Absquatulate

Bailed 30 minutes early from the museum to miss a heavy squall, got to my door just as the first drops hit, then weirdness, hard rain in sunshine, everything glittering. So much rain the box turtles have reconsidered their positions and are moving to higher ground. Stopped on Mackletree this morning and moved a dozen off the road. I've never seen them migrate at this time of year. The good old boys like to squash them, so I move every one I see out of the road, in the direction I'm pretty sure they're going. In the spring they move off of the hills, going down to water, but there burrows in the bottoms must be flooded and now they're moving back to higher ground, where they do their turtle hibernation thing through the winter. Their heartbeat is very slow, even when they've excited, when they're sleeping. they're hardly alive. What does the frozen minnow think? What's in their veins that they can freeze and thaw and still live. Sugar, actually, this bothered me and I did some research. Sara got me today, I was recounting some probably apocryphal story concerning carp, and she didn't believe me, thought I was making it up, for once it wasn't true but it made me doubt my source, which I don't remember because I read too damned much. Come on, get a life. The only Juan to blame is Juan of the two beauties. They caption the dialogue, no sound, and the captions are often really funny because it must be a voice recognition program or something and it screws up often. Amazing technology, nonetheless it's less than perfect, so you get this slightly abstract language. Today one became Juan and I remembered Juan Of The Two Beauties, one of the guys I worked with long ago. Language. The fact that I now read a little Aurignacian is amazing to me; I don't speak it, but I'm not sure it ever was spoken, the story-stick was all. I think we started speaking maybe 40,000 years ago, rough, at first, nouns: lion, mammoth, specific hill; but verbs are difficult because they factor time. The ablative. Consider verbs generally, they advance the cause. Time, space, all of that, the way language became a fact of life. The last thunder cell moves through, three in the morning, wakes me to shut the windows again. Ozone. I was napping on the sofa, exhausted from a day of moving heavy things, waiting for the power to come back on. Wanted to write, but after a single drink, a dinner of plain yogurt and fruit, I was out like the lights. Somebody into serious overtime, because it wasn't the thunder that woke me, but the refrigerator laboring back to life. Then thunder, then lightning, more rain, 3:47, I'd better go. Another nap, then the susurration of wind and wet trees, up for good just before dawn. One dream, I was in a robe, examining the entrails of a chicken, a soothsayer, specifically, a haruspex, a Roman priest. Rain was indicated.