Pride and Peckerwood

and introducing: The Gorn

Unless you’re in the woods, you never want to hear a chittering raccoon while you’re on the toilet at six-thirty in the morning. That happened to me the other day, or at least I thought it did. And it sounded like it was right next to me, so I assumed the worst: raccoons in the attic.

I somehow managed to pull the attic stairs down without waking up Sarah, and climbed up there with a flashlight to see what infested my attic. Thinking back on this, it was not my wisest moment, if a rapacious raccoon wanted to gnaw my face off. I saw nothing but insulation that hopefully wasn’t asbestos. My cat Louie, helpful as always, climbed up the steps behind me. Thankfully I noticed him before I stepped down the ladder, or one cat-yowl and crash later, I’d be in the hospital with a broken pelvis. I also checked the scuttle attic that’s only accessible from the garage, because we’ve never looked in there. Our ladder doesn’t reach it. But the door opens by itself, so Sarah thinks ghosts, or raccoons, or ghost raccoons make their home in there. I climbed on top of our new garage fridge and saw nothing in there but the pink itchy insulation.

What I heard was not a chittering raccoon, but a red-bellied woodpecker serenading the dawn, or telling a bluejay to piss off before they pecked their eyes out. The call of the red-bellied woodpecker is somewhere between an agitated raccoon and an orgasmic bottlenose dolphin. It is very disturbing to hear when you’re on the toilet. This woodpecker sounded like it was in my shower stall, but after hearing its call the next day in the driveway, I think it nests in one of our trees, close to the house, and isjust so damn loud that it pierces our poorly insulated roof and sounds like it’s about to land on my head and peck a hole in my skull looking for tasty grubs.

I’ve seen a red-bellied at my feeder, but they hang upside down because they’re too big to perch properly, and therefore the Bird Buddy camera never catches them. It did capture this fierce little Downy Woodpecker giving a house finch the business:

The fall migration is in the works, as I’ve seen on my morning hikes. I’ve been hiking more, because the Taint Hammer is in the hospital waiting for the insurance company to approve a butt transplant. (The seat tube is cracked, and the same issue happened before; this is the second frame I’ll be getting under warranty from Fuji.) After talking on Facebook with riders who use the same trails I do, and Redditors in r/fatbike, this is practically unheard of. The bike shop is waiting for a call back from the manufacturer, and we’ll go from there.

In the meanwhile, behold… THE GORN!

The color is officially called “Miami Green” and it’s a Trek Marlin 5, so it’s green and Trek, like The Gorn. I’m not sure if Miami Green is a joke because it’s half yellow and half blue, but it’s the best color available in this model. And it rides really nicely, both on pavement and on my usual morning trails. It’s a little more nimble than a fat tire bike, but also more delicate. I nearly went over the handlebars when my wheel scrubbed a rock in a trench that my Fuji Wendigo would have blasted over. A fat bike is like a Jeep; it’ll go anywhere. The Marlin is a nice little bike, and I’m grateful for the front suspension fork that makes bumpy trails easier on my shoulders.

My only regret is that it wasn’t ready last Thursday for me to ride it in the Haddon Township Pride Parade, which was postponed from June due to dangerous air quality thanks to smoke from the Canadian wildfires. I would have liked to been part of Ride With Pride, but maybe next year. They can use the numbers! I think there were five bicycles in the otherwise enjoyable parade. And this way, I got to stand with Sarah and catch candy and merch thrown by paraders, instead of walking my bike and stopping every few feet while I waited for the float in front of us to move ahead.

Haddon Township Pride

I wore my kilt, and my “Terminate Hate” shirt; Sarah wore her “Pride not Prejudice” shirt with Jane Austen, and we both caught a lot of compliments. It was my first Pride parade, and Sarah asked why I wanted to go after all these years. Being there was all the answer needed. Everyone was ridiculously happy! The kids catching candy and toys, the people marching and tossing us stuff, the drummers, the dancers, even the policeman who said he wished he’d worn his kilt, too. There were parents with little kids on one side of us, and a young couple festooned with piercings and rainbow hair on the other, and everyone was happy and kind, giving fallen candy to kids, and sharing silly merch with people who missed catching some.

There were corgis! And chickens! And furries! Everyone from Campbell’s Soup to Subaru was there, and my favorite was perhaps the guy in the pickup truck followed by a woman and kids throwing candy. It looked like a contractor’s truck but there were no signs on the side we were on. I like to think it was just some family who had nothing to promote, because it was a very commercial parade, with banks, realtors, and health care providers handing out rainbow wrist bracelets and stress balls.

We didn’t join the after party. We’d parked two blocks away in front of a favorite taco joint that makes good margaritas. A good time was had by all.

September 30th was the end of an era: NetFlix finally stopped shipping discs. In the beginning, I got 3 discs at a time and often watched them all in one night. I had over four hundred movies in my queue when they ended, and the disc they let me keep was Young People Fucking, a cute ensemble movie from 2007 that’s not as prurient as it sounds. There’s some nudity, but it follows a few couples through their evenings of attempted sex, and is at varying times touching, funny, cute, and thought-provoking. I immediately signed up for the Criterion Channel, as I was renting a lot of their discs via NetFlix, and the first one I watched was Derek Jarman’s post-apocalyptic time travel film, Jubilee. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and recommend it if you want an interesting look at our present from 1978.

Bookwise, I am savoring Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, as I greatly enjoyed the novels that she’s most famous for, My Antonia and O Pioneers!. This one is set in Mexico and New Mexico in the early 1800s, following a new bishop as he tries to save souls, or rather proselytize. He’s an interesting character, and as experienced through Cather’s spare yet evocative prose, he’s good company. I’m also reading the immense anthropological tome The Dawn of Everything, where David Graeber and David Wengrow question our assumptions about human nature, specifically Hobbes’s “nasty brutish and short” picture of humanity before the state and Rousseau’s idyllic one, and how they have narrowed our visions of the past and pre-history in particular. It’s easy to read and quite fascinating so far.

I also picked up Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad; I loved her new translation of The Odyssey. If you aren’t sure, read this great interview with her on the isle of Ithaka, where it all began.

If you’d rather have something to read then watch, this piece on the avant-garde origins of Gumby was fascinating. I was never a fan of Gumby, but I’ve been watching some of the shorts just to see how strange and compelling they are, thanks to Animation Obsessive:

The Avant-Garde Origins of 'Gumby'

And finally, I want to publicly thank Chris LaTray for introducing me to this marvelous tee-shirt with a farting fox on it, created by Hillary White Rabbit. My niece and nephew loved it. It is rare that two of my varied interests, such as foxes and fart jokes, collide with such grace:

I’ll let these fine fellows drum you out: