The town sent a fire inspector over to where I live not long ago who decided that most of the doors needed to go, as they aren’t “fire rated” under modern codes. So the landlord was good enough to shell out for some solid, custom-made new doors last week. Steve, our part-time building superintendent-of-sorts, decided to store the old doors out behind the garage until the next junk pickup by the town.

So, here are some pieces of wood that were once doors, out in the morning sun. Ah yes, doors. Aside from the name of a “heavy” rock group from the 1960s (RIP Jim Morrison), doors are an important but mostly un-thought of part of our lives. We need doors to keep out bugs, bad weather, dust, and other people from important places (like our houses and apartments). Doors give us privacy, comfort and security; a modicum of control in a largely uncontrollable world. It makes you wonder, what would it be like to live in an environment without doors? Is there still a culture on some island or in the heart of the Amazon or the Nile where doors are hardly used? Some animals and bugs also make use of doors to protect their nests and provide shelter from predators.

So these doors have seen their day. But despite all the changes to the world over recent years, despite all the stuff now going out of style like land-line phones and postage stamps and televisions with antennas, doors aren’t going out of our lives anytime soon.

My cell phone is old and has a crummy camera. But it’s still good for capturing something of those boring moments of ordinary life, the moments that you wouldn’t normally think to bring a camera to record. Like waiting in line at a supermarket.

But hey, life is what you make of it. Boring moments are better than no moments. Life has a lot of different flavors, and sometimes the flavor of the moment is boredom. Sometimes we do feel “Lost in the Supermarket”, as the Clash song goes.

But remember, you’re still alive, you’re still part of the ultimate network of time and space and consciousness — a bigger, more highly dimensional version of the digital social network that the guy in the pic is accessing with his smart phone. I don’t mind supermarket lines; it’s all part of the big space-time network of real life, of being.

A few shots from the front yard, of one of the many, many, fat and hungry squirrels in our neighborhood. These guys can be real pests, and I have no great love for them. But at least this one is earning his food honestly, like a squirrel should, by keeping his nose to the ground. It’s when squirrels become innovative around humankind’s various interventions (garbage cans, bird feeders, cookout supplies, etc.) that the trouble begins. Ah, we do bring out the worst in nature sometimes.