Interiority

The Law Of Flat Surfaces had me buried. Up at dawn and I started right in. The new dictionaries needed a home on the Dictionary Table. I go through an 18 inch high pile of paper. Restack the other pile (I can live with one pile) as an all manuscript entity. A bag of stuff that needs shredding (one at the museum) and a large pile to recycle. On a roll I clean the table, set out the books that I use often, set the OED in a place where I only have to move one book to get to them. Webster's Second sets closed, the Lopez "Home Ground" on top of it, the two volumes of "Americanisms" on top of each other, the Random House, opened to the last word, spine again rested by opening onto "The Yale Shakespeare". So neat, so tidy. I put away twenty or thirty books. My system has gotten too chaotic. I need another bookcase, has to be in the second bedroom unless I clean out the studio, my store room, B's books are stored in there, but they only take up one wall, 25 boxes, and when he builds a library over at his place, they'll be room for even more expansion. Which will mean cleaning out the shed, which has been home, still is, to many different critters. If you need to clean out a shed, throw in a couple of firecrackers before you go in, critters all gone. Just scouted it out today, a fucking mess, need to do it, I've allowed the studio to become a tool room. Almost needs to be, for the hard-assed life-style where you never know what you're going to need, truthfully, the room is an insult to anyone not living alone in the woods, living on very little money, chainsaws, wrenches, boxes of bolts, cans of nails and screws, tools. Telling just how this room came to contain what it now contains is not my point, though it would be an interesting subject. FOUND, at the bottom of the pile, a piece of manuscript of mine I thought I had lost, when the computer fried and I was robbed. I read myself for hours today. It's pretty good, this rough draft I was working on, 5 or 6 years ago, I think I see what I was trying to do, now I just do it, work hard a different way and it's easier. Speaking of handles. Which Gary made sacred, as it should be.

"Tell Laura,
it was just a
scarlet tanager."