Cleaning Wrack

Cold house and the stove-pipe not cleaned, so I add a layer and go out to clean wrack. An old bath towel is ideal for this, but it's a dusty job. Handling the pieces, I start to see them assembled. The Bull's Head stump is perfect, untouched, needs just mounting, with rebar, to a pedestal. Another, smaller stump, needs some sanding, perhaps trim the base a bit. Several delicate twisted and ingrown things will work wonderfully, hanging from the skeletal walls. Sandblasting again tomorrow, working on my largish walnut stump, just enough to clean it and expose some of the grain. Root systems are so complex. Working with the wrack, a kind of time compression thing happens, suddenly the day is nearly over and I'm filthy. The annual Fall Color Motorcycle Tour goes through the State Forest and they broke the spell for me, traveling down below on Upper Twin Creek Road, like an angry swarm of giant bugs. A bunch of bass cicadas with six-foot wingspan, growling and farting. They drive me to an early drink, just after five, a single malt Glenn left, while water heats for a bath. Read part of the latest Ian Rankin, then bathe, wash hair, and shave, like I'm going on a date with you, because all I have left to do today is write. Don't read too much into that though, because I was really dirty, couldn't live with myself. Odd, that if I'm dirty or need to shave, I really must do it before I write. Cooler weather has cured the foot rash, essentially a sweat and scratch problem (once the sequence was triggered by stupidity) and maybe I learned a lesson. Not able to get Glenn with Barnhart and wonder about music for the show and the movie; be nice to get a loop of the waves, when a string of barges go by, lapping against the shore. Now that several people are pulling the Wrack Pages from my writing, the past year, it begins to look like a book, "The Wrack Show", which I think about, while I'm soaking in the sheep-watering trough. Loved the conversation with Glenn, we go back a long way and share interests, AND he has a great memory, remembering when and who, so, together, we tell a grand story. I'm a good narrator but I don't remember the facts. Probably, D and Sara thought I was making a lot of this stuff up, my life history, but Glenn would remember not only the play, but the actors too, and we were all forced to reconsider. "To recall is not the same as to call." G. Spenser Brown. This may be the first visit ever with Glenn that we don't discus G. Spenser Brown, speaks to the level of engagement, so much going on. The Combined Arts are difficult, I prefer working alone, but this project is cool, "The River Sticks", because it fully engages me, I love all the people involved, I like making something out of nothing. We might talk about expectations or we might ignore the subject completely. It's a loose framework, plowing new ground, where do you want to go? For myself? Merely something interesting.

Tom

I didn't leave the house
but there was a spider
that wove a web over the door.