Hummingbird

I stopped feeding the hummingbirds because I can't stand listening to them fight, sets my teeth on edge, a kind of fingernail on the blackboard thing. But I didn't take the feeder down, silly me. Get home today and log on to read mail, maybe start writing early, fucking hummingbird, man, the Alpha Male, hovers at all four feeding stations, then right outside my window, looking at me, complaining in hummingbird-speak, that the feeder is empty. A tiny bird giving me shit, and I have to wave him away several times. Finally he taps the glass with his beak, arrogant bastard, and I scare him off with the corkscrew on my Swiss Army Knife. It's dangerous out here. We built a storage rack in the vault (this was a bank, after all) for quilts, archival storage, we want to roll them, with buffered acid-free tissue on tubes that are acid-free (an eight foot tube is $15, the tissue, 30x40 sheets is a buck a sheet) and we built the rack for $18, which impressed even us, who often scrounge every component for a specific given project. The Reimer Brothers, in the Florida panhandle, are the best in the world at this, but we do alright, in a much more difficult area, in poverty zones not a lot is thrown away, the dust bins are empty. I built a large 'set' for a play at the college, a few years ago, and when the show was done, I had to strike the set right then, the night of the final performance, tradition and neccessity, so I had hired a dumpster, so I could rip the thing apart and throw it away. The entire Maintenance Staff for the University was there, scrounging, I could have fit the waste in a trash can. The rack, the frame we built, was conceived and constructed for $18. It impresses me, remembering. D and I work so well together that the conversation is rarely about the thing at hand, often we're talking about boats, or the way women walk in different shoes, or the way spring sprang into summer. I'm only alive for the ride. Why do some men throw used bubblegum into the urinal? In so far as I might be existential I can't understand. If you throw bubblegum into the urinal someone will have to take it out. Be better to throw the gum in a grader ditch, or under a desk. I suspect sabotage. Bombs. Cell phones that blow your head apart, but it has always been simple stupidity that is the motivating force, consider my iris, which did not bloom this year, and I don't know why, I pay attention, but I can't monitor everything. I get an Email from a friend. Seems, seams, what was meant is misunderstood, what I thought I saw. Hey you. What is the wavelength? Sara saw clearly that a maple was growing in a clef of the elm. I just nod, you know, what can I do?