Diogenes' Barrel

Mostly history is apocryphal bullshit, but some of the stories become dear friends. Diogenes The Cynic, for instance, living in a barrel on the streets of Athens. Sounds like a Monty Python routine. I was raised in a pot-hole and learned to keep my head down. Thoreau, another case in point, took his laundry home to Mom when he was living at Walden Pond, spent most evenings in town, held little lyceums at the cabin. I love Thoreau, don't get me wrong, the Journals are an important part of American writing; the other books, are, I think, misunderstood. But it's in the two million words of the Journals that we hear a voice clarify, and get that first, original, modern (if you ignore Sappho and several hundred others) mind-speak. Another big week coming up, installing another show, upstairs, and the space is a wreck, much to be done, so I make a run to town: library, laundry, liquor store, CVS for deodorant. My last underarm stick self-destroyed in a way none have ever before. It was almost gone and it just dried up and fell apart, crumbles of stick deodorant everywhere, but at least they didn't smell bad. Couldn't wait to get home because I wanted to go mushroom hunting. Found thirty morels quickly. Had purchased a small rib-eye steak, remaindered. Good meat is great, but sauces is where you go to shine. The morels were an hour old, I dotted them clean, I don't like to wash them, as a member of the Great Unwashed and conserver of water, so I wipe them with tissues; it's possible to be too clean. If I slept with you, I'd like to know what you smelled like. Consider the morel. It always pokes through this tannic winter layer, fucking leaves everywhere, everything looks the same. If you're right-handed, most things are left to right. I noticed this and made some notes. You're my Journal, what's the definition, I write you when I can, for how ever long is possible. I have other things to do, other fish to fry, as my Dad is fond of saying, but writing you is the most important thing of all. It's not so much that I'd leave you hanging as where I was myself. I choose nature over any construct. An unconscious decision, what do we make of that? Unconscious. Decision. I thought I was writing a field-guide.