Sore Particulars

I use an 8 lb. maul with a fiberglass handle. Don't really like fiberglass handles but I've not broken the damn thing in eight years and that's a personal best. Heating with wood for 40 years, 2, 3, 4 cords a year, plus the cords I've sold (sold cords for $100 on Martha's Vineyard in 1980) so maybe 150 cords of wood so far. Was going to say I've never had a furnace but that's not quite true. First apartment, apartment when I taught at FSU, first 3 years living on Cape Cod, then the house on the herring run. Nothing since but wood. A Who's Who of stoves, some beauties, some real clunkers. A goodly pile of wood today and still have the dozen doubles from the newest drop. I calculate, sometimes, when I'm splitting, usually my mind is wrapped in the moment, where the maul is going to strike, where the heart checks have started and the wood wants to split, but splitting straight grain red and white oak you don't need to think very much, mostly what you do is swing the maul, John Henry. So I calculated that there might be 144 pieces of stove wood in the new pile. And this tree is so straight grained that the pieces blow apart. It's what we call splitting with a vengeance, a great way to take out aggressions. It's therapy for me. An interesting thing about splitting wood, maul-work, one of, is that you must always take a full swing, there are no half-hearted efforts, you don't take a full swing and the damned thing might bounce back and that can be dangerous. I've killed pigs with the butt of a splitting maul, when someone requested the brains on a hog they'd bought and I couldn't shoot it. I preferred shooting, a 410 shotgun slug, at the crossing of imaginary lines drawn diagonally down from the ears, shattering the brain. You see my point. I don't want to die at the woodshed, the victim of a bad bounce. It'd be days before anyone thought to look, and I'd look stupid, dead, in my motor-pool army drab-green jumpsuit with velcro attachments at wrist and ankle. I'd rather expire in someone's arms or under a comforter, but will probably take what I get. Writer Dies While Feeding Ducks, or, An Eccentric Dies An Eccentric Death. Listen, if I were you, and I were to die suddenly, I'd look into it. I think I'm targeted for all the wrong reasons. Someone thinks I'm a danger, fuck them if they can't take a joke. I merely mention some things and you draw conclusions. It's hardly subversive. My shoulders are sore, I was mauling, I mentioned that, the calculating, check, but I hadn't mentioned what I was reading on the breaks, a grace note, I just remembered, this bizarre book, literary criticism, that got everything wrong. I only read it because I disagreed so strongly, I'd come in, make a cup of espresso, swing my arms, read a chapter, and rant. Fit to be tied. Motherfuckers couldn't find their shoe-strings with both hands. Nor their ass.