At the end of the Spring beginning of Summer time frame, there was some kind of artsy craftsy thang going on in the main drag of our little community. A street festival, if you will. Only thing is they didn’t actually close the streets, they just cluttered up the sidewalks.

I concluded, these folks know dick about a proper street fair.

I continued to miss the huge multi-city block affairs clogging up Mass. Ave. in Cambridge, Mass. There you got all of the arts and crafts you could possible want, ethnic food, normal food (you know, like non-ethnic), bands, frivolity and awesome people watching.

Last night, though, as M. and I walked to and back from dinner, we knew something was a foot. All sorts of tent action being hammered up, including a monstrosity the width of the street.

We walked further down the street and came across a rocking bit of festivity a day early for the apparently due street fair, but right on time for the release of some book or another about a certain wizard boy.

I have some crappy pics of all the wizarding crossing into the Muggle world for the night, here: http://dee-rob.com/zenphoto/iPhone.

Unfortunately, they mostly prove that the iPhone, like every other crappy cell phone takes shitty night photos. But, there were throngs and costumes and vendors and bands and jugglers and more people than I have ever seen out past the street lights coming on in our sleepy little burg.

A couple of random thoughts on the Harry Potter party. One, I was surprised at the number of teenagers in costume, as I would have thought that dressing like a Hogwarts character excruciatingly uncool. Two, nonetheless and regardless of the nerdiness, a certain subset of teenage girls will let the English school girl look bring out their inner reserve of major sluttiness. Nothing like a short skirt and a tie to telegraph underage porno.

Finally, I wonder if I were a parent, whether I would have brought my children along for the midnight madness or just handed them a bucketful of sedatives and let them sleep through it. If I were to indulge the brood and enjoy the party, I wonder if I would mortify them and dress up like a character from the book. I hope not for their imaginary selves’ sake.

Already today, though, I have gotten a frozen lemonade and a whole slew of free junk from fair booths, like Naked and Burt’s Bees. Soon, we’re going back for some street vendor dinner.

Oh, and one thing they gots in California street fairs that they ain’t got in Cambridge. Booze in the street. Margaritas, beer and wine served in festive glassware for a couple bucks more.

Why can I know longer hold my head up and stay awake come an evening? I eat dinner, I fire up the ‘puter fully intending to write. And, then, I realize my neck is snapping back from dropping low and I’m wiping drool from my chin.

Once I was robust and full of life and able to remain conscious. Now, I just fucking need a nap.

I have a couple of pictures of of the post-moribund, the eternal sleep, the nevermore.

The first got my nature-girl swerve going, when another chick on the beach and I tried to suss out the characteristics and identifying marks of a bird that would be forevermore flightless.

M. guessed penguin, before it got washed into the waves and a Vikings grave. Or someone else who floated the dead.

These pics, though, this gopher in rigor, I took witha deliberate story in mind. The story isn’t mine, it’s my buddy’s. Or her dad’s, rather.

Cliff L. was an honest to fucking god Yankee, capital Y, can’t get there from here (notice I didn’t use cheesy spelling like theyah or thar, but the sound was theyah, just like an ay-up in a Pepperidge Farm commercial). Fortunately, I got a chance to trek to his farm before his aging, never quite healthy body quit fighting.

From another generation, for sure, actually more like two, since my friend was definitely a late in life arrival for her folks, his farm was a bit of a time-warp voyage. He had electricity and running water and all that modern shit, but he put together a lot of the systems himself.

He walked his property confidently, curiously, amused, walking steady on leg braces from childhood polio. I think it was polio, since that would be part of the old-timey feel.

He knew about plants and growing and nature, so he farmed. During the WWII conflict, he welded nuclear subs, or some other kind of huge, specialty of war, needing good welded seams for the boys kind of ship. Somewhere in there in his life, he was also a professional cook.

Instead of who from history would you invite to dinner, I like to imagine people I know meeting other people I know, even though the overlap would be damn unlikely. By now, with Cliff L. gone almost a decade and Pat gone over a nickel’s worth of years, it ain’t gonna happen. Leastways, not on this planet in any kind of conventional, non-mystic way.

I think New England reserve and cantankerousness would have chilled the initial meeting, if Cliff L. and Pat were to meet. But, maybe, something would come up and they would figure out three real areas of concordance. A willingness and patience to explain things to youngsters simply and with real-world metaphor, reading and an unbreakable, unchallengeble (or some real world) belief in knowing about and exercising within the civics of our society.

Vote. Participate. Be responsible.

Liz, his daughter, is one friend who I would never, ever, ever have faced the apathetic argument that is our modern age, “why vote?” Nope, like Pat, she understands, you vote because you can. Because in other places, you can’t.

I’m Pat’s daughter. She’s Cliff’s. We both vote for everything, I think. (I miss not voting for the town tree surgeon in my home town. Especially, when it was the son of my art teacher.)

None of this explains my photos of the dead, though, and why I had to take them on the good, old iPhone and email them to Liz.

Cliff was an amateur naturalist. He walked and wandered the woods and meadows around his town and his own land, flipping rocks while plowing to spot fossils or maybe arrow heads, knowing the genus and species of the flora and flauna around him. One day, he came across an expired, elusive star-nosed mole.

Like Darwin hanging out in an archipelago, he picked it up and brought it home to show his kids and anyone else and to preserve it in his own little museum. OK, it wasn’t a museum, it was his freezer.

I don’t know how many days, month or years had passed since the specimen was collected, but I got to see the star-nosed mole popsicle myself.

Somehow, photos of a dead gopher seem a tad less gruesome to me. And, my specimen was hardly rare, particularly as I found it on the path next to a golf course, where doubtless many other gopher friends and relatives were frolicking.

I knew Liz would get the connection. And, to Cliff L., continue to RIP and know we are carrying on the nature-loving.

One of those weekends where it feels like only now am I a body at rest. But that’s OK. Got stuff done, had some fun and now sitting and waiting on some laundry spinning.

Yesterday, was the charity bike ride for Breathe California. To assuage the general liberal guilt of our double-income-no-kids, indulgent lifestyle, what with dining on organic, free-range tapas accompanied by a light, chilled California whites the night before, I ponied up a bit of cash.

With the do-gooder matching that my own not-for-profit employer kicks in, I was eligible for a biking jersey. The back story to my desire to own such an item is pure hypocrisy. I work and live near a stretch of road given to brightly colored, spandex clad bicyclists. You see enough douchebags with thousand-dollar bikes rocking hundred-dollar gear wrapped in bright colors you start noticing. Mostly, I’ve noticed among the well-heeled folk in my neighborhood, active but aging and softening around the middle, much like myself, that spandex is a fucking unforgiving fabric.

One ounce of fat in lycra is the appearance of one thousand pounds of jiggling, stretched chubbiness.

So, I have mine.

Here’s me sporting my new polyester colors yesterday, while walking through a Bastille Day celebration at the local French cafe.

The bike ride was fun. I have no sense of direction whatsoever, which is well-documented and astonishes those who know me as otherwise relatively not retarded, for M. and our buddy Bob, though, I expected better. One way or another we added a couple miles onto my odometer through a misturn or two, so we clocked a 20-mile ride rather than the mapped course of 18. I hope those little kids with asthma appreciate our extra effort.

Here’s a few photos of our not-quite-at-all epic journey by bicycle.

Nature:

Getting ready:

Riding:

Resting:

My brain today is just in a place where it might as well be cutting school, smoking cigarettes and threatening the attending kids in the parking lot.

I haven’t been the same since the bells tolled high noon and we took the new girl to lunch. I had a tasty (and pricey) burger on the man’s dime. From that appropriately lengthed luncheon, which clocked a deuce of hours, through the afternnon, into the evening and on and on at home, I’ve needed coartoon toothpicks to pry the lids open.

Can’t even count the times I’ve done the whole heavy lids, falling head to neck snap “I’m awake,” maneuver while even trying to write this shit. Truth be told, though, I find reading my bullshit to be a fine sleep aid, so why not writing it?

Rather than fight it, I’m giving up. Maybe tomorrow or the weekend, I can keep my peepers alert enough to get past two three paragraphs.

Bit of a anxiety attack today. The mentor dude willing to provide me some first-class, double, no, maked that quadruple ‘A, ‘ mentoring is back from Europe and wanted to see what kind of writing I had done.

A fistful of crappy pages were surrendered. (Imagine this place with slightly more point and a whole lot less of the fucking profanity. I probably could’a’ doubled my output if I jammed the swears in the right way.)

He was gracious and great and talked to me like a real regular person, not the halfwit that I, in fact, am. I love it when people don’t seem to suspect the retardation thing.

I’m gonna be heeding pretty much everything he said and trying for some structure and build up to get the stories to hang onto it. One thing is maybe taking a look at spending some time letting folks know who I am and how I got here and all. You know, some kind of, I was born a wee baby and then shit happened and now I’m a me. But, interesting.

Imagine that. Me. Writing. Interesting. I’ll see what I can do.

One very quick note from today is that if I’m shaking your hand, and you and your family are worth not just millions but billions of American US currency dollar bills, no sweater vests, OK?

I met someone from the rarefied space of high-net worth individuals or Colbert Platinum, and he was dressed like Richie Rich or the young Ricky Schroder of Silver Spoons days. All I’m asking is if you can buy and sell me and my whole entire family for generations, don’t dress like one of the rich assholes from Caddyshack.

The second quick note from the day gets filed under what is done can’t be undone and freaks me the fuck out.

The helpful ex-prof guy at work who’s been away and told me to do some writing while he was gone is briefly back. I dropped off my paltrey offerings of prose, aka total crap, for his perusing. He’s planning to give me some feedback tomorrow afternoon.

I suspect he might just weep inconsolably, unable to find the words, “Jesus Christ, you talentless, delusional fuck, why did you put me through that?”

Talentless, uninteresting and delusional I may be, but I did surprise myself. Once I got the bullshit formatted, I had 43 pages spread over 2.5 or so chapters. Chapters with catchy names like “Fire” and “Funeral.”

The thing I think sucks to the core of writing is that totally horrible feeling of “Why am I putting myself through this?” Is there any other activity that makes you want to vomit with self-doubt so frequently?

We’re stationed in Bodega Bay, CA for the weekend. Tomorrow it will be the start of M.’s duathlon — biking and running. For the biking, it’s 51 miles, for the running, it’s 16. For me, it’s pausing to wonder if my partner is insane.

We’re staying where they filmed part of Hitchcock’s The Birds. There are a lot of them here, and they are menacing, what with the singing of the song birds and the whatever gulls do.

I’m uploading some pictures here. Including the circling buzzards. Oh, wait, I mean California condors.

Yeah, Bob said I couldn’t write about him. But, I got them issues with Bob. Bob and his non-firework ways.

Actually, Bob isn’t alone in not giving a rat’s ass for fireworks in this the Bay Area. I blame the fog and the risk of quick-spreading grass fires. The local news is reporting at least one fire right now.

I caught the tail end of some OK ‘works for an area where a 15-minute display with maybe four colors is considered exceptional. Fucking ‘tards.

I came home from Americana, softball drills and eating a shitload of things burnt over an outdoor fire and watched the Boston Esplanade show on cable. Truth is you don’t miss the fireworks in your own backyard until you move 3,000 miles from that yard.

I can forgive Bob his lack of fireworks enthusiasm which aided and abetted the barely seeing the tail end of some (and that involved running alongside a parking structure to get to a view beyond the roof of it). However, I am not sure I can forgive him for taking this shot with my own fucking camera.

Click my hideousness to see a gallery of our happy holiday. Boom.