What?

Hot days blur in succession. I did some things, but I don't remember what they were. A little of this and that. The truck runs well and isn't overheating, something to be said for that in this weather. The green has begun it's mid-summer wilt and the bugs are beginning to take their toll. Old Charlie, who I apprenticed with, as a letterpress printer, and his wonderful witch of a wife, Margie, had found the perfect spot to winter, at 5,000 feet in Guatemala; where the temps were always between 65 and 75%. The distillery was just down the street and you took your own jug to be refilled; they had what would probably be called a drinking problem but what was actually just a compromise. We all make them. If you live alone you make less, but you still make some. I compromise when I go to work in the morning, when I have a dog that needs feeding, a fire I need to stoke. Cleaning the basement hallway at the museum. We still take on a little water when the storm drains are overwhelmed, and a sand plus various soaps and solvents is left as a layer, a stratum, on the floor. It's cement-like, when it dries. The hall is probably 6 feet wide and 50 feet long. D and I, years ago, had removed the broken tile, cleaned the concrete, and painted it with a floor enamel I've used to paint boats. A decent surface. After the seasonal floods, first thing you do is scrape the surface with a plastic putty knife, then with a mop bucket of clear water, you wet the entire surface, which smears everything terribly, but you've removed another layer of fines and now the surface begins to become cleanable. Four moppings by the end of the day today, and another tomorrow should finish the job. I'll have this hall clean. I'm sore, I haven't been doing enough mopping and I didn't have the snap in my shoulders that the modified chevron requires. My old teachers would rag me about this, I can hear them in my head, but they're all dead, and it's too hot to be sentimental. I may be ready to move, when I notice I have to put a good red wine in the fridge for 20 minutes to bring it down to room temperature. I don't suffer to make a point. Then what? Why am I here? If I was a little more comfortable I might finish two or three more books in the time remaining. I'd like to read the Janitor College book, because I always supposed I was serious and had never imagined myself as a kind of Thurber want-a-be. Thoreau and dear sweet Emily walking off into the pines. Makes perfect sense to me. They could leave Emerson to answer the phone. What he said is another book. Phone and electricity out in equal measure, so I haven't SENT in a couple of days, and managed to lose another page to the vagaries of isolated storm cells. There's a ridge-top breeze, and I'm hyper-aware of it, the smell and feel of it, big Royal Pawlonia leaves, flapping in the wind; I'm cheap and easy, if B can salvage a life from this, more power to him. I'd move to Arkansas and open a business selling concrete yard ornaments. Making moonshine in Mississippi, free-ranging sheep in Colorado, whatever. Really, I don't want to be bothered. A cheap hotel room in Kansas would be fine, as long as I had a few dictionaries and a diner that served breakfast 24 hours. Nothing means very much to me, consequently I notice what matters to others, looking for meaning.