satin in a coffin
05.22.05 @ 7:06 p.m.
I feel full and drowsy and quite nice. I think it's a post-exerting-yourself rush, which I don't much get nowadays. I don't know why I cannot force myself to exercise ever, but I've just got this life inertia that keeps me laying on my couch with a book, my laptop, or the TV. Or some combination thereof.
It's been a trying day, for all that it's Sunday. Something in my sink smelled weird in such a way that I was in a mild "oh my god is there a gas leak? How can there be a gas leak? I haven't done anything to the appliances. All the pilot lights are still on. Oh my god what is going on?" panic. I opened windows and put on the fan and didn't quite decide it was a gas leak because it didn't really smell like gas, just vaguely... I don't know. I figured out it was the sink, though, and did some dishes and it went away. I think maybe it was from the garlic chicken bell pepper pasta business I made the other night. I felt like an idiot, really.
Eventually, after watching some episodes of "Secret Agent AKA Danger Man" ("Secret Agent" in the US, "Danger Man" in the UK, starring the most excellent Patrick McGoohan and just being something wonderful from 1965), making a stunning sandwich, and messing about on the internet, I started getting ready to go out on my bike. This took much preparation. I had to find and load up my camera and check my bike out, since I haven't ridden it in about a year and in that time it's sat in the barn, where things go to die painful deaths by rust and mold. So some mechanics weren't working so great. My brakes, for example, are not in good shape. One didn't work at all at first (too stiff) and when I went to repair it, my little dog bone wrench couldn't get at the nut I needed to tighten because of the goddamn fender. So I left it and went out with not-well-functioning brakes. For shame, but I wasn't going to ride on any busy roads or anything. Just a little jaunt through a Pleasant Valley Sunday sort of residential district, only with more hippie-ish students and other very Eugene residents.
The goal was the Masonic Cemetary between 25th and 26th streets. It's an amazing place, in part because it's a cemetary built on a bloody hill. Graves all up the slopes. I can't even think the kind of effort that had to go into digging such graves in the late 1800s, though people are still buried there today. Modern stones look kind of tacky compared to the big, stately Victorian monuments, at least to me. One has a goddamn bongo drum on it. What is up with that. But maybe I notice more because hardly any cemetary I've been to lets you place full on above ground stones anymore. Skyline Memorial Gardens, where my grandpa is buried, only allows those flat things for ease of mowing. The Eugene Masonic Cemetary is prettier, I think. It's just so nice and, though this is cliche, peaceful there. There are great big tall trees, high grass, bushes, and eerily, the whole time I was there I could hear someone playing the trumpet somewhat hauntingly. It would've been creepier if there weren't half a dozen other people there enjoying the nice day. It's almost too bad the last Sunday of the month is going to be the long weekend and I'll be in Portland, because I'm dying to see the inside of the faux Egyptian Hope Abbey. They open it from 1-4 on the last Sunday of each month for visitors. It has stained glass! The fake Egyptian-ness of it is so cool, in it's own dated way. I really love it. I love the overwroght Victorian monuments and the winding paths and trees. The weird hilliness of it makes it even superior to the Pioneer Cemetary adjacent to campus.
I plan to scan some pictures I took in, I don't know, November today. I still have 12 or so shots on the current roll, but I'm very hopeful about a few particular shots.
You would think that my Sylvia Browne-related freakouts (have I mentioned that I watch TV psychics in the middle of the afternoon and then get scared and paranoid at night? Because I do) would lessen the attraction of cemetaries and taking pictures there, but no. Still very pretty. I'm so very glad I got out of the house and into nature. I'm pretty disgusted with myself for getting tired just climbing to the third floor of the library on Friday, but the weather had been so utterly terrible. I can't believe it's May. How can it be May when it's pouring down every five minutes?
Previously
fuck it @ 08.01.05
fanciful imaginary sea voyages to come @ 07.20.05
*dies* @ 07.19.05
more ootp @ 07.17.05
harry potter: driving our children into devil worship @ 07.17.05
