Not Sleeping

Fat dark-eyed coon caught in the porch light gnawing my steak bone. Sitting back on his haunches, dainty front paws gripping the find as though it were a hymnal, eyes laser red in the sudden brightness, then back to business, paying me little mind. My compost raccoon, chubby as a favorite house cat, marrow and grease furrowing his chin. I see it is a male from the erection this meal engenders. At the edge of the cone of light, two rabbits work the weeds, both, also, slightly over-weight. I go pee in the sink, so as not to disturb their repast, then roll a smoke and watch through the glass. They can hear me move around but are little disturbed as long as I don't open the door. It's very quiet, but not quiet enough until I kill the breaker for the fridge, pull up a stool from the island and stare. They can't see me, I'm in the dark, and they're in the spotlight, a Mamet play, an adaptation of that popular children's book, "No Wind In The Poplars", you've seen the movie, the raccoon loves the rabbit, but it's one of those ill-fated love stories, cross-species angst, the coon settles for a fence post with a knot hole, and the rabbit runs away, becomes a whore in LA. She contracts every possible STD, comes back to die in the country, and the coon is there, to comfort her last days. I scramble a couple of eggs, with the left-over mushroom gravy, read the new Pynchon, drift to a dream state. Yes, yes. I stopped for a beer at the pub, on my way out of town, a draft Stella, Linsey serving, mutual flirtation. In my capacity as janitor, I notice that nothing is really clean, every single surface is tarnished. Makes you wonder. If every single corner is dirty what does that say about your skills? Maybe the corners don't matter, maybe nothing does. What you're left with is glitter on the floor. Almost nothing. Marshack makes the point that a great deal of prehistoric art is a product of factoring time, lunar time, menstrual time. Convincing argument. One thing Henri Breuil certainly got wrong was that a lot of male-organ sexual barbs that he saw were simple plants. When my old VW bug blew up in Nitro WV I camped out in the Marshall University library for a few days, got permission to cut the pages on a magnificent set of books documenting the digs at Dolni Vestonice and there were many female, sexual, statues, but it seemed to me then, and even more so now, that quite a bit of what was called male sexual depiction were/was simply plants, tying certain animals to certain seasons. Certainly, as Georgia O'Keeffe made apparent, 32,000 years later, plants can be sexy. But wait, maybe I'm falling into the same trap. Prehistoric is generally used to mean before written language, and there is a vast amount of storied, notational information in prehistoric art. I worry that thought until daylight, then go down and work on the grader ditch, an hour and I'm drenched with sweat, walk back up and take the two gallon over-the-head bath on the front deck. Another breakfast, featuring fried potatoes with salsa, and back to the books. These cave paintings, it seems to me, are proto-language, information exchanged across generations. Story sticks have an ancient history, the modern us, starting 40,000 years ago, were telling stories; we see this clearly, where Cro-Magnon overlapped Neanderthal. The latter learned quickly but we had better weapons. There must have been some cross-breeding, it's your duty to fuck the slaves, hybrid vigor, abs and a brain, cool, we can conquer the world. But we don't have a written language, we only have the stories, notched on a stick. A mere 30,000 years later those drawings become runic, hieroglyphic, we start recording transactions. Modern history, recent enough, an address: Tom, Dolni Vestonice. Third hut on the right. You can't miss it, it's painted pink. A primer I couldn't get beyond. I don't suffer stupidity well. I've made mistakes, legion, I would present myself as a failure, actually, if we were keeping score. I trust we're not keeping score., I might score higher than I should, I'm less than I might be, almost nothing.. So glad they got the cat.