Thorns

Thorns

Oh holy crap!

Whole lotta slackin goin on.

I've been trying to compose a novelette that would do justice to our vacation last month, and it's slow going. So fooey on that for now.

I have this habit of tormenting myself by visiting www.weather.com frequently to see what the prospects of rain are. (Yard anxiety.) And they have this tantalizing 7-day forcast map you can check out. So theoretically on Monday, you could look ahead to next weekend and see if there's any chance of getting a good drenching. And I don't know how it works for the rest of the country, which, I guess it probably works halfway decent because they haven't sacked those forecasts so far. But as far as Arizona is concerned, it's just a bunch of baloney. Any 'weather' you see within the boundaries of Arizona that's more than 24 hours out, is a crapshoot/hoax. Everytime I've let myself get all stoked that we'll get some precipitation in a few days, I can watch day by day as the Sonoran-Triangle dries it out bit by bit by bit, until that day arrives and it's as dry and crispy as the boogers on Harrison's face first thing in the morning. And oh by the way, if it does rain, you won't see it on the forecast map until at maximum, the day before it happens. So I'm poking around there today, and check this out:

That's today's forecast for Friday. Do you see that? It says "Freezing Rain". What a crock. I have to admit that my first reaction was "OOH! Freezing Rain? Wow! What a trip." And that's not to say that I want to die from frozen trees and powerlines collapsing on my car, but I think it would be far out to see what would happen to the town if we got a taste of this locust-plague of the midwest...in much the same way that I wouldn't relish a lava flow burning my house to the ground, but it would be incredibly cool to see a new cinder cone pop up east of town. Um...So anyway, where I'm going with this, is that as bad as their long-range AZ forecasts are, where do they get off throwing a little oval of freezing rain in there? I mean, I've come to expect the teasings of rain and snow, but this is laughable hubris. Now you just watch. Day by day, they'll go "oh! uh heh! by golly, what were we thinking? We shouldn't ever put freezing rain anywhere Southwest of the Four Corners, ever. Hah! And four days ahead of time too. Heheh. Okay, let's give 'em a nice easy transition. Change it to Rain & Snow Mix Tuesday...that oughta make them happy. And then on Wednesday, we'll change it to isolated showers, which paves the way for "Dry" on Thursday's map. Can't you just picture their yards begging for mercy? Gosh we're stinkers. ::snicker snicker:: " Bleah.

Ooh, and a couple days ago, I had my space all invaded at the grocery store. I was standing there in line, and some lady and her kid were in front of me, and I was giving them like 3 feet of space. That's about right for my tastes, and yes, I've got some 'give' in that equation to suit different people's tastes, and for crowded situations or what have you. So anyway, as I'm standing there morbidly perusing the tabloid headlines, I hear this older couple hustling up behind me, and they're speaking Italian or Spanish really fast so I can't tell which language it is. And allofasudden, this guy is like right on top of me. And my first reaction was that the people in front of me had moved and I'd failed to notice, but no, they were still right where I thought they were, but I scooted up a little bit anyway. And this guy just kept coming in, and he was loading his groceries, and since the conveyor had moved up, he actually scooted in front of me to stack up his consumables. Wow did that put me into a major crabby.

But like a mild little sheep, I backed up at first to let him through to take care of his all-important grocery loading. Well finally the people in front of me take off, and I quick-step up to the little ATM card reader as the cashier is scanning my pittance of groceries. And sure enough, the guy behind me starts barrelling right up. What does he want? To see my pin-code now? So I enacted my pufferfish reaction, expanded my shoulders as broadly as I could, took a wide stance, tried to expand the blood vessels in my head to give my bald-spot a molten sheen, and planted my backside squarely in his way. I think he bounced back a half-step. Har!

I know that the whole 'space-bubble' thing is like, some anglo-North American peculiarity, and different cultures have different levels of comfort, so I guess I should just get over it. But I just can't get with the theory of chaos, public moshing and survival of the pushiest. It makes me think of the roads of Tijuana. A disorienting avalanche of cars, carts, animals and people swerving about, filling any marginally open space, car horns and shouting voices cutting lose to no imaginable purpose. Streets where white dashed lines are impossible to see through the seething brickwork of cars, and would go unheeded even were they visible. It's just something I couldn't come to grips with, so I avoid it to the best of my ability, until its scraggly, anonymous beard tickles the back of my neck in some grocery store line.

It's strange how I act like I'm all stuck on structure when I glance at the disaster that occupies my desk at home or work.

Urf. Hypocrisy.

Jeremy