It’s a quiet day on the ranch. When I woke up this morning to rain, I was very concerned about my car. The gravel in the driveway is worse when the top layers become as wet as the lower layers. But for all my fears (and there are many of them, not all related to spinning tires), my digging paid off: my car hurtled at high speed from the gravel driveway. My neighbor’s theory on gravel depth was a good one. I still have to shovel the last fifth of the driveway to avoid having to accelerate to high speeds and risk being squished (or squishing) another car or pedestrian as I leave the driveway. But for now, unless I do something stupid—e.g., driving into the mounds of gravel I created while shoveling—my tires shouldn’t spin anymore.

Is it too early to think about summer and the dry season? I’m not going to complain (well, at least past the thought of thinking about the dry season) because it’s too easy and ordinary, and, for all the doomsayers, the rain in Seattle has not been that bad. Some are saying this is a dry winter. Since the winter is only six-days old, I’ll reserve judgment.

Tonight, I planned to light a fire and write for a few hours. My fireplace is real—not imitation gas—and it crackles, flares, pops, and perfumes the air with the scent of burning wood. Of course, with real fire comes responsibility. I have to clean the chute every few years and remove the ash that collects at the bottom of the fireplace. In the past, I used the fancy broom and sweeper, which came as part of the fire-weapon set. While gothic looking, the broom/sweeper combo is not practical, especially with the firedog (also known as an andiron, which are the technical names for the pair of metal stands, or in my case, connected metal stand, used to hold the logs in fireplace—aren’t encyclopedias wonderful?) obstructing the broom’s sweeping motion. While shopping for the gravel shovel yesterday, I took the opportunity to buy a few more things that I’ve been meaning to buy for sometime, including a wet/dry shopvac to suck up the ash. (I can’t take credit for this idea. Like the shoveling of the gravel, wiser and smarter people suggested it to me.)

With my plans to light a fire and write, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to test out the new shopvac. I opened the box and pulled out the 2.0 HP tiny garbage-can shaped shopvac. I didn’t find any instructions, but after experimenting, I reckoned which port the sucking tube plugs into—there are two ports, one blows air in and the other blows air out. I pushed the big green button and after ensuring good suction, I stuck the vacuum tube into the fireplace. For its small size, the shopvac sucked the ash effectively. I saw something on my peripheral, and when I turned around, I noticed that the shopvac was sucking the ash in the sucking hole and blowing it out blowing hole. Had I been thinking—a rare condition—I would have realized this earlier because both the open sucking and blowing holes worked when I tested the tube in each of them. The ash had blown out from the shopvac and filled my living room, forming a fine mist as one finds when walking through cloud flying clouds. When I realized what it was doing, I turned the shopvac off. The ash didn’t noticeably mark any of the furniture, but I was concerned about the air quality, fearing dreaded black lung. I’ll be sure to add checking my saliva for blackness, the early warning sign of black lung, to my list of daily medical tests.

After checking the box and finding no additional parts, I began to worry. I’m not much of a return-er when it comes to stuff I’ve bought. I do make the occasional exception when stuff is broken, but, for the most part, it’s rarely worth the effort for me to go to the store and return something. Yeah, I know, I’m lazy. What else is new? But I decided I’d make the trip tomorrow to exchange this $20 shopvac. Obviously, someone must have liberated the filter or other doo-hicky that stopped the shopvac from blowing out every time it sucked in (get your mind out of the gutter). Before it came to that, I opened the shopvac to see how it worked. Inside the plastic, garbage-can-like body was the instructions and filter. They need to put a huge sticker on the top of the shopvac for stop stupid people like me, something along the lines of, “open shopvac before attempting to vacuum or blow.” After following the simple pictures, the shopvac no longer blows when it sucks. The ash is mostly gone, and I can now cook dinner and prepare for an evening of writing, safe in the knowledge that the fireplace is once again ready for my use.

I started writing a story, but after dinner and the shopvac incident, I don’t have the energy to finish it. More likely, my sleep debt from jetlag has caught up with me. It’s barely 9:30pm, and I’m exhausted. Spent. Put an apple in my mouth, I’m finished. (Wow: that was terrible.)

As is my custom, however, I’ll post what I did manage to write. Originally, I planned to cut-and-paste it and finish it tomorrow, but what’s the fun in that. Besides, it goes against my policy of never being embarrassed to post all the crap I write. So, here’s my brief story for the day. It’s again an experiment with all dialogue and no description. While these types of stories are admittedly easier to write, for some stories it also flows better. I based it on my morning thought: “Categories of people that all look the same – the guy is categorizing them in a bookstore” and a late day conversation. I know, blah, blah, blah. (It’s sad when the meta-writing is longer than the story itself.)

The People Watcher

“What do you keep looking at?”

“Oh. What? Nothing. Just people.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“What? No. All people, I’m an equal-opportunity people watcher.”

“You’ve been staring at the one over there with the short skirt for the last twenty minutes. I’m thinking the unwatched people might start getting jealous.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“I don’t mind if you look at other girls, you know. More power to you, I say. I don’t want a firm leash on my boyfriend—at least not the proverbial one—the only thing I want is honesty. When I stop trusting you, I’ll begin to think that you’re looking for opportunities. That’s where I pull the plug. It’s as simple as that.”

“Boyfriend? When did this occur?”

“Getting scared yet?”

“I hadn’t noticed the short-skirted woman until you pointed her out. She’s a category F, Liza Manelli.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Since you’re starting to call me your boyfriend—”

“I never said such a thing. I was just talking about boyfriends in general. You haven’t reached that point for me, yet. You’re more in the, he hasn’t pissed me off and he brings me flowers, phase. If I didn’t like fresh flowers in my apartment, this would have been over ages ago, kiddo.”

“As I was saying, since you’re planning to start calling me your boyfriend, I feel it’s safe to reveal why I people watch.”

“There’s a reason?”

“...”

“Please, do go on. This has taken a fascinating twist. I like to categorize my boyfriends’ mental illnesses right upfront. That way I’ll have more reasonable projections for therapy costs.”

“Have you ever looked at a person and sworn that they look like someone else? Like, take all those celebrity look-alike people. Yeah, sure, some of them get surgery to change their faces, but even before the surgery, they looked like the celebrity, otherwise why would they even have thought about it? I’ve taken this one-step further.

***

Notes: People watching to learn what they talk about, say; Thinking about themselves; Why do you bother—interesting conversations; fodder for writing, nah. Fodder for joke telling? Even worse. Fodder for what?