Saturday, March 7, 2009

New Readers

Never cease to be surprised. All writing is local. Local enough, specific enough, it opens out. New reader in Moose Jaw. A complaint about my profanity from some asshole in Missouri. Continued fall-out from the reactor meltdown. I needed a day off, took a walk, March 7th, 72 degrees. The frogs will be copulating tonight, puddle waters are astir by mid-afternoon. Enough wind that I don't hear anything all day but the natural world, no argument, no whining, no bitching and moaning. Deep in the woods, I sit on a stump and roll a smoke, a moment of grace, the wind dies for a few minutes and the silence is sublime. Solitude is a bear, maybe it's human nature to want to be with others, I understand that, I look forward to the Non-Family Reunion, mostly because all the people are bright and the conversation will sparkle. I love good conversation. But to work, I need long periods of solitude. I don't necessarily do anything, I just need to be alone. I smoke and drink and talk out loud. Sometimes I can use the machine and forge it into a paragraph, sometimes I can't. I write best when I'm talking directly to you, notice in my cursory rereading, that when I'm talking to Linda or Sara, Glenn or Guy, I'm more transparent. I do want to be clear, if I could be glass, I would be. But I'm not, I'm just another confused blob of protoplasm. When I get up to stir the soup I forget an entire line of reasoning. I realize how devious Linda is, she set this up, she would buy the ribs, I'd be forced to cook them, the Failed Bet Ploy; we see this con all the time, but I would love to, so I will. Ribs and what? Slaw, certainly, some kind of potatoes. This whole sequence seems like something halfway between absolutely real and total fictional. Listen, I deal with this every day, we extrapolate, it's our natural system, and we're often wrong. Still, a pidgin becomes a creole. You can see the way things develop. Where was I? thinking about this. A rest stop in western Iowa. That time I was almost arrested for having an unabridged dictionary in Utah. Bizarre trip, I was happy to get back home. I'm always happy to get back home. I want my retreat. This is where I'm centered. Anabasis. Nepal. What you to say.

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