Last Soup

Maybe the last soup of the season, navy bean and ham because I'd found a couple of ham steaks in the remaindered bin at Kroger; cube them and chop a large onion, can of chicken stock, in the crock pot, with some diced sun-dried tomatoes, a pound of rinsed and par-boiled beans. Turned it on high last night, then down to low when I went to bed. This morning I made some cornmeal Johnny-Cakes and had a bowl of soup for breakfast. March rain and wind, a dreary day, but I don't really care, I hole up on the sofa with a blanket and a pile of books, every few hours I get up and nuke a small bowl of soup, toast a cornmeal cake and slather it with butter. On the phone several times, arranging logistics, check maps, I don't write any more and go to bed confused. Then another gray, cool rainy day dawns and I build a little fire, to chase the damp, make my first double espresso, and tackle the second half of "The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change". Leads to a massive pull-out of other books: books about book-binding, books about printing, books about paper, books about books. Pretty much uses up the day, thank god I made that soup yesterday. My library on the applied arts of printing and books is extensive. Found several things I had forgotten. I own some beautiful books, too, lovely objects in their own right, and I look at some of those. A day like this, and I enjoy them, I start a list of references and use a lot of bookmarks; I have a master sheet that looks like, and is in fact, a code. A single capital letter, underlined, with a vertical column of numbers underneath it; which reference pages marked by bookmarks in particular books. I have no idea what's germane to what. Sometimes I keep some notes, usually not, maybe a single word, which, later, means nothing at all. But I remember the flow, usually, the way one idea leads to another; and the next thing you know, you're reading about the history of glue, because you need to know about bonding. Forever is a fiction, even stars die. The information is cryptic, lots of empty space. There's something in the background that you can't explain. You peek again, over the trench, exposing no more than an eye, for just a second. Maybe there's some radiation, but you don't want to talk about it, part of the price of doing business. I'm learning from Dog to worry a bone. There's always the corner of the bottle, where a dram is trapped, a taste you might attribute to a higher power. I'm left in the dust here, I don't believe in god or any afterlife: fuck a bunch of handbags, baseball caps, bobble-heads. The bible is a fiction, get over it. Jesus is a minor prophet, you want the juice read Judith. Peter was an asshole, saw a con. The white whale. What he could make from that. I don't just hate, I actively try and mount a campaign against misdirected mortars, the misplaced commas. I feel it's my duty, you know, to call attention.