Pieces of the weekend

Spotted early, early Sunday morning while watering grass: A 40-something dude in gargoyles and a pick-up truck, windows rolled down, cranking The Marshall Tucker Band at a volume usually reserved on car stereos for music with a vocoder and a bumpin' bass. And it would've been funny and kind of cool, too, if he hadn't been singing along at a similar volume, sounding like a cat getting a pedicure. Where was he going? Home Depot? Famous Anthony's? Fishing? Into a Larry Brown short story?

Yesterday: My car sat under a thick layer of green dust, making me think of comic book villains, Swamp Thing and Poison Ivy. When I ran El Honda through a car wash it dawned on me that I hadn't washed it all winter, rock salt or not. This morning my blue Civic was just as green as it had been the night before.

Housecleaning: Takes me forever because I find so much stuff to look at -- I can get distracted just looking thru the register of an old checkbook. I created more files yesterday -- business papers colated and categorized; snippets of scripts and short stories corraled; countless notes and postcards from Truck finally tucked away in one place so I can avoid stepping on a landmine every other month or so; clippings from magazines and newspapers archived.

Things I found I thought had been lost: My map of America; a bootleg of a '68 Who show at the Fillmore West; the third arrow for my crossbow; a WSJ piece on John Kennedy Toole; the rejection letters for "Wave" and "Jones," which are hilarious and perhaps only slightly less wrong than I remembered.

Things I'd like to secure before the day is done: A new pair of jeans to replace the beloved old pair of jeans which developed a whole in, of all places, the crotch (not gonna happen); six pairs of extra-large (size 12-16) grey athletic socks (if the jeans don't happen, the socks ain't gonna happen either); a pizza from Bellachinos (shouldn't happen); some sunshine (it's right outside).