Quiet, Late

Bug noises, with a base note of heat lightning. Not a whisper of wind. The quiet and the darkness are a blanket on the world. They muffle sound almost like six inches of new powder, mid-winter, but the fact that I'm nearly naked, places me in my season. 3:33 in the morning, I heat water for a sponge bath, check myself carefully for ticks. When it's really hot, if you rinse your hair with cool water and sit under a ceiling fan, you'll be significantly more comfortable. Churrigueresque is a kind of baroque Spanish architecture with a lot of frills. Gaudy springs from this, but there is a long tradition, a profusion of ornament. Broken pediments and embedded shards of glass. Clunch is a soft limestone, used as a building material, an in-fill. Enceinte is that inner-most enclosure in a fortress. Even when I stop, I keep going. It's a disease, I think, my obsession with dictionaries. Propylaeum is the entrance to a temple. I love words. They're the other thing, other than reading, that keeps me from ever being bored. To reference a word, if I need the OED, I have to move a pile of manuscripts, various print-outs, a pile that's twenty inches tall. A printed ream is two inches, so twenty inches is ten reams. 5,000 pages. A million words, easy. I have to think about that. Back to bed and oversleep for the first time in forever. Slow day at the museum, slogged through some paper work on the permanent collection. Too hot to eat, can't even finish a kid's meal toasted cheese at the pub. They're back re-paving on 125, a second layer of asphalt. I'm stopped first in line where it goes one-lane for about a mile. The flagger is a thirty-something woman, dirty blond, good looking in a rugged way. I'd picked up some hydrating liquids at Kroger, and stored them in the fridge at work. Handed her one out the window. A look of sheer pleasure. If I had to do it, I probably could, but my days of being outside in the 95 degree sun are hopefully over. Ellen she said, I said Tom, and she said that it was an award winning kindness. We chatted about ticks, until her radio squawked, we waved, I headed home. Guy behind me passed, on the first of two passing straightaways, and gave me a big thumb's up. Odd, thumbs up is also correct there. Takes the window unit two hours to get the house down to 82, when I can turn on the computer. Another huge spread of afternoon thundershowers moving in for a few days. I need to bring in supplies tomorrow, three days on the ridge with no trips out. I need a piece of meat, and I think I'll get the smallest pork butt I can find, and a turkey breast. Cook them in the smoker, with the turkey breast under the butt. That way I get pulled pork sandwiches for lunch, and smoked breast, with gravy, in several different guises, for dinner. Mashed potatoes at dinner every night, as I need to gain some weight, make a batch of the crock-pot grits and eat a lot of eggs. I still have three half-loaves of the bread from Cincy. Good to go. Picked up a pound of butter and a block of very good Vermont cheddar. Got that Michael Gruber book, "The Forgery of Venus" out of the library, again, to read it, again, to see if I can really figure out what happens at the end. The ending is ambiguous. It's a beautiful book, lovingly constructed, the language so nearly perfect that, at times, I'm jealous. Then it's quiet, and late, again, and I'm staring into the middle distance, remembering a phone call with a former lover; rolling a smoke, getting a drink, remembering how badly I felt, that I really couldn't be there for her, that I had a life of my own, that required attention. Self-centered arrogant bastard, and I admit to that, that also expects his toast to be buttered. I don't expect someone else to butter it, I'll do it myself, but it still needs to be buttered. Marlon, "Last Tango...". What was her name?