Blog o’ Gnosis

Fall is a beautiful season here in Sonoma County. Being a California native, I have taken umbrage at those who claim that California doesn’t have proper seasons. These people can only see two: rainy and dry — and they usually complain about the rain. Yet to me, the four seasons fit perfectly with what I see, feel, smell, and experience through the year here.

I’m on a campaign of late, to surround myself with beauty and to write more. Happily, this two-pronged plan has a singular solution, which is to spend more time by the ocean at a property we own in Bodega Bay. There, in a half-finished house overlooking the bay, I can watch the fog roll in over Bodega Head, or sit out back on the porch swing and watch the moon rise over the eastern hills. It is as close to serenity as I can get and still be firmly on the planet, and the solitude (no internet! no TV!) makes it possible for me to write.

All I can say is, thank God for Jon Stewart. I thought I was going to die when the Daily Show took a week’s vacation while a natural disaster struck the Gulf and a national disgrace continued it. But this week, my favorite asthmatic Jewish comedian is back, and for brief half-hour segments the truth doesn’t hurt quite so bad.

For the past few days, there has been something very foul-smelling under the house. It was most noticeable in the hallway from the garage, and especially in the basement under the ritual room/music room/dream studio. Each day I monitored the smell and dreaded the inevitable search for what had died and begun decaying. If it were a small rodent, say a mouse, the smell would peak after a few days and then start to recede as the little mousie dried up. But this odor was not receding, it was getting more rich and complex each day. So today Ross and I finally undertook the basement search to find and dispose of said visitor.

Our basement is somewhere between a crawl space and a full room in height. It is a storage area for construction materials as well as lots of furniture that didn’t have a home once we moved in with Rosses dad last fall. Up until about a year ago it had been our nephew Alex’s bedroom for five or six years, so it was chock full of old stuff Alex had left behind, dressers and bed frames, antiques, plumbing fixtures, dollhouses, bags of mortar — in short, a place any sickly rodent would love. As we walked in the door, flashlight in hand, and were greeted with the first waft of smell, the first thought that popped into my head was, “I’m so glad I’m not in New Orleans. I’m so glad I’m not in New Orleans.”