Museum of Random Thoughts

February 18, 2008

I’ve ordered a complete stereo for the little wagon: A CD player with radio, four speakers that fit in the doors and the back area, and all the necessary hardware to install the stuff. It all came to well under three-hundred bucks—a bargain. It will arrive via UPS sometime soon. I’ve already called over to King to see if I can pull the car into his shop to install the stereo and he said ok, provided I bring along some peanuts. The car is running exceptionally well, and the small amount of damage sustained in the minor accident was corrected. It steers and tracks normally.

Back to the house. I’ve hit upon an idea—and it involves more demolition. Out back there is a massive slab of concrete, a monstrous and home-made affair that once passed for a patio. At the one end was a barbecue, which I’ve since dismantled and buried in the large pit I filled in some time ago. It was pasted together with bricks and mortar, and looked horrible—a perfect match for the cracked and shifting concrete slab. Everything about this installation was hideous, had always been hideous, would be hideous for as long as there was still a future. I’d already done away with the rusted and faded black lampposts that stood sentinel at the corners of the patio area. Gone too are the remnants of aluminum fencing that listed this way and that—a kind of border that accented the edges of the concrete patio. I’ve whittled it away to just the slab. This monstrous piece of concrete has weighed heavily on me: What to do? It would be pleasant to have some kind of attractive patio back there, a place that was partially under cover maybe, where you could sit in the shade and enjoy the evening breeze, have a cookout or just enjoy a drink. It is so unbelievably ugly, however, with large cracks forming in the concrete, and aggressive weeds protruding as if messengers from hell itself. God, what a dismal display.

So I’ve resolved to just do away with it all, to take a breaker hammer, commonly referred to as a jackhammer, and break the whole thing up into chunks, cart them away, get rid of the whole business. I’ll turn the area back into lawn, leave the shed I just erected on its small patch of concrete, and destroy the rest. I can always lay down a small brick patio later on, if the mood and time permits. I think this plan will work best, will get the backyard returned to some semblance of normalcy. The stairs that lead to the back door are made of aluminum as well—a particularly ugly building material in this case. They will have to go, replaced by a medium deck with stairs. I can hardly wait.

February 20, 2008
Yesterday J.O. came over, helped with getting the new lumber in place-where I’d taken away the termite-eaten wood. The results are good, and I can now turn my attention to other issues, like removing the rest of the kitchen floor and starting to rebuild things in there. I may start stringing some new wiring here and there, just to see how I like it. Since I’ve had to cut many of the lines that keep the house lit up, this may be a good time to put new wires in place of the old ones, and install new outlets as well.

Earlier today I packed up the car with my tools and a new mailbox for my brother’s house, made the drive over to his place to install it. With my recently-poured concrete already set up and cured, it remained only to cut the post to the correct length and screw the whole thing down. I slid the metal bracket over the two bolts sticking up from the concrete, and was amazed to see that the thing stood up pretty straight. Ok, not perfectly straight—but then nothing I ever do is perfectly straight. It was close enough. I tightened down the nuts that King had given me, and my brother filled in the hole to grade level, shoveling dirt out of the wheelbarrow I’d left there. The whole thing looks pretty passable—a decent repository for the mails. Just before I erected the box, the mail carrier arrived with some offerings for the poor, tilted specimen that was still hanging on by the road. It was an advertising flyer. I pointed to the new mailbox, told my brother:
“You’ll get more mail with this; it is more attractive and people will want to send you things.”

To finish off the job, I took out my chainsaw, sliced through the wooden post that had held his old mailbox, left nothing of it protruding from the ground. The buried wood will become food for bugs, maybe a holey place for them to live. No longer will it be the concern of mortals.

February 21, 2008

The CVS was a joyous place, the long lines stretching back into the aisles doing little to hamper the people’s mood. They even laughed at my lame humor when I approached to pay for my bottled tea. Pointing to the half-empty vessel, I asked if I could get a discount because someone had already drunk some of it. This was an impulse stop, a wild veering from Georgia Avenue into the parking lot, just because I had a clear shot, wanted something to break up the ride back home. The laughter and joy inside the store was infectious, kept me in a good humor for most of the ride to my house.

Downtown, at the big law firm, all was what you’d expect from such a place: The usual sleek appointments, smooth stainless steel, dark wood, textured paint on the walls, fine woodworking for the trim, and on and on. Then I saw the artwork, out of keeping with these big firms. Framed photographs hung from the walls, produced with a larger-format camera perhaps. The prints were rather big—about sixteen by twenty inches—and very clear. There was lots of detail. Pictured were scenes of the deep south; a rusted fence around a green pasture sported license plates from Mississippi, strung together by the property owner. Inside the pasture was a long Cadillac from the early sixties, its rusted tailfins getting closer to the ground with each passing year. Then, beyond the Cadillac, a storage shed. You could just make out the round headlights from a nineteen-thirties era car or truck. It had been backed into the shed many years ago, was now a prisoner of time. Other scenes were of an abandoned and deserted crossroads, the lone Coke sign fading on a shuttered store the only evidence that commerce had once taken place there. The road was potholed, with rain from a recent storm filling the large crater in the foreground.

At lunch I ate in the cafeteria, this firm seeming to subsidize the food for its well-fed employees. I sat down to a plate of Knackwurst, brocolli, boiled red potatoes, corn bread and a coke for around six bucks. But I could have had so much more; this place was a paradise of food, with a small delicatessen offering fresh sandwiches, another counter serving up more hot food, and one lunchtime customer after another carrying away small pizzas. It all made me somewhat dizzy. They’d offered me lunch in the conference room, said that there was probably enough food there to feed all of us. I’d not very graciously turned it down, even though the sandwiches looked extraordinarily good. I didn’t take the time to explain that I just wanted to get out and stretch my legs, to be alone and relax with my paper. So they stayed there in the conference room, the many people involved in the case, and I went off in search of food and the news of the day. The big event that has everyone talking is the massacre of eight people who’d gathered to enjoy an illegal street race. They’d wandered out onto the highway after two cars sped off in a contest of speed. Looking down the road, after the cars, they were apparently wiped out by a regular motorist who hadn’t been expecting a crowd of people in the middle of the road at around one in the morning. This happened a few days ago. The photo depicted a mourner who’d brought a stuffed animal to the site of the tragedy, a gigantic thing that appeared to be a dog or some kind of Disney character. It was almost as large as the woman who was depositing it there next to the busy highway. There were no children killed in the accident, only adults—ranging in age from their mid-twenties to over sixty years old.

On the way home, before the CVS, I stopped at a Museum of Random Thoughts. The place wasn’t there on my trip into town; I’d taken Route One all the way from the Baltimore area, just to be different, and found that it was the fastest drive into DC so far. But, near the end, I got a little lost; trying to hook up with the familiar streets, I drove around some unusual neighborhoods, places I didn’t know existed. One little stretch of road looked to be the main street through a small town—anywhere, USA. Stores and residences lined the tidy avenue, people walked dogs, poked their heads out of windows—all in the middle of the nation’s Capitol. I wondered if I would find that place again.

On my return trip I chanced upon the same place by accident, had not really planned on it. It was there that I found the museum, in a place that had been occupied by something different just this very morning. The establishment I remembered offered submarine sandwiches, cokes, and—most prominently, in large letters—LAKE TROUT. I stopped, parked at the curb, and went inside.

There were some visitors there already, but the hour was late, and it seemed that things were winding down. The curator, a man who appeared to be wearing a coat from the Civil War era, welcomed me with a wave of his hand, sweeping it towards the dark and poorly-lit interior. Three snow-white cats guarded the place, all appearing identical. The cats fought and carried on terribly, the three of them hissing and chasing each other, tripping over their feet and ending in a snowball of fury, the threesome forming a unit that thrashed and snarled on the museum floor. It made it hard to focus on the random thoughts.

“Move along, you!” Jabbing a worn shoe in the direction of the furious cats, the curator yelled, “Fluffy! Tinkerbell! Bjartur! Stop this instant!” The cats continued on as before.
“Well, there’s a gift shop,” mentioning this in a distracted way; “Look about if you like. I’ll be in the back.”

Three or four other visitors had gathered around a dimly-lit case, were pointing.
“What is that thought?”
“Where’d it come from?”
“D’you think it’s old?”
I peered over their shoulders, looked inside the case. Here is what it said:
“I WONDER IF THERE ARE LIZARDS.”

I wandered off to see what else the museum had to offer. Under a bare, forty-watt bulb, in a corner seldom visited by the museum’s patrons, this: “SAW SOME TINY FRUITS THURSDAY. TOLD CAROL.”

I had to admit: The thoughts truly were random; there seemed to be no connectivity at all. I felt right at home. One of the wooden cases with dusty glass had several random thoughts. They were:
“SPOT ON THE DRIVEWAY. MIGHT INVESTIGATE.”
“SHOULD TALK TO THE GROCER ABOUT BANANAS—THEY WERE UNSATISFACTORY.”
“ALMA PHONED AND I FORGOT TO ASK HER ABOUT THE RICE.”
“THE LAKE LOOKED DRIER THAN USUAL.”

I checked the gift shop, thought maybe I could buy a postcard from the place. I mentioned to the caretaker my impression of seeing an eatery there earlier in the day.
“They had submarines,” I said. “And lake trout, too.”
He stopped and turned about suddenly. The cats were carrying on as before.
“Who told you about the fish?” he demanded. “There is no fish! Never had fish! It is not here! Who told you that?”
“My mistake,” I said. “It’s nothing, just…never mind.”
He calmed down, showed me some postcards in the bargain bin.
“These were not well-received,” he said. The thoughts appeared perfectly fine, no different really from the others. I took several of them, as they only cost a quarter apiece.
As I was paying, the cats started up again with renewed vigor. He handed me my change as one of the white missiles came flying off an upper shelf, alit for the briefest moment atop the curator, then bolted onto a counter as if the man’s head were merely a stepping stone in mid-stream. The cat couldn’t stop fast enough, slid onto many papers and untidy folders piled onto the counter, upset all of them, so that the whole mess went sliding onto the floor. The cat toppled, too—and just as quickly the others were upon him. Then they were off—a single streak of white snaking though the dim cases of random thoughts. I glanced down at the papers strewn about the floor, saw a check made out to the museum. It was dated from three years ago, had never been deposited or cashed. The check-writer’s name was Fairy McWilliams, of Abilene, Texas. In the memo she’d written, in careful script, “Donation—Museum of Random Thoughts.” The amount of the check was eighteen-thousand dollars. I thought that the money could buy the curator some better light bulbs, maybe hire someone to dust off the cases, but kept my thoughts to myself. I was out on the sidewalk again, the tourist family was there, too—trying to hail a cab. They were all from Indiana and wanted to visit Chinatown.