What

I built myself a mountain, not dead yet, it's something to do. That's just the way it goes. As long as there's a road, what's that lyric, I'm a loser at the top of my game. Sins I've never confessed, I wish I was something else, but I'm merely mortal, getting older. I still carry heavy billets for hundreds of yards, a beast of burden, but I'd rather than not. Watching where my feet fall engages me completely, don't fall is the mandate. I'm careful. Expect the unexpected. You can't blame anyone but yourself. Doesn't matter how anyone tells you how you should feel. What you experience is an individual thing, hermeneutics, essentially it's you and Melville on a desert isle. "Omoo." I don't want to walk on water, I just want to not freeze to death. Crawling with Joel, under various floors, I learned some lessons, the major one being don't try to encompass more than you can encompass. I'm a fool for the impossible. Memphis in the mean time. John Hyatt, I'm sure that's Ry Cooder playing guitar. I'm going down to Memphis. Someday baby. Woke up to light snow, already accumulating, snows on for hours. When it finally stops there's just a scant inch and I go out to the woodshed, handsaw enough wood for today and the projected coldest night this season. I'll break out the chainsaw tomorrow, but it was too lovely for that sound today. Split kindling, cur starter sticks, the winter routine. Read an interesting article on proto-hominid locomotion. Odd to get visitors on a day like this, but a History Professor from the college and his small son showed up, mid-afternoon. They been visiting B, who's staying on the ridge when the nights get cold, to protect his cabin; he's making his winter wood, I could hear him cutting in the distance earlier today. It's strange, such a strained relationship, not a word in 9 months. Third time in two weeks I make a meal of caramelized
onions and peppers with hot Italian sausage, on a bed of mashed potatoes. Crab cakes for breakfast tomorrow, with a fried egg for sauce. On Cape Cod I had a fried egg on a codfish cake nearly every morning for years. I'll need to get up in the night to stoke the stove, I'll need to do this maybe 30 times in the next 90 days, and I've developed a technique, for waking, that's become habit. I sleep on the sofa, and I wake up several times every night, noise events and light events and the occasional bad dream, and I stick a leg out from under the covers. I don't think about doing this, it's become more like covering your mouth when you cough. If the leg gets cold I come to full consciousness and put a couple of logs on the fire. Sometimes I roll a smoke, turn on the computer, and start writing again, sometimes I pee off the deck and go back to bed. My life has a structure but it's not rigid. Really need to get off the ridge tomorrow, do a load of laundry, replenish the sock supply, and might be able to, if I go out when it's frozen. Hate to go down a frozen driveway, but probably be ok in four-wheel drive low, sticking to the ruts. Leave the truck at the bottom of the hill on the way back in. This snow wasn't forecast, just the cold, which is quite real, since the skies have cleared. But now we enter that period where the top few inches of driveway freezes and thaws. The ground will freeze to 3 feet or more, but I'm really only interested in the top few inches. Can I drive on it? I used to take more risks, but now I mostly walk when there's a question. It helps, I think it's just the time between A and B, the interval becomes a beat, music is all about interval. I indulge myself, from time to time, tapping a beat, it means nothing but it causes me to think. I'm not sure what meaning even is. An abstract fabrication. Aesthetics of necessity.