Later

I'm still pissed, but I wanted to get rid of some stuff and maybe this is a lesson. Don't be attached to anything. Consider the positive side, what you've gotten rid of, all that chaff. From no creature comforts to everything. I pale. Maybe so. Nothing matters. I'm not thinking I'm merely responding, consider the situation. What would you do? Suddenly there is running water. Do you wash your hair? Consider the situation. You could be anywhere, but you are here. Does that mean something? We're all dying, from the moment we're born. A simple Bell Curve, a certainty. What did I think, a free-standing hypotheses, a confederacy of isolates? I'd rather die with my hair clean. It's a personal choice, a last gesture. Maybe I'd shave. Nothing of any consequence is gone. I can replace a hammer, yet I feel violated. Why would anyone rob me? I have almost nothing. What little I hold is almost nothing, what you imagine I might mean. The best case. What I thought I meant. Anything else is heresy. What I thought was meant. You know what I mean. I rest my case. The wind picks up. When I left Jax there was some rain, the last squall from a front blowing through. Interstate 95 was a mess so I slipped over onto 17 north of Yulee, stopped at "Skippers", a fish camp, because the rain was coming down so hard I didn't want to drive. It's early for lunch but the staff, Sam and Connie, agree to fry me some oysters and make a Po-Boy with a sauce to die for. Interludes are overlooks, where you stop for the view. I make a kind of sense from road-signs, stop and make a note. In some states rocks are falling, in others they are fallen, I don't understand the difference between roadways and roads. Signs confuse me. I remember to stay to the left in Asheville. Memory serves. Then the highways are empty, a gap in the gap, no one coming or going; I pull over, at the peak, and there is nothing but the view: some cows and a few scattered crows. You can see forever. I'm pretty sure I'm looking at several states. I love my family but I can't wait to be alone. Doesn't mean I'm not a nice person, just means I cherish my solitude. At a Scenic Overlook, just where Virginia becomes Tennessee, I have a minor epiphany, something about open spaces. The leaves are swirling, dust-devils, what is it my father calls ducks, dy-dippers, I wonder what that means. Nothing but blue skies. There's a moment, at the end, the last night with my girls, they're out on the dock, feeding bread to fish, leaning against each other, and my Mom asks how I could have raised such children. I'm at a loss, she is, after all, my teacher. I strike a deal with myself: be nothing if not clear. Underneath the wind there is a current. Hail, sleet, something. Listen. Pellets strike the metal roof. There's a rhythm to it. Something that can't be denied. Despite the congregations of egrets and the salty smell I was missing myself. Something was wrong. Not just the fact that people were dying, but that they were my people. Listen. I make a note to myself. Post it. Listen. The natural world is cruel. A fine and final place. Consider the slings and arrows. Darts, quarks, the various by-ways, what you are is in the moment. Welcome back to the ridge, the wind is blowing a gale, what do you do?

Tom

A bowl of noodles,
nothing much,
go to sleep.


Next night. My AOL is screwed up and I want to copy this before I reboot it. Afraid I'd lose this. Have to hook up the new printer. A perfect task for tomorrow, and firewood, naturally, get out and about. So stuffy at my parents. Both on blood thinners so keep the house at a shocking 80 degrees. Then cooled to 68 in summer. Go figure. Be good to spend several hours outside in the cold. I did most of the cooking in Jax, including ribs for 15. The girls demanded southern style butter beans at almost every meal; Samara, gone vegetarian, pretended to not notice the fat-back in the beans. At every meal part of the discussion was about the next meal. Cooked a whole loin, rubbed and grilled; my Sis started a ham cooking, Mom's method, about which I know nothing, slits and cloves and something with a can of coke. I deal with home-cured hams, always slices, soaked in milk. Reminds me, and I make a note, to cure the boar ham currently in the freezer beneath the print shop. Forced Mom to make her wonderful ham salad, sitting down, with the little food processor. Dad still cooks breakfast, then he's done for the day. They both must sleep 18-20 hours a day. Dad turns 89 next week, Mom says she's 84 but the math doesn't work. Probably repeating myself, with no printer and can't go online to reread myself. The void. The usual questions about my preferred life-style. I am a mystery to my family. They love me, respect my intelligence, but don't understand completely why I live like I do. Close, maybe, in many ways, both parents raised in houses with wood cookstoves, no running water. But choosing to live that way, they don't get, they both left as soon as possible. How we are viewed by others. My nieces and nephews view me with a certain awe, I inspire disbelief. But I truly can't live without the natural world just outside my door. The horrible driveway, my cemetery, the fox, the crows, firewood, these things keep me grounded. And solitude, I require so much solitude. It's very difficult for me to be around people all the time, the unspoken builds up and I eventually say inappropriate things. I'd rather be watching tree-frogs or ants. I'm not a social critic, more a casual observer. I make no claims, absolutely do not recommend living this way, it's brutal and more than slightly dangerous, but for me, there is no alternative. The ridge is a kind of paradise, and I'm just another violated temple whore. Someplace on the way back, South Carolina I think, in the coastal plain, there was a swamp that was filled with white egrets, hundreds of them, they looked like a concentration of punctuation marks. At Darien, Georgia, I fed power-bars to a school of mullet. Did a cursory study of Country Music and marveled at the rhymes. Taylor Swift is hot. I bring back some frozen elk meat, from Florida, which is strange, when you think about it, the animal shot and processed in Canada. Who knows what it costs. Everyday paradoxes are enough to keep me awake at night. "Pretty much a nobody to everybody because I'm just another guy" I read in the Sunday paper, some football player, I'm out on the screened porch, having a morning smoke, trying to cool off, a cup of coffee and the sports page. Like I'm buying into the package. A single crow, Christmas morning, and it sounds about right. Make a joyful noise. I don't buy the package, the package is a piece of shit, everyone knows it, no one mentions it, like it's a big secret. The prescribed life sucks. At some point you have to ask questions, what if, you have to ask, Camus was right, even Derrida, you can't ask too many questions or you fall off the treadmill. Listen (I see my note) what you have is what you have, nothing more or less. I'm wrong about so many things I hesitate to sign anything. You would be forced to assume I meant something. What I meant. Certainly there is a sub-text. What he thought he meant. I don't go there very often, mostly I merely observe; it takes up my time, you know, engages me. Like a mouse when it spins, his sorry ass trapped in a trap. Keep me in a certain cote and I seem to make sense, a homing pigeon returning to the roost. If no one disturbs the snow tomorrow, I might see something clearly, who went where for what, that's all I ask. All I need is a clue. I can reconstruct almost anything, what you meant by something I might have said, listen, I can make meaning out of whole cloth, the yet not knitted, the mote in God's eye, a tiny drop of blood, I'm cursed, I can't not see. Maybe it's a product of the ridge, maybe the ridge is writing me, the way a place would need to be explained. Low jumps and bad horses. Listen.

Bad modem I think, still can't get connected. I'll get a new one tomorrow. Brown-outs eat them, this will be the fourth in my black Dell girlfriend. In the tradition of southern storytelling, I tell a few. Recounted several recent events when I first got to Florida and they were being told back to me before I left, checking certain points. B over for a drink, we discuss life on the ridge, the weather, Aphrodite. Outside most of the day but I didn't get much done. I had places I needed to go that I hadn't seen for a couple of weeks and I wanted to verify that the robbers had walked in, along the upper, logging road. Squirrel hunters, probably, clear impressions of work-boots. An opportunistic thing, though I can't help feeling paranoid. If I was here, I think, when someone broke in, I might not kill them, but I'd certainly break their knees.