Chicken Soup

Thighs were on sale and I decided a soup was in order. Poach six thighs in a white wine reduction with watercress. Because the cookstove is hot, roast a batch of roots, onions, butternut squash, some carrots. Shred the thighs back into the liquid, add the roasted vegetables and a package of snow peas, a hand-full of orzo. Simple, good; eat slowly, with buttered saltines. Naval warfare changes at Cadiz. Numbers rattle through my brain, a consequence of hanging a show. Rain on the metal roof and the frogs still rampant. Another ream of printed pages I need to take to the vault. 3,000 pages in just over ten years, a million words. What I consider a full page is 42 lines, wrapped as the computer sees fit, a nominal 500 words. I see it as a brick, a building block. Out of focus, as I usually am, it looks like a foreign language, a dark smudge masquerading as text. A convoy of meaning conveyed by ink, in Arial 10. Composed in Arial, though you probably receive it in a different form, Times News Roman or something. I don't like Arial, really, being an old-style kind of guy, serifs and all, but it's easy to work in. I can see the words, no frills. And that allows me to make fewer mistakes. Writing is difficult. One thing I've noticed, over the years, is that whenever you really focus your attention, you burn calories. More thunder rolling in, like a massive surf, another sweep of rain, beating hard on the roof. It comes in waves. I did so well last week, I'm almost ashamed to show my face; the show, in a way, hung itself, I'm merely a mechanic. The complex part is the math, but I've mastered that. It's tomorrow already. The overcast sky glows a gray-blue color that signals dawn. The rain hammers. I wish I could talk in sign, maybe I'll take a course. The rain steps it up a notch, it's now carving gullies. An inch an hour. Forty days and forty nights. Then the wind, blowing down from St. Paul. It's not lost on me, the things I reference. I was slightly nauseous when the thunder and the frogs woke me. That upper mid-west wind had the trees at half-mast. Blowing a full gale. From my vantage, it's beautiful, a soft light, that comes in from behind. A rumble of thunder that I can barely hear, deep down in the registry. Not something you hear that often. Banshees in the Marshes of Glenn. A solitary wolf in the distance. Then a lull, and a heavy silence. I tie a couple of flies, to pass the time, I want to mimic a just-hatched mayfly. With turkey feathers and twine. Try it yourself, it has a certain Zen flair. You could float by a dark pool and lure a record rainbow from under the rocks. I find tying flies interesting, because I don't see that well, so it's a challenge. Fucking wind, excuse me, the wind is blowing like there is no tomorrow. It's bending the house. I can only watch. Nothing really prepares you for a night like this. Lightning striking so close to home. That thunder. You had to be here, which I was, alone. No witness. He makes things up. How bad could it have been? You have no idea. There's a smoldering stump, where lightning hit, just outside my back door. The sound was a major event, akin to an earthquake. More rain, the gullies become ditches. It's all about drainage. Who said that? Chicken soup doesn't hold a candle. You know what I mean, a Knight riding in on the generic White Charger. Chiffon, I think, he called her. It is tomorrow, I can see the stick trees, the broken sumac, the blackberry canes; it all frames a certain reality. I forgot to ask. Are you with him, or is this an academic exercise? More rain, buckets of rain, everything is washed away. Biblical. You and that white whale. Hey, I meant to mention, I found several worked stones, where the rain is carving a grader ditch against the bank. Debris, right? What accumulates. I make some notes. A single stick becomes a major player, the way shit builds up, first thing you know, you've built a damn, and the waters back up, suddenly a lake, an artificial construct. When the rain slackened I went back to sleep on the sofa, woke up disoriented. Felt like I was in a laminar flow room, a bubble. Poked around in the dictionaries, made a pot of coffee, potatoes and eggs for breakfast. Rain all day, flood warnings on the radio. Roads closed. Midnight, the Sicoto peaks at 22 feet. D's house would flood at 26 feet, but that last four would require half of Pike County to flood. The big river should flood the first terrace. I need to get down there, poke about in the mud. I successfully do nothing all day. Read, look up words. Scan myself, looking for incriminating evidence. Several pages I quite like. Amusing. You can bet I laugh at myself, too. Got my hair cut, when was that, Saturday, and my normal twice a year place was 'out sick' and I remembered there was a barber shop across the park from Kroger. Went there. A woman barber and she has twins in Pegi's Cirque. So we hit it off. The Marine in the chair when I got there (almost done or I wouldn't have waited, I don't wait well unless I take a book) was home on leave from Afghanistan, two weeks off then back for six months. In a firefight last week, 50 Marines, well dug in, attacked by 500 bad guys. Five Marines wounded, 200 enemy dead. He had pictures on his cell phone. I didn't look. I made egg noodles. Don't have a machine, I rolled them out with an old wine bottle. They didn't look kosher but tasted great with cheese and butter and a serious grind of black pepper. Fresh made pasta cooks in seconds. Make a note to buy some pesto. Try this: rub a pork tenderloin with maple syrup and let it sit for twenty minutes, to dry, but remain sticky, smear it with pesto, cook in a 400 degree oven on a rack in a pan, for 30 minutes. De-glaze the pan with wine to make a sauce. In a perfect world, I'd serve this with jasmine rice and a salad. I want the crust on the tenderloin to be almost black but not carbonized. Caramelized. This is so good you'll cry. I usually cook two, so they'll be leftovers, and I can have medallions, with eggs, at breakfast. I never know, really, what you know. I can only guess. You don't know what I know, and I don't know what you know. Two unknowns and not a lot of room to move. A simple enough equation. if you have the math. I never could solve for two unknowns. Not that good at chess. I pitch horseshoes pretty well, if that counts for anything, even in the dark. I'm good at darts. I throw knives really well, the last three operas I built, were in a brewery with cork walls. The first show needed daggers, and we ordered a hundred of those throwing knives, because they were cheapest thing we could find that looked like a dagger. I learned to throw them, what can I say, I got really good at throwing them. I could take out your eye, at twenty-five feet, before you knew I'd raised a hand. I could kill you with a fork. Or my bare hands, for that matter. I could slice your neck with my library card. Oh. What were we talking about? I got distracted.