Crazy Day

I'm of several minds, maybe that's the problem. I told the chairman of the board I'd find where the water was coming in and big rains forecast for tonight, so I stayed in town. The janitor, with flashlight, in the basement. The water is coming through the walls and around the old cast iron pipe we'd plugged and capped. I knew this to be the case, but now I really know it. I stood and watched it, in my yellow rubber boots, looking, for all the world, like the village idiot. Duh, water. A whisper of musk at lunch, I couldn't track it down and I didn't want to get arrested. Scent has become a subliminal pathology with me. Barnhart, his wife Amy, and Drew, from the college, surrounded and joined me for lunch. We exchanged mushroom stories. They all read me, so they knew about the rattlesnake. We exchanged snake stories. The vagaries of life. I'd come upstairs, from the basement, and Anthony called, wondering if I might be there (he'd seen my truck) and I let him inside, for an after hours drink and conversation. He's hurting, emotionally, and I'm a good listener. If we do this in what is now referred to as my office, we save a hell of a bar bill and I can hear better. It's hard to nuance when the base is playing lead. The May-Apples are blooming in the understory, lovely things, like watching the Lady-Slippers in New England. Why I had my outhouse on skids when we lived on the Vineyard, so I could move it about, to where the current action was. I built bleachers there, to watch the sunset over the terminal moraine. A former brother-in-law was impressed. He was pretty sure I was crazy, but he liked my work. Due diligence and I'm no poseur, I actually do know the breeding habits of certain salamanders. Rarely do I learn something I'd rather not know. Now that I have a designated computer at work, I look up shit all the time, it just takes a few seconds; a particular Singer portrait, right, there it is. I use it, but I'm uncomfortable in the ease with which I find things now. Used to be I'd have to look through several books, now, I just call up the image. By your name, and the various interconnectedness, you shall be named, "Membership Green", what was I thinking, that's a terrible name. I could have called it Sassafras Leaves, or New Mown Hay With Bacon, and I called it Membership Green, I should be shot.