Favorite summer meal, Open face tomato sandwich with bacon & fresh mozzarella.

A true masculine chauvinist product of his generation, my FIL never could understand why I invested time in calla lilies instead of the edible delights practical gardening had to offer. It didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t have an adequate location for a vegetable patch. The back yard, too shady, and the front yard was under the fascist rule of the homeowners association. My green thumb… wasn’t. I’ve murdered enough basil, rosemary, and oregano to supply a chain of Italian restaurants for a year. I never succeeded with potted herbs. I just dried them…on the stems. Nonetheless, he felt I should enjoy the labors of vegetable gardening as much as he did.

What he might not have known, or possibly remembered, was I had a garden once. The summer I met his son, I attempted a small “bucket” garden behind my duplex. Half a dozen plants in five gallon buckets. Tomatoes and jalapeno peppers. I had visions of fresh salsa and open faced tomato sandwiches. The plants flourished. The tomato vines were so healthy I draped them over the clothes line to prevent the fruit from rotting.

Things went well, until I started spending more time with the one who was to become the Better Half. In my absence, the birds turned my garden into salad bar and pecking holes in each to tomato and absconding with all the peppers. The plants were healthy but naked. As if that wasn’t bad enough, my houseplants begin dying one by one until the only remaining live botanical was au succulent stuffed in an insufficient amount of potting soil.

In light of the results, I concluded that I was only qualified to nurture one relationship at a time and five gallon buckets were assigned other uses.

Perhaps I was hasty or superstitious, but it can be burdensome to nurture. Need nags and some withstand the drain better than others, not that it isn’t good to be needed… We are simply not allowed to quantify the dosage, and are left to cope with that which is thrust upon us.

I get in a hurry. Not exactly impatient, but a self-inflected rushing. I assume since I dislike waiting idly, people waiting in line behind me feel the same way. So, I hurry racing against a fictitious stopwatch, for what or against what, I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter, because I’m behind schedule, whose schedule, I can’t say.

During one of these self-induced scrambles I scalded my wrist with hot coffee. I was waiting at the counter of one of those carefully branded coffee boutiques, and rattled, because it took longer to place the order. In my mind the great scone debate of 2009 lasted five minutes, not thirty seconds, so in my head I was one of THOSE high maintenance customers. When my order was up, two tall coffees and supposedly a cinnamon chip scone, I did as I always do. I balanced one cup of coffee on the lid of the other to pick up both cups with my left hand, while using my right hand to carry the pastry bag.

So this time the cups weren’t balanced as well, and the top cup fell over as I stepped away from the counter. It splashed my shirt, maybe covered is a better description, and scalded my right wrist before the cup fell to the floor. Groan.

It’s unlikely I would have scalded myself, had I not created this artificial pressure to get out of the way. Ironically, in an effort to dispel attention away from me, I attracted more.

When we returned home, I perused the interwebs for treatment options and quickly discovered I box of bandaids does not constitute a first aid kit. In typical DIY fashion, I confiscated one of the Better Half’s cotton t-shirts, and used it for bandages, sterilizing it in the microwave first. Instead of the painter’s tape, I opted for electrical to hold the cotton strips in place. It looks like Bob the Builder was hired to do the costume design for Xena, Warrior Princess. Cheap, tacky, and strangely effective.

The Better Half is concerned about scarring. I’m concerned about ability to go on as if nothing ever happened. Both of us might be ready to concede the necessity of a decent first-aid kit.

I decided I should read The Fountainhead. Maybe it was a desire to overcompensate for an inferior literature education, but it could have been the title. Those words: The Fountainhead, held a mystery to be be delved and considered beyond the initial glimpse of article plus compound noun. Obviously, I didn’t have a clue as to the book’s content.

It took weeks to trudge through (that’s what happens when you read at 15 minute intervals), and I won’t trouble you with a synopsis, because in the words of an airplane seatmate from L.A., most people read this when they were “students in like the eight grade”. So you know already, or even if you don’t, it isn’t really important.

The Fountainhead was largely conceived as a vehicle to promote Rand’s philosophy, objectivism and to project the ideal man. So, I wasn’t the target audience…The initial encounters between Dominique Francon and Howard Roark strike me as anything but ideal (and more than a little disturbing), but I will leave those details for the critics and students of comparative literature to sort through.

After I finished the novel, I came away with two impressions.

The first being Ellsworth Toohey was colossal dick, brilliant but a dick is still a dick. Toohey’s subtle manipulation of characters like a deft puppet master, infuriated me off, like a well written character should. He was so wonderfully despicably written that Bagging Tooheys became another euphemism for expunging waste from the litter box.

As for my second impression, maybe objectivism has a limited application. I object to one size fits all philosophy based on principle. I have yet to encounter an ideology, or an ism for the matter, that adequately takes into account the complexity of individuals when proclaiming what behavior is most beneficial to the collective. I don’t agree with Larry Flynt about many things, but I do agree with his quote, “Majority rule only works if you’re also considering individual rights. Because you can’t have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.”

Objectivism’s most logical application is art. Not inclusive of so-called-art that infringes upon the rights of an individual or group. By infringing, I mean unsafe, or unlawful.

Artists are more apt to create their strongest work when they follow their own vision. They may not succeed in creating timeless work, or work that appeals to the masses, but they will produce work that better represents the essence of who they are and their path of growth. Will it make the world a better place? Probably not, but do millions of velvet Elvis paintings, or Thomas Kinky reproductions make us more enlightened?

Artist choose their own paths. I’m not condemning anyone who has made sacrifices to obtain some level of commercial success. All must eat. Freewill permits us to choose. I’m glad some still choose to follow their own stream of conscience even if it doesn’t lead to greatness, because sooner or later it could inspire someone else to transcend the barrier.

I keep a folder for thoughts easily misinterpreted outside the context of the moment, which I don’t post. I may be stubborn, but I learn from my mistakes.

This creates an interesting dilemma. I don’t feel any better after writing about situations that trouble me, nor do I feel better after I discussing them. No sensation of weightlessness, no shifting karmic bile. Nothing. Mostly, I feel trapped. On the page and in real life.

The essence of who I am remains the same, and therein lies the problem. Adapt or perish.

I’m struggling. I’m not opposed to change. I makes modifications so as not to disrupt the continuity of the moment. I’ve worked on my temper, and avoided useless confrontations. But some alterations, are elements that make me who I am, not defects in character, as much as a difference in philosophy.

Adapting as a concession, and the notion one should transform for the benefit of the group pisses me off. I have never requested the group, as individuals or a whole, make concessions for my comfort.

Feelings don’t cease simply because the moment has past. It isn’t that I relish or feel justified in holding a grudge. Anger builds slowly and embers smolder.

I don’t feel like a partner in union as much as I feel like ship that has been sucked into the sea. My remaining individuality resides in these posts, and in studio flat files. Not much content of aside from abstract double speak.

I thought the days of scraped knees and blue shins were behind me, like the childhood days of creating a homemade slip-n-slide out of a plastic drop cloth and using dishwashing detergent as a lubricant. That was the last scraped knee, or was a small gash,I recall having. Maybe childishness never really evaporates, we just grow too uptight to appreciate the joy and begin dismissing it in the name of sophistication. I still adhere to some juvenile traits, like sulking. Mature, huh?

We finished the paver path and the end result feels anticlimactic. Nine months of various stages of planning, designing, compromising and redesigning, unadulterated laziness, deliveries, procrastination, begging and pleading. Completion should be a means to an end, but it falls short. Not of expectations exactly, but something like it…I can’t claim disappoint sans expectations, because how can you be disappointed if you don’t anticipate a minimal return on planning.

I’m displeased all the effort didn’t yield some pinnacle of greatness, or golden idol of suburban idealism. Nope. None of those things. Just a fucking path from the parking pad to the front door.

The neighbors have been complimentary, even generous, with their praise, though I can’t help but wonder are the praising the path itself, or the fact that it only took six months to move three palettes of concrete bricks out of the front yard. All I see are the shortcomings, the squandered preparations, and the micromanaging I’ve endured for the past four days. The slowly executed task transformed into a high priority project because the weather was sucky for execution there was a piece of equipment with an expensive rental contract (tick, tick, tick tick). The results feel paltry compared to the effort, but the neighbors aren’t concerned with such trivial details like my sanity, so the proper response is, thank you, rather than voicing that all inclusive, but…

The path should be enough, but I allowed all sense of accomplishment to be tainted by the journey. I thought if I were patient enough, anticipated enough, and knew enough about the idiosyncrasies about the project foreman, I could rise to the occasion, and be a better partner, but in the end, I just wanted wanted to chew off my own leg to escape, all over micromanaging to the hundredth decimal point. In spite of extensive planning, you can’t adequately expect to influence the basic nature of others. If they are accustomed to solving problems in specific ways, you’re unlikely to influence a change. We are who we are, and we don’t change unless we choose to.