Corrupted Materials

A great deal of scientifically worthless material was duplicated in the first century of print. Corrupted copies penned by scribes who didn't know the language, spurious crap to begin with, lousy translations, you can imagine. Took a while to sort things out. A cooler day, and I work outside, cutting brush, and hour on, and hour off; during the off hours, I start plowing through the second half of "The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change", which I had expected to be quite boring but actually is very interesting. Mid-afternoon I need to clean up. I'd put several gallons of water in a dark blue canning kettle out on the front deck, to heat in the sun, and it's a perfect lukewarm; strip out of sweaty clothes, drench myself, soap down and shampoo my hair, rinse, come inside to dry under a ceiling fan. Read an article online about pre-historic art that pushes fired ceramics (not pots, as I would have suspected, but small animal fetishes) and some of them, bracelets predominately, were imprinted, before firing, with textiles. So they were firing pots and weaving, and this was 26,000 years ago, at Dolni Vestonice, in what is now the Czech Republic. This is 15,000 years before the first agricultural societies. I don't believe everything I read, but I'm becoming familiar with the drift of study on pre-historic art, so I have a sense of relevance, what figures where, within what context, and I'm coming around to the point of view that's it not so much corrupted material as it is a corrupted interpretation of what's being done with that material. When I think about the Romans, and I almost understand their language, all I can think about is concrete. What I think of is viaducts and arches. Critical mass is a relative thing. Depends on what you think you're using. Doing. Deposit. Deems worthy of something. Keep your head down, wear a scar. I don't know anything much beyond actual description. At Janitor College, it's what we were taught, sinks, toilets, it's all drainage. I carry the algorithm in my head, a quarter inch per-foot carries shit downhill, over a ten-foot span. Pace it off, do the math. The combined arts suck, because everyone else is always late. I like working alone because I'm always early, gives me a chance to figure out where I am, and what the odds are. I'm not a betting man, but I wager everything, all the time. Small chance to pay.