come on. So instead of roasting the potatoes and grilling the meat over the fire, I had to sauté them in butter. Very thinnening.

Didn’t work. Tasted good, though.

An hour or so ago, it dawned on me that since this pain is radically different from the usual aches and pains, maybe it is different. What if instead of a pinched nerve, it’s a real, actual muscle spasm?

Hm.

So I dropped one of the generic Flexerils that came my way when the Mayo guy speculated the back, hip, and foot pain were caused by some sort of chronic muscle spasm.

Stuff didn’t work on that, but in the hour or two since I took the thing this afternoon, the hip feels a little better. Not so’s I can walk around. But better.

Shit. This getting old business is for the birds.

Oh well. The question is, what will I do with this manuscript after the guy in Maryland rejects it?

Not, I expect, sink $1200 into graphic design and e-book conversion. A friend has recently started converting Word files to Kindle format. He’s only charging $250 or so, and he does a good job.

So I’ll need to decide whether to try another scholarly or mainline publisher or to just go ahead and peddle it myself on Amazon.

Don’t know. We’ll just have to see what kind of response it gets.

Image: Books. Johannes Jansson/Norden.org. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Denmark license.

Well! Here’s a clarion bell announcing good news: from PBS NewsHour‘s Business Desk comes “Why the US Sits at the Brink of a New Boom.”

Let’s hope Mr. Morris has got it right this time, as he apparently did when the prognosticated a major crash. Think of what it would mean:

• The US deficit would shrink some more.
• Private industry and government jobs would bloom in gay profusion.
• The increased tax revenues from all that employment would revive Social Security, Medicare, and a wide variety of other key public programs.
• Our homes might increase in value to what we paid for them — for those of us who have managed to cling to our homes, that is.
• Most important: Our young people would have a shot at jobs that pay well enough to get them out from under the saddle of their college loans. They might even be in a position to save for their retirement and to help their own kids get through school without outrageous debt.

Speaking of “wouldn’t it be loverly,” we have that e-book I mentioned a couple of days ago. In a je ne sais quoi moment, I followed an impulse to run the manuscript past an old friend who happens to be a fairly big cheese in academic publishing. To my astonishment, she liked it.

A lot.

Enough to suggest I send it to a friend of hers at a very prominent academic press, with a recommendation from her.

Can you imagine?

Well, I think it’s a pretty long shot. But since cover design, page layout, and e-book formatting for print and electronic versions would set me back almost $1,200, I would be very pleased to get someone else to foot the bill for production, printing, warehousing, and fulfillment.

If a miracle happens and this publisher accepts the book, it will have to go through peer review, revision, and then design and production. So it’ll be a year or so before it sees print. But WTF? The interim will give me time to put together the three cookbooks I want to publish, which will be easy and relatively inexpensive to put together as e-books. 🙂

So I was feeling pretty smug this morning, trotting around the park, having dropped off the fat-loss plateau to the tune of another 1.5 pounds. Coming into the home stretch of Mile 3, I see a plump lady gamely running through the early morning heat. She has another 30 pounds to go, I figure.

Nya nya! I’ve only got 9.4 pounds left to shed!

Ahead of me I spot another woman, a large woman with a terrible limp — looks like she might have injured a hip that never healed up right, or maybe she has a birth deformity that’s nearly got her crippled. She’s a tough gal; she’s not giving up, but wrestles herself along the sidewalk with a twisting, rolling gait that must be exhausting to sustain for any length of time. My guess: 40 to 50 pounds overweight.

Thank God I don’t have to deal with that much fat!

As I come abreast to pass her, she pauses to gasp for breath, so we see each other face to face for the first time. And…my god!

It’s not a woman!

It’s a boy. He looks to be about 13 years old. Holy mackerel! The overweight probably derives from a combination of the injury or birth defect, mean classmates who make him feel inferior, and lots of computer gaming.

Baby boy, what happened to you?

Of course one doesn’t vocalize any such question. Instead, I smile vaguely and proceed around him at speed.

Forthwith I reach the end of the three-lap park circumnavigation and am flying up the feeder street toward home. At the corner, in front of the house that always has all the gay decorations at Christmas, I see a lady in a bright pink bathrobe, sitting on the ground by her garden.

She says something softly, and it takes a second to realize what she’s said is “help me!”

She’s fallen on the ground, evidently trying to get the newspaper.

I ask her if she’s hurt. She says she’s not, but would I help her get up.

She’s as tall as I am, but so frail and wasted she looks tiny. Under the bathrobe, she’s wearing an adult diaper that looks like it’s wet.

I take her hands while she struggles to get her feet under her. We try to get her upright, but it doesn’t work. She’s too heavy for me to lift, and she’s too weak to pull herself upright.

I say, “We’d better call 911.”

She says, “Get my husband.”

“Is he inside the house?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“Chuck.”

I stick my head inside the front door and holler for Chuck.

No answer. The house is neat as a pin, spotless, and odorless. But other than that clue (this lady obviously couldn’t keep house at all, much less maintain a house and yard to perfection), there’s no sign of anyone else in the house. Maybe he’s still in bed.

I enter the home, still calling his name, and walk down the hallway toward the bedrooms.

Silence.

A closed door. I knock on it and call his name a couple more times.

Just as I’m thinking the woman is confused and only imagines her husband is still with her, he calls out from behind the door, “What is it?”

When I explain that his wife has fallen out front and that I’m not physically strong enough to lift her, he says he’ll be right there. Evidently this is not the first time.

A compact, fit-looking man, he appears to be in his early 80s. He hurries outside.

On the grass by the sidewalk he kneels beside his wife and caresses her face.

This is a man of extraordinary kindness, loyalty, and grace. He speaks quietly to her, and then he manages to haul her to her feet. The trick, it develops, is not to try to pull her upright by holding her hands, from the front, but to get behind her and lift her by her shoulders from the back. Again, she has to get her feet beneath her, a painful and difficult process.

Once she’s upright he holds her in his arms. She still isn’t walking — says she can’t balance upright but feels like she’s falling forward.

I ask him how else I can help them. He says it’s OK, that they’ll be all right.

Why do I doubt it?

As I walk away, I look up into the cloudless blue sky, symbolic abode of my personal deity.

Hey! You — the one with the omniscience and the universe and all that… What the hell are You doing back there? Either make it right or make it stop, will You?

The mockingbirds sing. The doves coo. The quail crow. The waiting sky resonates with construction and traffic.

If She has an answer, She chooses not to share it.

Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori.