Dave's journal, week 33

Fixing a hole.

This week: Iowa, D.C., Atlanta. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the state fair this much, as a fair, thanks to my brilliant colleague Shelby. It was she who suggested that we use some of our Monday downtime — not much, but it felt long and lucky due to the week’s only cloud cover — and “do the rides.”

Some people love rides. I have limits. But if you’ve learned anything from reading my random thoughts every seven days, it’s that I’m easy to sell on a new experience if convinced that skipping it would be cowardly. Every ride has that possibility. I was talked into the Top Gun, which locks you into a literal cage and flings you back and forth at higher and higher speeds until you do a full 360. Here:

Did I scream? Oh, obviously. And I am not a screamer; I pride myself on barely reacting to anything, pushing emotions down until they I can uncork them on a phone call to my wife. But I screamed on this, a loud “aaahhhhhh” with a couple of “oh God”s after I drew breath. If Shelby lost respect for me, she didn’t say so, because she didn’t say anything — just endured this like a warm bath. The “double ferris wheel,” which I’d recommend, was more my speed, throwing us up as high above the fairgrounds as any ride could, but in open air, and with a creaky bolt reminding you that if you survive you should start counting your macros again.

We had one more assignment, a dinner with Republicans in Story County. Tim Scott was the special guest, but nothing resonated with me as much as the benediction that thanked God (the real one, not the epithet I was yelling) “even for the veiled blessing of COVID, because a lot of parents began to understand what their kids are being exposed to in the public schools.”

Then home, then Atlanta, for the annual Gathering of conservatives organized by Erick Erickson. You can read about that if inclined. For minutes at a time, it felt like a world where Donald Trump was not relevant; more frequently, it felt like a place where no one how to make Trump irrelevant, and blamed the media for his refusal to go away.

I did not have much downtime. That’s why this edition is a little late and a little short. The leisure time I had at home got diverted into one of the stupidest household tasks — fishing an HMDI cable through a wall. This is an important skill to learn, the kind you pay a handyman $150 for, not knowing that with three items — a hole in the wall, a cord, and a fishing tool — he can do it in five minutes.

What we needed, and did not have, was a hole that made sense. The previous tenants had routed a few sets of cables through three breaks in the stud. One was too narrow to fit the cord, one wide enough to push it down but not pull it up, and one was the right size but blocked access to the other side of the wall, via some invisible obstruction.

Yes — Goldilocks, but stupider. And not very interesting! I’ll try to have more interesting experiences this week, because you’re not paying anything, but you deserve better than this.

The Best Thing I Read: No single book, because I didn’t finish any. My spare time went to the poetry I bought in a binge after realizing how you could get the western canon for $25 or so on Kindle. The biggest mountain: “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,” my first real experience with Lord Byron after a life of listening to pop music and bad poets inspired by him. The passage that’s trafficked the most out of this makes Etsy pillows irrelevant:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods
There is a rapture on the lonely shore
There is society, where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more.

Good stuff, and would go great on a wood etching for the garage where you keep the kayak. The feeling I got from the poem is harder to explain — I would never, ever write like this, but the unembarrassed pomp and beauty swept me along. Nice respite between books.

The Best Thing I Saw: “Porco Rosso” with the wife, who’d been wanting me to enjoy it with her and discovered that AMC was playing it as part of its proudly commercial Ghibli Fest. Really commercial — literal jeans ads made to look like Princess Mononoke scenes before the film rolled. We saw the dubbed version, with Michael Keaton doing his best Robert Mitchum as the pilot who becomes a pig who stays a hero.

She reintroduced me to Ghibli — I’d only ever seen “Spirited Away” in theaters — and what I like about these movies is the confusion of where they’re going. There is a hard rhythm to the classic American (read: Disney) animated film. You can guess when the hero’s going to be at her lowest, guess how she’s going to come back, assume the villain will die by falling at a height that never risks showing us a body. But these Ghibli movies? I never know what’s going to happen, and feel just great when it ends without a simple lesson, leaving me ruminating about the sacrifices and failures these cute little cartoons just endured.

Milwaukee this week, then a few more places. I’ve spent as much time as feasible trying to put a cord in a hole — greater things await.