Blue sky and lovely temperature today. Rain last night again but sweet smelling in the morning. Friends are bringing in fish or working on their boats. Gardens are lovely with flowers, including ours. This year we put up pots around to keep them away from our nosey dog, which seems to work. Dot still loves to dig and eat unspeakable plants and animals. She is in for another vet visit on Monday because of an infected lump in there jaw which is probably from a sliver of stick or clamshell from her crazy diet. She is still plenty active and happy no matter how full we keep her with antibiotics. But she is getting better with the chewing and eating. She doesn’t seem to eat cans anymore where I swear, she used to consume aluminum cans before we could grab them out of her mouth. Now she might give one a bite to suck the soda down and then spit it out. She reminds me in many ways of a black bear. She still loves to dig and eat clams at low tide and will scrape a rock for mussels with her teeth and swallow every thing down. Her poop is a geological wonder.

Anyway… life feels good today. I made a big pot of chili last night and we have fresh cornbread. We will have that for a couple of days I’m sure. Jan is working hard on plans for the fall and I’m back at the blog while I’m waiting for news from Soho Press on the next Cecil book. I’m also taking notes and filling out three by five cards for the next Cold Storage book. It will be set in the early seventies, when the Hippies started to show up in the fishing fleet and a Trappist Monk from Kentucky came to Alaska thinking about settling here then he went to Thailand and died under what some thought were mysterious circumstances. This book will have some of my favorite old characters from the series, Ellie, and her niece. Slippery and the old cop who followed them up to Cold Storage. We get to find out how they settled in to life on the outer coast. No prisons, no wars, just old time Alaskan stories as were told to me.

I love books and reading but I’m having a hard time with my attention span for serious books during the time of covid 19. Even if the writing is particularly good, my attention weanders reading an entire book all at once. I stop and start. I think I’m reading about six books at once right now, and I keep buying more, because that’s just the way I am… but also I’m hungry for good writing and intelligent stories…. Yet…. I have the attention span of a fourteen year old boy on the first day of seventh grade. “What happened to all these girls over the summer?!!” Life just seems so weird. I’m reading about life in Italy after World War II and then I’m thinking about the upcoming US election and what it means, what’s going to happen, and then suddenly I’m day dreaming of a racist America and vote by mail. Jesus H. Christ… what happened to post war Italy?

Is anyone else like this?

Then why can I troll Netflix and watch one program from every Star Trek series every night, when I don’t even like Star Trek? (Though I have to say what peaked my interest in all things Star Trek was watching the latest Star Trek: Picard which I found out was written by Michael Chabon and his wife Aleyet Waldman. Both terrific writers… Michael C of Wonderboys, Caviler and Clay and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, fame. He is also one of the executive producers of this new TV series. I had the good fortune to meet him once when he was touring with the NY T’s and he came to Sitka after Policeman’s Union. He was a very good guy, incredibly smart and hospitable, and he did me a couple of favors after that.. Anyway I thought I would give the new Picard a try and thought it was great: The writing was really tight and snappy. He understood the genre and the world of Startrek it seemed to me. He wasn’t condescending towards it, but he elevated the production values to make it really beautiful. He let Jean Luke really show his stuff and I loved how the old characters had aged so gracefully. His wife is a terrific crime writer and I did a reading with her in Nevada City, California once.)

So… I can watch TV now, I can read short fiction and poetry easily but novels I have to read periodically. Visit the world and then comeback to mine right away, then back to Italy. Here are some of the books I’ve been reading:

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Fererante is a lovely and atmospheric novel about two girls growing up in Italy. It’s the first of a trilogy. I love it, the way I love rich food, right now but as I said, I come back to my real life of cheese sandwiches and chili often enough. You also see Ghost Month by Ed Lin….terrific crime novel set in Taipei. Also great characters and setting: Food, smells, action and historical/cultural background enough to be a good vacation. You will also see, a new edition of Ed Ricketts From Cannery Row to Sitka, Alaska. This is the book Jan Straley put together with new essays and revisions. More material, new artwork and a new design. I also have a piece in this wonderful book because I slept with the editor.

You can get this book also at Old Harbor Books (907) 747-8808 or on line.

I took Jan to her physical therapy this morning and then Dot and I went for a nice walk up on the cross trail behind the ball fields and the old City Dump site. It is a very lovely trail, wide enough to give good distance for cyclists and people concerned about social distancing. Dot enjoyed the walk a great deal but for some reason she was very sniffy, and her hackles were up often. This could be because she saw her first mountain biker ever and that was a little strange for her, it was a person I knew and he said hello to us and I think that was why she didn’t bite his front tire and try to herd him down off the hill. But she did bark twice and follow him for a bit. She stayed sniffy when I whistled her back.

This of course made me think off bears. There have been bears reported up there recently, and I started to run through my mind what we would do if we ran into one. I didn’t bring any bear spray or anything. As a good liberal and a Democrat I’m sure I would have tried to remain calm and reason with the bear. As an anarchist I think Dot would have let things ride on how much mutual respect was shown by the bear to us and then risked trying to kick it’s ass, which probably wouldn’t have worked out well. Bur she is a big strong dog, we both could have held our own for maybe ten seconds before we were munched up.

But it was not to be. There were plenty of people besides the rattling bikes and barking dogs. Sensible bears were up the hill, and the sensible puppies and old men made it back to the car just in time to get a frozen coffee drink at McDonalds for Jan and an order of French Fries for Dot. French fries are Dots favorite treat. We made it back to the physical therapist where we sat at the picnic table and Dot sat, laid, down and stayed for french fries until Jan came out. Then she ate all the rest straight out of the bag. Jan and I drank our frozen coffee drinks and it was a happy, happy day, because we had french fries and we didn’t get eaten by a bear.

Bright sun through the trees,

a brown bear eating berries

between dappled leaves.

jhs

Here is a recording I made of me reading a bit of the beginning of the second Harry Potter Book. As all of them do, this book creates the perfect world for underdog kids to believe in their unexpected powers.