Holiday Storms

Weather alert. Storms arriving from the upper Mid-West tonight so I had to write early, hail and big winds, they're saying. Mahler on the radio and they interrupted with a warning. Ruined the symphony. I put the Bach Cello Suites on to erase the auditorial insult. African dominoes (or golf) is a slang term for shooting craps. I'd forgotten about calling 'shooters' (in marbles) agates. This new dictionary is wonderful, I really am just reading straight through which could take a while as it's a couple thousand pages, large pages, small type. Rereading Samuel Beckett's lovely little book on Proust "The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in the the core of the eddy." Struck me strongely from several different directions. I had to take a walk. Watching the river so much this year, the swirl and eddy, the Wrack Show is all about eddies, what gets left behind when flood-waters recede, how the quote seemed to be exactly how I work, where these pieces come from, how my life is ordered. Something else I was reading, a quarterly review, don't remember which one, part of a line I remember, "...unexpected pausings and defeated climaxes...", an essay about Susan Glaspell I think. First thing this morning I rubbed and fried some pork loin chops, boneless and thin, five of them. Eat the first one with fried potatoes and shirred eggs with salsa, sour-dough toast. The second and third ones were really funny scenes. I only had this flattened loaf of sour-dough but I wanted a sandwich, so I cut a center slice in half, standard, but the chops are pretty large because I've flattened them, because I like to, to break the fibers, and I can cook them very fast that way, 4 minutes, so the meat over-hung the bread by an inch all around. They had been rubbed with a red chili mix and browned in butter and were wonderful but very messy. I ate them hunched over the island, reading out of the corner of my eye, trying to keep one hand clean to turn the pages. Life is difficult. The fourth and fifth ones I had with baked beans, the last of the last of the Colorado pintos that I 'doctored' as my dad would say, and a johnny cake, as I would call cornbread in a skillet on top of the stove. A fat tortilla. You got to have bread, or noodles, some green stuff you can learn about, kill a few animals, it happened everywhere. Suddenly you live in a town, buy bread, there's a blacksmith that makes hinges and a place you can buy lumber. The pressure is off, as long as you can make money, buy what's necessary, hire the sub-contractors to do what's necessary. I'd rather do everything myself, suffer the slings and arrows, and not go to town. I can project my needs, they're minimal, a place to sleep, I have a knife, I keep a sheet of plastic close.