Considering Attachments

Deeply tired, bone-weary, still woke early, raucous crows. Adventure in the night I thought was a dream, then remembered it wasn't. Sara had given me a tennis racket, the preferred weapon against household bats, and I had put it next to the bed along with the big cop flashlight. Sometime after midnight (I don't keep a clock in my bedroom) I awoke to those little nips of sound bats use for echolation and actually managed to knock the fucker out of the air. One for the home team. Back to sleep. Awake again just after dawn, tired and leg-sore from 42 trips up and down stairs at the museum, but wanting to rest, not sleep, I heated water and dragged in the sheep-watering trough, took a bath, shaved; huge breakfast of sausage, potatoes, eggs, toast, enough coffee to float a boat. Then a trip to town to run all the errands I'd postponed, laundry, library, Kroger, moving slowly, driving slowly, smelling the newly cut grass. Got the new James Lee Burke novel, Clete and Dave take on Montana, and when I get home I strip down to my drawers and rub the backs of my thighs with SOMBRA, a pain relieving gel that really works, assume a prone position on the sofa, with my knees up, and read for several hours. There's a light wind on the ridge, and the leaves rustle, the occasional birdsong, the usual bugs, otherwise, not a sound, what I think of as natural quiet; no vehicles, no planes, I disconnect the phone and unplug the fridge. At some point I put down the book and get an early drink, roll a smoke, drift off into consideration of the Wrack Show, specifically, the attachment. It's like a house of cards, we can't attach into the floor, but we can attach to the walls and ceiling, how do we keep things from falling over? Tie everything together and anchor it at a few points. My model for this thinking is the railing on my stairs, it's a single curved dogwood (very strong) trunk, maybe three inches in diameter, it only touches anything else at two points but would support a college linebacker. Attachment is everything. If you can avoid that initial moment of movement, you save the farm. If it starts to move, all is lost, house of cards. I don't really come up with any solutions (or precipitates) but know I have in the past and might again. After the second drink I'm drawing sketches with "lines of force" arrowed and underlined, as if I understood. Probably I do, just because I've lived long enough, like Kim solving that one inch problem in his brickwork, you can move even metal roofing, but not very much per course, always measuring to the edge, to see how close you could be. I've been perfect a few times but it was always luck, I'm not that good, even at my best, I never could see those birds crossing.