Blessings On The Roof

It flat poured all night long, and into the morning. We have a metal roof here at the cabin and it sounded like the saints were throwing a party while God was out of town. Dave agreed to spend the day having me read my novel to him. Six hours in, I was getting hoarse, but carried on, emboldened by the fact he was still conscious. It rained on. We had beers.

But it was getting stuffy in the cabin, and we weren't either of us designed to sit for hours. We went for a walk. Put our rain gear on, of course, but the drips by this time were all coming from the bodacious canopy of drenched fir trees. It got dark. We came back. Rustled up some beer and artichoke dip and found crackers in the cupboard ("Best By 2012"). Mountain food!

And no sooner had we sat down than someone sliced up a fat wedge of weather and slapped us upside the windows with it. 100-foot-tall trees squinted down at us and lined us up in their sights. Things was flying. Miss Gulch and her bicycle, diced to pieces, sailed past in a rapidly disintegrating swarm. Our eyebrows shot up to our hairlines and stayed there. And we both felt it at the same time: the irresistible urge to check the weather app. What was going to happen? Was it going to rain forever? Was there going to be a break? These were all knowable items.

In that somebody, somewhere knew them.

Well, it felt irresistible, but it wasn't. Because there was no weather app. Our phones lay inert on the counter, plugged in to maintain power, because they lose power so fast here: straining and searching for the mothership, a biddable satellite, their little tentacles dangling for a connection. There isn't one. Rain pounded the place, and we had to just let it, and assume it knew what it was doing. We couldn't do a thing about it.

On an ordinary day, when we could get a weather app and see what's coming, we kind of thought we could do something; we could avoid ambush; we could strategize. Aha, we would think. You thought we'd be surprised by this shower coming in nineteen minutes, but we aren't. We saw you coming. You think you're so smart, Weather. Our trouser pockets have radar right in them.

Tell you what else we don't know, here. We don't know if anyone commented on my blog. We don't know if someone's trying to get hold of us. We're not entirely sure what day of the week it is. We've got a social obligation tomorrow, unless it's the day after, or unless we already missed it. Somebody with more power than he earned probably did something massively stupid today, again, and we don't know what it was. We don't know the name of the filmmaker guy who's married to Frances McDormand. We do know we love Frances McDormand. We do know how many beers we have left in the fridge. We do know to wear rain gear when we go out.

It takes a few days to get over not knowing. It takes just that long to go back in time, say, twenty-five years, when we made idle talk and rummaged in our own brains for bits of missing trivia, instead of tipping it out of our phones, where our species' collective memory is now stored. It wouldn't take more than a good gust of unpredicted wind on a loose-footed Douglas fir tree to send us back to the nineteenth century, when, inexplicably, people seemed to navigate life just fine.

Here's what I know. I know that the water here is sweet, and that I can walk a long, long way. I know my baby loves me. I know that if I trip and fall on a long, long walk, someone will probably help me out. I know that if there's no one to help me out and I die in the woods, it's all the same to the woods. And if it's all the same to the woods, it's okay by me.

The Shoe Has Been Dropped

Sorry for taking a tone. But things are changing altogether too fast around here, and not for the better. And now they've changed the Monopoly tokens.

No sooner had I complained about the exile of the perfectly exquisite little thimble piece than a bunch of others, including my beloved shoe, were rounded up and marched to the Bastille, and for no reason whatsoever. Marketing. Someone in Marketing thought there weren't enough people talking about Monopoly and they decided the people should have a say on the tokens. "Have a national conversation around them," as they'd probably put it, in Marketing. Screw Marketing. There is little evidence, and certainly no recent evidence, that The People can be trusted to make wise choices about anything just because they can vote. We already have too many choices. Breakfast cereal takes up a whole aisle. There should be no more than two types of screw-heads, and one shade of black.

Don't tell me it doesn't matter. Of course it matters. People need something to hold onto. Everybody has a favorite Monopoly piece. Dave, for instance, likes the man on the horse. If he can't get the man on the horse, he takes the cannon. His fingers lack slenderness and he wants a tall piece to move around. I like the shoe, but I'll settle for the thimble. They both have a roundness that appeals to me. The other night we talked about this with friends. Both Mort and Dave liked the horse-and-rider, so immediately there was some tension. Mort is a nice man and he acquiesced. "I guess I can always take the wheelbarrow," he said.

Too late, Bucko! All five of these pieces are out the door.

This stuff is personal. Hell, we even judge other people, just a little, for their choices. "I like the race car," someone will say, and some little part of you will think Really?

They've already messed with the board. Mediterranean and Baltic Avenues are brown now, for no reason.  The Poor Tax is now a Speeding Fine. (We don't have a poor tax anymore. We call it Jail.) You used to be able to decide whether to pay a percentage of your income in the Income Tax or a flat tax of $200, but now it's just a flat tax, which makes sense, because it favors the wealthy and people who can't do math, both trending demographics.

So I don't care much if they change more of the board. Free Parking can become a bike rack, and Jail can be Cell Service Dead Zone. We can put a homeless camp on the Just Visiting square, so you'll still be okay but feel kind of icky passing through. Maybe they can make it so if you buy the Water Utility, you can change it to Nestle's Bottling Plant and charge everyone a hundred times as much for their water. Whatever. Just leave the tokens alone.

They've changed before. Dave's horse-and-rider didn't exist before 1942, and neither did the Scottie. But those don't count because they happened before I was born, which was when Time began. Which means, it's always been this way, just like indoor toilets and jet travel.

But that should have been that. Instead we have a Cat now, which is no surprise, since they're an invasive species. And also a penguin, a rubber ducky, and a Tyrannosaurus rex. And of course they're all plastic, because there are still one or two sea creatures that haven't choked on any of our shit yet.

It ain't right. And don't get me going on blue M&Ms.