Dew Point

Building to code. Thinking about a conversation with Kim about building his 'Carage' and what a chore the inspection process had been. Building codes are a minimum standard and if you exceed them you're suspect. Plywood has gotten very expensive, so they started making OSB, oriented strand board, which is glued wood chips. It's fine, it sheathes a building, provides some racking resistance, I used it on this house. Kim dives the building dumpsters around Tallahassee and salvages thousands of dollars worth of material, tens of thousands of dollars worth. He'd filled an entire room with 2x4's and decided to sheath the Carage, diagonally with them. By a factor of ten this would be stronger than any other product you could use, more than that, it might well be the strongest combination of materials possible. But the Inspector, who must have been very stupid, required that Kim get an Engineer to sign off on the strength of the construction. Which he did, for $300, which allowed him to build the strongest small building in North America. There's a lesson here. My final resting place, the ridge, has no codes, there is no inspector. I'd been awake for a while, needing to get up and pee, but I just lay there, thinking. The dew brought me back into focus, dripping on the roof. Are all water drops the same size? What affects the moment of drip? Not quite enough light to cast a shadow. Almost 100% humidity and the dew is actually falling from about eight feet. Not rain, exactly, but rain-like. It's falling but it doesn't achieve any velocity. Like snowflakes forming around dust motes. Dew-drops. In western Colorado, at 6,000 feet, they often never hit the ground. A delightful day in which I boxed up several hundred pounds of paper, to recycle, and collected together a garbage bag of clothes to go to the Goodwill. I've winnowed my wardrobe down to black jeans, dark tees, and denim shirts. In a social setting, an event I might attend once in a year, I usually wear a sporty jacket, a lovely suede thing someone gave me, with just a tee-shirt. One of the last events where I was pouring wine at the museum, I had rolled up the sleeves of my jacket; one of the gay members of the board said that I looked kind of hot. Mostly, hanging around the house, I look like a homeless person. My clothes, though clean, are stained and perforated, my shoes are glued together, and I never comb my hair unless I'm going to town. It doesn't occur to me that I should alter my appearance. More a character in a Beckett play than an actual human being. People that know me accept that, what you see is what you get. Maybe a Pinter play would be closer. If I put together one last play it would probably be a Pinter. With B and Phillip. Phillip is the best natural actor I've ever known, and B is a student of the word. It would be fun, not to say interesting, to dig deep into the language of a Pinter. I've done this on my own, but hearing other voices speaking the parts would be wonderful. For me a good table-reading of a play is almost as good as any production, and a lot less trouble than actually staging something. Combined arts are difficult, the personalities involved. By nature I'm just a hedgehog.