Fog

A giant rope of fog on the Ohio, about half-way up the towers on the new bridge, so maybe 150 feet in the middle tapering down as it approached the banks. Very thick. Walked the debris line and found some interesting sticks. Saw a squirrel get hit by a car on my way back to the truck, took it down to the river and skinned it out; a meal for the dog, maybe two meals if I make a gravy and add some egg noodles. Still no one to feed her while I'm gone. Spent another afternoon photographing the permanent collection yesterday, then several hours in the vault today, identifying pieces. When this chore is done, I will have seen and handled every piece at the museum. An extremely attractive young woman in the museum today, with regal carriage, and, of course, she was one of Pegi's girls, from the Cirque program. Posture should still be taught. And Rhetoric. Fencing was a required course at Janitor College. The reasoning, quite zen (and correct) was that after a day of crawling in boilers, sweeping, mopping, looking down for loose change, you needed to stand upright, get centered, and breathe with the various organs aligned. I wasn't very good with the foil, too much lunge for me, but I was hell with the saber. Not much of a poker, but I'm a mean slasher. Harvesting sugar cane and harvesting tobacco are a lot alike. You bend, and with a very sharp implement you cut them as close to the ground as possible. Very like a janitorial position. Oops, this is one of those places, when if you talk off the top of your head, there are a great many directions possible. Maybe I should say janitorial posture. But that bifurcates too, two to, which reminds me of a certain ballerina. But that's another country, and besides, the witch is dead; or whatever those lines are. I can't make any sense, sometimes it's maddeningly just beyond my grasp. Just now, I was putting together a ham and bean soup, lots of onion and garlic, in the crock pot, to cook overnight, and I thought: I still read Levi-Strauss, knowing, as I said it out loud, that I was at least two schools behind: I still cook, and gather at least some of my ingredients. I hate to even mention, I had some morels in a thickened gravy, tonight, that were Best In Show. When I cooked the egg noodles for Little Sister I cooked some extra for myself. Despite what the dog thinks, I am not here merely to feed her, I have my own needs. I wish I remembered how I made the gravy, but I was already writing you, and I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. It was a butter sauce and I thickened it and added some things. Some fresh dill, because I had some, a few drops of hot sauce, I don't remember which one, I have an arsenal of hot sauces.This meal was so good I remembered past lives. Phone out, so no SEND. Loaning out an iconic Carter watercolor, "Jesus Wept", so I rummaged around and found some wrapping materials. The woman that does some of the cleaning used the wrong stuff on the upstairs bathroom floor and left it slicker that an ice-rink. I had to mop twice with cleaner, then four rinses, to make it less deadly. Sartre said that is only through the consciousness of the reader that the writer can regard himself as essential to his work. I was reading Sartre, sitting outside at the Dairy Bar, waiting for my monthly footer (sauce, mustard and cheese, standard hereabouts) and onion rings, when a local walked by and asked if I was a preacher and I asked him why he thought that. He said, well, you was reading a book. Structuralism attempts to articulate the codes that govern various kinds of communication. Roland Barthes, maybe quoting Saussure. I didn't tell the hillbilly that. Just an enigmatic negative. When I get home I have to feed the dog before I can eat in peace. She enjoyed the squirrel and noodles. And I enjoyed my footer and rings, eating with just my right hand, holding a book in the left, "A Perfect Red", sent to me by someone, a history of the cochineal red. Excellent non-fiction, sticking close-by her subject. Amy Greenfield. Saving a book sent by The Utah Kid for the trip. It's a huge thing, two generations of Amazon ethno-botany. I may buy an inexpensive camera, take some pictures. I don't have a single picture of the houses I designed and built, or just built, from architect plans, in Colorado. Some very nice places, running from folksy cabins to high tech Telluride. I don't have many photographs of my life after Cape Cod, 1978. I don't think there's a single shot from the 10 years in Missip (I built three houses there, six barns, dozens of out-buildings), and I didn't take a single shot on the Vineyard. Other people have photographed some of these places, it would be possible to reconstruct a time-line. I'm still on this track, even though it was not the question, about the missing year 2007, the track was interesting speculation. I've left a trail, not extensive but it exists. I've planted more trees than I've cut down, that has to count for something. I use rainwater for most of my needs, and pour it back outside; compost everything and assumed responsibility for an overly frisky dog because there was food going to waste. It's not that I even think about it, living lightly on the world, I do it without thought. Little Sister will certainly eat the bones so I cook the squirrel forever, then add the noodles and thicken the sauce. Read more...

Just Images

One of you asked me about the year 2007, and I don't remember. I could reconstruct, from my writing, the calendar of shows at the museum, and what various other people might say about some events that might jog my memory. Actually, as I think about it, I could probably do a pretty good reconstruction, the weather, what was eaten, who I talked to about what. Probably a music list and a book list. Could be an interesting project. But if I did it as a separate project I'd need a grant to pursue it, because I couldn't use this writing time to work on it; I don't want to stop doing this, therefore there'd have to be an additional writing time, and I'd have to stop reading as much as I do, and reread myself more. I might or might not be able to do that. I require x amount of contact with the natural world, that's time; I could cut back at the museum, if I could find anyone who cared about the floors, but I need the social contact the museum supplies. This is a standing problem, I've been asked to do several different sets of text, manuscripts, I guess, and I haven't been able to supply them, because my lifestyle and habits, reading, and writing these paragraphs, pretty much takes all my time. I'm sloppy with it, no question, but I don't know what the exact mix actually is, that allows me to be moderately happy in my skin, and allows me to do my work, which are the same thing. I yam what I right. Could use a bit tighter structure. It's fine that I read 5 books this past week-end, because it rained the whole time, but I do have some other things that need doing. The pair of Peregrine Falcons were out, looking for a likely pigeon. Duck Hawks, I grew up calling them, raptors for sure. They sometimes hit 200 MPH in a dive. To look one in the eye is another whole experience. I've known some Falconers, dabbled myself, so I've 'known' some birds, and they scared the shit out of me, talk about a thousand-yard stare, what vision; I feel the same way, walking with Little Sister in the woods, wishing I could smell a fraction of what she smells. I play with words, it seems a distant remove. Living, the while, in a world that has never heard the word mercy. It's Archaic. Which is the drift of art since Picasso slipped into that cave. The bull in "Guernica" is the bull from Lascaux. 40,000 years compressed into a heartbeat. The primitive is not un-sophisticated, merely doesn't talk the same language. You'll develop a language soon enough, a patois. I harbored a Russian dancer once while she was making her escape, and we developed a system of signs that mostly concerned the bathroom, for whatever use that might be. Artists return to the archaic, because it gives them a history. I'm very like Emily, if you think about it, offering my pure white ass to whatever your prick would demand. I have to think about that. Would she have posed for Playboy? Maybe, I don't know. No one ever offered me a new car and a clean slate. George gave me an old Ford, this was a long time ago, and the head-gasket was blown; I effected a repair with library paste and that worked fine, until things got hot. Fucking dog is upset about something and the moon is full, draw your own conclusions. I'm forced into the position of an idiot, blasting away with a shotgun, to get the whip-o-wills to move away from the house. I taught mopping, for a couple of quarters, in grad school, and was struck with how helpless most of us were. I try to not draw conclusions because I can't draw. What I can do, and it's no small feat, is imagine. I may have fouled my nest, but I'm still fairly independent. There's a miniature or stunted Iris at the top of the driveway, I'm sure it has a name, that is so beautiful it takes my breath away. Like that. Or the light this moon casts on the gathering green. Caps are just a kind of punctuation. The Natural World. Little Sister has chased the rabid coon away, maybe I can snag some sleep. Read more...

My World

A very, very, fine place. Two dogs in the yard. Little Sister protects her turf, I'm free to concoct meals and morals as I choose. May the best dog win. Darwin, right? Vagaries of neurological chance indeed, the nature of the world, I can't take a step without killing a thousand things. It's all about voice, isn't it? There's nothing else but silence. The crows make noise, the scratching of mice in the corner. Listen. I don't think of it as a blog, I just write, Glenn makes the post. It's not even me writing, it's someone that seems like me; even I'd be hard pressed to point out the difference. Occasionally I lie, and that confuses the issue, and I'm comfortable with that. Sometimes a lie is better that the truth. Marilyn taught me that, and my hat's off. I'm not sure the world is round, I'm convinced planes can't fly. Nothing matters more than anything else. I have a rule to not drive through puddles where there might be frogs, it's in small print, you probably missed it. Which meant walking through thorns, fine, if that's what I need to do, I can bleed as well as any other. Hey, someone asked, I was only answering a question. Tap your foot, it's Bach in the background. Listen. A Partita with you in mind. Of course I'm not who I pretend to be. Who could ever, I'm a janitor, I struggle with the floor, nothing is what it seems. Thunder, I have to close down. Second day of rain, reread essays by Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport. A note from Anonymous has me thinking about Point Of View and Voice. I think about them quite a bit anyway. I've worked hard to get my written voice down on the page, my natural voice. Plain-speak. Kenner says that of a large text, 40% will use just 40 words. I know a lot of jargons, having done a great many different things in a large number of fields, and own more dictionaries than most libraries. Just a few morels and I have them, fried in butter, on toast. Sup on just a bowl of mashed potatoes, sitting on the sofa, watching the rain, eating with a large spoon. The green is becoming visually impenetrable. Maybe another week, or even two, of mushroom hunting, then I give up the woods, to the bugs and snakes. The sumac and blackberry are still fairly thick around the house, but another few hours should provide a firebreak. The trip looms large, two weeks from Wednesday and gone for two weeks. No writing except for taking casual notes, the longest break in 13 years. A staggering amount of text, in that period of time, maybe 5,000 single-spaced 42 line pages, average 500 words per page. Thoreau, in the Journals, and Prost come to mind. I love them both, but I love a great many writers, so my affection means little. Excellent quote from Kenner: "The purpose of a proposal, as we have seen, being to conceal its real thrust behind screens of high-minded obfuscation." Excellent. I spend several hours thinking about the system in which understanding takes place, no conclusions, just marveling. It's amazing we understand each other. If I can just avoid an automobile accident I'll be fine. A thin gray line separates dusk from dark. I flip on some lights. Illuminate some things, talk with the younger daughter, about graduating from High School. Every drop of rain is a prism, It's very hard for me to focus. Too much going on. Every failure is me, an aspect of me; when I think about it, I've never done anything correctly, I've fucked up absolutely everything. Read more...

Rain Delay

Needed to work in the yard but it rained all day. Spent hours looking at prehistoric art. Marshack's great book "The Roots Of Civilization" and several texts I got on inter-library loan. One of the reference librarians has started asking me questions, but my answers seem to confuse her. She asked what my specific interest was, I talked about time-factoring for a few minutes, how the seasons were depicted in certain cave paintings, how that told those early nomads when what was where. I'm so deep into this subject that it's off-putting, I almost sound academic, but that's just a product of the of the jargon. Every subject, every occupation, has a jargon, it's inescapable, because you have to name things to be able to talk about them. The first time you do something new, sailing, pounding nails, plumbing a house, little of the technical aspects make much spoken sense, there's often an entire new vocabulary that must be learned. Of the dozens of various ropes of a schooner, none of them is called a rope, they all have names. It occurs to me that I take life one paragraph at a time, almost literally. Just heard the honorable Mr. Barber, the Governor of Missip, on the radio, and the way he sounded, I'm sure I met him once, at the bookstore in Oxford Ms. Everything sidetracks. It's a hypocritical rationalization to say I got anything done today. Did make an excellent mushroom soup. I had brought in some store bought mushrooms, several varieties, crash sale, as they were well beyond their prime, but perfect for what I had in mind: a creamy mushroom soup. I barely trimmed them, brushed off the dirt, put them on the simmer in a couple of cans of chicken stock, salt and pepper. I didn't add any aromatic herb, wanted just an earthy mushroom thing. Cleaned the morels. I use an artist's brush with a fairly soft bristle. Fried them gently in butter. Let the other batch cool, I'd cooked them slowly for an hour, and when they'd cooled, I ran them through the blender, back to the pot, then added the morels (cut into fractal half-moons) and a big hit of cream. I fry several rounds of home-made polenta in olive oil, put them in the bottom of a bowl, cover them with the soup. An extraordinary meal. The soup, full of trace everything, is probably not that nourishing, as a meal, not much protein; as a first course, it would be fantastic, but you'll need a starch. I like using the polenta, because you can slice off a bite with the edge of your spoon and still get the soup straight. But you could put a grain in the soup, before the blender. Acorn meal would be good. Too calm outside, an electric smell, I may have to go, soon, but there was something else, another dream. I don't dream often (that I remember) sleep, for me, is usually a black hole and then I wake up, confront the day. I have systems and back-up systems, which usually don't include cops with funny hats. I'm still pissed. Bastard. I can drown my sorrows but how does he live with himself? A dream where I was holding on to a rope and everything below me was crumbling. I can understand being disabled by panic attacks, I can barely climb a ladder any more. I sometimes understand the content and intent of a specific dream, some things are obvious, but often I don't have a clue. Dreams are message- boards, but the notes are cryptic, almost as though they were in another language. Which they are. In. The whole spread of meaning comes into play. Look at those cave drawings again. Read more...

Dog, Late

Little Sister tangles with a coon at the compost pile. I have to feed the dog an extra meal to allow the coon an exit. Not the end of the world, just the middle of the night. In the midst of a bad dream, something about failed expectations, vague and bothersome, I'd just as soon get up, roll a smoke and get a drink. Got my tax refund and I'd bought a decent single malt, a Balvenie, Bonnie Rait on the radio. Waxing moon breaks through the overcast. Keep on dying, but hold the center. Something D had mentioned, I found an essay Liza had sent, took it in for him to read (how I found it, in the mountains of paper that comprise my world, is a mystery) and extended the argument that original thought is rare. That asshole cop that gave me a ticket yesterday was wrong, I read the signs, I understand the rules, I play by them, I need to get a funny hat, so we'd be on equal footing. It's hard to argue with someone who assumes they're correct just because they wear a stupid hat. I'd argue this in court, but it's not worth the bother, fuck a bunch of stupidity. It's all about quotas and budget short-falls. I pay taxes and obey the rules, leave me alone. It will be difficult for me to be more careful, driving to work, but I will be, because I can't afford the fine, but where are we going with this? At some point I shoot the cop, or blow myself up in a public place because I just can't stand it anymore. The restrictions. At what point does someone stop me, walking in the woods, asking for identification? It's almost dawn and I've fumed for hours, the Belvenie at half-mast, and I'm no closer to an answer. I don't need a keeper, it would be nice to occasionally sleep with another warm body, but I don't need the threat of a stun-gun to keep me in line. The classic Libertarian Bind. With any luck, when they come for me, I'll be naked, standing on my head, listening to the Cello Suites. I'll go meekly, because I'm not a fighter, and it's hard to be dominant when you're naked. Or not, I have to think about that. I wouldn't be embarrassed, if you found me standing on my head, naked, listened to Bach, but I'd feel vulnerable. I've taken this trip so many times, it should be mere habit. I have ear-plugs, so I don't have to listen to the Whip-O-Will, did I mention that I hate those birds? Fucking Goat-Suckers. Fucking cops and their funny hats. I just want a warm place to sleep. Read more...

Parking Protocol

Chalk it up to lack of consideration. When I park at the bottom of the hill, I always park in the same spot, I back in, and nose up to a little earth berm that may or may not be natural. My emergency break doesn't work. Walked down the hill, this morning. Light rain, a clean earthy smell welling from the hollow, and when I get below the curve I see that a car is parked behind me. This has never happened before, a car tight behind me, I assume someone visiting B for the night. When I get to the vehicles I see that the car is tight to my rear bumper. I mutter the word 'moron' with several expletives, consider walking back up the hill and rousting whoever it is, dismiss it as a bad idea. I put the truck in 4-wheel drive and climb the berm as far as I can and gain maybe 18 inches, then do a 25 point turn and manage to worm myself free. Pass a State Trooper on Route 52, my way into town, and think nothing of it. I never speed, ask anyone who's ever been in the car with me, I'm a careful driver. The cop does a U-turn and follows me for a mile before he turns on his flashers and pulls me over. I know I haven't done anything, but maybe I have a taillight out or something. The speed limit is 55 on 52 with one small section where it drops to 45, I actually have a marker, a house on the left, where I take my foot of the gas to slow for the slower zone; usually have to stop for the light at the West Side schools, then the speed limit is again 55. The cop stops me a half-mile after that, flags me for going 57 in a 45 zone. He clearly doesn't know that the speed limit increases after the school. I point this out to him and he thinks I'm being a smartass, so he writes me a ticket. Fucking assholes, I swear. $100 that I really can't spare, and I don't want to spar with a State Patrol officer in a funny hat. D is amused by my morning so far, when we go for coffee. A food event at the museum, a good jazz group, last night, so we put away some tables and chairs, and I spend some time in the kitchen, mostly gathering trash and hauling it away. The janitor's lot. After lunch D and I discuss logistics, the shows upcoming and what needs to move where. Rules of engagement. Someone with bumper-stickers stops in the middle of the road, they can't make up their mind which way to go, I consider my horn, but have never used it and see no reason to start now; so I stop the truck, walk up and ask if there's a problem. They're at the wrong lake, I give them directions. Chaos is a fact of life, things break down, you look for meaning, it's never there. That should tell you something. All the leaves are curled against the wind, that tells me that the wind is blowing. I'm a rocket scientist, in one of those previous lives. Was Dyson or Benjamin the best mind of my generation? I don't know, torn, actually, because I want to understand myself, and how someone else responded might not be germane; confusion becomes a tool; I didn't see at the time, the way you could manipulate what we thought we saw. I've always been suspect of what I thought I saw, now I'm down-right leery. Read more...

Jazz Riff

Little Sister stops on the way down the driveway to eat some opossum shit. The walk down is always pleasant, because it is down, and there is little real effort; but very nice this morning, as the rain had washed the pollen from everything and the colors were vibrant. Enough rain to settle the dust. Much more in the forecast, days of rain. Slight enough drizzle going down that I didn't use my umbrella, choosing to get a bit damp, so that my view would not be restricted. Excellent drive to town, 27 turkeys working the duff off Mackletree, a dead deer I pull off the road and open up for the crows and vultures; trout fishermen at the lake, fishing with whole-kernel corn, because these are Rainbow Trout raised in cages, fed pellets, and they go for corn. Miniature marshmallows are good. I'm at the museum early and open up, Tammy comes in early, we chat office politic; Pegi comes in and forgives my rant of the other day, I remind her that we've learned to not allow hysterics. We're all cool with me being a kind of heavy-handed janitor, the bad cop, in the good cop, bad cop interrogation. D arrives, I'm waiting outside, smoking a cig, looking at the buildings, town, also washed clean, and there some few flowers. We go to get our morning coffee, scone, and I can't help but notice that Erica's replacement (Erica joined the Navy) has spent way too much time in the tanning booth. She's darker than Tammy, who claims to be Black. Later, D, Tammy and I are huddled on the loading dock, having a smoke, and it's a drizzling rain that D and I ignore, and Tammy says, "Black women do not go out in the rain." I feel I'm being played, set up for a joke, knock knock. But I have to say, "What, does it wash off?" She punches me on the arm. She needs some work on the speed-bag. She says, "no, dummy, it's the hair." She did a kind of model slink, brought her right hand up and patted her very short hair, "I've just enough white blood," she said, "that it stays fairly flat." I'm so far removed from this that I don't even know what the problem is. I can parse it out later, but my memory of specific detail is blurring at the edges. D asked me specifically, what was not the desire path, and I said, "when you stay on the sidewalk." He didn't laugh for several heart beats, but then, in the elevator, he did. A done deal. Sense is an amalgam,
a combined consideration. I need to go, a line of thunderstorms. I'm not sure where we'll pick this up. I trust you with the thread. Read more...

Pocket Sextant

I found this odd compact brass instrument in the woods on Martha's Vineyard, 30 years ago, a well made thing. The workings unscrew from inside the case, then screw back on the top, lots of moving parts, mirrors, geared gauges, an amazing intricate device. No one had ever identified exactly what it was, but we all agreed it was a surveying tool of some type. It took James 10 minutes on the web to identify it as a Pocket Sextant. He says it could be worth money. I'd sell it, as I currently use it as a rock, to hold papers in a breeze. Made in London, 1917. Bet someone was pissed when they lost it. Trish was pissed at me today, because I ranted that anyone who really didn't like their job should quit and get a job they enjoyed. You'd think I would have learned to keep my mouth shut. A great day though, spent the morning in the basement, where I talked to myself, then, after lunch, James and I started photographing the permanent collection. We shoved the lunch table against the wall, with a sheet of ethafoam as background, and the table covered with a sheet of white paper, opened the vault, donned white cotton gloves, brought out and unwrapped 18th century silver services, salt bowls, 16th century Chinese vases. I love this stuff, I get to handle it, I'm the guy that unwraps the piece and puts it on its stand. The ultimate perk, for those of us that like to touch things. A transport of joy. We get a great deal done, James and I, arrange and photograph 19 things in just a few hours. He makes condition reports on the back of the cards. You could spend a large amount of time establishing the condition of anything. I thought about this for hours last night, how precisely you might examine something. George called from Charlotte, he mentioned scallops and I realized that I had eaten morels for 14 or 15 of the last meals at home. It's not a boast, just a seasonal obsession. Where are you, really, when the veils are torn away? A Pocket Sextant might be handy. I had started a pile of firewood at the bottom of the hill, days I didn't want to drive up, I could haul it later, and someone stole it. I can't believe we're drawn to this, that someone would steal my firewood. You could hear my mouth drop open. Direction is a matter of course. Unroll some maps, look at the terrain. I don't think morals is an issue, I think it's all about drainage. Trickle down. Ronnie and his horoscope. Hey, I don't know anything. I only write what I see; our worlds are obviously different. You probably believe something. Read more...

Pattern Recognition

The office politic, pure bullshit, was out of control again today. Pegi and Tammy were all day in Columbus, for an awards luncheon, and Trish had an early morning dentist appointment. When she finally got in she was ranting and raving (I walked off) about her mistreatment at the museum. It went on for several hours. James had to shut the door on D's office and play music to get anything done. I spent the day in the basement, sorting hardware and tools. There have been a couple of screw-ups in having a receptionist, especially on Saturdays, and there is no question that is Trish's responsibility to have a warm body there, and Pegi had said something to her, yesterday. What Pegi had dragged me into the Cater's to talk about. And today was the rebuttal. My sense is that it will play out and there will be someone at the desk. The basement is much cleaner, it was a royal mess, I put things away and swept and read some instructions on how to mount a certain brand of anti-theft hardware behind paintings. The instructions were useless because they'd been badly translated from the Chinese, but interesting in a kind of fractured 'Language School' kind of way. James finished the first major stage, the largest step, in documenting the permanent collection, there is now a separate, nicely formatted page for every piece. Most of step two, a photograph on said page of said piece. Then step three which is the condition report. Securing the provenance. Interesting stuff, he and I talk about this, have been talking, for many months. Archiving is an interesting process. I was fronting books in the library today, some fucking demon keeps coming in there and shoving the books back on the shelves, if I catch them, whomever it is, I will probably throttle them. On the other hand, I'd never complain about the occasional hour I need to spend in one of the better art libraries in this part of the country. Found a great article on Carter today, in a small book from the Met on American Realism. Audubon studied with David, he actually did, then came over here and drew birds. There's such a studied composition, and I'd never thought about where it came from. Patterns don't always mean anything, they might only indicate minor daily enigma: none of your socks match, you've missed a call, you can't find the key to the back door. I get away as soon as the clock strikes five, I have a dog, and I need to finish the book I started last night. A simple dinner, a spinach salad I wilted with hot butter and morels, some garlic toast. But between those two things, leaving work and eating dinner. Something happened, I'd just gotten on the west side of the river where the roads diverge into drainages, and there was a turtle that wanted to cross the road. Slammed on my brakes, it's is fucking female Midland Smooth Softshell Turtle. This species, the female is always larger, and she dictates terms. I have the hots for Shiva, I had just been reading about this very turtle. I swear to god, she was just looking for the river, four lanes of traffic, I'm feeling, in what is my opinion, she might have made have made it across. Because she's a superior turtle. Midland Smooth Softshell Turtle. A female, I know, because they don't carry a pattern on their back, I thought at the time, you know way too much about turtles. This is a world class issue. I lock my brakes, grab the fucking turtle like a bandit, slip it to freedom. No question, a female Midland Smooth Softshell Turtle. And full of eggs. I take her down to an island I know, a backwater on the Ohio, a safe place, but she doesn't trust me, she scuttles away. There's only so far I'd go. Fuck a bunch of turtles. Read more...

Unavoidably Detained

I got a little lost, looking for morels. I knew where I was within a couple of miles, knew I'd intersect one of two roads. Being a little lost sharpens the mind. I looked at the setting sun and figured out roughly where I was. The dog was no help, she just stuck her nose in everything. A dumb dog's life is the smell of potential food, and actual food. Maybe it's not stupid, actually knowing where your next meal is coming from. Time I got home, steamed an artichoke, cooked the morels in butter, it was almost dark. I was in the woods for two hours and I have little seed ticks all over my legs. Strip down and wipe them off with alcohol, then witch hazel. The babies are insidious. Just a few dozen and I'm careful to get them all, baggie my underwear until the next laundry. Once, in Missip, a really lovely Southern Belle, wife of a good friend and a city girl, came out, to take the country air, while her husband hunted deer. We were going to feed them supper. We lived miles out of town, Marilyn was pregnant, and when she went into labor, we were going to stay at their house until the contractions were close. Walt was in his tree-stand, pregnant Marilyn had gone to milk the goats, I was fixing dinner. Kathy had gone for a walk. She got back to the house having a panic attack, hundreds of seed ticks on her legs and feet. I went and got the alcohol, the witch hazel, and a roll of paper towels, got her to a chair on the porch and told her to hike up her skirt. There followed one of the most erotic experiences of my life. She had great legs, and after the rather harsh treatment with astringents, I rubbed them with lotion. It didn't then, or anytime after, lead to anything further. But we agreed it was an amazingly sensual event. Their marriage broke up a few years later when Walt broke the picture window at a swanky motel on the outskirts of Grenada, finding Kathy and a local lawyer rather flagrant. Small town life. I was going to say Southern small town life. Then realized, leave off all the adjectives: life. Pegi grabbed me at the museum today, hauled me over behind some panels in the permanent collection, and vented about some things that were bothering her. None of them concerned me directly, nothing I had done, but I listen well and she needed an ear to lean on. Office politics. I have little patience with negotiation, because I live alone, pretty much do what I want. That should be at the heart of education, to do what you want, but it's almost never addressed. The huge rolling ball of society, culture, wants to codify. That's the goal, then they can sell you something. I intend to spend more time lost in the woods. I don't want any part of it. Lord High Doofas on his own little piece of ground. Reject almost any explanation out of hand. I don't believe planes fly. Do you have any idea how much a 747 weighs? There's a Russian 'plane', the largest in the world, it's smoke and mirrors, what they actually have is a very good underground railway system and the dope in the food takes you out of the equation. "Too many morels, we think he's having a fit." It's fucking Tom, though, man, he knows what he's doing. Probably not. Let's say I know him well, assume some things. I thought you'd never ask. He's just another redneck asshole. In so far as I understand. Why would there be separate files for women? I'm curious. Read more...

Traces

I miss-represent myself. I don't wear a coon-skin hat, I've never scalped anyone, I just walk slowly and stumble on small purple flowers, miniature violets that probably have a specific name. Even though Latin is my other language, I don't know the name. I hide in my embarrassment. Another day, another performance, you become whatever is necessary. I have to think about this, whatever is necessary. Some yard work, some reading, eat breakfast several times, collect a nice bag of morels, 18 of them, half fairly large. Three meals. Once on toast, once in an omelet, and once in herbed butter with a small steak. One-third leafed out. The Black Walnut trees are budded. They are the most careful: limits their growing season to six months at this latitude. I repair a dead chair with a miniature Spanish Windless. I like the old chair but it was to thin and multi-repaired to drill out and replace rungs, and the middle bottom stretcher was busted. I have a nice collection of bits of rope, found a piece of quarter-inch hemp and whipped the ends with a needle and linen thread, dipped them in binding glue. Used a stout little split of Osage Orange, to twist the loop tight, caught the tensioned end of the stick under the back stretcher and tied it off with a piece of twine. A dynamic system, under tension, caught in time. I looked at it for a while, it's a frozen event, with a large amount of stored kinetic energy. Chair as battery. When I was doing my Post Doc, writing my second book "The Janitor IS History", and shivering through a winter on Hokkaido, there was interesting professor, Applied Physics, Mr.Muti, small, trim man that exuded an aura of confidence. He had bungee-corded the tree-tops together and there was a weight involved, a big rock with a ring-bolt, and somehow, with a system of pulleys, this drove a belt, and the belt turned a cogged gear that engaged another cogged gear, and this huge fucking millstone starts turning. It's twelve feet in diameter, two feet thick, covered with these runes that predate anything that's that's ever been uncovered. Turned an alternator, charged some batteries. Since then, I've always been interested in very large fly-wheels. Not a very efficient system, energy loss everywhere, but it doesn't have to be efficient. All of my printing presses were powered by a foot-treadle turning (often elegant) cast iron fly-wheels. I always thought that system rather elegant. Between rounds of cutting brush today, I looked at some really beautiful letter-press books, they were a joy to the hand and eye. On my breaks from working outside, I listen to mid-day news shows on NPR until I get moderately depressed, and go out looking for morels. New green growth makes the hunting more difficult, but you learn to notice the cod-piece bulges beneath soft young leaves. I find enough to smother a small piece of meat, cooked an artichoke mid-afternoon, just steamed it, so I could eat it cold at dinner. Reading, at a meal like this, is a challenge; I have to clean my hands many times. I manage, because I'm experienced at this, reading at every opportunity. I carry a book in my back pocket because I might be caught in an elevator. I change this book every month, I don't even look, I have a pile of things, I don't want to know. I like to be surprised. Read more...

Considering

I don't think of myself as laid-back, I think I'm almost manic. It's almost tomorrow and I haven't finished yesterday. Whip-o-wills clamoring, a faint light in the east, I must admit to another day. Birds drive me crazy, the concept of song. Bach gets it right, the fugue state; Miles Davis, "Kind Of Blue", Greg Brown may be our best current song writer; and this time of year, you'd be a fool to not listen to new leaves in the wind. Up at four, Little Sister had treed a coon, I had to walk her down the driveway, to give the coon a chance to escape, then feed her an extra meal so she would forget about the whole thing and go back to sleep. Knowing there is no chance of further sleep for myself, I read a while, then reread and edit myself. Several things make me laugh out loud. I've laughed a lot in the last 24 hours: being with Liz and D, then laughing at myself. The bad humors are migrating north, where they can suffer the black flies and mosquitos that grow to the size of small birds. In the glooming I find a wonderful sense of centeredness, the me, sitting in this chair, that is experiencing this dawn. I mull it over, with a bowl of cheese grits, and a first cup of coffee, spiked with a shot of whiskey, to make the transition from night into day. The issue of solitude came up with Liz, she wondered was I lonely. The easy answer is no, I don't miss the ten thousand compromises that compose a relationship. I've always been eccentric, and it's getting worse. I live in a narrow world, in many ways, but it allows me to open out (Olson) which feeds me what I need. The mandate, from early on, was to tighten the loop, eliminate everything possible. Still, there is compromise; working full time, in town, no place to pee but the urinal in the Men's Room, I'm using more water, because I have to flush. I hate flushing. A waste of resource. Almost sunset, the wind sprung up from the west, and the saplings danced; you had to be there, but it was just me, and a dog that wondered what I was watching. Brisk wind in early spring and the new leaves look like satin, glistening in patterns. A shimmer. The last couple of miles, into my place, was so intense, I had to stop several times and clean the windshield: the world explodes, and you're doing what exactly? Nothing means more than the natural world. What you see is what you get. Read more...

Preemptive Strike

Stayed in town for a couple of beers with D and Liz, haven't done that in almost a year, but Liz worked at the museum years ago and comes back to visit. Serious laughter. I told a couple of dog stories. Liz howled at my fixing roadkill with polenta for the dog. We talked about floods, graduate school, working in Chicago, the museum dynamic, everyone's health, everyone's children, The Wrack Show. A couple of beers and I had to go, fairly heavy rain so I knew I was going to park at the bottom of the hill and avoid the sleigh-ride tomorrow morning. Going in to do laundry, check with D about the membership brochure and various other things, resupply liquids. Yard work in the evening. I dream of a yard that is concrete, painted green, or, if I lived near Kim, would be completely bricked. This rain will accelerate the leafing, and is good for the morels. Excellent timing. Bonus at the grocery store, an 8 ounce smoked brie for just $2.99, remaindered, 'old', but hey, old cheese is good. I invent a finger-food that is to die for: cook sliced morels in butter, let them set, so that the butter re-solidifies, a spoonful on the cracker of your choice (I use saltines for everything), top with a spread of smoked brie that is out of date, run under the broiler. These will have you weeping. It's spring, excess sap, everything is leaking. I'm labile in the spring because I made it through another winter. And besides, it's beautiful, the return of color. Late February is so black-and-white. Stark. Then this, where everything explodes in a fucking rampage of color. D posits an interesting question about dying. Graduate students. He's taking a course in Buddhism, I hold my tongue, but the idea is enough to get me wondering. If there is no mind, and no body, what comes back? It's a shell game, and that's why fakirs run the show. Promises. Ass-holes doing their 'we pay too much taxes' are full of it; what we have is what we're given. Everything else is chaff. If I make some money, I pay taxes. I think we should all be taxed the same. No pork-barrel. Wrong phrase, but you know what I mean. There's so much we need to deconstruct. I did park at the bottom of the hill, popped an umbrella, did my Mary Poppins imitation, a little song-and-dance. Swirling spring rain in gusting wind, leaf litter caught in dust devils, all the pliable new growth bending to the cause. Liz called us, this place, the museum, laid-back, compared to Chicago, and I had to think about that, what it meant. Priorities, smell the roses. I move more slowly because I broke a toe, it only becomes a philosophical stand in hindsight. I tend toward slowing down because I'm older, an added benefit is that I notice things. It's not rocket science. The aging janitor, stooped from his years of service, moving slowly, notices a particular, very small, purple flower. The flower has always been there, but the haste of youth, and the speed of the world has always precluded looking down and walking slowly in the rain. It's not too awful, arriving home damp, a dog bouncing for its feed. Alone at last, I dismiss Little Sister with a sizable chunk of squirrel and polenta; an aspect, no, an aspic, from the real, no, the natural world. D intimates to Liz that I sleep with the dog, but that's not true. She has fleas. I never did a dog with fleas, after that one time with a lady bull-dog, I'd been drinking and I thought you said frog. Later, in the Emergency Room, I made up a story about a bear. I'm not sure they believed me. It doesn't matter. Read more...

At Odds

Sun dogs. I take them as a good omen. Lovely drive in this morning. Closer to town, 800 feet lower than my house, the slopes are vested in that soft green peculiar to spring. I'll walk in tomorrow, I think, and look for morels. My largest of the season today, six inches tall, an inch-and-a-half in diameter, plus several other smaller ones. I grill a brined pork chop, then cover it with mushrooms cooked gently in butter. Cooked an artichoke, but could only get through the leaves, save the heart for tomorrow. I'm thinking an artichoke heart and morel omelet. James wants to doctor my computer while I'm gone. I made another batch of crock-pot grits, plain, just grits and water, a serving for four, which I dot with butter, salt and pepper, and microwave of a morning. On weekends I might put a coddled egg on top. Incredibly good. Logan Turnpike Mill, Old-Fashioned Speckled Yellow Grits, 3485 Gainesville Hwy, Blairsville, Ga. 30512, www.loganturnpikemill.com, they ship. You really need to try these. Four to one, cooked overnight in the crock-pot on low. You'll think of things to add, any dried fruit is good, maple syrup is excellent, but I eat them mostly with just butter, salt and pepper. They always stick, scrape the sides down and mix the crust in, it's a delightful change in texture. I could live on this, the occasional pot of beans, some dandelion greens. The Vegetarian Tom. In which regard, the truck ahead of me clipped a squirrel, on the way home up Mackletree, I stopped and threw it in the back of the truck, dressed it out at home and put it on to cook for Little Sister, she was wining at the back door, so I quickly thickened the boiling mass with some generic dried mashed potatoes and ladled out a third for her dinner. She was so excited she went straight up in the air, all four feet off the ground. She's dumber than a stick of wood, but she can actually levitate, for a few micro-seconds, like an NBA star. I had butchered the squirrel into six pieces, two front quarters, two squirrely hams, and split the torso in two pieces; maybe two quarts of water, and four servings of mashed potatoes. Gotta be meals for three nights or I don't want to bother. Cooking for my fucking dog. Me and your Grandmother. I think I can get Bear's daughter, Cara, to feed the dog; I'll want to bribe her just so. Her Dad Or Mom will have to drive her up, but it's only seven miles. If Bear drove her up, I wouldn't worry so much about being robbed. Nobody fucks with Bear. He scares me and I consider him a friend. He once poked me in the chest, to make a point, and I fell over. The strongest human being I've ever actually known. He picked up the back of my truck once, when I was hopelessly mired, and set me on firm ground. I occasionally work small miracles, but I've never lifted a truck. I hang paintings, I'm a simple guy. James doesn't smoke, but I'd asked him down while I did, and we were talking about Antigone, not a neutral subject, when Valerie, the lawyer, walked by. I made a point, she paused, she doesn't even know my name. I really can't have a relationship because it would threaten whatever trip I currently imagined. I'm a loser. A quick look at the track record is enough, he never could run the 440. Nor the 220 or the 110,;I was always was a step off. The best coach I ever had said I started slow, and I never could improve. I'm still as bad as I ever was. I throw a wicked side-arm curve and a change-up that hovers at the plate, but my fast ball is barely eighty miles-an-hour. I fall short of anyone judging anything. Even my dog is suspect. I watch some tadpoles swim around in a glass dish and actually feel that I've done something. I watched. Now, I can't even rub my eyes without remembering.. A bad day at Black Rock. Nothing you could say would make any difference. Having lost the most important race of your life, what do you do? I've done a survey, as you might imagine, of losers. They comprise a huge section of the demographic. I'm not saying, don't quote me, but nonetheless.

Tom

Three crows
keeping time,
everything else
is easy.
Read more...

The Past

The rich man claims his chattel. We could enter a war of words. In a fit of pique I'd take the side of the oppressed, on principle, without knowledge of the specific case, even though I might know I'm on the wrong side. Sometimes it's hard to hold your tongue, even if it gets you hurt. I have a tongue that might be likened to a stiletto but I rarely use it as a weapon. I often say things under my breath that I'd never say out loud. We all act out, occasionally say things we might regret later. Harbor resentments. I'd really like to unload against a couple of former friends, but it would be a waste of effort. I entertain the idea, because it could be quite funny, and humors drive the world. In an attempt at self-medication I spill some juice and find myself, early this morning, on my hands and knees, cleaning after myself, with a spray bottle and paper towels. The poor man accepts the yoke. Historical fact.

Poplar buds a
soft green that
open into spring.

I meant what I said, whatever it was, under my breath, or out loud in the woods, that I hate the way someone would chide me for a debt they imagined. Fucking system doesn't work.

Redbud and dogwood
are resplendent, a
clash of color.

I'm angry, actually, the whole system is a farce. Sarah Palin is a joke. Saturday Night Live, Tina Fay, is closer to the truth, but I don't know what that means. I was early to town, again, and I went down to the river; when all else fails I look to hydrology. Hydraulics never fail without reason. A blown gasket, something tangible. I melt a pat of butter to fry an egg. It means nothing, but it looks like it means something. I'm confused. I try and apply meaning, but it's a lost cause. Nothing means anything. Not that that's important. It just struck me. An egg on toast is just an egg on toast. It doesn't really mean anything.

A small flower,
purple in the litter,
makes the point.

There was a back-water that took my attention, a counter-intuitive drift. A standing wave that stood in the wrong direction. Usually, when I watch things closely, I have no idea what they mean.

Tom
Read more...

Being Surrounded

The varieties of green seem to be endless. The wall between me and the world has started filling in. Down through the hollow, color from leaf and bud, soften the angular and gnomic tree-trunks. A glossing over. Consider the way solar energy, water, and trace minerals can do such a thing. I watch it so closely, it will tear a chunk out of my heart to miss two weeks of vital spring. I know, I know, I can see it other places, I could use a change of scene, be good to see old friends. But I am not a nomad, despite my nomadic life. I only function well, as a writer, in my airy and well-lighted cell, remembering at the end of a day. I take notes, in the field, but I can rarely remember what I'm referring to. Meaning is my favorite thought-line, and I follow it, several times a day, into cul-de-sacs or amazing vistas; I can reconstruct lines of reasoning, sometimes, for up to twelve hours. Beyond that, everything is fiction. Nothing makes any sense. Power cutting in and out. Air Conditioner use? Lost two pages. Need to change over to writing in a file that continually SAVES and SEND from that. One page was a rhapsody for Crock-Pot grits. I made an over-night batch of cheese grits with morels that was really quite amazingly good. Maybe not so amazingly when using the best stone ground grits I ever tasted, a double cheddar, butter, and just a few drops of Crazy Andy's Hot Sauce, a goodly pinch of kosher salt and many squeezes of fresh black pepper. I had a small Porterhouse steak, grilled rare, with an herb butter. I go through the lunch garbage from the ladies upstairs, taking stuff home for the dog and sometimes me. Had a couple of nice hard rolls from the trash that I turned into Texas Toast. Probably the best meal of the year so far, but I've not been grilling much yet, and I haven't cooked Baby Back Ribs which some argue is my very best meal. I'm not so sure, except when eating that meal; the sauce IS extraordinary, coming up on its ninth birthday now and reflecting a decade of my life and what I've eaten. It has absorbed sea-changes in styles of marinades. I keep a jar, in the fridge, in which I keep the dregs and cleanings, a little potato or pasta water, whatever marinades might be left-over. Not as much as you might think. because I usually reduce a marinade and use it as a sauce. But I also use The Sauce on slices of pork tenderloin, and I think this is my favorite cut of any meat. I had a small group of thwarted polymaths over for dinner and conversation, this was years ago, and if you've never attended such a convocation, it probably wouldn't mean anything. The conversations were reaching a crescendo, arguments, histrionic presentations, a broken glass or two, and I served dinner, buffet style, four people could sit at the table, everyone else perched on the stairs or sinking into the sofa, and it was deathly quiet, for 12 or 10 minutes, you know; and this squirrel of a guy, a professor of mine from Janitor College, who retired to Ohio for the birds, looked up and said: "God-damn this is good." A pregnant pause. I'm not quite hermetic, I have a job, talk to people at lunch, have social skills, can docent a group through any show. Found myself in a strange position today. A call for Sara or Darren but neither of them were available, and a call got funneled to me. Strange enough because I don't have an office or a phone, but I recognized the name as a lender for the Circus Show, and I explain some things to him; he's in Princeton, and there's a Carter painting I want to see, at Rutgers, he dines with the president. No one else is available, I might as well do this. I don't know who this guy is, I remember the name, he collects art, so I shoot the shit for a few minutes. I've made so much up, I don't know what I've eaten. Me and Alice. I may be going to New Jersey. I need to see this painting at first hand. I'm interested in the model. There's a painting in Naples Florida that I want to see. A nude, that I think is the same model. Very soon, I will know more about this than anyone on the face of the earth, I just process information, my mandate is very narrow. The Public Option should have been there all along. What kind of country do you consider yourself? Read more...

Fragile Body

It's a good thing, once in a while, to push your body. A little muscle ache is fine, as long as you don't hurt yourself. I bleed more than I used to, so I wear old clothes when I'm cutting blackberry canes, and carry a hanky that's actually a square piece of tee-shirt. When I take a break, I wipe myself down with Witch Hazel and drink water. Fucking thorns will make a believer out of you, but they're minor damage and never fester. Little Sister doesn't see the point, her interest flags and she runs off after something she smells. Times in my life, I've done that too, so I'm sympathetic, and, besides, I need to be alone, so I can talk to myself, figure things out. No TV, no radio, no dog, just the soft green of early spring and the wind in the trees. I see a morel and stop dead in my tracks, look around carefully, spot three more, get the Kroger sack out of my back pocket, flip out my knife. In the field, you must be considerate of where you step. Few things are worse than stepping on a morel. I like to cut them right at ground level, leave to roots, the mycelium, to grow another day, like asparagus on fence-rows in Colorado, and I hate to wash mushrooms of any sort, because the flavor is diminished. I blot off dirt-specks with a piece of toilet paper, usually; sometimes I just eat the dirt, as a flavoring agent, salt of the earth. A little grit, once in a while, a mouth-full of clay or a charred stick, might be just what you need. Artichokes are suddenly cheap, the harvest at Castorville, and I'll eat one a day for the next couple of weeks. My favorite dipping sauce is mayonnaise with a touch of horse-radish. 4:44 in the morning, I had to pee, you're never far from my mind. Artichokes, go figure. Why we think the things we do. I'm still tending a couple of gashes that continue to bleed. My skin is thinner now and I bruise more easily, but it's not a big deal, I'm not going to die from blood loss. A car-wreck or a plane crash more likely, not that many people are killed by a falling tree, or a bee-sting, or some hypo-allergic reaction to maple syrup. Not death by blackberry cane. Usually we die of cancer, or some cardiac event, or blowing our brains across the sitting room floor; rarely do we freeze to death, or conspire to die oddly. Or maybe just disappear. You could just go away. For thirty years he whored in the barnyard then he disappeared. Slaughtering chickens is an ugly job. The stench is overwhelming. Nothing smells worse than a gutted chicken. Booby gave me one of his chickens, a roadkill, I brought it home and dressed it out, kept half the breast to grill with a Madeira sauce of my own invention. Madeira, butter, morels. And boiled the rest with potatoes for Little Sister. Another good day on the brush front. I'm two-thirds of the way around the house. Suffering the death of a thousand cuts, but otherwise in great spirits because of the hard work and wonderful food. Glad I waited to drop trees because several close by are standing dead, victims of the various ice-storms, and they will be perfect firewood for next year. Giddy with accomplishment, late afternoon, I grill my chicken breast and Little Sister goes crazy. She assumes all food is hers, I must stand guard at the fire, lest she steal my dinner. Farce is very precise. I feel almost German, guarding my chicken breast. Art is a lie, obviously, but if it plays real, it becomes more than that. A stout wind picks up, the leaves are swirling. I save this paragraph. I like the way it jumps. A Force 9 gale after a calm day. Whatever. Batten down the hatches, you know more than you might admit, a white whale might be a suspect subject. An albino rams a small ship. I questioned everything, ever the Doubting Thomas, but nothing was out of place, everything looked normal. Fuck a bunch of normal. Read more...

What Is

Cognitively recognizing things that happen. Nothing could make me doubt what I actually saw. Certain things are locked in concrete. What you said. I defend your right to say whatever it was. The mystery zone, where, without thinking, you channel Emily: "To shut our eyes is Travel." Sleep is hardly respite, a dreamscape, where the young bull walks down and fucks all the fine young heifers. Everything he says is a line from a song, a voice like John Lee Hooker, "King Snake" against the backdrop of a lonely guitar. Catch the night train. What happened in the harsh shadow of the ghost light may have meant nothing. Meaning is a slippery slope, generally a fabrication, suited to a specific situation. Nothing's fair in love and war. Little Sister is so excited about spoiled lunch meat she practically bowls me over. You gotta like a dog that digs the blues. Fur is flying, she whaps her tail on the back porch, the blues for sure. The real deal: a lonesome train in Kentucky and a bird-dog beating time. Finally got back to sleep, then back up and off to the museum. Return a wood-stove, borrowed for the "Ghosts Of Business Past", then set-to with a vengeance. Hang the entire high school show without a single miss-step. Small wonders. There is so much math involved that we generally have to re-hang one or two pieces. The numbers are flying. D calls them out and I do the calculations. Measure the wall, add up the width of all the pieces for that wall, subtract, divide the remainder by the number of spaces (pieces plus one), gets you the space between. Add that number to half the width of the first piece and you have the center line. Measure the length of the piece, divide by 2, subtract the distance from the top of the piece to the hanging wire or d-rings, add the answer to 57, which is the horizontal center-line. Do this fifty times without a mistake. We're on a roll, so we light the show, then do the vinyl signage. Enough, already, for one day. All that remains is making and mounting labels and cleaning up the gallery. Excellent day. It's a pretty good show, one we need to do, to get the kids and their families into the museum; and it's good for the kids, to see their work taken seriously. Seriously hung, and lit, and labeled. First time most of them would ever have their work handled professionally (is that a conditional pluperfect?), there's a reception and an opening, the whole nine-yards. Should be a nice trip for them. And it is a juried show, a lot of awards, some cash too. Some of it is for sale, I've often bought a piece, but the only two I like enough to buy are NFS. Tastes differ. A good friend, Lane, juried the competition. Lane is probably the best water-colorist currently alive. Which point came up recently, because a Tennessee gallery is currently doing a show of photographs that depict small frozen pools. As it happens, Lane has been doing paintings of small frozen pools. His paintings are more real than the photographs. This strikes me like a bolt of lightning. Reality turned on its ear. That wasn't my point, though. His "Best In Show" was my number three pick. D and I would get into a bidding war for another piece, both of our favorite piece, but NFS; and another piece, a water-color, that I would buy in a heart-beat, also NFS. Not for sale is killing me here, I want to support artists, I like looking at interesting things, and it is a buyer's market. I talk with John and can spend my last night in Colorado with he and Kay. Things are falling into place. I can't SEND, high winds must have dropped the phone line on Mackletree. Up in the cool morning, I clip brush until my arms are sore, working in hour stretches, then drinking coffee and reading. New fiction about Emily. I usually don't read books like this, but he's a decent writer, Jerome Charyn, and he uses all the source material well, and I actually get through the whole book without throwing it across the room. Some modest headway with the brush. Sweaty and rather dirty, I just wash off at the kitchen sink, planing to spend tomorrow in much the same fashion. For a late lunch I have a huge omelet with morels, toast and bacon. I nearly swoon, it's such a fine meal. No one coming forward to stay in the house and feed the dog, don't know what I'll do. Committed to the trip now, though I know my house will be robbed while I'm gone. When unemployment hits 20%, in rural areas like this, robbing houses gets out of control. I'll take my tools into the museum, my manuscripts, maybe another box of books. I'll thumb-tack a couple of twenty dollar bills to the central tree-post, with a note: "Take This, Please Leave The Computer." There isn't much left to steal, my collection of cast iron cooking vessels, but they're heavy, and I can understand not stealing them. Books. All the light stuff has been taken. What does one pauper steal from another? That's not a joke. Operational relevance. Eventually the witness tells a story. What do you believe?I don't even believe primary sources. Doubting everything, a Thomas for sure. Read more...

Attachment Again

That old black magic, hang them straight, centered at 57 inches. Got the high school show arranged, all the wall pieces sitting on the floor, roughly where they go, pedestals all set and the 3 dimensional pieces where they want to be. D and I working together again all day tomorrow and we should be able to get it hung and lit. Maybe 50 pieces. Do the labels, touch-up the peds, and clean on Tuesday, oh, right, and signage; open the show on Wednesday, reception and awards on Thursday. I love hanging shows, getting to touch everything, and smelling the effort. Both of us today, D and I, on our high horses about how one of the first art classes you should take would be on actually finishing a piece, whatever medium, and considering its installation: it needs to be moved, it must be handled, it must be balanced, it must be rigged for hanging or whatever. You can't expect an installer to be precise if you're sloppy. Although it's true D and I could actually install an impossible show, but we'd only do it if we liked the work AND the artist, and it engaged our attention. The green is coming on, it's everywhere, and the new leaves are so young and so flexible and so strong, to weather the spring winds. The red maple leaves roll into cones so that the wind doesn't blow them away. I can no longer roll into a cone. I used to, but no more. Now I wedge a prop against my back and stand up to the wind, I like that image, because I'm tired of getting up and down. Stay up, suffer the winds of change. It's a fall-back position. Besides, it's a beautiful evening, severe clear, cool, a brisk wind, 10 to 20 knots. This could be it. What constitutes a perfect day? I've had so many I'm not a good judge. I folded today's morels into a cream sauce on pasta, shells, it was very good; better than that, it was one of the best things I'd ever tasted. Morels, I think, engage an earlier brain, where taste was really important. I do nothing but listen, now, but half the time I don't even do that. What I find is that no one is paying any attention. Right, right, the sub-text. Read more...

General Stowage

Redbud Day. A spring flourish. The color, after a brutal winter, is a treat for the eye. The Shad is in full-bloom. And the white petals from the Oriental Pear, blown off by high winds, look like snow. The drive to town was a very slow affair, with many stops. Early enough to town to grocery shop and there's a weird dude ahead of me in the check-out line. My guess is Tardive Dyskinesia, a twitching, especially of facial muscles, usually a late side-effect of prolonged treatment with anti-psychotic drugs. Maybe it's Targive. I read about it somewhere. Two red lights, one over the other, on a boat at night, is the signal for Not-Under-Control, which usually means the boat is single-handed and the skipper is below decks, probably sleeping. Statistics is not my cup of tea, but I was reading an interesting book recently "Statistics of a Stationary Random Process" (I was intrigued by the title) which is essentially a study of wave dynamics. A section considers Cape Horn, which is unusual in several ways. At the very bottom the Horn is at 56 degrees south, wind is deflected there by the Andes, we're talking the roaring forties AND the furious fifties, Force 9 gales one day in four in the spring. Really bad weather. And the current is swept through a sort of funnel between the South Shetlands and the body of South America, the water moving at 10 mph or more, and when the wind and water are moving in different directions, the chop is infamous. Statistically, in a 40 foot sea, one wave in a hundred thousand might be 120 feet. You might be able to just ride over that, in a small boat, a rubber raft might be best. My Dad tells a story, he was a Navy nurse in WWII, on a North Atlantic convoy. The North Atlantic is no light-weight when it comes to waves. He was on a hospital ship destined to moor permanently in the Thames. It was a really rough afternoon, the waves were huge, but a hospital ship is a barge, it doesn't ride waves, it just plows through them, and after mess, a bunch of them were gathered on deck, wondering if they were going to die. The sheep-dog in these convoys was the Destroyer Escort, a small ship, that steamed circles around their perimeter, looking for German submarines. The interval between the waves was such that one of these escorts was caught completely suspended, broke in the middle, and sank within seconds. All lives lost. Pegi and Tammy were working all day at coming up with a concept for the "Cream Of The Crop" opening. I didn't say anything, I had some business to attend, nothing really important, but I was busy enough that I couldn't focus my attention. Hours later I thought of something that might be funny, not as an actual idea, but as a kind of interlude in the process. Pegi was off the phone and I'd come upstairs for something, I caught her eye and said just "Homecoming" by which I meant it was a local show; and went on that we could have cheerleaders and maybe I could have some input on the costumes. Some of those Circus girls are really cute. Sex sells everything. Even a staid museum is sold on sex. Consider the miniature flowers of the median. I seem to be making a point, but I don't want to be held to that, mostly I just think about things. Spend a lot of time in the dark. Too much time in the fog, I never know exactly where I am. Everyone lies. Everyone. The world you assume. I tend to duck, and cover my face. I'm wanted in several states. Fuck a bunch of carrots. Read more...

Sounds Exciting

Five morels this evening. Cook them in butter and have them on toast. Having just read Chichester, I have beans on toast as well. James assures me it is a proper English breakfast. Surprisingly good. Francis ate them all the time, on his trip around the world. One of the indexes, indicies, is a list of everything in the boat and where it is. Fascinating. Every article of food for four months, which tub it was stored in, and where the tub was. An important list. He was vegetarian for that trip, but eating fish. Fresh food kept better on the second leg, from Sydney back to Plymouth, arrived home with a few potatoes left, and a lemon. Most everything else tinned, beans, soup, butter, tuna, fruit. I love a good list and this one goes on for several pages. He baked his own bread, learned and perfected his technique the year before he set sail. Took about 50 pounds of whole-wheat flour, broken into smaller units, double-sealed, and stashed everywhere, which was good, because he did capsize (the boat was self-righting) and took on water constantly, especially down in the roaring forties. Small chores at the museum. Trying to create some space to store all the pedestals, most of which will be coming out of the two main galleries at the next turn-around. All storage space is currently filled with the crates for the "Relief In Wood" show. Juggling, looking at the calendar. One more show to install upstairs, then the trip, then the big turn-around. "The Cream Of The Crop", biennial juried local (within 85 miles (eliminates Columbus and Cincy)) show is installed in all three galleries, and that starts the day I get back. Take down "Relief" and whatever is still upstairs, patch and repair all of the galleries, and install a huge show. Sounds exciting and it will be a lot of fun, in addition to serious work and constant attention. Back in that same old role, stage managing and arranging logistics. A comfortable pair of shoes and I can do this. Sometimes I need a stop-watch. Parked at the bottom of the hill because they're calling for severe thunder storms later, needed to assure an early arrival at work tomorrow, because the museum list is growing by leaps and bounds. Walked up. The change, on the color meter, is striking. Now there is a little green everywhere I look. The poplar buds are leafing, the blackberry canes are leafing, the sassafras is outrageous. There's a clear view of the opposite hollow wall, where I can see, a tree fell, on my side, and cleared a line-of-sight. That slope, over there, is greening too, and I can no longer see the ground, even with my glasses. Owning a drainage is special, you get to see everything. I transplant some watercress. If you've never had watercress and butter sandwiches, on white bread with no crusts, you wouldn't have a clue what I meant. How important it could be. Stick your head outside the roof rack and drive with your feet. Read more...

Public Relations

Out in the woods, cutting paths to trees I want to drop. The green is coming on everywhere. A beautiful day, clear light, and I walked around for several hours, with nothing in mind. Looking at buds, smelling things. Officially morel season, as I found a couple, two weeks earlier than last year, but I didn't think to look this early last year, so the record is suspect. First two small morels, and what do you do with them? I stuffed them with Ricotta cheese, put a dab of butter on top, salt and pepper, ran them through the toaster-oven, ate them in small bites with a plain omelet and toast. Excellent meal. There will be many variations in the weeks to come. Lost a page last night to a sudden power outage, now, the next afternoon, a line of squalls. I'd taken the truck down earlier in the day, so I wouldn't have to slide down tomorrow morning, and also so I could look at the various species of very small flowers that punctuate the median and the verge. Nothing in my pack but the foam pad and magnifying glass. I only know a few dozen flowers, and I know nothing about these miniature varieties, but they are very beautiful. I was down at the bottom of the driveway, kneeling, bent over with the glass, when the local Deputy Sheriff drove by and saw me. Of course, he had to stop, to see what I was doing. He's stopped several times, over the years, to see what I was doing. I stop to observe drainage events, I stop to observe life and death, I drag animals off the road, I pick up trash. I'm rarely in a hurry, coming home or on my days off. I'll stop for a butterfly, or a leaf that looks like a butterfly. At the wood dump, one day last week, I stopped because some branches caught my eye. They were orange at the cuts, but they weren't Osage Orange, rather, some kind of fruit wood, and I don't know what they are. Dense, heavy fruit-wood is all I know, and I get a small load for either just burning, or smoking something, a cured pork loin or a turkey breast. When I got home (I'm still parking on the far side of the frog puddles) I carried in what groceries I had, fed the dog, took a hatchet and hammer back over to the truck, so I could split a piece and have a smell. Smelled wet and nutty, overtones of apricot. A good smell, earthy and masculine: the first wave, like some hickory nuts run over by a truck; then a wafting fruit smell, like blossoms on the wind. Lost loves are like that, a scent. We should talk about need. Big thunder storm, have to go. Terrific light show last night. Lost power and just sat in the dark, watched and listened. A good soaking rain, great for morel hunting. Good to see that the humidity in the museum this morning was a perfect 50%. Most art work likes 45-55% and temps between 68 and 70 degrees. Easier to maintain now that the boilers are shut down. Three flocks of turkeys on the way to work. It's hard to count large numbers of turkeys on the ground, they're always moving, but at least 75 birds. I was out early, such a beautiful morning, so I stopped and watched the flock that was in the State Forest, in the Mackletree burn area (from last year's fire), and they were easy to follow with field glasses. Doesn't take long to discern a pecking order. Still way early for work, so I do a small grocery shop, then stand around the parking lot at the museum, looking closely at the Oriental Pear trees. The blossoms are multiple small flowers in an umbel, and today the soft green (lovely color) leaves were beginning to break out behind and through the separate stalks that form the flower head. Nice. After the storm last night, the power still out, I moved a stump over to the end of the sofa, where my head is if I'm prone. I can read comfortably there now, in a black-out, with just the single oil lamp that has a brass frame behind to which I affixed a mirror. I could just see beyond the carpenter chest coffee table and something stuck its head out. A large skink but it frightened me and I threw a rubber ball at it, just to make it go away. Forgive me Father for I have sinned, I killed a Blue-tail Skink with A Barbie Ball. A lucky head-shot, a little blood, pooling from the mouth, I cleaned it up with a tissue and put the carcass and paper in a baggie. With an indelible marker, I drew a teardrop below Barbie's picture on the ball. Prison tattoo for a kill. On the way out this morning, I stopped and gave the skink to a crow. I didn't want Dog to eat it, and I usually just throw small dead things out in the yard, mice and such, but my experience is that dogs always throw-up after eating a lizard. They eat them anyway, but they always throw-up, great learning curve. First night that I have to put a bowl of ice (actually a re-usable freezer pack) under a fan next to my computer. The seasonal clothing saga. It was 85 degrees when I started writing, and I'll need to add some layers soon, but I started the evening out wearing thin moccasins, some boxer shorts and a wife-beater tee-shirt, all from Goodwill. The perfect model of a modern Major-general. The moccasins are duct-taped together. There's a picture, abstract, small, of three sails, on the shirt, which is purple. The boxer shorts are printed with hearts. If, for some reason, the medics had to come and get me now, I would die while they were laughing. But I live alone and it's a comfortable outfit, exactly correct for the specific environment. Direct TV calls, and they want to install a system. I'm sick of these calls, this one is from India, and I finally tell her fine, send the guys out. I know that I'm what the package delivery services call an "undeliverable address", I get packages tied to bushes on the driveway, no one gets to the top. If the Direct TV guys make it, I'll watch the Movie Channel, and the Cooking Channel, and the History Channel and stop writing. Verizon, all the rest of them, have only claimed 97%, and I've always lived in that remaining factor. However small it gets, that ratio between the rabbit and the snail, I'm fine with that. I can jump with the best of them, find my place, and who among them ever killed a skink with a Barbie ball? Read more...

Too Strange

Nothing surprises me anymore. The Pope was a Hitler Youth and now it seems half of Ireland was sexually abused by repressed priests looking for love in all the wrong places. The Vatican is suspect. The devil, it seems, was a destroying angel that took advantage of our children. You trust the collar, then discover Sister Mary doesn't wear underpants. A rude awaking. In confession, she tells you she's wet, you're bound by your vows, still, you'd like to touch her, to make certain something was real. Voice becomes vibrato, breathless. I can hang out a shingle, but it doesn't mean I'm a Doctor, it only means I have a shingle to hang out. I'm a perfect example, a failure in so many ways, sometimes at night I can hardly live with myself. I know, I live alone, what would seem the ultimate argument is just another form of denial. Silence says very little, often a dodge for what needs to be said. Fence posts in the dark, a duck that satisfies carnal knowledge. I don't know. Everything is called into question. Maybe I need a break, too much with the world; spring is such a shock. What does green mean? Warmth is always something dying. Maxwell's silver hammer. The second rule of thermodynamics. You can bounce balls until you're blue in the face, the fact remains: it's you against the universe. Doesn't matter if you have a great ass or a winning smile, can cook or not, well-heeled or down on your luck. Camus was correct, what it comes down to. Life is a mess, then you die. Not that that's a bad thing, just that that's the way it is. Writing earlier, thunderstorms tonight. Extra trip to town, cheerleading D on the important membership brochure, clam chowder and a small beer for lunch at the pub. Back at the museum, I change the day calendar (Sara got from the Met, a holder with each day being a photo of an object or painting from their collection) and today's image is of a bronze, Southern Netherlands, circa 1400, "Aristotle Being Ridden By Phyllis". A story, apocryphal or not, with which I was not familiar. Seems Aristotle had warned his pupil, Alexander the Great, that he, Alex, was spending too much time with (either his wife or mistress) Phyllis, but in due time, Aristotle also fell under her sway and she agreed to satisfy his lust if he'd get down on all fours, with a bit in his mouth, and she would ride him around her garden. There's also a 1510 woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, much less elegant than the bronze but quite funny. D's doing a paper on the painter Veronese (1528-88) touching on the restoration of a large altarpiece. The technology is amazing. Reading several off-prints and watching a couple of short videos, I feel like I just woke up in another century. More questions than answers, because I don't understand how some of these things are done, but I can certainly appreciate the results. One sidebar is the making of archival copies, so that we have an accurate record at least starting now. Copies used to be flat drawings or photographs, straight forward. King Tut's tomb as an example. Like the caves in France, is being destroyed by the very presence of viewers. So why don't we make an exact copy of the original, EXACT, and let the great unwashed walk through that? Money is not an object, because a thousand people a day go through Tut's tomb. First you modify very sophisticated equipment to fit in the space. Maybe a million dollars worth of equipage. Then you filter out the actual image and 3D scan the sub-strate, then, using a computer driven cutter, you carve the exact field in a medium, archival, than can be hardened. The you photograph everything, 1 to 1, from six inches away. All of this is a huge amount of information, such a large amount, many hundreds of gigabites, or whatever they are. So large, it must be discreetly sliced into pieces and sewn back together, and we can do that: you match up the field and then lay on the image. I'm dumb-founded. It makes so much sense. Even paintings, almost two-dimensional, especially those artists that use thick paint and pallet knives, profit from attention to the ground. Dog is dumber than a sack of rocks. My off-again, on-again, relationship with the fox better suited me. I like to be alone outdoors. Pets are so needy. Probably not an issue anyway, because I'm pretty sure Little Sister is dying, I can't put any weight on her, she's got some several internal parasites. In his dotage he ran a hospice for animals. He produced results that have never been duplicated, so his conclusions are suspect; at the end, he was working on a large manuscript that would include everything. The perfect map, he often said, would indicate exactly where your foot would fall, an 'x' as it were, a mark on the page. I don't doodle, I don't draw anything, I can't, I don't know how. My wits are sorely tested. I draw a line through most things, eliminating possibilities. The Red Maples are leafing out, does that mean anything? Read more...

Flowering Pear

Portsmouth is an ugly city, but these are the days she looks pretty good, the Oriental non-fruiting flowering pear trees are lovely things. They are determinate, crowning beautifully with no trimming required, and survive the urban landscape. They are awash in white flowers. Yesterday morning, just buds, but by today, fully engulfed. I didn't write last night, a friend stopped by for conversation and a couple of drinks, and now yesterday is on the edge of memory. Barnhart did his April Fool music gig at the museum, extreme electronic music, some of his, some John Cage recreations, and it was wonderful. Music as transport, close your eyes and imagine. A combination of random, arbitrary sounds, and generated music that sounded much like Tibetan throat singing. Things in the museum were vibrating, adding overtones. Cage liked what the venue added to the composition, I met him once, we talked mushrooms, I was briefly dating a woman in Merce Cunningham's dance company, and I found myself standing at the back of a theater talking with him about interesting ways to cook puff-balls. Also yesterday I saw the crested pigeon again. James and I had seen it on Thursday. One of those weird birds, must have escaped from someone's cote, with a feathered crown and different coloration. Not your normal pigeon. Thank god there were two of us to see, otherwise it might be a figment of my imagination. A stunning bird. Consider the Pin Oak, as I have in recent days, those few trees that hold dead leaves, I was wrong about the mechanism, it's two separate events. But even my description would be flawed by interpretation, because several events, interconnected, might be considered one thing. What actually happens, and I looked at this closely today, with a magnifying glass, is that last year's leaf has a very strong stem, incredibly strong, and it's shredded by winter winds, freeze-thaw, winnowed to bare fiber. Right next to its attachment point, another bud, this year's branch or leaf. I can see what's happening but it doesn't answer my question. Why? There must be a fall-back position, where last year's bud, if it had to, could sprout again. In the growth form they are linked, I'll cover your ass if you'll cover mine. After Drew left, last night, I remembered the Santayana quote:"Fanaticism is described as redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim." Life is a mine field, architectural cliches seem to say something. Public policy. Be careful what you believe. I'm, at best, a tainted source; all the sources I've examined closely are tainted, memory is a slippery slope. Was that just yesterday? The horse you came in on. I thought what you thought was one thing, but might be another. I wondered what we were talking about. I'd held back one loin of the woodchuck, in a marinade of red wine and herbs, seared it quickly on a very hot grill. Very good, and Dog seems pleased with her body parts, bones and all, stewed in chicken broth. Mississippi John Hurt, many fish bite if you've got good bait. My baby's going fishing too. Slack delta guitar. Yes, I'm going fishing too. Read more...