That may be Cthulhu’s eye up there in the clouds. Or it could be the moon.
This is what the eastern sky looked like around 7:30 last night.
“No more monsoons! The end is nigh! Prepare ye for mostly sunny and warmish!”
Which it was. Eighties as I pedaled off nine-ish this morning, and it only got hotter.
Later in the afternoon Herself popped round to the Dark Tower for a window chat with her mom, but couldn’t stick it out more than a few minutes.
Don’t expect her to have a window chat of any duration with Louie Gohmert, though. Not even if the dumb sonofabitch wears a diving helmet and a diaper over his Bug-hole.
The question very much not on everyone’s mind is: “Whatever happened to Radio Free Dogpatch?”
My little podcast was ticking along nicely there for a while, with episodes popping up semi-regularly since the first of the year.
Then the broken ankle took me down in February, and The Bug® put the boots to me in March.
And that, as they say, was that.
A podcast, even a low-rent, one-man, half-assed model like mine, takes time. Thought. Quiet.
It’s quiet out there. Too quiet.
All those things were suddenly in short supply when Herself joined me in working from home.
If any of you have been doing likewise in lockdown, you know the drill. Zoom meetings. Phone calls. Speakerphone calls, with voices that often fail to harmonize with the ones in my head. Skypeing. Messaging. Texting.
And it all starts at stupid-thirty, ’cause Herself is an early riser. By the time I crawl out of my coffin around 6-ish she’s already brewed the coffee and fed the cat, and is two-three phone calls into her day.
Which is rigorously planned. She has a List. Items will be checked off same or she will know the reason why. Any gaps that appear unexpectedly between chores will be filled with … more chores. Herself is a Tasmanian devil of relentless functionality and accomplishment.
Me? I just, y’know, kinda, like, fuck around, an’ shit. See what happens. If anything.
Ho, ho. Too bad for me. Her gig is the one that makes it rain around here. My contributions to the general fund have become a little less laughable since I started collecting Social Security in April, but next to her mighty fiscal Niagara my revenue stream remains the dribbling of a very old dog with prostate issues and a bladder stone the size of the Hope Diamond.
Shucks, the podcast never brought in a dime anyway. In fact, it sent dimes out, in the form of dollars. Many, many of them. An essential worker it is not. Like Adolf Twitler’s “presidency,” it is primarily a cash-burning vanity project.
So if anybody is going to STFU around here for a minute, or even for months, well … it’s gonna be Radio Free Dogpatch.
I take solace from learning that I’m not the only voice to develop a little situational laryngitis in The New Weird Order.
For instance, parents who podcast are finding it tough to get their Ira Glass on with herds of unschooled munchkins free-ranging around the home studio, according to Caroline Crampton of the “Hot Pod” newsletter (scroll down).
Writes Crampton: “[F]or those who work in audio and need to edit for long periods, or record links and tracking to the highest possible standard that the moment will allow, there’s the extra challenge of finding the space and quietness to do that.”
The short version, from one anonymous podcaster: “Take after take just gets nuked.”
(Insert sound effect of Trinity atomic blast here. Oh, wait, we’re doing text now, not audio. Never mind.)
Happily, my primary distraction is not a horrifically bored, runny-nosed, ankle-biting, boundary-testing expense that a dozen or so years down the road will call me a fleshist at my own dinner table for not pledging some of my hard-earned Imperial credits to the Robot Liberation Army. She’s an income-generating asset, and right now, too.
So if Herself screams “GRILLED CHEESE! GRILLED CHEESE!”, she’s gonna get some grilled fuckin’ cheese from yours truly. We call it a quesadilla around here, but still, whatever you wanna call it, she’s gonna get it.
Radio Free Dogpatch is not the new toilet paper. It may be in short supply, but that doesn’t mean the punters are throwing hands over it at Libsyn. If I have something to say, I can always slink off to where the old toilet paper is, close the door, and squeeze out a quick blog post.
And yes, I’ll turn on the ceiling fan and wash my hands afterward.
I’m no longer running because I’m apparently a fragile old fart, assembled from stale Olive Garden breadsticks, paper straws, and Tinkertoys.
But Herself is still at it. Denied her beloved indoor group workouts, she zips out to pound ground. Hup hoop hreep horp, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
Me, I went for a brisk walk. There are worse ways to spend 45 minutes on a sun-splashed afternoon in New Mexico. Most of them involve reading the news.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla, The Last Cat Standing, briefs staff on the emergency measures she has ordered, which for some reason are heavy on cat-food acquisition and litter-box maintenance.
It’s early days yet, of course, but so far our lives have not been radically altered by the governor’s stay-at-home edict.
Even before The Fourth Horseman rode his sneezy hayburner into town we were mostly homebodies. Herself got up at stupid-thirty four days a week to pull a 10-hour shift at the Death Star, and by the time she came home she was rarely in the mood to go out to do … well, pretty much anything.
So I would cook dinner, we would watch something on TV, and then it was early to bed because see “getting up at stupid-thirty,” etc.
After the guv gave us the word yesterday, I cooked dinner, we watched something on TV, and … well, you get the idea. One of us still gets up at stupid-thirty, too. Guess who.
We maintain our respective hobbies, of course. Herself eBays bits of this and that, for us and for friends. And as you see, I continue to operate my little one-ring nonprofit, the Cirque du Sowhat.
Meanwhile, Miss Mia Sopaipilla remains firmly atop the org chart. Somebody has to be in charge around here, and it’s never gonna be me.
Mad Blog Media 