Headway

Just a few hours in the closed museum and I make enormous headway against the mess. Get the floor cleared, a rough cleaning, but all I care about now, because I need to make more mess before the restoration is complete. I shuffled the list of chores, needed to create the semblance of order, before I could move on. When building a house, the final couple of hours are dedicated to cleaning (on my job-sites) because it makes progress possible on Monday morning. When I was stage managing, last thing I did every night, before setting the ghost light (all theaters leave a light, always a bare bulb in a shade-less floor-lamp, in the middle of the stage every night) was vacuum the floor of the set. A poke at order. Lunch with D at the pub. I'm so politically incorrect discussing some things that bother me, that it bothers me. I'm more concerned about where this new batch of moisture hits the dip in the jet stream, which is either just south or north of me. Columbus is going to get hammered, but that's a hundred miles away. Latitude and altitude. Attitude, for that matter, but we don't need to go there. I'm willing to pay a little bit more for subsistence if I don't have to talk a line of talk. I'm willing to pay for my independence, a coward in so many ways, I never confront anyone, I'd rather wear overalls and look homeless. Because of the dry-skin-splits I have to change fingers, and I make a lot more mistakes. Typing has never been easy for me. I can build a house, from found materials, but I never learned to type. My hands, right now, are beat to shit, I can barely write my name; every time I pick up something, I consider what I expect my fingers to do, whether or not they might reasonably be expected to do anything. When you live close to the ground, nothing prepares you for winter. Everything is always a surprise. The simplest act becomes a chore, but sometimes almost nothing becomes significant, poignant (as Tommy Smothers famously said, 'pregnant with feeling') in ways we don't understand. Coming home, driving over the Second Street Bridge across the mouth of the Scioto River right where it joins the Ohio, something was happening. I always drive this stretch slowly, looking closely at where the rivers merge, usually looking down, where the different colors swirl, but something catches my eye up in the air. A ragged crow, coming in for a sloppy landing on one of the streetlights, no one behind me, I have to stop. There's a single crow on every single streetlight as far as the eye can see. A small thing, and it doesn't mean anything, but it stands out against the gray. Contrast. What we notice. The rest of the way home I'm attentive to the color of roofs, the tops of trees, clouds. Usually I'm looking down, where my feet fall, or at eye level, where a twisted leaf or a burl makes me curious. Looking up is a revelation, the fog rising as smoke on the hillsides. Even when words don't make any sense what we see does. When the world is called up yonder I believe. A crow can do this, a beaver, a kingfisher, the break of light on a piece of ice held in shadow. The visible world is a wonder. I'm speechless. Walking in tonight, there was a deer on the opposite slope, aware of me and me of it. We were both being careful. She would lift her front paw and stamp it delicately and I'd take a couple of steps. Richie Havens, open tuning, over the top. If I had my choice between money or fame I'd choose neither. One thing for certain, I'd be splitting wood, a matter of course. A satisfied mind. A murder in the red barn. Is that blood on the trees or merely fall? Murder in the red barn. Tennessee Jed. Won't you carry me? It's all Jamaican. Patois.