Spit and Blogs and Secret Fermentation

Here’s more from last summer, which to tell you the truth is when I started taking notes for this blog.

A blog is a hard thing to get off the ground. Someone told me it was lame to start with just one entry because you’d seem like the kind of person who nothing happens to; the kind of person picked last for the big dodgeball game which come to think of it I sort of was.

I have a couple of friends who write blogs and one guy just does it about every day which is what you’re sort of supposed to do I guess. (I’ll list him over in the corner here soon as I figure out how to do that.) But I know other people who only get to it like once a month and I’m not sure but I think that’s no good. If I did that it would seem so labored and you’d think I was making draft after draft and trying to get an A in blogging and all and I don’t want to do it that way.

I want to just let fly. All the funniest and sometimes the truest things people say they say without expecting to; it just comes out of their mouths. I want to write like that here, not for your sake only but for mine. It makes you feel so free to talk off the top of your head and you can’t do it most places. You sure can’t do it in a newspaper column unless you want to start getting bags and bags full of hate mail.

Blogs are still new so there aren’t a whole lot of rules about them yet. Sometimes you write long and sometimes you write short. Heather Armstrong, whose blog is called Dooce.com writes about everything that happens under her roof to get at the dailiness of everyday life.

I like that.

The same person who told me to store up a couple dozen before I 'went live' says the idea with a blog is that you can slide right down the bloggers' words and picture them sitting in their living room. They let themselves be known to that extent.

If we’re doing that now you would know that I’m sitting on a couch that for some reason smells strongly of fermented fruit today. I do carry a lot of fruit and lots of times it leeches out of my pockets and seeps down into the upholstery and all so maybe when I get done I’ll stand up and take out the cushions.

Everyone else here is asleep even though the sun is blindingly bright and it’s 9 o’clock in the morning. The Patriots won last night but it was a near thing and I think it wore away at all their nervous systems so maybe they’re still recovering.

I skipped that Pats game. My plan was to watch DVDs, sort through old photos and go to bed at 10. Instead I ended up watching one tenth of one DVD, sorting no photos at all and toppling over from my sitting position on the floor to fall dead asleep at 8pm so me I’m fresh as a daisy.

But here’s what I want to live like when I’m old:

I saw this lady last summer. I was trudging along the street on one of those sweltering August days, with a sun so hot the drops of perspiration falling from your poor sweaty head sizzle like spit on a griddle when they land on your forearms.

“If I can just get to that air-conditioned deli!” I was thinking as I eyed the place shimmering like a mirage some hundred feet away - when just then an ‘80s-era sedan bigger than your average bedroom cut me off.

It had an old man at the wheel, almost like a paid driver.

I could tell though that he wasn’t paid; he just felt like the spouse or the brother or the domestic partner of the person in the back – who was an old woman with slate-grey hair falling straight down in a bob of the kind little girls wore in the '20s and '30s, the kind Scout Finch had in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

She was wearing a baseball cap and a baseball jacket.

She swung before my vision pretty quickly but I could see she was chewing gum. At least I thought it was gum - until she rolled down the window and spit mightily into the bushes.

"Maybe I’ll be like that!" I said to myself. Because that would be OK, right? Better to be like that than be some fancy old broad who everyone’s afraid of with pink hair and fingers encrusted with jewels.

"I want to be like her!" I thought with my nice old husband Dave wingin' around the corners in his big old sedan.

Because there are worse things than being a public spitter who looks like Moe of the Three Stooges, right? One might be sitting on fermenting food. We found the nicest little mouse footprints in the old orange juice can full of hardened bacon-fat last night and that was sure entertaining. Plus one of us keeps finding tiny acorn-parts under her pillow so there it is: you just never know what a day is gonna offer you.

Yeah I guess I’ll get up now and take a look. Shakespeare says we have a nose between our eyes so we can smell out that which we can’t peer into. Guess I’ll try doing both now and if there’s screaming, too bad for the others. How much recovery-time do they need? Land sakes, it’s only football!