Tuns out Jomax, Tri-sodium Phosphate and Bleach will eat the skin from your hands. Mixing it reminded me of George's Marvelous Medicine, but instead of making me really really tall, I just got burned really really bad. Well, sort of bad. Well, not really bad- it just kind of ate a few layers of skin, and now my hand sweats. I'm not sure if this will be good or bad for my hands (see blog entry Man Hands) You should see the mildew though... Well I guess you can't now.

I should stop working outside, but I can't. The prospect of having a child at any moment is driving me a little crazy. It looks like rain tomorrow. Maybe I'll start a project inside. There's at least one floor I have to re-do, and a noisy freezer that needs to go to the basement.

Mooney Skarl

Still no baby, babies. I'm thinking June first for some reason. That's this sunday. I built a swing. Well, actually it's just a frame... the swing itself has yet to materialize. I used some plans I found online, however. I think I made a sturdier frame by using carriage bolts instead of nail plates. hmmm...
I'm seriously getting pretty good at using my reciprocating saw though. You've seen those guys that carve with chainsaws? Yeah, I'm going professional with my reciprocating saw. No one would want to watch it the way some people can watch a guy carve a bear out of a tree trunk with a chainsaw, but it might be a little bit like something you see at the Warther Museum. "How did he do that? With a reciprocating saw?" With any luck, people will come to regard me as a contemporary of Mooney Warther. Hey, I wonder if Carrie will go for that name...

Hello world. It's been a while. I cleaned my computer desk, so that now it's not layered with stacks of papers and other things. I was burning some incense tonight while I was cleaning and playing guitar with a friend and woah... it's good stuff. I think it's from World Market of all places, but it's called,,,oh wait, I threw away the packaging. Too bad.

I was typing something the other day about the Hemingway story with the Romans drinking wine from stone bowls... the ones that had just finished crucifying Jesus. I forget what I was going to say about the story. I think I was going to fashion the text I was writing into a fancy pattern or something... not a crucifix. Like a bulls eye or something.

So yeah, I got to play some guitar today with a friend. How awesome is that? I'll tell you, it was very awesome. He was playing my fretless bass and he had bought some nylon strings, and the black nylon strings for the fretless bass are pretty awesome.
And I'll tell you folks, some days you feel like a rockstar, some days you don't. Today I felt like a rockstar. It was the guitar, yeah, but it was also the way the sky was sunny, but still threatening rain, and the rhododendrons out front finally bloomed and a big bud like a pink crown fell to the ground, and there are some white flowers blossoming somewhere that stick to the bottoms of your shoes and you end up tracking them inside, and my bonsai tree hasn't died yet, and I opened a few windows, and time moves on regardless, and now it's Sunday the 18th of May, 2008.

I keep waiting for Carrie to go into labor. It's kind of weirding me out, but then I talk to her, and not really. Did I tell you, we picked the baby name? You're going to like it. I promise.

So here's the room now that it's done. I was driving home from the library and I was reading the first paragraph of a book I got, and it goes like this:
"In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day."
As I swerved to miss two large grey geese crossing the street I couldn't help but gape at these two sentences. I think the idea that I'm soon going to have a child is coloring my thoughts, but I just think this passage is pretty super. The book is Peter Camenzind, and like all of Hesse's books (except Journey to the East- I found that one tiresome... maybe it was a bad translation) I was... am... hooked. I don't know what it is, but everything in this book is magical. There's a whole passage about clouds that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. Maybe I'm getting soft. The book is set in the Alps, and I once dreamed of a woman giving birth in one of those telpherage cars high above a mountain range. Maybe it was the Bermese mountains. I think I envy anyone who grew up in a time and place free of television, roads, cars, phones, computers, fast food, cell phones. The World is Flat, indeed. I think we've flattened it irrevocably... the way I almost flattened those geese.