journal

The lawnmower is my lifeline. It's not working. It starts easily but dies after a few minutes. A man from the country picked it up in his truck for repair and brought it back. It still died. Then he mowed the lawn with a riding mower, picked up the walk-behind, returned it again -- it works just as before, starts and dies. He says he will pick it up again on Wednesday. The housekeeper said her brother would mow the lawn, I don't want him to -- she brought his mower which is now in the garden house, mine is in the basement. The renter next door wants to mow it regularly, I don't want him to do this. He has mowed the edge of the yard next to the rental house, trespassing, to remind me. He did it again recently when my walk-behind stopped working. Paranoia says my enemies are closing in on me, driving me into this room lined with wormy chestnut. I once dreaded the room seeing it as a 'room of wormwood' but now I love it. And I love the lawmower more than almost anything because it has a throttle and a green deck, and because it is a high-wheeler with 20 inch wheels that I cannibalized from another mower, bolting them onto the deck. I love the yard too, the grass and trees, especially the large sugar maple tree that I can see from the window beside my bed.
 A few months before he died, my friend asked concerning my mother who is 93 years old 'What happens when she dies?' I said 'I have no idea. Maybe I'll move into the big Victorian building that my other friend has bought and mortgaged.' This friend is desperately trying to ward off foreclosure, paid part of a lawyer's fee to file for bankruptcy. We are both Mama's boys and our fate is somehow parallel.
I mow and trim the hedges. This year I didn't trim the crepe myrtles on each side of the driveway. Their buds were frost-bitten so they looked dead, a few leaves are coming out on them now. Some of the trees suffered similar damage, but maybe they will live.
In this room three computers a dual-boot Dell with XP and Slackware, a Windows 2000 PC and a whitebox with FreeBSD installed. The friend who lived in a western state gave me the router switch which links these three machines into a cable-modem network, and a 4-way KVM switch links them to the monitor, keyboard and mouse. Last night I made a mental note of the possessions that I've accumulated since I returned to this house in 1993 -- books, tools, appliances (refrigerators, microwave, tv, VCR, DVD player, Champion juicer, Waring blender, water boiler, coffee maker) paper clutter, and system i.e. the three working computers and 2 non-booting. Many books upstairs and some here in this room -- computer books, dictionaries in several languages, Bibles in Hebrew, Greek, English and German, Strong's concordance, books by German philosophers Hegel, Heidegger and Spengler, Greek and Latin classics Homer, Vergil, Horace. This reflects a huge ambition to make myself literate. The books are there, I can look things up in them, but now most of what I would find in them is available on the Internet.
Long ago I composed a list of essential things, prerequisites for 'doing anything' -- 1. tools 2. materials 3. energy 4. information 5. space. Inspired by this list and 'The Whole Earth Catalog -- Access to Tools' there is the collection of tools -- hammer, rubber mallet, drills and bits, vises, screwdrivers, wrenches, chisel, sheet-metal cutter, drill press. In the 'materials' department nails, screws, bolts nuts washers.

6/18 offline for 1 month 2 days, monitor crashed. 17" LCD arrived today.

7/02 -- Conversation about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory led to learning about the suicide of Boltzmann at Duino, which led in turn to Rilke's Duino Elegies.