Excess

One more drink, one more cigaret, I don't see what harm it can do. I'm dead already, for god's sake. Surely I've rattled myself into the grave at this point and there is no turning back. What I choose, and the reasons, are a closely guarded secret. It's generic, or something beyond that, that I don't understand. Universal maybe. What we feel. Why does Duck Hill seem further back than Kay's Basement? I feel the same way. Maybe because the move was so retro, I mean Mississippi, come on. We had a great life there, no complaints, but we didn't feel we could raise a child in that atmosphere. Even in 1981 it was about segregated as you could get, but we were so self-contained, it didn't really matter, we left the farm maybe once a week, and then for just a few hours. The most focused I've ever been, on anything other than writing. Toward the end, I left more often, to build another of the patented "Bridwell" barns. I was younger, and I could build one in a week and clear $1000, which was lot of money, to us, then. Maybe not the most focused, probably an over-statement. As a stage manager, calling a musical or an opera is a pretty tight focus. Big line of thunder showers moving through, I make some judgement calls about turning the computer off and on. Being at end of the grid sucks, always something getting fried. But I want to write, and I now do that at a keyboard. Clearly need something that has a battery, that I can send and print-out from work. Everyone knows how to do this but me, a fucking dinosaur. I don't even want to know, and yet, I have to know. I went in today merely to open the gates, Sara was staff, and the gates have gotten difficult. Unwritten part of the job description. We've become close, I think, because we think alike; and we both smoke, so several times a day, we retire to the loading dock and blow rings, which we puncture with any handy object. More storm, I have to shut down. Read for a while, by the light of the head-lamp McCord sent me, excellent light, and ate a cold can of pork and beans. Stumbled on the stairs in the dark and smashed my forehead against one of the steps. A little blood in my eye, but no real damage. Don't look at yourself, in a dark house, with a flashlight and a mirror, late at night, with blood running down your face, and expect not to be startled. You don't really have a good side right then. I clean up the small cut, put on a band-aid, go to bed. This morning, because I had been damaged, I read reclined on the sofa for six hours, B came over. We talked about books and his trip to NYC. Our friend Jana took a fall, while they were walking and gawking, and I need to contact her. When he leaves I get an early drink and step over to the kitchen area to work on dinner, particularly a dish that is probably most like a Korean BBQ. While it is still mostly frozen, I slice another London Broil, a small one, one-and-a-half pounds, using this very cool knife D and Carma gave me. Which must be a dinosaur de-boning knife or something, because I can use it to slice frozen meat quite thin. A marinade of peach nectar, ground green chili from New Mexico, many grinds of pepper, and a goodly squirt of a balsamic vinegar hot sauce from the Minnesota State Fair. I caramelize two large yellow onions, taking over an hour, and they're perfect. Remove them, then heat a wok very high, 500 degrees, and sear the strips of beef quickly. I had added the marinade back to The Sauce, and boiled that, before I cooked the beef; cooked some egg noodles, and opened a bottle of old vines zin. Doesn't get any better than this. My vantage on the rest of the world. I'm eating these strips of beef, that evaporate in my mouth, and these onions that are the ghosts of all the onions that ever existed. It's a good meal, I'm sorry I usually dine alone, there should have been a witness.