Not Depressed

Not to worry, I rarely write twice in one night, I'd slept for a little while, somehow gotten sober, and the computer was just sitting there. The occasional rant does wonders for the spirit. Rain continues all day today, sometimes hard. I collect water for a bath, take one, the whole ritual, then dab on a little Dzing. It smells like old books, mesmerizing. It is, as Luca Turin says, a female scent men can wear. The dry-down is wonderful, a bit vanilla or close. I love it. Sara has a bottle of Tommy Girl at Hilton Head and has promised it to me. Also nice, and very cheap (Dzing, by comparison, is $135 an ounce) which is strange in the perfume industry. Read the new Sanford novel, a good read, then started rereading "The Song Of The Dodo" by David Quammen. A big important book. These rains have me living in a tropical jungle. Country Fried Steak and the lovely scalloped potatoes I do in the microwave and brown with a propane torch. 4th of July. Woo hoo. There's a large bent tree on the terrace below the road below the floodwall, but certain logistic problems. If Kim and Kurt were here, with B and D and myself, we'd stand a chance: the eight feet or so I need must weigh 1000 pounds. Eyes bigger than my gravitas. Some things are impossible, I constantly remind myself. The crotched poplar, as index, is less than a hundred pounds. The big rock I need, for the deck stairs, will be loaded with a fork-lift, all of the moving will be slightly down hill after that, easy; but the bent stick, 18-20 inches in diameter, is down on a bench, and would need to be lifted 12-15 feet at a sheer terrace face. Might could haul it up with the truck, I'll have to go back and look, some places that would be possible, could get it into position with some six-inch rollers, it might not be impossible (of course it's not, I mean relatively easily) and I think about it for a while. I'm attracted to the difficult, or maybe not that so much as attracted to certain materials and using them entails moving them and often they're large and heavy and awkward. This stick would make a great stringer for the stairs, but it's very existence proves that such sticks exist and maybe I'll look around on higher ground. I built a staircase in Utah, using a big Ponderosa Pine, horribly bent, as the stringer, come-a-longed the damn thing out of the woods and then went to a bar and enlisted large drunk cowboys to help me get into my truck. Using the ploy that always works with good old boys: -bet a round that you can't lift this- they lift it and I buy a round, sometimes two. You just have to know what's the carrot. The Deputy called me on the new carpet, said that I didn't respond when her cousin was flirting, I countered I didn't know, so far removed from the game, then D asked me what I thought about that dancer I dated a few times several years ago, stopping, to chat, when we were all out having a smoke, I said I thought she was flirting with him, he's attractive, I'm a weathered drunk, what am I supposed to think? I love holidays, everyone leaves you alone, they all have plans, and if you don't have plans you're a loser. I admit to not having plans, I don't use them anymore, just build things out of my head. I'd rather think about building a boat than talk to most people. The Wallace Line (you are, of course, familiar with that) which is generally deep water that separates islands, tends to divide species too, what Wallace was thinking about when Darwin wouldn't speak, then Hooker entered the picture, the classic case of independent discovery, and the mediated settlement is we remember Darwin and Wallace is a footnote. Life ain't fair. I really expected to be the Goat Cheese Tsar at this point, dictating terms, instead I'm a janitor. Such are things constellated.