Natural Causes

Noon Smart Talk with Michael Barnhart, one of my favorite people. PHD, composer, plays all instruments, knows the history of music, in order categorical. Interested in electronic music. Composed a piece for a church organ here in town, All Saints, and when they recently rebuilt the organ, they added electronic potential. Mike can play it from his laptop. Composed a piece for that instrument. Great big piece of organ music, a wall of sound. I liked it immensely. Played recorded versions of a John Cage piece. The piece itself is lost, the original tape fell apart or something. But it can be reconstructed. Actually, can be reconstructed in endless ways. It's a set of instructions, a vessel, as Mike called it, into which you plug little snippets of music you've recorded from vinyl records, according to strict time and volume indications. Mike has done it five times, the latest using just Cage's music, is coming out this month. He wants to work with Glenn again, so that probably means we're going to do another movie. Probably also about drainage. Glenn's a thematic kind of guy. Pegi just breezed through, having forgotten her car keys, thanked me for being here, as I may or may not docent a group of doctors through the galleries. Told her I was comfortable writing here, it's very quiet and warm. At the pub, Astra was cutting the last of the lemons from a bag, and the bag was a perfect morel collecting bag: open mesh, plastic, strong. I asked her to get it out of the trash for me, because I needed it. Then had to explain about, hunting for, and the cooking of morels. And it is time. Barnhart and I compared notes. He had the information on his laptop, last year, April 5th 29 morels, April 6th 29 morels, April 7th 54 morels. If you find yourself with a basket of nice plump morels, three or four inches long. Clean them, I don't use any water, I consider small pieces of leaf part of the whole morel thing. Slit them open enough to stuff them, they're essentially hollow, stuff them with an herbed goat cheese, tie them shut with a strip of Nori sprinkled with just a touch of wasabi. Mostly I eat them on toast that I no longer cut into points. Rain and warmer weather, next weekend I'll find them on southern slopes in their range. The best omelet I make, hope to eat my weight in them, the next 8 or 6 weeks, is a caramelized onion, morel, sprinkling of cheese thing, that is so good I just stare into the middle distance and remember an impossible past. Sometimes I wonder, it happened today, some insignificant event reminded me of a chain of events that had engaged me years ago. The glint off a piece of silver I was polishing, the shape of a cloud, the way my sandwich didn't hold together. I ask for a fork, they give me a spoon, with a twist at the end. Itinerant text. Suppose something meant something, how would you precede? I generally just open the door and walk through, duck low to the left because most people shoot high and to the right. Playing the odds. I've lived this long. A testament to living cleanly, do docent the doctors around, it's K's tour, but we play tag. I like the way she uses her hands. I over think everything. They're impressed, which is the point, I think, that the janitor knew more than they did. It was so cool, the way we handed off the ball. It seemed rehearsed. I'm a student of this. What's actually being said.