[OCTOBER 2020.]
Out for flu shot, TDAP, SSRI refill for the happy new year. Four new pandemic pounds—your weight’s still in the normal range, says the doctor, are you happy about it? Do I look like I’m happy with anything? I don’t hate my body as I once did, this is what our truce looks like and it’s unattractive, like any compromise.
Planting a desert garden out front. The agaves were here when we arrived. I gave them some gravel, added ceanothus and manzanita and a small palo verde that lost all its leaves as soon as I planted it. They do that; the bark is still green. But I’ve worried about it for months.
Still no rain. The wish for rain.
A bit of burn on the air, but the sky is back to sane blue and the view very clear across the bay out to the Salesforce tower.
After a year and a half in the house we still have heaps of dry, dead vegetation to harvest from the yard. No embers are landing here, but these yellow stalks would go up like the Fourth of July if they did. Get a goat! Get a megatherium!
Dave Eggers writes about fire season for the New Yorker, and reassures us that fire season sucks. For his friends in the wine country it especially sucks.
We watch videos with R. of orphaned mountain lion cubs getting rehabilitated at the Oakland Zoo. Spots, blue eyes, bandages. They hiss: we’re not yours! Then I dream of going to the Stanford campus and adopting small tigers. In the background, behind the library, their mother is growling.
