It was ready today as promised and I could have left work early and gotten it but I didn’t. Whatever, I missed the bike commute today and was a bit bitter that the express didn’t have the proper sign on it and the driver didn’t stop so I had to take the local. Ten minutes difference, could have been delays on the expressway due to a crash.

Truth is that I don’t like motoring one bit, 🏁 in many ways I would be happier if I never owned a car or drove again, even if an automobile is the best way to escape the city. 🏡 The truth is that I’ve started to look at houses 🏘 again and it’s just such a grim landscape out there, they are all so big, and the places I actually like – cabins in the wilderness are all too far from the city 🏙 for practical commuting. Yet, the fact that I like smoking 🚬 grass makes me rethink if I hate New York State all that much. There is a lot fucked up in New York but pot is legal. Boy oh boy can you smell it whenever your just walking around or are downtown. Not that I smoke much except up at camp and it mostly just mskes me tired 😴 but I do like the colors and clear perception of the euros around me.

I am looking at houses and land again, 🏡 and have promised myself that the next book 📙 I will read is about rebuilding old houses. I want to make that next jump, as I’m well aware my current living arrangement is not sustainable as much as I may like it. I’m the director, it says it on my business card 📇, yet I still live in my dumpy apartment since college 🎓 some 17 years ago. I oversee a division of six and while I bitch about inflation 📈, I could do better for myself. I mean how many professionals ride the city bus and free shuttle 🚀 to work when they don’t ride their mountain bike to work? Yet I’m trying to save every penny possible, 👛 in hope of some day having that off grid cabin and homestead some day in the wilderness. 🌲

I was told buying a house doesn’t make you into a slave in a gray flannel suit. 🕴️ I just hate the lawns and the suburban house plants, 🌿 and the vinyl siding and marble counter tops and carpets. Plus goats 🐐 and hogs to feed. 🐽 Plus growing cannabis apparently isn’t that simple like most plants. Agriculture is complicated, a battle against nature. And then so much of the housing stock is a complete dump and it would be a hell of a project to rebuild it. 🔨 I might have the money 💵 if I actually wanted to spend but I don’t have the skills and would certainly get ripped off left and right.

First night of the Altamont Fair 🎡 I believe, so walking back home past Mr. Preska’s dairy 🐮 I’m sure I’ll see the lights of the midway in the sky. Summer is coming to a close, the sunset is before 8 PM now and the skies hazy from wildfire smoke. 🌇 At least he’s not been doing too much pounding on the walls when I’ve been home but then again lately I’ve been heading into the office 🏢 early today to walk and then make sure I get in sufficient legislative hours. The retired operator where I work brought in some zucchuni 🍆and tomatoes 🍅 which was great, as that’s my staple of summer eating most nights. I hired a new operator today, 🤝 hopefully this one will work out. Friday I was thinking 💭 about working from home – well remotely – before heading out to Schoharie for the weekend but the weather looks like crap. Maybe the following weekend it will be one last summer weekend at the Potholers.

At some point, the old 🧓 will just give away, Big Red 🛻 will go no more, gentrification will lead to my eventual eviction or the mold covered refrigerator will give way, the door fall 🚪 off once last time or the building burn. 🚒 More and more sheet metal falls off Red, the front end is getting looser again, the transmission not shifting as well and the engine idling rougher. Then ultimately it will be a fresh start. 🌱Change is not a bad thing. I just have to make it through the year first and eventually things will get better.  Smelling the fresh cut hay by the dairy, soon it will be silage time. 🌽 Much too soon especially in the high country. The hardest part of my job is making  decisions, when you are director, you’re expected to make the calls even when your employees have been there decades longer than you and have far more institutional knowledge at your office that overlooks the sewage treatment plant and old.. city dump.

I have to tell myself that the reason I got put out to pasture above the print shop next to the wastewater plant and sewage sludge incinerator 👃 was because I’m not phased by the smell. You can count the sludge haulers rolling past the office 🚛, much like the trucks hauling cow shit 💩 and silage 🌽 back when I was working out in Madison County. 🏢 While the acres of parking 🅿 are nice especially if some day I do buy the house and decide to car commute, I do miss the team working downtown. You know, I do like pungent things. Be it dairy and cows, landfills and burn barrels, or nowadays the grass. The later is so cheap, at least the amount that I smoke up at camp 🏕. Healthy, natural things are dirty and have a smell. Highly refined things are not healthy, if anything sterility is not a virtue. Maybe that’s why I want to someday do all those redneck things.

“We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things.” – Art and Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance