Severe Clear

We should have to pay extra for days like this. Wrote early last night, stoked the stove, went to bed early after drinking a big glass of water, my alarm clock; had to get to and pee at one-thirty, stayed up an hour reading Theroux, "Ghost Train...", re-stoked the stove, and the house was lovely this morning warm by my standards. A firewood day, light cloud cover that blows away and a severe clear. 16 degrees when I get up the second time, just enough light to see without any lights, stoke the stove, fix a huge breakfast, sausage, potatoes, eggs, toast, 16 oz. of egg-nog that I salvaged from the museum, about to go out of date. I'm sure I've told you the story of the 147 quarts of egg-nog salvaged from a dumpster in Missip: when it was gone, the pigs went on a hunger strike for almost a whole day. Funny story, I embellish it now. Mostly what we remember is fiction. I'll get back to this. Glenn asked me a question and I want to talk about it, seemed particularly germane. BUT, such a day in the woods. I love the winter woods, the bugs and snakes are gone; I study the tracks in the snow, I haul wood, I hum Bach. B came over and he felled the smaller tree, which was actually pretty large, we'd been looking at it from 100 feet away. Probably take me thirty trips to haul it out. B cut it in doubles, but I'll have to split the bottom 6 or 8 because they'll be too heavy. Then, because he still had gas in the chainsaw, and he likes to use it up, he felled Big Bertha, a monster indeed, shook the earth when she fell, a minor earthquake. I'm interested in her branches because they're all heart and bone-dry. That sounds like a metaphor but isn't. The cult of wood heating. I love branches, two, three, four inches in diameter, they burn so hot. The perfect fire for biscuits, is dry red maple branches. Glenn had asked (I love when I can do this, drop it right in) -How is it that we can talk this language- and I know he means in a larger sense. I know some things about it but it's largely subjective. I made a note today about how at some point that object became my subject. I'm not sure what I meant. I know it was because of Glenn's question. Meaning accumulates, the second time I refer to something, you know what I'm talking about, because I mentioned it before. Now the ducks are a fact of life, what I feed them. I can't help it, what I get interested in, I just try and stay open. Meaning unveils like intention, never look too far ahead, the future is a cess-pool. What Glenn was asking was how do we understand. A simple enough question. With a complex answer. I've thought about this a lot, walking through the woods. I have no answers, zero, not a thing, so why would someone ask me what I thought about something? Talk about the bottom of the pecking order, I mop for a living. But I did come up with a theory, about, you know, what it all meant, given my input: I'd say it's pretty well fucked for the next twenty of thirty years. A huge amount of debt, amortized on the future. Taxes have to be increased, there's no way to pay for this. Trillions of dollars. I'm just a janitor, but it looks to me like there are problems ahead.