Reconsidering

The fact that I'm a virtual hermit, that I hate almost all artifice. I do love Art Nouveau, though, and a lot of things that really straight people would consider camp. I don't like small dogs nor a whiney quality in anyone's response to anything. My standards are a joke. A parrot and a Rabbi go into a bar. I often mean more than I say. Dendritic drainage. Take time to draw a flow chart and it resembles the roots of a tree. Brownian motion. The edge always resembles the edge ever finer. Patterns. If you travel with a magnifying glass, as I do, and examine the edges, you begin to see patterns. I found a perfect portrait of Elvis recently, in a tortilla. I ate it quickly, because, frankly, I didn't want the traffic. This stint in town, what I realize, is that I can be alone anywhere. You, maybe, knew that, but I wasn't sure. Isolation is important to me, because it allows me to think about things. Stare into the middle distance. Intrinsically, I'm not sure anything actually signifies. Meaning is a can of worms. But I like losing myself in the middle distance. Everything sounds like a Bach progression and the light is perfect. Keep your hands at your side and listen. Back to the ridge tomorrow. A good day, today, walked to the library and liquor store. Lunch at the pub. A bit of banter with a couple of people I know well enough to talk to. Chili in the crock pot generates (rather, holds) all the moisture, so I added a can of crushed navy beans. Excellent. D set his computer up for me to watch some TV on Hulu, where you can see five episodes of almost anything. I found I could read and watch, so went through most of the shows that people had mentioned to me, over the years. I watched stuff for a day-and-a-half. Then got very bored. I never really watched more than a few hours a week. If I had cable I could wile away a few hours watching cooking shows and The History Channel. Mostly I read and stare off into space. I spend a lot of time writing paragraphs. Some of them take a long time, with many diversions. This morning, looking at the altered furniture in the upstairs gallery got me thinking about chairs, so at the library I got a history of chairs. The book Neil sent, "Mechanization Takes Command" also takes an interesting look at furniture generally, but chairs in particular. In my current state (one in which I study things closely) reading about chairs seems about right. Having the library nearby is very cool. Reading about cast iron stoves, now, too. Rumford. Another guy, Philo Penfield Stewart, one of the founders of Oberlin College, developed a stove (he ended up building 90,000 of them, "Oberlins", and they helped to fund the college). Technology was slow developing, because the guys that built stoves weren't engineers. Rumford and Stewart developed prototypes of the modern range. I've used so many wood-fired stoves that I can follow the language and schematics with attention to detail. Engages me for an entire afternoon. Over to the pub, again, for a draft Guinness, at Happy Hour, where I ignore conversation, smile, happily, over certain smoke chases and damper arrangements. I'm a cheap date. Back at the museum, I eat another bowl of the thickened and improved chili, with saltines, smeared with an herbed butter, and hot pickled pepper slices. It's very good, a transport, actually, and then I write you, which pretty much fills the time remaining. Usually, when I start writing, that place I'm in, remembering, doesn't allow a serious interruption until a final period. Increasingly, I leave part of a paragraph in limbo, go back later, make some changes, correct the flow, alter the time-line. It's all non-fiction. But even the next day I can seldom remember what actually happened. I make a show of it, present evidence, but I don't really know what happened. This is the problem, of course, with history, it's just another lie.