Lake Heat

The most impressive display of water losing heat I've ever seen. A kind of visible entropy. Roosevelt Lake creating its own fog bank. Had to stop and walk down to the shore. 42 degrees this morning, after a high over 80 yesterday, and the vapors were almost solid, 6 feet high, then trailing off into fingers reaching skyward. A warm vapor too, warmer, at least, than the outside air. The geese seemed perplexed but still accepted the rock-hard sour-dough bread, they bobbed at it until it was soft enough to swallow. Enormous gaggle of turkeys and I have to stop again, to count, maybe 37, not easy to count, they're working a field of fallow-land grass gone to seed, moving like a band of sheep across the hillside, flowing. Looks like three families, mothers and yearlings, no gobblers. The mothers herd them like border collies working a flock. Still early enough to town to get below the floodwall. No fog, no vapor on the river, because it's moving? because it comes from further north and was cooler? No clue. What I don't know greatly exceeds what I know, I like "What I Don't Know" as a title, implies writing about what you don't know, which implies you know what it is. Is denatured alcohol the same as rubbing alcohol? pretty sure there is only methyl and ethyl, and you only drink ethyl (a little mantra), but I don't know for sure. Maybe the title should be "What I Don't Know For Sure", though it's more awkward, it's probably closer to the truth. Interesting tension at the museum, getting ready for the next change-over of shows, the scheduling, the e-mails, the calls; in many ways the most difficult aspect, the arrangements. And these installations are special, because D is curating the major Abstract Show (Distilled (no methyl or ethyl intended)) in the main gallery and then we install the Wrack Show upstairs. Fortunately that damned Brit shows up and we all drop what we're doing to gather around and laugh at his dry sick humor. The man is funny, his foul mouth and dead-on mimics have us sputtering. He corroborates, for me, what I'd been thinking: if you don't enjoy doing it, don't bother. D and I had gone to the pub for afternoon coffee to go, the Brit was there, reading the paper, checking the value of the pound in this time of crisis, having a pint, the place was almost deserted, so we were loud and offensive, he shot back with equal invective, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the experienced bar-maid counsel the new bar-maid that we were full of shit but amusing. We are that. We'd both rolled smokes while he paid his tab, so we could walk over to the museum together, stop on the sidewalk to finish smoking, and he was loud, a crazy man on the streets, a kind of formal cursing, a litany of wrongs, all the things you had done incorrectly, and he was correct, we had done those things badly. "You have a republic, if you can keep it..." Ben Franklin's words keep coming back at me, how clearly did he see the future? It's a crisis of the imagination. Imagine what might happen. How are you with that? I have to go listen, I'm interested, for the first time in years.