-- Saturday, July 10, 1999 --

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7:32 p.m. The guys with the diamond drills and the jackhammers haaaave just left ... the aspirins should be kicking in any time now.

We had a deep, hard-to-find leak in the front of the house, outside the boundary covered by the insurance company, of course, and by golly, the guys finally found it. Little holes here, bigger holes there. A perch of stone moved in the course of the day.

There were clattering piles of copper pipe: the cheap stuff that was root-wrangled and pierced and removed and thrown in a banging heap, and of course the expensive stuff that was blowtorched and sqree-scored and fitted carefully back under the house. They had a huge squealing electric mixer for the concrete, no different from my ancient Kitchen-Aid, and when you put too much dry powdery grit into the liquid too fast, this is what happens: a fine spray of batter coats the kitchen walls. Only now, there's a fine splatt of concrete on the outside walls. Dried concrete in a pattern of frozen flight.

The guys. The huge, Popeye-armed guys. They wear big, very very big orange ear mufflers, industrial strength. They had to break through a whole patio of concrete. There was no place in the house to go to get away from the noise. The windows were open, of course, when they started. Weird dirt from way down too deep, fungal X-file dirt, dirt better left undisturbed -- was spattered and tracked over the threshold and I know I sniffed some of it in.

The water was just turned back on a few minutes ago. That's nice. I'll have an entire glass of it, thanks. Think I'll just go lie down now, let the analgesic get to work. It's industrial strength.

Tomorrow -- coherency. Without the pain.