Digital Red Emery

   A red emery board lies on the asphalt, parallel to the yellow line that marks one of the spaces at the post office. As I fumble with the engineering compass to obtain the heading of the man-made arrow to find out if it is pointing north, I get a reading of 330: it appears to be shy of north by 30 degrees west. How did it get here? How did I get here?

   Today I am doing bullet work. There is just one thing that must be done today and that is pay the Target bill. I have accomplished that and more. Here is my account.

   I slept from (blank) until (blank) on the couch in the living room. When I got up I played guess the time .

   “It’s between two and three,” I said, traversing the dining room to bedroom and kitchen, where the clock on the stove read 2:27 in digital red.   

   I fed the cats, changed to go out and went out. I stopped at the bank to withdraw money. I drove toward Target. The sky, which delivered light rain this morning, now was the color of a bleached heron. An unbleached heron flew, flapping eastward, in the sky over Spring Ridge at 3:11. It made me glad to see one.

   Morphine was playing on the radio when I arrived at the shopping center. At Target, I picked up a lighter someone had dropped inside the store. It was filled with lighter fluid. It was light. It was pale pinky-orange-red. It was a cheap one. It had no markings. It lay on the carpet between the food area and the dollar deals section where the indoor carts cluster. A lighter would not be the kind of thing I would want running loose in my store. I gave it to the individual who processed my payment, which was for twenty per cent of the total and six times the minimum amount due. Exited without further excitement, leaving the lost light lighter behind, and photographed a round sticker with a happy giraffe face next to the pedestrian crossing area with its multi-stripes of safety yellow-orange that run at a diagonal to the curb kerb.

   Next, visited the library jonesing for a computer and suspecting they were in possession of my library card. Yes, they were holding. Was assigned a public computer next to a man who has been searching for a job from there for weeks. The computer monitor in front of him contains his resume.

   During a check on business, I learn Target has dropped Amazon Kindle. I learn I have an order to be fulfilled. The computer next to displays a letter to Human Resources. I go home to the fulfillment center and process my order. I learn about the evils of sugar by perusing a book, like when you go on a vacation you take one last look at where you’ve been. At 5:37 the package is taped and ready to go with me to the post office. I drive like a conservative bat out of hell to get it off by 6:00 p.m.

   “Take the Skinheads Bowling” plays in the radio during the drive on the expressway in Reading PA, much to my amusement. My amusement, My amusement. The package I busted ass to send off will arrive next Thursday, Next Thursday? Next Thursday!

   Read my memory. A red emery board is in the space I pull into at the post office. This is how it got there.

Cast Rite Metal

   A Cast Rite box truck is on the road the same time as I travel by car to walk. Cast Rite Metal is located in Birdsboro, from what my reading of the lettering on the vehicle tells me.

   My arrival at the park is greeted by something the crew has deposited in front of the dumpster: a crumpled 50-gallon steel  drum. The cast away container stands upright, yet is a third of its normal circumference. No longer round, its outline is irregular.

    The color, possibly once green, is now rust. Its patina is that of having been submerged in the water for a while. It looks like some of the crew dragged it out of the creek, there is the thread of a weed across the top, stuck on a jagged edge.

   It looks like a sculpture that an artist would make of a steel drum container – one that might cost a good sum. This is the original.

   As for this morning’s walk, there are no herons along the creek that I can see under the overcast light gray sky and clouds that bring intermittent rain. Trees and shrubs are filling out, the forest is filling in with new, green foliage and wildflowers such as Philadelphia fleabane and wild geranium polka dot nature’s dress.

Gotta Love This Crazy Market and CCTV 115(degrees)

Fila delphia today and snapping Sleepymobile pictures along the  way, beginning at Chick-fil-a in Exeter/Mount Penn area proceeding along 422 east toward Pottstown to the GAS FOOD LODGING signs. Today is a four day and the end of the summer vacation month of August. There was a Thomas school bus 31 on Green Tree. Before my very driving eyes goes a brief flash of vanity in the form of auto tag GETSBRG, why not? I saw men in green painting the bike lanes along the parkway in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. GOTTA LOVE THIS CRAZY MARKET! was the clear lettering on a freestanding sign near a Douglassville agency. I saw a blue heron sketch on the white Hay Creek Watershed sign in Birdsboro on the way back. I saw a hard-hatted man digging a ditch near city hall; his hard hat was dotted with stickers and so was a nearby lamp or sign post. After presenting a coupon and tapping into a free coffee at ING Cafe on Walnut – where the Free Library Banner is purple and reads Prosperity (good Feng shui!), I tried some things on for size, as if Superwomanmodel, in dressing room 11 at Lucky Brand jeans, where Taina works. Short time and distance up block in the hereafter find a heads up penny on the sidewalk: glee ♣! I see a sign outdoors near city hall that has been slapped with a fine heart sticker with the word Lucky printed in cursive inside. I picked up trash with some urgency, including an evanescent fluorescent orange poster that has the permament writing: Can you please make a donation toward our football team…Saints family football THANK YOU #1 QB. Bought blue anchor notecards at Paper Source to send to Massachusetts. Paper Source is positively intoxicating. Alyson rings up my sale, giving the purchase a nice striped bag in which to ride home.  A Triune Color (paper * mailhouse * bindery) panel truck was parked out front. Carr & Duff Going Green employees worked along the Schuylkill expressway beneath the solar panels. The writing was on the cement walk near the PMA. One of the bronzes out front of the PMA seems to be missing its left arm and the whites of its eyes are pronounced beneath a streaky patina on its tresses. On Elm, a man exited an apartment building called the Nightmare. A hawk cried out from the peak of the garage roof between 519 and 520 this morning – that is not a time, that is a partial address – and one of the big tits of litter I scarfed up is a Hawk box. After the hawk and before Exeter, trainspotting in Wyomissing led to JBHunt Intermodal, Clipper Worldwide and the fascinating term controlled logistics. The drive-up ATM at Wells Fargo was tight-lipped, allowing for no card insertion, keeping all accounts intact.

linky linky linky linky:

http://www.thomasbus.com/

http://www.papersource.com/

http://www.luckybrand.com/

http://www.sleepys.com/

Red Del Tote

Red Del Tote by Allison Huyett

 

Some train cars bear the marking REBODY. Today is the Fourth of July.  A few have chosen to begin with fishing along the Tulpehocken creek.  I have found Pick of the Litter in a red, green and black folded Unilever brand enclosure. Part of the delivery address shows up in an arc of white lettering: P.O. Box 19007. I like to accept it as is.

The path contains many sycamore bark pathlings from recent rains. Some are flat and some are three-dimensional curled leaves of bark.  The path also has flourishes from decorative bike riding: circles and stops and curlicues.

Early into my walk, the bird chirps and soft flow of water are interrupted by an outburst.

“I had a big rainbow swipe at it,” says a man in wader boots. “I mean a big one.”

I keep walking. I take a picture of a dead mole. The fishing buddy of the man in waders is an upstreamstanding man in waders, holding a net with the bottom rounded out.

“First catch of the day!” says Upstreamstandingman. His hand is in the net. The fish flips around his fingers.

The screen on my cellular telephone indicates 7:10 a.m.

A heron dips its bill into the water near Red Bridge. The heron stands on junky island and must stretch its neck down to sip.

Among the many people bicycling and walking, these tee-shirt words combine: New River Disney Nerd.

This man has a field day: A man sets a water bottle upright in the meadow. He distances himself from it.  He turns to sprint toward it like a barrel racing horse. He repeats.

At the far end of the trail I locate a small red white and blue produce sticker. It must be fruit, but not bananas.

When I try to look up code 4015 at the World’s Cleanest Grocery store, the self-serving terminal voice says “Help is required for this item.”

A store associate helps with the code inquiry. The result is Red Delicious (apple) tote (bag), abbreviated.

The garden at home contains an illicit extra garden ornament.The extraneous item is a blue hen planter that is broken into bits. Delaware’s state bird is not the red hen, but the blue. spending part of the day recharging exhausted camera battery and battery low warning on mobile phone. Carry on, hope you have a nice Fourth of July! Celebrate independence.

National Museum Day

   A famous “S” decisions to make manicure, pedicure and coiffure, banker to see, kitty litter to clean, cartesian quandrants in the garage and litter on the street. A heron skimmed over the still creek surface along the first part of the middle mile, then braked and alit in the near side of the stream, its head peeking above the line of the meadow like a periscope from the sea. It strutted, strided and glided and ;ooked brown. I walked to the ruins of a lockkeeper house 16 by 20 feet of limestone and sandstone foundation that has spokes of purple and white phlox rising from it.

   Several patches of different descendants on the path, the catkins of the hickory ? tree, pea size petals of apple blossoms that form speckled shadows under the crowns overhead and areas with maple seeds, some the same size and some with widely varying dimensions. It is almost like driving on a road and entering, experienceing and leaving the towns along the way – each with something distinct about it and all long the same line that becomes not the same line at the same time.

   At the end of my walk, near the mill bridge, another heron stood tall and erect, poised on a pointed rock, like a mountain climber on the highest ascent of a great peak and stretched like an actor, with an invisible string pulling the top of its head toward heaven. A dead mole lay on the path near red bridge, among some pulled onion grass stems. That is my report for Wednesday May 18, 2011, National Museum Day.

“Little Tooth” POST

   DEAR READERS: scraped from surface of pebbly asphalt on Penn avenue, Pick of the Litter, a pulverized polka dot-bordered tag STOP thought lettering spelled Goody’s, identification incomplete STOP found 46 cents STOP heron flew west over transit clover leaf Monday morning 6:41 none along creek STOP duct tape plasters paté STOP.

Brisk Mink and Vans or Van 5

     A mink stared at me this morning as it found a spot on the wide double trunks of a big sycamore tree. It had run along the path, and its flashy dark brown coat was a clue to its identity. The hairs were wet. Its face was tiny. Its beady rodent eyes were bright with what I registered as enthusiasm and the gleam of rising sunshine. We regarded each other as creatures in the woods. I asked “Have you been swimming?” as if it were a retriever puppy and it shook itself off and vanished. This was at 8:00 a.m.

     There is a website which accepts lost lists and dropped pieces of paper. Sometimes Pick of the Litter falls into this category and what I find today is a list for either Van 5 or Vans and has a line entry for “Plaza  upper floor” and another for “Sunglass Hut” or a note that “Sunglasses” is hot.

   With the creek high and full after the weekend storms, no herons to report.

   It may seem I have been slacking in the writing department. Saturday’s post would have been Bow Tag and Sunday, don’t know yet. I went to Philadelphia after work and shot video of a rack of advertising lamb and some photographs in and around the Logan Circle area. The Free Library’s Philadelphia Book Festival ended Saturday. A few bookmarks with this years splendid design by  Mikey Burton

http://libwww.freelibrary.org/bookfestival/index.cfm?srch=3&postid=1208 

 were available on a table near the auditorium.

    On 21st street, lay a postcard from a Washington D.C. gallery – the picture reproduction of a painting: boy with something or other, that I thought was a girl. Ballpoint pen markings on the upper right margin showed a possible date from 1982 and no message or address was on the back. Near some potted plants, one a rose beginning to burgeon a bit after the winter, lay another one, the same painting. How they came to be discarded that way remains a mystery.

NS 9338

   Can’t say WordPress doesn’t have a sense of humor! Ha! What statistics administration!!! Thank you for sending my spirits soaring for a moment. This morning under the weather, uncharacteristic, onion snow? Walked in dark for coffee and to put a gallon of gasoline in snow mobile $3.59 and the pump only went to $3.51. April trifle, strawberry fool and thief!

Cowboy Junkies

   4:03 pm EDT Paper Mill Road. A heron flew over the yellow-orange crayon school bus at After it had dropped a lad off in the rain. It wasn’t directly above the school bus. It just seemed that way from where my car idled and I sat still in relation to the bird, the everlasting sky and Wilson School District Bus 26. I could also spot raindrops on the windshield. The heron did not see a sentence fragment, it was directed due east. It is a professional bird. I have Cowboy Junkies OPEN playing from the d——-d. Idea House soon will be open for business. I forgot to note earlier today, evidence of someone having tossed orange peel fragments onto Broadcasting Road near Keiser. There were two hemispheres of unequal shape and size, so they may not have been hemispheres, just two large sections, roughly yet neatly torn, and they looked like flowers, big orange-petal flowers in the street, one on the yellow center line, the other left of center. It reminded me of the baseball flower idea I saw in a magazine and that on ESPN this morning, Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig says ticket sales are up five to eight per cent this year. That is good news. As if playing with your food and forget your tense

Showers of Sparks

   Beside a city tree is a FREAKY TIKI bag.  The bag is the product of Keystone Fireworks company. The blue picture on the packaging includes palm trees. A figure was included, but the face of it is a burned out hole. It is all legs and maybe a touch of grass skirting the issue. I take a picture. As I do the trillion cigarette butts that have been dumped out become evident. This is interesting, gross and disgusting. I have peeled away the advertising on the bag for future reference.

   “Do you have a dollar?” someone asks me.

   “I wish I did!”

   On the back side of a road sign, a green paper frog face grins from one of the screws. I AM A FROG, reads the lettering. STOP is on the front of the sign, facing the parking lot, to ask something of drivers as they exit.

   This is my facebook, because I am too depressed and maladjusted to use real Facebook. I prefer Failbook, which distills the essence and culls the very best, gives me the giggles and shifts me into laughing mode. Today begins with Spermy the Whale.

   At the Reading Area Community College library, computer time is denied me because I am not a registered RACC student. Activate Plan B.

  In the entryway of the Yocum library building is a three-minute video about the Schuylkill River Natural and State Historic area. It says the Keystone state was integral to the industrial, commercial and farming development in the thirteen colonies. It shows video of sites in Philadelphia, Berks county, points in between and beyond. 

    The phrase Shaped the shifting currents hooks my ear. The video also contains an audio quote from Alice Altwater: “Water is the blood of the land,” which gives me something to think about when I leave.

  I spent forty-nine cents on a Maple Cream egg yesterday at Ronco’s pharmacy.

   The five metal pendulae with holes, a kinetic sculpture Gong by Harry Bertoia in the garden is attractive. I take a picture of it. It is better than Calder. It is on a human scale. The plaque dates it 1960. It seems timeless to me. It is garden jewelry. Metal fastening.

   I photograph the open interior of a Dominoes pizza box with a portion cup of sauce standing inside. A man opens the door of the house and stands in the entry way. As I prepare to cross the side street, a car with a Dominoes cap barrels toward Franklin street and the stop sign to my left.

    I take a picture of a smashed compact disc on the ground that has a hole in it like the sculpture. It could be the eye of a heron. I feel less lost and more found when I find things.

   At Reading Main Library, at the corner of Fifth and Franklin, a waiting list tracks the names of computer-using hopefuls. I look at Green Home magazine and select three music compact disks.  A librarian calls “Allison” and scans my card. Nathaniel at information logs me in. Computer number five sits at my fingertips. Today is a two-day, for relationships. Like five, it is a nicely balanced number, a numeral with straight and curved lines inasmuch as a straight line is also a curve.

   In the trunk of my car is a perpetual calendar souvenier of the Wernersville Fire Company, part of an auction lot I have yet to inventory. On the Freaky Tiki bag is the warning: Emits Showers of Sparks.