Thank you for your service, little yellow hose. You never failed. You were just too short for the weird moment, under the current weird conditions. Not your fault.

What did fail, and continues to get worse and worse, is that shutoff valve, seen sitting here between the new long silver hose and the pipe coming out of the wall.

The valve still needs replacing. But now that is not nearly so urgent a matter.

In order to put in a new valve I will need to get the Water, all of it, shut off again, at least for five minutes.

But what I got done on Perfect Sunday, was to take a risk, by swapping out the short yellow hose for the new long silver one, and routing it straight down the sewer hole, so that the broke valve can leak to its heart’s content in the short term.

The risk was in doing it without shutting off the main Water.

It paid off.

I’m sure you’re nowhere near as happy about all that as I am, and quite possibly not even the least bit amused or interested.

But part of the beauty of Spilling is that it makes that artless question about How’m Doin’ completely redundant, and unnecessary. In the unlikely event that you actually want to know the answer to it, all you have to do is click on over here, and read.

Self-evidently, today, I’m a-doin’ amused, interested, and FINE, in the moment.

Or to put way too fine a point on it, I’m

Splendid.

***

Now I know not everyone is blessed with the miracle of their own spillsite.

So my rant does, I must needs admit, leave the next question begging: What if I want to know how you are doing? Do I ever want that?

Yes. Sometimes.

But I don’t always have a good way to get that question answered.

I did try. I invited you here to tell me. That did a tiny bit of good in a few cases.

I did try, to be a good texter. Sometimes I still am, even if it’s not at the thread I consider now to be wrecked by a sugary Joy. I feel like there are still ways to develop, to make that a potentially useful thing, maybe. And when you text me, I respond very dependably.

I won’t do the Zuckerberg platforms, and resisting them is slowly evolving into something even more hard-wired, so that’s not a way. Pretty much the same with Elon’s, most weeks or months. My hate for those modalities is pretty visceral.

An actual phone call is a relatively big ask, especially if you’re counting on me to be the one to Initiate. But I do pick up. And sometimes, fairly rarely, I even am the one to call. The stars have to be quite well-aligned, and the energy levels very high–that is one of many reasons why Amplifying Energy is such a central concern to me right now.

I’m cutting myself a lot of slack in the matter of whether I should be more interested in how you are, and that’s mainly because being mad or judgmental toward myself, about that, seems far worse than useless to me.

This whole matrix of questions and concerns is one small part of a very big life cluster.

Maybe it should be bigger. I doubt that it will be, given how Jesus flang me …

but I am not unwilling to consider the possibilities, or to grow, in ways expected, or not.

It all kinda loops back to that question of Interests eventually, I think, most of the time.

It might be my next book. In the meantime, it preoccupies a lot of me, in this one true place where cometh we not to praise the little yellow hose, but to bury it.