We have upstairs three rooms, each inordinately large: a bathroom, walk-in closet, and bedroom. They are what I would consider artifacts, which I define as something unintended and left over from other intended activities. This house in original from was much like a toaster, two floors, small footprint, and by world standards fully adequate for its intended purpose.
The former owners, however, wanted something bigger and better. They did not want this in order to live in a bigger house – they wanted to be able to sell it so that they could buy a place with land. The woman who was partnered with a man in the construction business wanted to raise horses, utterly impossible here, as it is a steep wooded hillside. So they popped out the north side of the building, and doubled the size of the structure, creating a lovely living and dining area, and two “offices” on our main floor, each qualifying as a bedroom were it to be used for that purpose. In the basement, they created two large areas of no particular purpose, and two small rooms, one qualifying as a bedroom, the other not (no closet).
It’s all very nice, and requires very much upkeep. Back to the bathroom, in the southwest corner exists a tub, a triangular shape in a corner with non-triangular features to make it fit next to a large vanity. One would think that it would be ideal for a whirlpool, but as we found with many other parts of the house over the years, the former owners had to scrimp, and anyway, they only wanted to sell, so the bathtub is just a bathtub.
In nearly fifteen years here I have used it as a tub once, after a grueling day of physical labor. One, there is no whirlpool feature, and two, I don’t have the patience to sit in lukewarm water. It started out hot, but due to a large surface area, water in this tub quickly cools.
So the tub just sits there, its tub-function unused. There’s s shower across the room. Part of the downside of having this tub is that it forms a film on its surface, partly caused by pollen. Part of my duties here is to clean that bathroom, and sometimes when I do that I wipe a small part of the tub, see that it has formed a film. If so, I have to step into it, draw water, and wash down the entire thing. Someday someone is going to use this monstrosity as a bathtub, but not us.
Something happens with this tub that we all know about … spiders crawl into it and cannot get out, and die agonizing deaths. Maybe they come up from the drain – how they get there is a mystery. I have been known, in warm weather, to capture the larger ones and take them outside to either become bird food or to live another day.
Annie Dillard wrote the 1974 book A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I loved. In it, she describes the world around her home in Virginia in minute detail. I was reminded while reading of how Henry David Thoreau described the formation of ice on Walden Pond, and its removal to serve nearby communities during warmer months. The detail was excruciating and delightful. Indeed, Edward Abbey described Dillard as the true descendent of Henry David in our literary legacy.
Abbey was a man of flawed character, a heavy drinker with an outsized libido, so I cannot help but imagine that he noticed Dillard to be an attractive woman. His wild praising prose about her told me he was seeking her out, wanting to bed her, maybe even add to his already long list of spouses and partners. Dillard, currently 80 years of age, to this day lives somewhere unknown, as I imagine more than one man sought her out.
About those spiders, Dillard, in another work that my wife read, described how she would drape a towel over the edge of her tub to allow stranded spiders an escape route. I found one there the other night, and decided to give it a try. I took a bath mat and draped it, and in my mind’s eye the spider took notice, as it moved a few inches as I laid it out. Later, on return, I found the spider gone and delighted that Dillard’s strategy had worked.
A problem arose, however: I had laid my used clothing all about the tub, and so imagined that the spider had taken up residence there. I shook it all out, and it was not present. I was moving some stuff to the laundry basket in the closet and there sat the spider, middle of the doorway and, in my mind’s eye, either grateful or defiant.
I took a small wad of toilet paper and easily captured it, as it did not try to avoid me. I carried it out of the house, and placed it on a railing of the back deck. There it sat. Maybe absolute stillness was survival strategy, so that birds would take no notice. I left it there.
When I came back a while later it was gone. It had either found a new life, or was in a digestive tract somewhere. In either case, I thanked Annie Dillard for helping me to spare the creature the slow death that awaits all bathtub spiders.
We get smaller spiders in the tub, some tiny. Them I don’t rescue, don’t care about.
Piece of Mindful 
Very good read, I enjoyed all the minutiae and reflections/ asides.. maybe you are in the Thoreau-Dillard-Abbey lineage : )
Have you ever thought about writing any fiction? I’ve done a little, it can be quite thrilling when you get into a daily routine with it.. a kind of high-wire act because you never know if you can pull off the next scene or sequence, but often the “muse” arrives when you step off the ledge, and then you’re amazed at what develops, almost without your conscious intention. The whole “the characters wrote themselves” kind of thing that writers talk about. But anyway, this kind of attention to detail could maybe be applied in fiction writing.
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I tried my hand at fiction, but did not stick with it as I should have. I invented a character based on my late friend Steve, naming him Roper Jobes, biblical reference intentional. His nickname was Rope. Parts of it worked out to my liking, especially using his journal from camping and hiking the Great Smokies, able to use actual passages. I lost that journal somewhere along the line.
As to the rest of it, I lacked a beginning and end – that is, I thought since he ended his own life my writing about him had to do that too in fiction. I also had him down as a hunter, and I know nothing about hunting. What if, I now think, he were to survive the garage monoxide episode, recover, become an annoying reformed drinker, meet a woman, get dumped, etc etc etc., and in the end, nothing resolved except that he wants to live, decides living a lousy life is better than not having a life.
You see where it goes? Downward spiral!
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My genre of choice [reading] is usually crime/mystery – the closer to reality, the better. Connelly’s Bosch was good, but maybe a bit to governmentally status quo. My favorite vigilante remains Crais’s Joe Pike but with Hurwitz’s Orphan X the most devastatingly efficient and capable ever (would chew up Reacher in ten seconds). I spent loads of time in the Scandinavian realm and recently finished The Hypnotist, the first offering from pseudonymous [Swedish] couple Lars Keplar. The story and characters were so disturbing, and plausible, that I came away thinking: “Hmmm, yeah, awful… I can see that given the evil in this world”. But also, that the awfully accurate stories abound… where are the realistic stories of greatness – good, that is, in a contemporary setting. NOT romance novels and not fluff. I’m not talking about “literature”, I mean stories of life and love and lust and loss.
I have begun to grab things off the “new” shelf – but unfortunately Covid horseshit still abounds, as does good altruistic cops and arbitrary figures of authority (doctors and lawyers). The mind-controlled psyop of humanity (authors and editors especially) taken as fact – infuriating. Sometimes, simple inaccurate, easily accessible info is blatantly wrong, or pure propaganda – like Stephen King these days (never again for me). No way do those books really sell “millions”; more lies. But if you don’t toe-the-line, you are likely not to be published – mainstream anyway.
Rambling a bit, but as Mark indicated, you need to know something about what you write. Subject Matter Expert, hire one, or learn. When the author gets it wrong, and the editor doesn’t get it either, what is that? Purposeful or just lazy shitty writing from useful idiots?
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Have you read any Dean Koontz? Maybe too sci-fi thriller for your interests, but he does answer some of your requirements.. he really does grapple with honor, integrity, the struggle to act nobly in an ignoble world.. and there’s a slight conspiratorial/ cynical view of the system, albeit maybe more in the “counter-narrative, conservative” vein, as opposed to a pure Mathis level rejection of all mainstream narratives.. and it is just pulp. Thrilling suspense, but most likely not as rich as something like The Brothers Karamazov by Doestoevsky, wrestling with those questions on a deeper level.. any moderns doing that are probably hard to come by..
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I believe that I read a book of his many years ago… before I was the Me that I am now. I thought he specialized in Horror. Anyway, I picked up his book from last year: The Bad Weather Friend; I like the way he writes, and the story is promising in the early going.
Thanks.
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Sure thing.. his later books seem to be mostly sci Fi thriller, that’s what I’ve read.. I got hooked after picking up one of his Jane Hawke books, not really expecting to care for it. But the conspiratorial elements, blended with his well crafted suspense and fast moving storytelling was very engaging.
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Koontz; The Bad Weather Friend (2024): Thoroughly enjoyable. Witty, funny, good story – and bashes the ultra-rich who would presume to decide for us.
The word is that he wrote this at age 79… sure doesn’t write like a codger. Fast paced; good generational references; and good guys with morals.
An excerpt:
—
Over the centuries, he has met many people who are so certain of their righteousness and their entitlement to power that they do not know the truth of themselves. They become convinced of their humility, although they possess none, and of their wisdom, though they have none. They believe passionately in their goodness, though they are evil; they believe they are motivated by a noble desire to make the world a better place, when in fact they merely insist on shaping it to suit their preferences, and to hell with everyone else.
—
Thanks again, Tim
I will be looking for more from him.
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Yeah I don’t know what to tell you there.. My approach was to try to write the sort of fiction I enjoyed reading. Which at the time I had gone through a big Elmore Leonard phase. So, I ripped off his Get Shorty concept about the gangster who wants to get out of crime and become a movie producer (aye, maybe another type of criminal.) Anyway my spin on it was to have him collecting debt from a newspaper comic strip artist, heir to a formerly hugely successful strip. I have a little subject knowledge matter there, but my criminal underworld knowledge would mostly be riffing on pop culture lore – just “faking it” and sending it up humorously.
Leonard had an assistant who would research places/ fields he was writing about – someone who knew the kind of detail he wanted, just for color. It’s not a manual of course, and only true experts might notice anything amiss. What the writer brings is more his own perspective, life experience, blah blah blah.
Beginnings and endings probably don’t matter a lot when you begin writing, all you need is the motivating spark that interests you – a scene, a character (as you have), image, etc and then as one writes and mulls over it where it might go, other ideas occur. But I understand, just saying, NOT trying to persuade you if you think it’s not your cup of tea.
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Whenever I get blocked and need a plot boost I put a gun in the hand of an amnesiac and have him shoot his way out of a cheap roadside motel. Then I cut back to “three days ago” and the damn thing writes itself. (No help here)
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Someday I’d like to write an autobiography that includes all the crime I committed as a teenage in the 1980s, and some beyond. My friends and I were basically a gang that at times terrorized our high school, town, and were constantly scheming how to steal – shoplifting books, music, beer, stealing car parts, parking meter money, you name it. We had rules – never steal from your friends, neighbors, or the little guy (small stores). This is the days before cameras, the golden age of crime. I’m rather proud of what we were able to accomplish before the age of 18 as criminals, as we knew we had to give most of it up once we were of age – because once you get caught after 18 you would go to the big house.
Two of the best gags we ran in town were setting off homemade bombs on top of the supermarket using time delayed fuses – a cigarette with the filter removed, then lit, stuck into the bomb fuse – a 10 minute delay. We may have got that from the anarchists cookbook. We would sneak onto the roof and then retreat to the back of the parking lot and watch what happened when the boom went off – and our exploits almost never made the newspaper! For some reason we wanted these things to get in the news but they didn’t – which was an early indicator to myself that many things that happen never make the news – a saying I’ve heard others repeat.
Another great exploit was breaking into the parking meters around town and stealing all the change. We had a system – and my buddy was a patient mechanical genius who sawed down a parking meter and then used spark plug gauges taped together, and filed, to make a key that worked on all parking meters. There was a separate key for the cannister inside. We would work a crew of two quickly and get $100-300 in less than one hour, in the 1980s. That was good money for teenagers.
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Lucas Jackson came to mind. Don’t know why.
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Unfortunately what we have here is a failure to communicate.
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That line was almost, to me, like, from the future. People did not talk like that then, especially in prison camps down south, but Strother Martin delivered it perfectly. I did not see into the future, but did know that the line was out of place, beautifully so.
A other thing I saw in the movie, repeated references to crosses, making Luke a Jesus-like character – they are all about, the photo torn in two and repaired, and at the very end as the camera pans away into the sky, the two roads converging, forming a cross.
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What about the hard-boiled eggs? Gold!
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Good call! Lucas Jackson of Cool Hand Luke Days. My friends actually started the parking meter ripoff idea after drunkenly sawing down a few parking meters and taking them home. The idea was like – give a man a fish (parking meter) he eats for a day, teach a man a to fish (break into parking meters) he eats for life.
It was a college town so we knew the times when the meters would be full (visitors, like homecoming etc), and would never hit them more than every 2-3 weeks. Much of the town was wooded and we knew every trail and back alley so it was virtually impossible to catch us on the run.
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We simply used a pipe cutter on the support shaft – very quiet if lubed up. Beat the shit out of the unit at “home”. A short-lived effort, as you can’t have too many trees missing in the forest.
Back in newspaper machine days, we clipped the padlock off a few Chicago Tribune boxes located near the commuter train station and put our own lock on (for a while anyway).
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Bham had a huge wave of sawed off parking meters a few years back, and then they handed them over to a private company out of New Orleans that makes everyone use a phone app or some digital system. Obviously, the company sawed the old meters in the first place? I just try to avoid them and park far away if need be. Resent yet another tech thing that’s less convenient than the former system.
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The town of Morrison, CO, where no one actually lives, passed an ordinance putting heavy parking fees in force. So now when you drive there you pass dozens of cars parked along the road into town, and in town, nothing.
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