As though lifted into the garden with a rake handed to me upon landing, I put on my shoes and sweatshirt and stepped out to resume the work I had begun earlier that afternoon. The newly planted border had been swept and all that remained was to rake out bits of plant matter and roots from recently displaced weeds. Then I remembered that the irises I pulled from the ground this afternoon needed to be kept in moist soil, as per my grandma’s instructions. As it was late in the day with light waning outside, the unfinished room adjacent to the garage was quite dim when I entered it. Opening the sliding glass door precipitated a scurrying noise which I could not tell if came from inside of or on top of the building. I hurriedly chopped off the ends of the rhizomes and buried them in the soil with the rest of the prehistoric crustacean looking creatures.

Then I went back outside and watered the new plantings from today and rewatered a few from yesterday and watched the light turn pink and dim as the sun descended behind the silhouette of trees that enshrouded the property.

That verb took some decision making. “Enshrouded.” Seriously, just me for a minute staring blankly and making funny faces.

I then came back inside and looked at my phone while a college football game played. It was halftime before I went out to garden, but now UCLA was losing by even more to the Arizona State Wildcats. Is that even right? Isn’t it ASU? Or is that the Sun Devils?

There was a KFC commercial in which Norm McDonald plays Colonel Sanders selling Kentucky Fried Chicken, but being really broad about the fact that he was in fact Norm McDonald playing Colonel Sanders and not in fact the Colonel himself, because as the audience slyly knows—the man is long dead.

I texted my friend who follows college football if he had seen this commercial and he texted back that indeed he had—and on top of that he maintained an admiration of Norm McDonald to this day!

I assumed he had a good Maron episode (which I misspelled first Marin, and then Maren), since his show manages to endear the listener to celebrity personas who you may have written off as, for example, creepy uncle types—and indeed you can listen to it on youtube. I then told him as I had just then learned, while the Bruins were losing at football and I was texting about Norm McDonald, that I had sent 600 people an email that began

We then talked about other things that were happening, for example that I was also in Washington, though far away from Seattle where he was. Relatively. It took only 3 hours on a train, then on a bike to the ferry, then on the ferry, then on the bike for a little bit, then on a bus, then on a bike. Going back’s the problem because all the buses leave at the crack of dawn because everybody’s going to Seattle to get to work. Nobody’s commuting at noon to Seattle. It would be seven hours riding a bike. I guess I could just wake up early and go with the commuters with fancy island homes and Seattle jobs.

After discovering that I had made such a bonehead move, with the arrogance to not show it to any one else before sending off the email, I became really fixated on it and starting texting other people regarding it. You ask why?, but it’s obvious—I needed people to forgive me, to tell me it was OK. I needed people to absolve me of a tiny mistake, of being human and assuming that everyone else would be human about it, too. I decided instead to take this vulnerability upstairs to the pages document open on the computer—is that how it worked: no I was fact-checking how many unsubscribes had happened since I sent the email, since I mentioned it in another text conversation.

Whatever happened, at some point I decided to get these thoughts down upstairs—name of book, right there: Thoughts Down Upstairs: High Thoughts from Deep Within. I’m getting ahead of myself on the second blog post. I also haven’t hiked the PCT, much less sat on the experience 10 years and then written a brilliant account of it.

Anyway, while the Strawberry Banana pretty much provided more of the same—inspired me to do something for myself that I knew would make me happy, getting caught up in words and strains of logic as I go through those motions (before reading in the bath, now gardening and laying on the sofa while the football played), and then incorporating connections made into a piece of writing—it encapsulated a method to continue the narrative using the content of the narrative, in the screen shots of the text messages. I think the forgiveness thing has to do with the pope being in the country recently and being among relatives.

Does any of this make any sense?