Well, this weekend I trimmed my toenails and put out the flag. We didn’t make any plans. I moved a knobby round of firewood up to the fire pit so we could use it as a side table. And broke down cardboard from the outdoor furniture we got. That big Doug spruce we had taken out because a root pushed the patio up and messed with the alignment of the hot tub so we had the hot tub taken out too, but the patio area beneath it was now a different color than the rest of the patio (which had seen sun and rain and abuse), so we covered that spot with an outdoor rug and put in an outdoor room with a trellis to screen off the neighbors. I boiled a chicken carcass and ordered no contact pizza, tipped well, added a bottle of red to our order. Dawn and I felt for a moment that we were okay with this, we weren’t far away from remote already. I read the Joy Division book for my weekly book club meeting with Anthony. The singer’s wife wrote a book about their lives together and it’s named after a line in a song that goes, “touching from a distance, further all the time.”

Categories: Memoir, microblogging, prose, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, Joy Division, Memoir, mid-life crisis, pacific northwest, prose, William Pearse writer