Cooler

End of September, the edge is off. Thoughts turn toward firewood, walking sticks, and the condition of my crampons. There are things I must do. The yearly battle with my reading habits. I read so much of the time it's almost shocking. Over the three-day weekend I'll read for 20 hours. I need to cut that back about half for four weeks, then I'd be good to go. But then today, at the library, there was the new Carl Hiaason, which will be an idiotic delight, and a book I had ordered on inter-library loan about cave-paintings. I have a new phone with a functioning '9' which will undoubtedly increase my phone bill. $11 at K-Mart, I can't believe I've gone for months without being able to call anyone with a 9 in their number. I immediately place some calls, but no one is home; at least I can now, so I'll call Mom next Saturday or Sunday, touch base with the daughters, be able to call Pegi and tell her I can't make it to work. 75% of my time off is weather related. Look to the larder, I need winter food supplies, canned goods and beans and rice. I'm going to use the crock-pot a lot this coming winter, to make soups and stews. Risotto doesn't fry well, but I heat it through and have a portion on toast. I need some salt-pork in the freezer. I need to eat bacon, not only for the smell, but to accumulate some grease. No way you'd venture above the beaver ponds to fish for cut-throat trout, above12.000 feet, in May. Everyone calls you back. I save a fortune in long distance calls. Read more...

Risotto

The driveway, after 24 hours of rain, seems delicate and slightly dangerous. I decide to take the day off. Can't call the museum because the "9" is dead on my phone, but I figure they'll call me (Pegi does, after lunch). Mid-morning I rummage around and discover enough ingredients to make a decent risotto. A package of snow peas in the freezer, a can of shiitake mushrooms, plenty of cheese, a stick of butter, chicken stock, some arborio rice, an onion, olive oil. Actually I substitute walnut oil for the olive oil. Follow any recipe, I didn't use one and didn't pay much attention. I've made a lot of these, it's easy, just takes a lot of time. I did pay attention to the needs of the pot, of course, but I mean I didn't measure anything. Finished it with ample cheese and butter. Added some acorn meal with the first liquid to the pot. Excellent and very filling meal. A big shallow bowl of this, and a piece of bread, lots of black pepper. I opened the good zin Glenn and Linda brought on the last visit, a Ridge. As good as life gets. Plowing through Umberto Eco's "Kant And The Platypus", which, I swear, has taken me five years to finish. Dozens of passages marked with my little pencil dots and corresponding page numbers on bookmarks, AND pages of notes by B, as we had passed this book around for years. It is finished, but I'll leave it out for an extra year just in case. I moved the pile of books off the sofa, because they were putting a serious dent in the sofa cushion, and got them all the way to the dining room table. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I need a convenient bookshelf for books that I'm not ready to shelve. Books I'm referring to day to day. I let the tool-chest coffee table thing get of control. There's a space to put said shelf, if I throw away some junk, so I think I will. I'll take Trivial Pursuit (the girls and I took the question cards on road trips) and the aquarium Samara raised funny frogs in, to the Goodwill. There's a way I can simply block off the upstairs, with a couple of pieces of dense foam, and convert the downstairs studio/store-room into a bedroom. Added perk is I could get shed of stuff. Shit accumulates. I need to do this, work on creature comforts, last winter was too hard. My friends were worried, and, frankly, so was I. Too close to the edge. Many times I didn't know if the cornice would support me. You hang five or ten and hope for the best. It's a rogue phenomenon, you do a couple of nice turns, because there's power in this wave, then you merely try to stay afloat. Grab any floating anything. And you're good, because of what, exactly? An edge honed by repetition. First thing I'd do is investigate his dirty diary. We'd need a secret handshake. Read more...

The Season

Wind and bird-shit. You sit in one place long enough. I start a small fire to leech some nuts while I crawl under my house. Never underestimate the janitor. Rule One. I listened to the cello suites, Rostropovich, over the course of a rainy day, rereading sections of the excellent book by Eric Siblin on the suites. There's a transcription of the 5th suite in Bach's hand (called the most beautiful flowing hand in music) for the lute. We actually don't know which was first. Change the water on the acorns. The yellow ones don't seem as bitter. Anthony and I were having a beer the other day and there was an ad on the bar TV for the USPO Flat Rate Boxes. I recounted that Joel had sent grits and corn meal in one. Anthony immediately thought about things you could ship. He thought we should cast a block of lead the size of the box. I still have the one Joel sent and measure it, do the math. Cast lead specific gravity is 11.55, a cubic foot would weigh 708 pounds. The box would hold a piece almost exactly a third of a foot, so a 236 pound block. I don't think they'd take it. I heard the lute version (Sylvius Weiss) and it is amazingly lush compared to the spare 5th suite, especially as the final suite is so ecstatic, so glorious. But I love the 5th too, because it always reminds me of change-ringing. I decide to put some books away and it leads to the usual mess of getting more books out than I actually put away, leading to a net gain in clutter and a day in which I manage to read for eight hours. Hey, it's raining. I only go outside to pee and then feed the dog. She's very confused about being a mother. Raising hundreds of pigs, I never had a confused mother, but the two or three times I've been around a first-time dog mother, they've been too inbred or something, they just don't get it. I spend half-an-hour in the dirt explaining nursing techniques. I think Little Sister gets it, but I'm not sure. Raining hard, I may miss a day of work because of bad driveway, though I could probably get down in four-wheel low. I choose to not use four-wheel low, except in emergencies, you need to draw the line somewhere. I can always reread "As I Lay Dying" or one of those gothic early McCarthy's. I need to cook something I can eat for the rest of the week. Essentially, I blew off the entire day thinking about the difference between the 5th and 6th Cello Suites. A straight line journey. From the inside. Read more...

Fall Walk

Susurration, the wind in drying leaves. A cool breeze that trembles everything in sight. The dog stayed home, sleeping under the back porch, and it's peaceful, walking alone, slowly, without her frantic antics. There are so many acorns that the footing is awkward, and I collect a shopping bag full of just plump yellow ones, wondering how they might be different from an earlier batch. Three crows in the graveyard, not a symbol, but merely three crows. Extrinsic, by which I mean originating from the outside, not the secondary definition, which I find confusing, which is 'extraneous'. Over a ridge-top, beyond the graveyard, I walk down through a hollow that is remarkably clear of underbrush. The mature oaks and hickories in this specific area, maybe twenty acres, haven't been cut for a long time, by human standards, in fact a long human lifetime, maybe 80 years. They've canopied and not much light hits the ground during the growing season so there are no brambles. I make a note to come back in winter, if I can remember where it is. I was slightly lost, a state I encourage, and often seek when something's on my mind. I do this so much, I usually don't even know what's on my mind, nor, particularly, care. Stumbling and cutting my way through briars, my mind is much more present in the cuts and blood-letting of the moment. Walking in a clear glade, a park, as they say out west, is a different kettle of fish. A cross between all-mind and no-mind. The American Zen state. There's an old rotted stump, that I marvel is actually chestnut and must be a hundred years old. Sit there and roll a smoke, clear the leaves and litter with my feet for a safe place to drop my ash. Across the hollow, there's a ledge of sandstone, with a cave-like alcove beneath, and after a ten minute, two-smoke break, I walk down, then back up, to investigate. A well-used site. Everything up and down the food-chain has lived there, pack-rats and squirrels to a recent use as a hunting stand. It's cosy, and with the right rug and wallpaper, would make a decent hideout. If I could only find it again. The close examination of even a small area is a long term pursuit. I lived on 120 acres in Mississippi and never saw it all, in ten years of study. The clock is ticking, right? The damnest thing, though I'm not shocked, Little Sister seems to have whelped a pup under the house. I noticed her dugs were dragging and that fucking smug killer Rot hovering on the fringe, so I'm not shocked, but Jesus, I'm not ready for another family. On the other hand, this could be a hell of a pup, so I pour milk on Little Sister's kibble. Make a note, the doggy birth-control didn't work, I'm now burdened with a family of killers. Me and Michael Vick, I feel his pain. Little Sister is not being a good mother, and I have to do some things I'm not proud of, crawl under the house and get very dirty. Camus was right. It's just not worth it. You find yourself, under a cabin, trying to jack-up a corner, so the place is stable, and you realize you could die there, buried in the rubble of whatever, a mere statistic. You know what I mine. Read more...

Common Fulcra

When rowing a boat, is the fulcrum the oar lock or the water? Logistics discussion with D today, plans need to be made well in advance when the publicity is already out. Many things happening from the end of October to the middle of November. Change-outs in the two main galleries, two shows going out, two shows coming in, the major fund-raiser of the year, a residency, a wine event. One of the shows, Litchfield's altered furniture (funny stuff, and perfect, because the "Alice" show will be downstairs, front and center) but it is 3D, and both Sara and D called it a 'plop show', because you just bring the stuff in and plop it down. All the county art teachers are in the basement classroom most of the day, with Sharee, the administrator, doing something they call an 'in-service', meaning, I think, they compare notes. A couple of talks, one by Anthony that I took some flex-time off, so as to listen to and perhaps to heckle. I had a kazoo. But he was coherent, lucid and transparent. It was power-point presentation, and I finally saw images of some of the things I had heard about. Frankly, he's a janitor's nightmare, but I love him anyway. I have a sense that we might work together in the future. We think somewhat alike, though the janitor in me cringes at melting un-fired pots on the gallery floor. Installation Artists have to understand, the janitor is your friend, buy him a beer. Give him a Ridge Zin at Christmas and admire his mopping pattern, it's no skin off your teeth. If you keep the janitor happy, you can get away with murder. I have a plethora of food, people keep giving me things, and I had ordered a ten pound box of salted cod, which came in, so I'll being doing cod-cakes, with a basted egg, for the foreseeable future. You'll get bored with this, I can't imagine why you don't get bored with the whole construct. There's the occasional absent-minded professional person that sets his pocket on fire with a lit pipe, but they are far and few between. I think of myself as incredibly mundane. I bare hard on the oar, going into a rapid, because I want the bow pointed just so. Other than that, I don't do much. I pull the punts every year, and give them a coat of bottom paint, check the stove-pipe, this year I'm doing a connection up-grade, screwing the connections together. There's always room for improvement. Unless you're really arrogant. I keep a low profile and identify with nothing. When people I know act out, I keep my hands behind my back and say as little as possible. Sarcasm is so easy. I have to go. I might have a phone line, after a day of heavy winds, trees falling everywhere. But I am probably isolated again, by acts of nature. I was, the phone was out and I couldn't SEND anyway. Today I covered for D at the museum, went to town early and did my laundry, then opened the facilities and read Jim Harrison all day, a novel I'd missed from 2007, "Returning To Earth". I love Harrison, he's brilliant and funny. He knows his terrain, and the smallest details ring true. People actually eat in his novels, shit and die. Sara comes in for a few hours, and cleans her office, throwing away maybe 50 lbs. of accumulated papers, catalogs of exhibits, the detritus of being on a great many mailing lists. She leaves before I close up, and Anthony comes over from the college, we go over for a Harp on tap. There's a new waitress, Jordan, and she's unbelievably lovely. I'll stick to my guns that conversation is the most important thing, but she almost changes my mind. Beauty is a terrible thing, the way it wrenches us. That's what I'm talking about. Anthony made a point about performance art, I was glad to see him squirm, because I don't know either. Him or it. What is what. I don't know anything about modern culture because I live in the woods, without running water, a thermostat, or a television. I miss so much I'm a joke, I don't even have caller ID, because my connection is so tenuous. Yes, I'm serious about moving; I could move to town and stay at the museum, or I could sell my place and move to Arkansas, Missouri, or some fucking island in the South Pacific. It's all pretty much the same. Read more...

Thumbnails

Looking at the calendar, I tell D that the next show is a piece of cake. I can hang "Alice" by myself in a day. The show after that is more difficult. Thomas Hart Benton and various other post-modern pieces under glass in heavy frames, anchors in the wall and extreme patience, white cotton gloves, and that care you take with dead presidents. It'll be interesting. The times are changing. The new director burrowed into my back today and hummed, there wasn't anything specific but she needed a post to lean on. I thought I stank, slightly, and she thought I smelled good. I wonder about that. I pretty much smell what I smell like. The various peeps re-infuse my claim. Small pictures don't always convey enough information. Spend an hour going over the calendar, so I don't get blind-sided by something. Confused by a couple of things. "Alice" has to open a week earlier than scheduled, because something else got scheduled incorrectly, looks like to me. Not really a problem unless the delivery date is delayed. Looked at thumbnails for the Mid-Western Post Impressionist show and wish they had included sizes. Hid out in the basement, sorting hardware. I schedule a full bath out on the deck for this coming weekend. Felt the need to schedule something. Covering for D on Saturday will give me a chance to do laundry. Buy Anthony a beer after work, and we discuss a myriad of things artful and otherwise. He's going back to the studio to trim some pots; I head home, up the creek. A lot of fall weeds blossom white, adumbrating winter. I'm ready to be done with this, which would make one more winter a kind of treat: I could burn most of what I wouldn't take to a smaller place. The rest of it, I'll hire Booby to dig a pit, and when the move is done, I'll hire him to come back and cover the midden. Least I could do. The next owners would get not only a graveyard, but a midden. I look at my bottle, and the projected abuse, decide to stay up and think about things. Fucking acorns probably contribute to that point of view. Who could sleep with a military barrage in the back yard? Normally I sleep like a rock, but this season is all about acorns. I gather maybe twenty pounds between where I usually park, and my house, I wear a football helmet whenever I'm outside. God-damn nuts. Read more...

Target Quip

Sorry, my private language. The Target of Evil is the woodshed roof, un-insulated galvy metal, and the acorns really do sound like gunshots. Not getting a lot of sleep. Up in time to wash my hair, shave, and still get to town early enough to slip over to Kentucky and buy some tobacco. On my ride down the creek, the first Pileated Woodpecker of the next season (I don't know where they go in summer, Aruba?) which actually hadn't started yet, but close. Half-way down the creek there's a several generational enclave, a couple of cabins, a couple of trailers, a big wood-pile because they sell firewood. They have a kitchen garden up on their high ground, but they also have a narrow strip of bottom land, down hard against the road. In places the bottom is non-existent, just a creek and hills, a winding road. They always plant the bottom in potatoes, a lot of potatoes, five or six 75 foot rows (that's hundreds of pounds of potatoes) and they had finished harvesting, but the weeds had grown like lightning, so they had to mow it (yesterday) and then, this morning when I drove by, I saw something I had never seen before. They were plowing the field, using an old usually mule drawn plow, a single-bottom turning plow; I've used one of these and they are not easy to operate. You've got a hand on each of the handles, and you're trying to furrow a straight row, the reigns are over your neck, and the mule actually understands Gee for left and Haw for right, or the other way around. With some practice you can actually get fairly good at this. These guys, there were two guys, were using an ancient four-wheel pick-up to pull the plow. In this case you've got your plower and your driver. I feel like I've seen something out of Dante. Someplace, in the circles of hell, you plow a furrow, breathing exhaust. But maybe that's no worse than water-buffalo farts. The image of these two guys getting the potato patch ready for next year, doesn't leave me all day. It's beautiful and very sad, though the 'very sad' is an intellectual construct. I was telling the story about how my 8N Ford tractor got painted purple to Sara, and about how manufactures guarded their colors closely: Rip, in Duck Hill, painted my tractor with mixed left-overs, it ended up purple. I didn't care, but people drove from miles around to see the purple 8N, which should have been gray and red. Fuck a bunch of preconceptions. If I had enough time, I'd paint a tractor pink. Leave it as a marker. You wouldn't have to know that construct was done by me, or even that it was done, merely that it existed. An outcrop. Read more...

Atypical Paraphilia

Lovely drive out this morning, thinning leaves, slanted light, some fall color. I stopped at the sandstone place, bedrock exposure, looking for trilobites, and the State Cop who lives in a recreational trailer on Rt.52 pulled over to see what I was doing. I showed him a nearly perfect fossil and he was amazed. Gave him the five minute tutorial on how to see them. He allowed as how my duct-taped right front turn signal could use a new round of duct-tape. Told him I'd get on it when I got to the museum. Oh, he said, you're that writer guy that works at the museum. I have no anonymity. He knew where I lived. Shouldn't be surprised, D very nearly found my house on Google Earth. Only saved because my green metal roof sinks right into the forest; he did find the driveway. Sara had three Carter's reframed, two prints (need to find out who he worked with, the prints are exquisite) and a very nice water color, "Lone Pine". I hang the prints in the back Carter gallery on a virgin wall; the Egg Room, we call it, because Carter's big fiberglass egg is there. White egg in a black box, lit from below. The egg needs repainting, and that takes us into muddied water. If we repaint the egg, it isn't the same egg. It would then be the re-painted egg that Carter had done. I have some problems with that, but I'm a salaried employee, and will paint white whatever I'm pointed at. I even agree not to tell. I'd sign a contract. You and your silly lawyers could draw up a page, and I'd sign. I pay no attention to anything. You, and the Target of Evil. Read more...

Leaf Fall

Maybe 20%of the leaves are down. Acorns are driving me crazy. I can see more sky. Acorn gunshots go off in volleys. Big Roy and I were smoking meat and grilling at his place in Little Babylon (across the tracks in Duck Hill), under a big white oak tree. The nuts were falling all around us. In Mississippi things moved slowly. We'd been drinking a very good moonshine. Roy had a great smokehouse, the fire was outside, in a pit, and the smoke got to the floor of the smokehouse through a ceramic pipe. This is long, slow smoking, and it didn't require a lot of attention, we were grilling ribs and brisket for a wedding party. The smokehouse looked a lot like an outhouse on fire. I asked if we shouldn't maybe move the grill out into the open. What, he said, you're afraid of getting hit? Yes, I said, these things are half the size of golf-balls and could kill you. We moved the grill, but he chuckled at me all afternoon, about how I didn't have faith. I don't really have any. Faith is an intellectual construct, where it's not a mindless que. And holds moderate interest for me, as a way that people pick lifestyles. I don't know why I ended the way I did. It's a curious thing. Barry Lopez and Cormac McCarthy. Fucking Faulkner, man, he turned my head around. The way a story could be told. Four people on their way to a burying ground. Why you do the things you do. Ubiquitous. The bugs at night. A solid field. The ground seems to fade away. Solar flares interrupt radio reception. Caught between solar flares and acorns. Would you come to me and ease my pain? Robert Plant singing Townes Van Zant. Then a lovely female voice, over the top, like a waterfall. A slack guitar, sounding like Dwayne Allman. I don't understand the language, but the music is loud and clear. West African? Court Yard Hounds? Music has a way of cutting through. When I'm confused I listen to Bach, slow down, eat a scone, keep it clean. Chet Adkins, Bill Evans, and my blood starts to circulate. Crossing borders. It's always the blues, that draws me back. Whatever I'm considering. You know? Read more...

Mast

Flakes scattered from a previous culture. Find an outcrop of shapeable stone and there's always the tell-tale evidence of someone having been there before. Temporal reminders. Reading Hesiod, then an obscure Anglo-Saxon text, a gnomic poem that seems as relevant today as it ever could have been. Leaves are changing color and falling. The sumac is spectacular, green and orange, and red seed heads. Clip my way out to the graveyard, first time in months, wearing a hard-hat against the acorns. An odd sense of displacement. Linda, yesterday, was much enamored of my staircase, and I tried to explain the concept of letting the materials speak. Mostly I was incoherent. The finish on the dogwood railing is just the oil from my palms, nothing special. I'll probably not build another set of stairs, as there isn't anywhere to go. That's arrogant, but what I mean is that I can't take the idea of stairs any further, someone else can, leave it to them. Leave all of it to them. I gather a couple of pounds of acorns, shell them, break then into large pieces and put them on to soak; tomorrow I'll make a pot of grits-and-acorns to last the week, breakfast of champions. I don't compete for anyone's favor, I can't muster the steam. The most I can do is put on a pot of acorns to soak. I listen to Bach, "Saint Matthew's Passion", walk to the heart of Low Gap Hollow and get a drink from the spring there, cold and refreshing. Too much vibrato, I can't listen to country music. Too much hair and painted eyebrows. This I know, I miss faces without any make-up, I'd rather the wrinkles of misfortune than the paste of stage make-up. Feels like time for wasting. The here and now. Julie Adams sounds like an angel, an accordion in the background. A talking guitar that sounds like Garcia or Greg Allman. Merry Christmas. There isn't anything stopping it now, rock around the clock. The Hudson river line. Got a reservation on the Hudson River line. Wild thing. I want to know for sure. You make my heart sing. Weary angel. No shame in what I end up being. A recluse listening to acorns on a hot tin roof. Not Bach, but a country yodel, strangely similar. Say one thing and mean another. Mountain top removal seems like a good thing, because it employs people; but It's bad, because it clogs the drainage. Read more...

Conversation

Liza and Linda out for a couple of hours. Nice conversation. Linda is quite lovely, several times I forgot to breathe. The acorn fall continues, a hail of them just broke my concentration. Right, they were, the ladies, getting some background on alternative lifestyle in Appalachia. I seem to fit that bill. Plus I'm coherent, for the most part. Talked about physical and sexual abuse, talked about trailer life, prescription drug addiction. A goodly list of serious topics in rural America today. It's rough, in the boonies, nobody has a job and the poor steal from the poor. Both of them thought acorns were poisonous. Linda thought I should write a book/cookbook about acorns. I never explained, and they never asked, what the 35 gallon Rubbermaid Roughneck trash can was doing at the front middle of the house, in front of a set of patio doors. It's dark blue and contains my back-up supply of water. I collect it from the roof. It's very soft, I use it for washing my hair and the dishes, so I don't have to use a lot of soap, so things are easier to rinse. I'm a fucking water nut, when it comes right down to it. Rinsing uses much more water than washing. I've made a study of this, let it be said, in these few lines, I know whereof I speak. Moving toward rinsing as a fine art. I don't have an MFA and absolutely no qualification to say a damned thing, under educated, and probably the next to the last writer that might be plowing a furrow with an actual plow. There was torrid sex. Beans on toast. Nothing is what you remembered. What I replied seem to care. It could have been a good night for me. Astra danced circles. I reply in a language I don't understand. That's just the beginning of my problem. Misunderstanding. Then you cross that bridge into meaning. And you attempt to make sense. Screw you securely to the floor, I missed the first part of that. Where they screwed you to the floor. You mean nothing, you and what I said. Hey. Come undone. John Hartford. The American song book. Drowning in tradition. Rowena. Sleep on. I think I left the kitchen light on. Plenty of food on the back seat. Listening to music on the radio. Smoke 'em if you've got 'em. If you make a mistake, in the bottomless lake, you'll never see your sweetheart again. She rides the wild horse. The Joker. She gets close some times, and in those moments, you feel something stir, down home fiddle music, Bach in hill country. The hand of God. Don't you cry for me. Oh Rowena, don't you cry for me. It was dark and nothing was sacred. I need a long sentence, dripping blues. Insert that here. Close to heaven, a guitar riff, maybe some drums, brushing the cymbals, the standing bass keeps the beat. I could drown in this. I ain't no beauty queen. But something plays in my head. The vision of you by my side. That's wrong, I know, nothing behind me, but I really want you there. A hurricane. We'd seek shelter in a tree-tip-pit. Black sky.

Tom

I'm going to Carolina in my mind. Willie Nelson going back to Texas. That's where I belong. No, stop the music, I need to sleep. I don't know where I'm going, there's no way of knowing, but I'm on my way.
noting Read more...

Nepenthe

Forget which way my head is screwed on. Got hit by an acorn, right on top of the head, it had never happened to me before, and hurt like hell. Raised a lump. Liza, one of my favorite people, a film maker, is in town, with the lead in her next film, and they invited themselves out for coffee tomorrow. Thinking about remembering, Liza was last here, I think, in the fall of last year, and we had a great ladies-from-town sleepover. I don't remember what I fixed for dinner. Anyway, D was out just one time, bringing me the window AC unit and figuring out the mounting bracket, and now Liza is back, it's almost fall again, and that is the total visitation for the year. It's not that I'm unpopular, so much as that I'm difficult of access, I think. I put a few things away, because I know people are coming, but I can't really disguise who I am, a quite slovenly recluse with a lot of books. Instead of a closet, I use laundry baskets to sort my clothes, everything is wrinkled, it's my motif, I'm known for my wrinkles. When I visit anyone, decreasingly, I use a laundry basket rather than a suitcase. Dirty clothes go into a plastic shopping bag and we don't have the 'sock' problem. Gorganzola on a stick. I mean, come on, a dead skunk is sometimes just a dead skunk. Not a metaphor for something we don't want to think about, but the rotten eggs of a really sour fart, something completely smellable. Everything is relative. I worked with Beverly Sills on her last "Traviata", held book on Hume and Jessica going in Off-Broadway with"The Gin Game", it's a shooting match. Damned if you do, and damned if you don't. The problem with working with good people is that the bar is set higher. I resist this because I'm lazy, I'd rather do nothing. Sit on my ass and figure why they'd used that type face. What were they thinking? Baked beans on toast. I'm becoming British. Awfully convenient, though, when it's blowing a gale, and you have to keep one hand on the tiller. I will never again climb anything higher than a mole hill. There is no reason to see more than twelve miles ahead, which is what you see at sea level. The curvature of the earth, if you're sitting in a crow's nest. Higher is certainly better if you're looking to extend your view. I look down, mostly, tadpoles and inflatable geese, what is above remains above, something I seldom notice. Even acorns falling is something I could readily forget, but they are so insistent. And so irregular in time. Post-modern for sure, maybe even beyond that, but I don't keep track. I'm a Structuralist, really, I tend to make something out of nothing. I can SEND this now that I have both power and a phone. Read more...

Rehanging Carter

Knew this was coming. We're loaning a couple of Carter paintings to hang in the Ohio Supreme Court building and that means one very big hole a section that Sara had based on paintings that featured the river, and the largest (a lovely thing, "Around The Bend", a riverboat scene, viewed from inside the wheelhouse). It's a complex geometry, but knowing Sara, realizing the largest and 'anchor' painting for this grouping was going away, I knew the section would need re-hanging. Also gives me a chance to paint some walls. The timing is good, because I have the time to do this now, and I was driving myself crazy cleaning corners. Some walls to paint, some paintings to hang, sounds good. There's a mistake in the hanging of one watercolor, in another section, that I can correct when I have my job-box up there. I worked at little things all day and still ended up with more things on the list than when I'd started. I was mopping in the main gallery and an old geezer came in, stood there, watching me mop for a few minutes. He said, you're using the Modified Chevron, and I said yes sir; he said, how old are you son? and I said 64 recently. He said that stroke takes too much wrist, in a couple of years, you'll be using the Straight Clapboard. Janitors are a breed, I love them, us, we have a demeanor, a way of being, a zen thing, I think, that allows us to be invisible. I like to docent with a mop in my hands. When I go to other museums, I seek out the janitors, we exchange greetings and the secret hand-shake, retire to the basement for a cold beer. They always have great calendars. Where do they find those girls?The '"Snap-On-Tools" calendar is a piece of work. The acorns are dropping at such a rate, it is a mast year, and I need to investigate that. Why this year? The wood-shed is killing me, a young war. Fucking acorns on a hot tin roof .But when they are yellow, the sugars have partially converted, two changes of water and I have a mess: a bumper crop. In the evening breeze they fall like an infantry barrage, several per minute. I'm afraid they'll rot. I have them drying on every flat surface. I'm awash in acorns. It's illegal to fight chickens, but it's not illegal to raise fighting chickens. This fact was driven home on my drive up the creek this afternoon; there's a guy, I don't know his name, two miles up the creek from the Ohio, who raises these torrid small game-cocks: they attack my truck. Mean birds with an attitude. I can't even imagine living amongst them. Malaysian death birds, Indian Blue Cocks that attack full-grown goats. We're talking bad birds here. Scarification. It's ok to raise the birds, but not to fight them. I have a particular bird, a demon, and she rakes the field, what do I do with her? I've raised too many issues. I need to go to bed. Read more...

Forgot

What I meant to say. It was an entirely different thing. I got side-tracked before I started. There were a bunch of imported, dried mushrooms, Porcini, great mushrooms, I've used then to make risotto before and love the texture and the taste. This was at Kroger. There were like a dozen packages and they were priced at $1.99. Should have been $11.99 probably. I bought them all. My winter's supply of dried mushrooms. I reconstitute a batch tonight, fried them in butter, then caramelized an onion. Saved some of the mushroom water, added it to the skillet, after cooking the onions and mushrooms in the same skillet, reduced to thicken, piled it all on a thick slab (oh trencher) of toast. I recommend this meal. I ate both halves of a smallish avocado with it. It was so simple, and so good. There's a 10 pound box of French farm-raised frog legs in the frozen food case they reserve for oddities. I often find things there, sweetbreads, other body parts of various animals. It's $20 but it would be my winter's supply of frog legs. We all have our priorities. I sorted hardware today, thinking about hanging the next two shows, all wall, 2D stuff, I need to gear for that. And I need to get serious about firewood. I have another winter here, no matter what I decide. But, I could do a winter in a goose suit. I could, actually, burn the chairs, so there was less stuff to move, burn everything but my desk, I'm not even attached to my desk, really. Drawers are a dime a dozen. I almost remembered what I had forgotten earlier, but then I forget it again. Fucking reality is starting to sink in, whatever you're thinking doesn't lift you from the morass, those French guys were right, correct, it's an uphill battle and then you die. I'd love to believe in something, but it isn't happening for me. The believability quotient is low. You and your insidious inroads. Read more...

After Opening

Always happens that lots of things get taken to the basement without sorting, last minute on opening day. Also, after a reception, there's always a bit of mess. There you have my day. In early, down the creek, went below the floodwall to sit and watch the river. A good place to think. I've lived beyond the boonies for a long time. Moved around a lot as a Navy Brat, more than usual, because Dad was a Chief and a nurse, so he could do pre-induction physicals, his shore duty (two years of a four year hitch (he did six hitches)) was often a year each in two different states, and after the very first years I can remember, living in quonset huts on Naval bases, we always lived in neighborhoods. Neighborhoods can be alright. An apartment could be alright, if it was above a bakery. A sea-change, the simple algorithm, pay for someone else's labor and extract time. I could use the time. Looks like time to deal. Like playing chess. I always move one move too soon. And nearly always lose. I'm sure I beat someone somewhere, at something, but I don't remember. Something Kim said, I had forgotten, in extreme rural situations, you don't pull a permit and draw plans, you just build whatever it is you need. There's no inspector, no Big Brother, just you, and a pile of materials, make what you will. Down the creek, there's a rough-shod family, in an ox-bow, that cares little what anyone else thinks, every appliance they've ever owned is in the tall grass beside their trailer. But they acquired a ground-hog saw-mill, and they have some timber, and they're building a butt-and-pass log cabin with neatly squared timbers. This is no mean feat, and though there's no real jointery involved, they're doing a tidy job. They're up to roof height, and I can't wait to see what they do with the roof. I build in my head. Joints, the connections, are the important things, I usually let everything else go. I rarely finish anything. Being honest here. A hunter walked in to my place this evening, I heard him coming and the dog barked, I went out on the back porch to warn him I was here. He commented I didn't cut my yard, and I replied that I was conducting an experiment in jungle. I don't like having to defend myself. Leave it to the MFA's and the other various philosophers to even predict what road we're on. With the bridge situation the way it is, when I leave the house, or leave work, I don't know which way I'll go. I turn right or left. It's arbitrary. I try to not think about which way I'm going, and then just enjoy the ride.

Tom

It seems too obvious, but I'm nothing if not transparent. Read more...

Errands

Laundromat, liquor store, library. Stop at the museum to read in quiet AC space, then to the pub for a draft Harp and a bowl of stew. Slow drive home around the long way. Another park lake coming in that way, no one in the parking lot, so I stop to watch another large flotilla of geese. They didn't seem to be doing anything but floating around like a bunch of funny balloons, very still, rigid necks and heads, all in exactly the same pose. Had the thought that it would be very silly to get a good goose suit and float out there on an inner tube. Would they worship me or peck me to death? Writer Found Dead In A Bloodied Goose Suit Floating On Lake, or a human interest story about a reclusive writer who had attracted the following of several hundred geese. Spent a lot of time today thinking about building just one more house. I could do it, it'd be a push, but I've only ever lived in my own houses for a very long time. But I'm not sure it's important any more. I live so much in my head now, all I require is solitude. I'd do best, I think, in a single apartment above a commercial enterprise. A bakery would be good, or a place that canned pepper jelly, I wouldn't be too particular as long as the smell wasn't sneaker socks, or any of those cheeses I bring in late at night. Hey, I have limits. You, and your cheese, are just a part of my life. I looked at some really nice apartments but they were in the shade of the flood wall and I couldn't live there. My guardian angel points to higher ground. There's one more house I'd like to build, I run it through my mind, a thirty foot square with a full hip roof, overhanging eaves, vaguely pagoda-like, based on ten-foot bays defined by posts and beams; no interior walls, just bookcases. I could build it in 90 days, I think, hire Bear to assemble the roof, as I cut the pieces, otherwise, do it all myself. On the other hand, any small house, on the west side of town, with a serviceable roof, would do. I have nothing to prove, I don't really need to build another house, still, I can't help thinking, I could build one more place. I make some sketches, doodles really, figuring how I'd do some joints, physical building is one thing. What you think is another. Read more...

Cold Vacancy

No longer actually raining, but water dripping from every flat surface. Bug noise. The occasional acorn falling. A coyote or maybe just a wild dog, some canid, stirs Little Sister from her sleep, and she wakes me with her grumbles. I long for a cork-lined vault, running water, and a thermostat. I've suffered enough that I could expect creature comforts from here on out. A crossroads with myself. I'm not depressed exactly, but not happy enough to argue. A stranger here. Isolation. You keep your distance, I'll keep mine. Life is a blues song, love lost, a train in the distance, a dog that can't sleep. Make me an angel. To believe in this living is a hard way to go. If I had my way. John Lee Hooker. Have to get up, to quiet the dog. I keep a small pile of throwing rocks on the deck and run a coon off the compost pile with a couple of tosses. Dog had an unfortunate run-in with a coon, so she just stands back and barks. Fully awake (at 2:30) I roll a smoke and get a short drink, consider my demesne. Domain. In a way, moving to town would be the conclusion of a syllogism. Acorns falling, hit the woodshed roof with a sharp report. I'd need a quiet place in town. I'm so used to solitude and quiet. We'll see what this next winter is like, buying some firewood, using more electric heat, stocking the larder, taking some time off. But I want to write more, a couple of projects that involve actual editing, and the Mississippi book, from which I recently found some pieces. I thought I'd lost the whole damned thing, but parts were published, and I found, in an old book-bag, a section, 12 pages, about Aunt Pearl, that is very funny. All true, though it reads like fiction and she really did the best fried chicken in the known universe. Even at the end, when she was buying everything they sold on late night TV, and sending the rest of her money to tele-preachers wearing thousand dollar suits, she could fry chicken. I watched her. But I still can't do it. Hand to eye there I'm not familiar with. She knew when to turn the chicken, and I was barely old enough to vote. Young people are stupid and make mistakes, there was a time I thought I knew everything. I'm satisfied now I know almost nothing. Read more...

Reception

The dog doesn't care whether we open a show or not. She wants to be fed. Her sense of art runs to kibbles. I'm sympathetic, in so far as, but there's a lingering doubt that she doesn't have a brain. She's so pissed when I'm late getting home she bumps me several times on the walk to the house, then nips at my bags of salvaged reception food. Miss Pegi put me up several things in baggies. I'll be eating finger-food all weekend. Low-key, a nice but smallish crowd. The gallery looked great, everything done, everything ship-shape. The show is very good, a little edgy, a little difficult to understand (though the title, "Construction Zones" should give it away, force the disparate elements together and thereby make sense) and a lovely installation. The space looks good. Really good. I like that the box units, and Anthony's plaster pieces throw us into three-space. Everything very clean and uniform. Too much, I know, for A's taste, but it looks sharp. We'll do another show where we dissolve cow dung or clay in beakers of water. Feel like I've been whipped with an ugly stick; on my feet, on that hard tile floor for eleven hours. I don't drink much, because the cops are closing down on local violations, because every city is strapped for cash, and I have to drive the long way around besides. I've manipulated this interface for years, decades, but I think I'm done with that, now, what I think I'd like to do, is throw pots. Ten thousand bowls. We'd stack them, in a particular way. A maze probably, or something mysterious. The proof is in the pudding, does it float, or not. Fly, or spiral down, like a dead leaf in fall. Phone out and I couldn't SEND last night and moving slowly today. Actually only temporarily sick of shows and I have weeks to get over that. Then we do the new illustrations for "Alice In Wonderland" show, and then a huge Mid-western post-impressionism show that I saw the thumbnails for on Friday. Looks fantastic. Another 3 or 4 shows in the upstairs galleries during that time, D back off to MFA land and Sara back to Hilton Head. We'll be short-staffed and hard-pressed and I'll hardly have a chance to get bored. I'm thinking about a show based on those ubiquitous wooden shipping pallets. Read a book about New York food, along with recipes, all day, waiting for the rain, now a thunder storm is moving across northern Kentucky. I may have to stop writing again. Rain on the metal roof. Rolling thunder. Temps falling. A striking effect is that the green was all dirty, dust covered, and that color is revitalized. A good thing, because in three months the natural world will be black and white, mostly, and I'll be wrapped in several layers of clothing, huddled near the stove, considering what I remember about a lamb stew I read about today. Harder rain, a drumming, I have to turn off NPR because I can't understand the words. I collect enough rainwater for a bath tomorrow, a soft bath, good for my wrinkles. A reader (anon) sent a sample pack of dried salted cod. Jesus, it's raining cats and dogs, thank god I have back-up whiskey and cigaret papers. I soaked the cod in four changes of water for 24 hours, then brought it to a boil and took it off the heat, simmered it for seven minutes, lifted it out with a slotted spoon onto craft paper, that had formerly covered art, to drain. I'm not troubled by microbes, because I house so many. Shake my hand, and you are diseased. Make some cod-fish cakes that are stellar. Sneak a nap, return to consciousness when the last of the rain is dripping and actual meaning is a subtext. The fog is rising up the hollow and flowing over the ridge top. What had been previously clear is now much more opaque. The story of my life. Read more...

Penultimate Day

Working on the punch list. No one messes with me, show opens tomorrow night. I've slipped into the role of bartender at these openings. What you might call the default bartender. Meet and greet. I'll enjoy it, despite the bitching and moaning. Just hate getting home after dark. Must remember to pick up a fifty pound sack of "Old Yeller" dog food, fed the dog a can of beans tonight. She liked them. She'll eat anything. Went down the creek this morning, and in the other way this afternoon. The other way is over a mile further, but faster and less crooked. On the way out this morning, though, I didn't pass a single car, seven and a half miles. Lovely drive, cooler, windows down, smelling the end of summer. The punch list, before you open a show, is a very interesting thing. Dozens of discreet tasks that really need to be done before you open the doors. This is part of my job description, and I take the job seriously. Hammer away at the list, and we are just about ready, another one under my belt, I'm sure we can finish tomorrow. I shouldn't have doubted the kid, but I hate waiting until the last minute. I have the thought that my writing is coded, not with any intent of mine, but there might be another text. Here's the exercise. You must place two screws in a perfect line in three space. Fucking plaster wall. Igmorphoz into something hard to deny. Did I mention that I'm tired of shows? You and your breath-list, is closer to the point. Read more...

Busy Day

A and D are matting and framing all day, rubbings of the ends of logs in a dove-tail jointed log cabin. And each one looks like a simple cabin, with a cute little peaked roof. They're especially cool because of all the checking that's gone on in the logs. D is cutting the mats, and while he's doing that A is painting the tops of three pedestals flat black. I hate this, of course, because they'll have to be painted white again after this show, but they do look very good, with the nine plaster casts of nine small (just less than a cubic foot) house-like objects white plaster against a flat black surface. I hang all there rest of the wall pieces, 23 I think, and fuck up on the last one because it's after 4:30 and my math has failed me. Actually, there's one more of the glass, enamel, copper pieces to hang in the entry way, so two things I need to hang, plus the nine pieces they matted and framed. We're good, on time here, I think, though, of course, we've trashed the place, and I need to clean up. We were pretty funny, working around each other all day. Anthony did a very funny ten minutes about shitting in China, he was there twice this past year, and I don't know how that conversation even came up, Darren talking about a train in Europe. Because I'm hanging pieces, and they're not, both of them are constantly telling me things are crooked. God-damned MFA's are overrated, it just allows people to play with mud and bitch. I spend some serious time with a four-piece glass thing and get it really close to perfect: hanging four uniform sized pieces, two by two, exactly an inch apart, on a rough plaster surface, is really difficult. I do the math a dozen times. They are, in the trades, what we call 'good enough' but Anthony sees that they're not actually perfect, and I curse his eye. I knew they weren't, but I couldn't spend any more time making them better. We're talking very small increments here. I don't even want to be perfect, it's beyond my sphere. Set the standard too high, and you're always going to fail. 'Good enough' is almost always good enough for me. B's son-in-law made a legitimate offer for my place, and I have to think about it, leave the country, move to town, get an apartment. I'd have to make to make my life simpler. Short of moving into a tree-tip-pit I can't imagine what that would be. The geese were a flotilla on the lake, resting, floating, I don't envy them that flight. Bunch of assholes trying to shoot them down. I'm just saying. Read more...

Glitches

Mackletree is closed, rebuilding a bridge, at least the third iteration as there are two sets of abutments. When they re-paved Mackletree last, they asphalted right over the old wooden bridge, thereby sealing its fate. Now have to replace the whole thing. For the best, as at least four guys above the bridge on Mackletree are long-haul truckers and often bring their rigs home. My egress is blocked. I can take Upper Twin either way. Easiest drive would be out the upper end to Rocky Fork and back to town on Rt.125, longer, though, than just going down the road to Rt.52. Going down is such a winding wend I hate to face it first thing in the morning. It is beautiful. Probably use both routes. Can't come out of town the way I'm used to (out the back way) because they're rebuilding an overpass. Went down the creek this morning, stopped at the ford, where the new bridge is, drove fast, over and back, over and back, to clean my wheel-wells. Stopped to admire a lupine-like purple flower, that, for all I know, could have been a lupine. They had some mud-slide --- rock-fall event, a few years ago, about 7 miles west of Portsmouth. They took off all the overburden, down to sandstone bed, in terraces up a goodly slope. It's an earthwork. I like it a lot. Stopped to look for fossils and found several nice arthropods. I have a nice little hard plastic pig that I think was part of a game, I found it below the flood-wall, and keep it perched on a very nice flat rock I found in Mackletree Creek; it's just a half inch-thick piece of sandstone, maybe four inches by five, but it is perfectly banded in some hard smooth rock-like substance that isn't the same color. It's always darker. I have several of these rocks. I think it's a mineral intrusion that oxidizes in cracks where there have been shifts in the earth. I now have the pig, on the rock, smelling a trilobite. It's really cute, and because I install shows, I take it very seriously. The pig is probably fiberglass, but I guarantee, the trilobite is cast concrete. If the pig is ten feet tall the trilobite weighs over a hundred pounds. You can't expect me to like that. The next thing you know the pig is mylar, hauled behind a plane, and the trilobite weighs a ton. Read more...

Previous Iteration

The soup was so good I wish I remembered exactly how I made it. The dried onion crumbles (an Indian trick) were fantastic. Labor Day, so I don't do anything but read all day. Another holiday alone, at which I have become expert. Re-fried cheese grits with salsa for breakfast, an open-face grilled sandwich of tomatoes and mozzarella for lunch, an artichoke for dinner, dipped in a garlicy mayonnaise with a touch of horseradish. I fried some sweet potato chips to eat during the all-day reading session, careful not to oil the pages of the last of the library books, William Gibson's newest, "Zero History". He's an awfully good writer, edgy and well researched. I read a few pages of myself, looking for clues as to why several people, Linda (my best critic), and several people I don't know, thought I was writing well right now, and I wondered about that. I don't like doing this really, reading myself, I notice mistakes, the extra word, the missing word, bad punctuation, and cringe, like you might expect. There are always mistakes, dues to Allah, I sometimes embed them on purpose. I'm not above not being truthful. Nice to have the house opened back up again, the AC off. I used it 14 times, which seems like a lot, but isn't that much really, the interests of creature comforts. The drone of late summer bugs. I get through the entire day without saying a word to anyone. Read more...

Soundscape

A disturbance in the night. Something woke the dog and she woke me. Probably not nothing, but nothing I can see. 48 degrees at 2:42 in the morning and I can't get back to sleep. This is when I need a hobby, like tatting or something, knitting, instead I take my haunted soul outside and stare at stars, then go back inside and roll a smoke. Nothing is an empty field. An intellectual construct. I stack boxes, mop floors. It keeps me focused on the thing itself, which is an ephemeral puff of smoke. I'm fine with that, the delicate nature of things, but I hate not sleeping. One more night alone. One among several thousand, so it shouldn't be a surprise, but I'm feeling lonely right now, and the darkness spreads like a pool of coolant beneath a punctured radiator. Bill Evans raises my spirits, then I listen to a Bach partita. I'm about to lose my mind. Nothing makes any sense. Miles on trumpet someplace in the distance. Edgar Meyer transposing the Cello Suites to the double bass. Buddy Rich. The incredible way things progress. The ongoingness. Finally get back to sleep. Before I went to bed I changed the water on the acorns, took them out of the crock-pot and started a batch of grits; before I went back to sleep I started a small fire in the cookstove and put the acorn pieces in the oven to dry. Slept well, the second time around, got up, made a double espresso, ground the acorn pieces to a coarse meal in the little food processor I got at The Goodwill, mixed it into the grits in the crock-pot. Took out maybe three-quarters of a cup, mixed in maybe half a cup of grated cheddar, nuked it while I fried an egg. Lots of fresh ground pepper. Excellent. I make a cucumber-yogurt soup for later, cucumber, chicken stock, water, yogurt and dill. Having a merry old time in the kitchen, I cut up three onions and caramelize them, 45 minutes stirring onions, then watching carefully, continue cutting them until they dry out almost completely and dissolve in your mouth. I'll crumble these on the soup. I took out a measure of the onions at the perfectly caramelized stage and had them on toast with another egg. I want to make a country pate, the ultimate finger food, but I don't have the things I'll need: I'll have to get Ronnie or Bear to get me a couple of squirrels. My favorite pate is 1/3 squirrel, 1/3 chicken livers, and 1/3 mushrooms, as the major ingredients, with onion, garlic, a stick of butter, a little nip bottle of brandy, pine nuts and a touch of nutmeg. The light has become slanted and flirtatious. I walked down, then back up the driveway, watching the light and smelling the desiccation of fall. Dried leaf dust, what charred pollen is still around, the various scat I can't identify. The world was fresh for me. A good time to take a walk. But I did have to blow my nose when I got home. It sounded like a trumpet, and that reminded me of other sounds. I was in the marching band four years running, in undergraduate school, I played the tuba, maybe I thought I'd marry a blond from the upper mid-west,  but I ended up with a large horn and no friends. Go figure. Read more...

First Acorns

Harvested a small batch of acorns from a tree in town. A Pin Oak, and I know from last year that the acorns aren't too bitter. Shell them out and cut them into 6 or 8 pieces each, put them on to simmer in the crock pot. Two changes of water so far, and two more before I go to bed. Rain water is good for this. Tomorrow I'll dry the pieces (first fire in the cookstove, supposed to be in the 40's tonight) then grind them and make cheese grits with acorn meal. This stuff, which is quite tasty, along with alfalfa sprouts, would keep you alive forever. Now I just need a still. I'd need to buy corn and sugar, but I could sell part of the whiskey to pay for that. Spent most of the day at the museum, doing a few odd jobs, waiting for D and the last of the art from Cincy, needed to touch base with him about installing the rest of the show. Lunched with Sara, on barstools at the pub, and it was lovely. We talk about such a wide variety of things, and we both enjoy the conversation. And we both smoke. I only really enjoy being around people who can teach me something, though 'teaching' and 'something' are just relative terms for anything that takes my interest. Living alone, eating acorns, I don't have to make many compromises to what anyone thinks. Sara accepts me as what I am, which is refreshing in a world of hype. Yesterday, after I got to work, I realized I was wearing a really ratty tee-shirt, something I'd pulled out of the wrong pile. Sara and I were sitting out on what she calls 'the concrete sofa', which is what she calls the loading dock off the kitchen in the alley where we retreat to smoke, and I apologized for my ratty appearance. She said she hadn't noticed, which meant she was seeing me and not my clothing. It was a nice moment, for whatever reason, intensely rewarding. Far beyond, really, the specific situation, two people perched on the concrete sofa discussing the next show. It has to do with connection and the way we communicate. I'm not blessed with fingers that can twitter, I can barely wipe my ass, but I can talk, I can tell stories. Does that count for anything? Take the last sentence you heard and parse it, the Grammar Police will be here any minute, what do you do? I throw everything into the swimming pool and disavow any knowledge. And run like hell. Read more...

Small Things

Fall in the air. A little squall line ran through, this afternoon, and the temps dropped noticeably. The breeze is cooler, rather than that stifling blast of hot air that makes it so hard to breathe when it's 95 degrees or above. Found an unlikely but genuine source of excellent firewood today. Had to go pick up the keys for D's rental so he could leave early tomorrow to pick up art in Cincy, and drove by our board chairman's headquarters outside of town. Plumbing, wholesale and retail in three states, and they have a side yard that is filling with pallets. Some of these, that commercial heating and air units come on, are eight feet long, with two inch slats of hardwood. Firewood you can cut with a circular saw is much safer. I had seen these before, but never knew where they came from. The bottom members, to which the slats are attached, are 4x4 oak. This could be good. I have enough Osage Orange, bone dry now, to split out maybe a hundred pieces, two each for the fifty nights I need to bank a fire through the night. It's still so hot I ran the air-conditioner for a hour when I got home today, and I'm starting to obsess about firewood. I have a small library of recipes that I've book-marked for next winter, though I won't follow the actual recipe, just the idea of the thing, whatever dish it was, interests me. I must make a trip to Columbus, because I need some things. Lemon grass and squid, some seaweed, a couple of other things, in a language I can't understand. Shopping is a pain in the ass. I need an assistant shopper, because I'm terrible at this. Establish meaning. A cloud with black lace lining. Casandra Wilson, "Shall We Dance", or whatever turns your crank. Bill Evans or Bob Dylan. Bach. Steely Dan late at night. The way a strained voice cuts through the ether. Music is weird, the way it makes sense. Calls sense into question. Just saying. You have Buddy Holly on one hand and Mozart on the other. If I had my way. Dan Bern, "Estelle". The best friend I ever had was a dog. Sometimes the world is upside down. All night long. Make up for lost time. The world is upside down. The rhythm of my soul, you know what I mean, deep water, what I thought I was saying. Read more...

Booby's Chickens

Left home early, to do some grocery shopping before work. First there was a large tree down on Mackletree, taking the phone line down to the road. This isn't a whimpy little line, but a cable the size of #1 or #2 electric, in a braided metal wire sheath. The tree is a large chestnut oak, 16 inches at the butt, 60 feet tall, fell from the other side of the road and didn't break the cable. A truck already parked at the other side of the tree, getting out his chainsaw. He has salvage rights, but the neighborly convention is to help haul the cut pieces out of the road. I keep gloves in the truck, several pair usually. Get the road cleared. Then get down to Booby's place and his spring chickens have all flown the coop and are congregated in the road. It's like getting caught in a cattle or sheep drive in Western Colorado, free-range country, where twice a year they still drive the animals, up to open pasture and down to feed-lots. You can move through these herds, but very slowly, nudging the animals out of the way. So I moved slowly through a flock of chickens, with them flying up and jabbering on both sides. A veritable chicken wake. Got to laughing so hard I had to stop at the lake, no one else there, go sit on a table in the covered picnic area and roll a smoke. Chickens are a hoot. Not early enough to shop. But I have a new tool. One of the ladies found a Chinese made, bamboo handled, smallish, butterfly net for $1, at the hardware store. I'm sure I know where the bat is staying, stuck to one of the black walls of the stage in the theater. So, armed with a flashlight and my spanking new butterfly net, I went to see, and, Watson, he was right where I predicted and it took about a minute to net him. Showed him, netted, to Pegi, so she could tell everyone the bat threat was over. As it turns out, a lot of people are really freaked by bats. Took fifteen minutes to get the little fucker OUT of the net, long finger things, designed for clutching, then Pegi insisted I give it some water because she thought it was dehydrated. I don't know how to water a bat. I went and got a little plastic pitcher with some water, and kind of splashed it in front of him; seemed to work as he moved toward it, but when I splashed water, accidentally, up on his face, he bared an ugly mouth, like something from a Stephen King dream. Endured a small chorus of bat screams, an unfortunate frequency they use for echolocation. I'm told, by one of you, that bat shit is interesting, and I do have a microscope. All those little color patterns in the hard parts of insects. So I was kind of on the lookout for bat shit today, but because the poor guy wasn't eating much I didn't find any. I'm not sure I'd recognize batshit anyway. Unwrapped the pieces D dropped off for the construction show. They're heavy, enamel on quarter-inch thick glass, on copper, mounted on a wooden frame with hanging wire. I can't hang them by myself, D knows, says we'll hang them next Wednesday, when he's around, but I unwrap them, to see what we have. They're wonderful, I've never seen anything like them. I'm not sure yet, but what I think they are is back-painted glass fired to a sheet of distressed copper. The copper bleeds through as background. And the drawings or the photographic reproductions, are wonderful. I suspect a projection, that's how I'd do it. They're heavy, and awkward enough that I'm slightly uncomfortable handling them. Not exactly delicate, but breakable, like so much in life. I'm a little stressed because I'm uncertain about elements of this show, I haven't seen them, and I don't know where they fit in, I assume someone knows more than me. Read more...

Boxes Moving

This many boxes, you fold them and screw them all together, there's a certain amount of torque that's locked in, and moisture plays a part. They move. First thing every morning, I tinker with them, realigning. When the dog awakes me at 4 in the morning, I develop a theory that if you had enough cardboard boxes and a typewriter, you could write all of Faulkner. Specious, of course, and derivative, but I toy with the idea. A coon in the night, Little Sister goes nuts. I restrain her, so the coon can get away, and end up with fleas. Not good. I can deal with fleas, set my flea trap, but I'm fully awake, and I wanted more pure sleep, dreamless and deep, but that's denied me. Decide I should go night-fishing for a world-record catfish. Chicken guts as bait, a deep-sea rod, with 80 pound test, a stump as seat, and a piece of PVC as rod-holder, a simple sport. You drink beer and wait for the rod to dip. If you're alone, you talk to yourself, if you're with someone else you talk about missed opportunities. Sad, but true. Maybe not even sad, the reflection of the moon on the river, darting clouds, the occasional train in Kentucky, a cold Bud Light from the cooler, life might not get better than this: slapping at skeeters, the middle of the night, watching a string of barges push up stream. Perfection is a difficult concept, even drawing a straight line is almost impossible when the surface is uneven, because the nail or screw enters at a different angle. Doesn't seem right that a straight line could be a relative concept, but hanging the photos on a textured wall, I found it to be true. Each of the pieces hangs on two screws that catch the top of the back of the frame, a superior system when confronted with things exactly the same, better than wires, which are always different and stretch. I draw the best line I can, then punch a starter hole with an ice-pick. Small adjustments are made by tapping the screw-heads up or down with a hammer. This is art, not science. I did sleep another couple of hours and then was late for work because I started writing this. I need to get out more, or not. Anthony and I agreed to a beer after work. Made labels for the photos and mounted them. Cleaned corners most of the afternoon. There was actually a course in corners at Janitor College, everyone hated the teacher, Benzek Quitzal, because we couldn't understand a word he said, it was as if he talked Cyrillic. Meaning, intention, all that, and then the fact that we just couldn't understand what he was saying. We didn't even know what might be on the test. A double pluperfect for your pleasure. I was nudging my roommate for a clue, all I got was a blank nod. Make what you will. Read more...