syncretism
My dad and I wired up much of the kitchen yesterday. It’s a small amount of visual progress (the addition of outlet boxes, various wires) but it still produces a sense of satisfaction when observed. The added bonus is that I’m not nearly as tired and sore today as I was last Monday, after the weekend in which we ripped everything out.
Charlie and I enabled sharing on our respective iTunes here at work. What this means is that while we work, we have access to all the music and podcasts on each others’ computers. I’ve been enjoying his stash of podcasts quite a bit. He has a “Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Best Albums” ‘cast with some interesting selections (Black Sabbath and the Beastie Boys?). I was pleased, however, with the inclusion of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Paul Simon’s Graceland. And it piqued my interest about some artists I hadn’t heard of before, or hadn’t paid attention to, among them Robert Johnson (influential blues guitarist) and Patti Smith.
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It’s later in the day and I’m here at home, putting off cleaning the rest of the kitchen as Diane reads the latest World on the bed and Luke chirps from his room after having been in there for the past hour and a half without falling asleep. The fan is running for Diane’s benefit and in a rare moment I caught her saying “This fan is really loud.”
I remember the sky early this morning during my run, how the lowest clouds were the red of an underlying fire as the sun rose, darkening in contiguous bands until they ended abruptly in a thunderhead. It rained this morning, a fluke, though not unwelcome thunderstorm that tempered the rest of the day. I catch fragments of other lives in sensations here and there: a fleeting whiff of a pine tree from the park in Fréjus or just the quality of light filtering through the leaves will remind me of an afternoon at the Col de Vence. After years of consciously training myself to catch these subtle sense-prompted memories like butterflies in a net, it happens so instinctively now that it borders on the white noise we have to train our senses to filter out, like extraneous stimuli when driving or the feel of the clothes against my skin. We just don’t think about these things.