The Dishwasher and the Lady on The Verge

*

A rare portrait of us at home.


Back from a recent trip abroad, where the Lady presented a paper on the thermodynamics and sub-atomic structure of dark matter and the quest for the Higgs boson, and I slipped off to settle a certain difficulty for the government that I'm not at liberty to discuss.

What a grind.


*

Last night I watched "Police Beat," a little indie film about a Seattle bike cop from Senegal who is too obsessed with his break-up with his girlfriend to pay much attention to his work. Throughout the film he rolls from call to call, wandering among the dead, bad, and injured, seeing them but not seeing them, hearing only his own internal dialogue, asking to borrow their phone so he can check his voice mail to see if she's called him, etc.

An odd, moody little movie.

I was struck by the crimes he responded to and thought over and over again how the filmmakers had gotten them exactly right- that mix of the boring and stupid and ugly seasoned with a dash of something you could never, never make up yourself if you were writing it. The lady who calls the cops because a branch from her dead tree fell and hit her. The woman who gets knocked down and has her purse snatched by a woman and a five year old boy. Etc.

Of course, it turns out that all the crimes in the movie were taken from real Seattle police reports.



*

Happiness.


It does visit us.


I think sometimes its there, even when you can't feel it. If you were smart enough, quiet enough, you could tune it in wherever you were. Like a scratchy radio station when you're driving through the night a long way from home.

You could make it out if you tried.


*

At all times I am blessed beyond reason. Don't think I don't know it. Good God. The horrors heaped upon us, and always I am spared.

Again and again it doesn't happen to me.


***

Namaste.


*