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January 19, 2000
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maintenance Life is one big errand, a series of chores. Keep things up, but they are always on the slippery slide to being undone, decayed, dust. I've become realistic as I aged about trying to keep things all perfect. Sure, you have got to do that upkeep, but you aren't ever going to be at this nice static point where everything is clean, working and arranged just as you'd like it. You are always somewhere in between, some things taken care of, some things pending, everything building up to another need. Of course, if you ignore some things you need to do, sometimes they become unnecessary on their own. Today we got up and left the house at 7AM to take Forrest's car for an oil change and whatever maintenance might be called for. Always good to do that before going out of town which we plan to do one weekend soon. Have I mentioned that the first trip that we are taking for the new year is to...Houston? Well, there is this play we want to see which won a Pulitzer price. It's called 'Wit.' (I try not to Amazon. I don't know why. Perhaps because Barnes and Noble gives Click Miles.) So we are going to see it at the Alley Theater. So Forrest's car is maintained for now on its way to the next one on its way to a junkyard. You don't see your Honda Accord with the leather seats in a junk yard. But that's where it's headed. Ever notice how few VW Beetles (the old ones) there are on the road? You now see more new ones (rare enough themselves) than old ones. VW's fortunes in the U.S. have sure fallen...at least prior to this seemingly impractical return of the Volks car. But I digress. Work today wasn't bad. Only one meeting, with a shaky video conference picture and an echo delay. Otherwise, just work on things, no interruptions except in my own head. At noon I decided to go to the grocery store and get some stuff rather than go out. I ended up at Randall's spending $31 or so. I went back to the office, made a plate of decadent nachos and ate a banana. (The company provides free tortilla chips in what must surely be the oddest benefit in town. But one has to buy one's own jalepenos and cheese and whatever else.) I left the rest of the banana bunch I bought in the kitchen for the troops to eat. It's a food vortex there and you can leave anything. I thought somebody might like a healthy banana instead of chips. (In the Houston office, there are free bananas or other fruit but no free tortilla chips. Go figure.) What else did I get for my $31? Some paper towels and Pledge knock off. (The maintenance people don't seem to be dusting.) Several more kinds of cheese in easy to eat formats (shredded for nachos, waves?, string cheese), some smoked turkey, some bags of pre-washed salad junk, some green onions, some Eastside Cafe Feta dressing. Then I remembered I'm having lunch at UT tomorrow. Oh, well, the 'handy salad' should last another day or two. Maybe I'll remember to bring it home for the weekend. Tonight we went to a lecture about a dance. No music, just talking. No dancing. Made me itch to hear music. Anyway, there was a classical DJ, a Mozart expert, Stephen Mills (associate artistic director of the ballet) and Joe McClain (general director of the opera). The subject of the evening's hour lecture was the upcoming 'Evening with Stephen Mills' (Ballet Austin). They are doing three very different pieces but one is choreographed to Mozart's 'Requiem' and is called 'My Wall of Names.' The names in question are names of people who are dead and whom community partipants would like to remember. The names are used in the performance somehow as scenery or something. Should be interesting. The lecture was interesting as the panel members talked about music. (You know, in the Chronicle they have a music column called 'Dancing about Architecture' because someone once said writing about music was like that.) But it was entertaining and they talked about Mozart writing a requiem while dying. Surely this is a good question for this piece given the play and this ballet: would you rather have a warning that you are going to die in, say, one year or simply suddenly die?
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"All other
things destruction draw, John Donne, The Anniversary |
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