PopWars

Someone told us how our neighbor in the city earned his nickname, and it had something to do with him getting shocked when he was holding a spark plug while someone else started a car. Sparky owned the Shell station on Hudson Avenue in the Polish section back in the ’60s. We have some stories about him. I could have used his help the last few days.

With nine days of full sun and moderate temperatures ahead of us, we were all geared up to split the piles of wood we have from the fallen oaks this spring. I changed the oil in the Heathkit splitter that belonged to a small group of neighbors until they all stopped burning wood. It started right up, and I was going great guns for about ten minutes until it ran out of gas. I filled the tank, and it wouldn’t start.

I took the spark plug out and cleaned it, but it still wouldn’t start. Peggi got the manual out, and we went to the troubleshooting section. After the spark plug, there was a small section on the right gasoline and then complicated instructions on cleaning the carburetor.

I bought a new spark plug at Titus Mower and picked up a can of carburetor cleaner. They told me bad gas is a common problem when a small engine won’t start. I put in the new plug and pulled my guts out, but it still wouldn’t start, so I bought a couple of gallons of ethanol-free gas at Herrema’s.

Peggi and I spent about an hour discussing ways to get the old gas out of the tank, and then I remembered my brother Fran siphoning gas when we were growing up, so I gave him a call. It was noon, and he had just sat down for lunch, but he said he would stop over.

He came with a short hose and stuck it down in the tank and then sucked on the other end. He got a small taste of gas and spit it out, but the tank was empty in a minute. He told me he and his friends used to siphon high-test gas out of the school buses at night, back when gas was thirty cents a gallon.

The splitter started right up with the new gasoline.

Helena wrote lyrics for a song about how she first met her husband. He was born in Jamaica, so she had AI put her lyrics to a reggae song. It was really sweet. There were six of us listening to it on her phone, and the discussion turned to AI in general. Someone said, “I feel sorry for kids born today,” and someone else agreed. I held my tongue.

Now, I have no idea if I’m right about this, but I have always felt that youth is a glorious time no matter what decade you were born in, and the youngest generation today will witness all sorts of marvels we can’t imagine. More generally, when one generation acts like theirs was the best, it sounds sort of full of yourself or worse, like you have given up trying to figure out our current day. That’s why that World War II-era Greatest Generation talk always bothered me. Do we have to have another world war to stack up? Maybe it’s just that every generation feels theirs is the best.

I understand the concern about the state of the world the next generation will inherit. We continue to make a mess of the environment, social media is dividing us for profit while leaving people with fewer friends and the country id openly flirting with fascism. But like Kahil El’Zabar reminded us, nature is stronger than these forces.

We recently spent time with some old friends, and we were talking about technology when one of them said, “We just got old about two years ago.” I had a friend and roommate more than forty years ago who wanted to be old. He was already settling into routines and prepping to shut down.

Near the end of my father’s life, I asked him straight out if he felt life was better when he was growing up. He started out talking about all the innovations he had seen in his time, how wonderful the personal computer was, etc., and then he started to pivot to how the priest in his old westside neighborhood knew everyone and kept a tight rein on wayward kids. Sort of a mixed report.

We shopped at the Co-Op yesterday, and as always, we stopped by to visit Pete, who lives nearby. He showed us his newest mixed-media pieces in what he called both the world’s oldest and newest mediums. Pete was born the year WWII ended, and I couldn’t wait to hear his perspective. He told us about his father turning Frank Sinatra off when he came on the TV. And rock ‘n’ roll, that was all about sex! How the Vietnam War ruined so many Americans’ lives. About forty-five minutes later, he said the idea that one generation has it better or worse than another is complete bullshit.

I’d like this straight before calcification sets in.

We haven’t listened to our recording from Wednesday night. We left for the mountains the next morning. The gig with Bernie was an odd one in that the crowd, mostly regulars, was especially intent on listening. Bernie had sat in with us before but not on the Little’s new stage. He set up in a way that we couldn’t hear what was coming out of his amp for the first set. So Peggi and I were playing sparsely as we strained to hear Bernie, afraid to run over whatever it was he was playing. It was especially nerve-wracking. We talked during the break and the second set worked.

We left after breakfast and stopped at the Fastrac in Walworth to go to the bathroom. The only newspaper on their stand was the Epoch Times, and they had a whole pile of them. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found it described as right-wing or far-right, known for its strong support of Donald Trump and the promotion of conspiracy theories. We made plans to stop at the nearby Mi Hacienda Jalisciense on our way back.

Driving up to the mountains at this time of year is like traveling into the future. Here, by the lake, our fall colors are just rolling in, but as we drove north the colors grew more and then less intense until we arrived post-peak. Our hosts live off the grid, so in one sense we arrived in the past, no internet or running water, but in a very real sense we were far more grounded in the present.

It is always tempting to take detail photos of their minimal but artfully constructed home in the woods, the perfectly stacked woodpiles, the burnt pots on the outdoor grill, the titles on the bookshelf and the glass tabletop on the hemlock stump.

Shelley took us down to the beaver dam on the marsh, where she pointed to the vertical supports the engineers used to support their thatched wall. The dam had raised the level of the marsh by three and a half feet, and the creek, where I was standing when I took this shot, had slowed to a trickle. So Shelley suggested I remove a few pieces to refresh the creek.

After a few days in the woods, we pulled up in front of the Mexican restaurant in Alton. It sounded like they were having a party inside. At four in the afternoon, some farm workers were just getting off work, and there were twenty or so, all men in their early twenties, eating at tables. Mexican music was cranked in the kitchen, and the subwoofer was rattling the building. Peggi went back out to the car to get our earplugs. Another couple showed up and sat next to us. They ordered margaritas. Peggi and I were having Negra Modelos with guacamole and enchiladas. We came home, made a batch of pimientos de Padrón and watched Atlético defeat Alavés 2–1.

Our friend, David Greenberger, has a fine arts degree in painting. After graduating he took a job as activities director at the Duplex Nursing Home. He met the residents of the nursing home and abandoned painting in favor of conversation. “This is my art,” he said. David created the Duplex Planet, his life’s work.

For the next four days he has an auction on eBay where he is selling his collages on postcards at insanely low prices!