Canned Laughter

"Beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic." Gertrude Stein. How often we are misjudged on the basis of what we never were. I don't care where I haven't been, it's mostly the same. Cut off your nose to spite your face, go around your finger to get to your thumb kind of thing. Pot calling the kettle black. Work on the budget with Pegi and D, then discuss approaches to some stimulus grant money with Sara. More hard rains. Finally get to some cleaning, simple by comparison with balancing budgets in an imagined future. Stop at the lake to experience the spillway. Turkey Creel in spate, 10 inches of napp over the spillway, a standing wave at the bottom, the ground shaking, noise so loud I couldn't hear myself think. The water's too warm for trout here, but they stock them anyway, stupid farm-raised Rainbows dumber than rocks; most of them get caught right away, they're used to being fed, but I watched several get washed over the top, flashing in late afternoon broken sun. More rain coming, but the fractured light is a lovely thing, the way just small sections of real estate are lit, intermittent illumination, the best we can hope for, really, under any circumstances. A clear sky hardly guarantees nirvana. The fugal state a writer, or any artist, might achieve isn't predictable in terms of weather conditions, though they might factor as part. I've thought about this, because I go fugal, at times, forget where I am, or why. Exist in the middle distance. Thinking about water use, I'm, frankly pissed: when I work full-time (I love my job, best job I ever had, and I've had some really interesting jobs) I use more water. I have to stay cleaner, so as not to offend, and I use the goddamn toilet and urinal. There are no bushes to pee in. It's town, you have to act civilized. I shit when I have to, and when I work full time, it would fall (I've kept a record, I'm very conscious of my water use) twice a week, and we've got those old monster toilets that use five gallons, so that adds over 500 gallons to my yearly water use. Year before last was my best year, less than a thousand gallons, for the year, try that. Water is the next oil. We've so fucked our nest. This water-shit problem bothers me. Shitting in water is probably the dumbest thing ever considered. If we collected our shit, compost it, spread it on the fields of alfalfa, we wouldn't be considering hauling ice-bergs from the North Atlantic, that grand mid-west aquifer would still be available. We're greedy bastards, we see it, we know we should act different, but you wave money in front of us, we follow. Two things: money is always a false value, and you need to leave the room as soon as possible. I'm good at the balancing act and it's difficult for me. I don't know how anyone else survives. I keep notes, I put them in boxes, we'll make sense of this later, but the actual spread of this, in front of me, as the nature of reality, I'm not so sure. I accept some of it, other parts I reject completely. I'm guilty of very little, my position, I might hold Little Round Top against a spirited charge, but that doesn't mean anything other than I hold high ground. If you only held a Gattling Gun you could sweep this field into a different posture, everyone prone and dead, but all you have are words, and I wonder where you'll go with that. Listen, a brunette goes into a bar.