Something, Late

Two coons fighting over compost, one of them foaming at the mouth, rabid, surely, but not a threat to me, and I don't feel like killing something at this hour. Very still. The only sound is large drops of condensate falling from the trees. I'm in the clouds, at the very altitude where rain forms, this time, today. Site specific. Go back inside, for some clothes and proper shoes, get the headlamp McCord sent me, and look for mushrooms. The darkness is absolute but for the cone of light I cast, hunkered to my task. Life is what you make of it. I find enough morels for breakfast, and the first oyster mushrooms of the year. So beautiful, a hand-full of fungus that I'll fry up nicely in butter and serve myself on toast. Not a big deal, but the only deal that matters. I am become eccentric, I think, in the way I confront the world, but it's not an act, just my actual response, without mediation. Self-medication. While I brew the first double espresso of the day, I sip a shot of Knob Creek and roll a smoke. I'm killing myself, I realize, but a hundred years from now, everyone alive will be dead. It's a long way down. In the absolute darkness, walking old logging roads with a headlamp, I feel like I'm imposing myself on the landscape. This could be a good scene from the docent movie, I'm not sure how you'd shoot it, opens on almost complete blackness, then this shaft of light, clearly someone walking, exposing poplar trucks and blackberry canes, the focus narrows to a particular mushroom. Get Barnhart to do a cello piece here, something deep in longing. The voice-over is sad, recounting floods from the past, the various dead that speak from the past. As I love my brother, I love Maria more. Fucking angels are a pain in the ass. Maria is sugar cane. I could say something about loss. Answer if you can. I want someone to tell me, what is the soul of man. What is the soul of man? One more day I find myself alive, sun going down. Or dawn. A gypsy light, what you first see. Poignant buds. Kant Leak is a collapse of morals. I had resolved to put some books away, a simple chore, been on the list for years, but the problem was more one of accumulation. That there were too many for the existing shelves. In an attempt to put one mushroom book next to another, which seemed logical, a slender volume squirted out. Kant. We could snuggle in the night. Spoon, as they say, but you have your space and I have mine. To many books and not enough shelves: "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morels" and as one of the simpler rules of my life is that if a book falls to the floor. you must immediately drop everything and read it, I set the rest of the books I was putting away on the sofa, six in the morning, and reread a copy, annotated by several generations of confused students. To over-simplify, read Wittgenstein here, to verify. What Kant was saying. Everything is moral. " Duty is the constraint to do an act out of a moral law." More involved than that, because you have to define everything, but in a nut-shell. Kant Leak is also, actually, the name of a wax ring one can use when installing a toilet. Check it out in the plumbing department of your local hardware store. I send them to friends on their birthdays. Not to be confused with that salient angle, cant, or the more usual contraction. Amusing myself with the dictionary again. Litter and duff, intimacy, so on. Teslas. Kant liked Rousseau, which reveals an other side. Coinage, Sparta. The eight point type in my 11th Britannica now requires a magnifying glass. Tesla in love with a bird. Bislama is a pidgin (auxiliary language, where the need arises) that uses English to define tasks on the waterfront in various ports where many different tongues are spoken; my own writing, but in several sentences recently, the action was only implied. Yet the job was accomplished, whatever it was. I notice these things in passing. Writing is a lot like building a house, you nail together a bunch of sticks and hope for the best. Cheese grits, with a large pat of butter and a poached egg, at the correct moment, can be a sublime meal. The windshield wipers in my truck don't always work and I had misjudged an afternoon squall yesterday. I had to pull over and wait out the rain. I know every spot top pull over, between here and town.. I've used them all, I stop more than anyone I know. Notice things. A particular flower, a windfall. Girlfriends and relationships. I fall back on the fourth. I docent my world, no pretense at anything else. I say what I want to say. At the same time, it's inside information. What you might have done.