Absolute Marginality

Sick of people who believe in God and worship idols. I'll take the entelechy of a hollow emerging from winter. Just today, some russet color, background pinks, and a few reds as the maples wake from hibernation. It's a lovely sight and I walk out the transverse ridge-line over to the graveyard. A perfect day for the shallow-black-pool method for identifying graves. The leaves are thick, and collect in the depressions where cheap pine coffins have collapsed underground. The indentations hold water, the leaves rot too. Shallow black pools. On the south slope of the next ridge over, the color is wonderful. It warms me. Back at the house, I drink chicken broth and eat saltines smeared with a dab of butter, reading Carlos Fuentes all day. A lively mind and a lovely writer. I know just enough about celestial mechanics to get everything wrong, so call Mac but he doesn't know the period between apogee and perigee of the moon either. Everyone else could find out the answer instantly, but I don't have a mobile device, or any service, for that matter. I do have some gorgeous celestial maps, brimming with just such information, but I can't find them. That German map publisher, who's name I've forgotten. One downside of a ceiling high bookcase, double sided, that's 12 feet long, is that stuff falls between. Clearly each side should have a back, but I built these bookcases for nothing. The uprights are peeled dogwood sticks, the shelves are one inch oak, milled from the beams, cut on-site. They cost nothing but a few screws. That sounds cheap. You know what I mean. I certainly couldn't afford even cheap paneling to put backs on the damned thing, besides I built it in place, and could never have slipped between to put on the second back. Pretty amazing bookcases, really, minimalist; strong support, and the loading is carried very well. I surprise myself, sometimes; not a bad thing. I had half a pork tenderloin in the freezer that I took o last night; a perfect, maybe, eight ounce cylinder. I butterfly it, pound it flat, roll it around a core of mango chutney with caramelized shallots, tie it up with cotton twine. Bring the cookstove oven up to temp, and hold it there, for thirty minutes, then let the fire die. The tenderloin, the roast parsnip and turnip thing (I rolled them in walnut oil with a lot of freshly ground pepper) and the sauce. The bread, who's in charge of the bread? there really needs to be a last piece of bread you trail through the drippings. If things were ordered and predictable. Which they're not. Still and yet, you should be allowed to clean your plate. Take one last dripping morsel toward your mouth, not pay for the additional dry-cleaning, if you held the drip away from your shirt, and just dropped it on the floor. As janitor I see desire paths, where we wish we might have gone. The dancer that struck me with her eyes. I have to think about that, I thought I was moving toward nothingness. Suddenly there is real shit, I have to deal with it, I'm the default number. It's you and me, not a good palisade, against an army that large. They merely send in enough troops and we are over-whelmed. No evacuation possible, you just jump off the cliff. Clutching a bag that might contain your salvation. I just mop the floors here, but I'm aware other things happen. The floors look really good. I may be nothing other than a decent janitor.