Prom Night

Lewdster: a lecher, one given to criminal pleasures. Lithomancy: prediction by stones. Lucubration: study by candlelight. It occurs to me that I might not be making sense. It's just me, you know, Tom Bridwell, but I feel like a fiction. Someone reading a dictionary. Prom is a beautiful delusion. Not life, but an exception. April brought her classes over, because they were zombies, waiting for an event. I'm often asked if I'm ever bored, the question itself is revealing. "The Tony Rice Unit", have you heard them? If you listen or look closely there's always something to take your attention. Mawkish: apt to give satiety, apt to cause loathing. "Flow, welsted, flow, like thine inspirer beer, / So sweetly mawkish and so sweetly dull." Pope. Anthony over for dinner, before he heads out to Wisconsin for a month of farming and building moveable chicken houses. He brings enough bread to feed an army, serious bread, bread to die for, and half a bottle of Knob Creek, cleaning out his apartment. I've made a crock-pot of grits, the no-name vegetable dish, which I serve on the grits, and medallions of pork tenderloin. We eat at the island and don't talk, grunting, and protecting our plates with the off arm. Something's bothering him, but I never discover what it is. Partly, I think, it's that he wants to settle. I've offered him a piece of land, and he'd like nothing better than to build a cabin and an Anagama kiln into the hillside. He knows we could do that, but he still has his life to prove. To the question of boredom. Seldom. And I've thought about this, because it seems to be an issue. Mid-winter, or during spring rains, I'm likely to be more or less trapped in the house for three or four days straight. I'll cook a meal that requires several hours, suit-up and go outside a few times, investigate some tree-tip pits, bring home a few oddities, look something up, read a couple of books. I might call a friend I haven't talked to in a while. Don't get me wrong, I like having a phone, having electricity, but I am, essentially, self-reliant. When I get into the 2 volume OED with the magnifying glass, you can kiss the afternoon goodbye. Be nice for someone to scratch my back, but I have a bamboo thing I can use for that. I like eating other people's cooking, but I can cook well enough. I spend hours writing a paragraph, any given day, thinking about words and marks of punctuation; considering voice, what it says and means. A matter of habit. I shoot for a state in which there is no mediation between me and the natural world. Silly me. There's always mediation. But I'm close, to the natural world, when I'm bent over, collecting morels, and discover a rattlesnake molting. I understand the concept of boredom, but it's not a problem for me, there a backlog of things to think about. Failed relationships, particular large fish that got away, gaps in my understanding: there's always something to think about. And I surround myself with thousands of books, in case I get antsy. There's always something to read. I'm alone more than anyone I know, but it doesn't feel lonely, it's just a state of being.