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.