Nothing Matters

The company you keep, the creek-beds you walk, your life list. Doesn't matter how well you play the banjo, the French Horn, or an ancient flute that is actually a hollow bird bone. You make a noise, it resonates or not, sometimes there's a harmonic that floats with a mind of it's own, sometimes nothing makes any sense. I'm a student of this, I watch nothing as a matter of course, the smallest thing can be quite important, not the sound she made, but a physical movement, the way she moved her hips. Then, if I hear correctly, this is all made possible by mountain top removal. The Indigo Girls play, I'm sure I'd believe anything. It's all a sham, a shell-game. Right? I don't believe anything, even what I see right in front of me, it's all illusion. What I think I see. If your band is good enough, the shill believe. It's not good enough for me, but it's good enough to make the mark. I understand that. Competence is a related issue. How well you play whatever it is. I admire your ability, I'm trilled whenever I can do anything. I went to see a Doctor of Philosophy, we drove to the pot hole, it was covered in leaves. Everything looked solid, but nothing was. Most of the oaks were across the lake, but the leaves had collected, a flotilla, at the leeward side, in a hard band, now saturated, they danced just below the surface. The natural world is too much, more than I can assemble. I lean toward a costume malfunction, where something might be visible, something that might take our attention, a whiff of the future, a tangible something. First walk in the woods post leaf-fall and the first thing you notice is the light. Slanting intense shafts. Everything is new and different. Sumac leaves, still attached, go from green to yellow to orange to a deep dark red, on the same branch. The sun is bright that even wearing a sword fisherman's hat (long brim) I develop the beginning of what be a headache, go back to the house with a bag of acorns. Start a fire in the cookstove, shell out the nuts, chop them coarsely, set them on to leach, put on another kettle to have hot water for the changes. Read Pete Dexter's new novel, "Spooner" and think it quite good. Stoke the fire but keep it low, after two hours I drain the nut meats, spread them on a cookie sheet (a piece of stainless steel from a dumpster) and toast them for an hour at 350 degrees. I make a small pot of Black Crowder peas, the only heirloom I've saved from Missisip, with a chunk of smoked hog jowl, and acorn bits. Excellent stuff and will be even better tomorrow, wood-cutting fuel. Cut enough by hand today to sting my muscles, get out the chainsaw tomorrow and make some noise. While I worked today I designed a very nice saw-buck in my head, complete with a shelf, at working height, to hold the saw when I need to move wood along. More postings last month than there were days, which says volumes about my social life. Work at the museum, read, and write; not so much a complaint as it is a paean to the convoluted path that brought me here, now. There are so many disconnects in the path, offsets, breaks, that I'm led to the conclusion I did it myself, put myself here. That it was volition, not just another step in a certain progression. The track to my truck indicates that it is not well-traveled path. I occasionally whack the weeds with a stick. I'm not much of a house-keeper, but I run a nice show.