THAT DAY

My friend Mark calls. He applied to a rental in a trailerpark where the association (not even his prospective landlady) wants every detail of his investments. To rent a room! He says "Hell no, I'm not giving you my personal data, why should I trust you with it? Here's proof I have a pension, that's all you get." They cave, he's in. Score one for crankiness.

My housemate Lisa complains the garage door's broken. Not really--the automatic opener just disconnected. We can reconnect it--but it takes two. So I make Lisa help--and to get her to do anything, I have to be bossy. Hard for me, and she resents it. But the door works! Score two for crankiness.

I read a few of Beatrix Potter's books for kids like Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin. They're pretty strange. I can't figure out what Nutkin's riddles are--or why he's spouting them--but he's not unusual; ALL her characters sing and chant truly peculiar stuff. She got rich off that, bought a farm, & lived there forever, feisty & independent. Score three for crankiness.

Read more of Glass House by Brian Alexander--how out-of-state capitalists wrecked his hometown. Holding companies ran the glass factory into ruin--the investors fire competent managers, since they bring unwelcome news. The town staggers on: the mayor and his wife are arrested for corruption, as formerly working people drift in & out of addiction & jail. They OUGHT to be rioting (score four for crankiness) but they never do. Unless you count voting for Trump. Who's easing regulation of the guys who looted their town...

THAT NIGHT

The early 1800s. A sickly woman has some ongoing syndrome with recurring flare-ups like mine (possibly Lyme). She's advised to go to a Southern California spring to be healed--Palm Springs or San Fernando Spring?

She makes the move, and joins a monastery or spiritual retreat there... and never leaves! Lives there a full century, surviving to a record old age, at least 120, more likely about 140! Born in the stagecoach era--pre-steam!--she lived to see humans walk on the moon.

During that century, she was notoriously grumpy and impatient with fools. Very un-saintly! But being herself plus a simple austere life by the dream-spring led to health. Nothing else did.

I met her once. I was hiking up a mountain path; she was skateboarding down it. A centenarian-plus, skateboarding. In her black chadoor.

• San Fernando Spring: means dreamwork! It's not a spring in the waking world as far as I know, but from an earlier dream of a magical dream-spring in the San Fernando hills.
• 19th Century woman living well into the 20th, walking the hills alone: Beatrix Potter. But she's also like Emily Dickinson, who hiked around alone, always in black or white--to simplify the laundry, so she could snatch a few more minutes to write poems between chores. Poems no one published. Wrong topics, wrong tone, they didn't even rhyme. A spinster filling her empty time.
• Skateboarding in a black chadoor: central image from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, that surreal Iranian vampire flick. Set in Tehran, it was really shot in Taft, my mom's home town. In the Great Depression, my mom, a solitary child, walked the hills around Taft alone...
• ACTION: Be me. Do dreamwork. Write the wrong thing. Face I'm a hermit and crank. Austere? Lonely? That's healthy for me. Live long! Live to 140. Live to see... miracles.

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