Tomatoes

I bought a few tomatoes at the farmer's market, then the afternoon receptionist gave me a bag from her husband, then I got home last night, after a beer at the pub, and B had left a bag hanging from the back door. I eat a perfect specimen, with salt, standing over the sink, juice everywhere, then get out the crock pot, nothing for it but to make a sauce. Par-boil and slip off the skins, roast some peppers and flay them, add some garlic, some salt and black pepper, a goodly squirt of balsamic vinegar, the remains of a white wine I'd only bought because it was cheap and I needed to deglaze a skillet. I don't normally make a tomato sauce, too acidic, but I temper this with some maple syrup, some cumin, a few drops of the hottest brew in the known universe. It'll keep in the fridge, maybe I'll make some very small spicy meat balls from the squirrels I found in my mail box. Life is too strange. Nothing is what it seems. A nice guy comes by, Phil, from Columbia, NYC, and he wants to know what I think about the area. I'm hesitant to say, what I think, because I withhold knowledge, I secret knowledge. That, out there, is another thing. Anyway, he is also a writer of creative non-fiction. He's interested in the local profusion of pain clinics and the abuse of prescription medication; he's also interested in the area. On his way to Chicago, to interview a pain doctor, and I tell him to look me up, when he comes back through, that I'll take him on a tour of the county and feed him dinner. D tells him I'm a good cook, and that I don't serve roadkill without warning. Rummaging through the accumulating stuff for the fund-raiser auction, I find a Coca-Cola cookbook, a serious effort, not a joke, and I read through it with morbid fascination. Might actually try a couple of the recipes, the one for crab bisque sounds interesting (substitutes Sprite (a Coke product) for Coca-Cola). Coca-Cola is quite good for getting dead bugs off your windshield. Handing out artwork, chatting with the artists, and every one of them mentions the installation, what good light it put their work in. I tend to laugh off compliments, knowing what I do well and needing little confirmation. Still, it's nice to hear kind words about something I've done. To a degree, we're all so vain. The geese have taken over the beach at the swimming area of the lake, they hunker down, like fat sergeants over machine guns, tender young sentries I'd kill for; the beach is covered with gooseshit and slick as an ice-pond. I make a simple tomato soup, cook a few tomatoes, run it through a sieve, add some herbs; grate a couple of different cheeses for a grilled sandwich, good enough. For two months of cold and two months of heat, good enough is adequate. I'm not a needy person, don't care if my socks are mismatched. Fuck a bunch of political correctness. I can only tie a tie correctly because there was a course at Janitor College, a required course, because they assumed at that level, post MFA, everyone needed a tie, remember who taught you how to tie that knot. Halliards, darling, we've scarcely begun. Not a single rope is called a rope, all of them have a name. I could never be a sailor. I breezed into college on a land grant scholarship, they needed me more than I needed them, I represented the real world, whatever that was. Either the phone or electric has been out all the time, then, today, a huge thunder storm, and the power must have been out for hours, again, but everything operational when I get home. The driveway is a disaster. The two tracks are scoured down to fist sized rocks and the ride is similar to driving on railroad tracks. It's hard to hold a line. Still, I'm so happy to get home every evening, that I'm thrilled to able to drive it at all. Little mercies. This morning I made a small pot of butter beans, a cubed ham steak, diced onion, red bell pepper, in the crock pot, and it was waiting for me. Bought some prepared cornbread, as I'm certainly not going to fire the cookstove in this weather, toast a split piece and top it with butter and a fairly hot pepper jam. An excellent meal and one that I'll duplicate exactly tomorrow. Signed up to work Saturday, as no one else had, and the museum pays for the air-conditioning. Not a bad deal when the heat index is 110. Hotter than the shades of hell. When it gets really hot (the interior deep south, the lower mid-west) conversation often becomes ritualized exchanges of proverbial wisdom, because it's actually difficult to think an original thought. Some of the best of the local artists in today, to pick up work, and it was nice to talk with Margaret and Dennis, Vernon, Todd, people who still produce actual work, and not virtual crap. Not just the heat, extreme cold too, generates that lapse into colloquialism: colder than a witch's tit, colder than the balls on a brass monkey. Maybe it's just a survival thing, thinking requires attention, and at the various edges there's no attention left for vacuous conversation. Google 'Bach Facsimile Editions' and you can see his hand; Mac sent me that, I knew someone would. My dial-up connection is so slow I miss almost everything, so I depend on the charity of others. Bach's second wife, Mary Magdalen, copied most of his scores, the only copy of the Cello Suites is her's. Imagine that. The only copy of certain Sappho poems is from an Egyptian burial shroud. The actual text is always a mystery. What someone meant. I view text as a field, make what sense when I can, and slink away, into the shadows. Opinion, that three leather acronym, CIA, FBI, I've learned to be discrete.