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I wanted to go bed early, I'm tired, for god's sake, but there's a pack of wild dogs chasing a coon on the ridge, and they would wake the dead. Real coon hounds, Blue-Ticks or Red-Bones bay, it's a musical experience, but a pack of wild dogs just yell. It's not pretty, and certainly not what I wanted to hear. Bear, what are we talking about? There's a final tear in a pair of Levi's and I finally throw them away. I've worn these jeans for ten years. I feel a little nostalgic. Cut me some slack. I turn the radio on, because I want to hear something other than my internal monologue, but it's a bad idea. Everything clashes, more than just noise, it's like an evil creature, rising from the void; I get to the radio, turn it off, and the silence is such a crashing nothingness that it leaves me stripped completely bare. I'm reading Basho closely. Emily. Maybe it's a stretch, but I hear a tone poem here. Something harmonic. What if you just repeated a musical phrase over and over, while words were being spoken, maybe the violin could become the dash. I spend hours thinking about that. I'm easily amused. A cheap date. Whatever. They think that dark matter is almost everything, considering the mass of the universe, and I don't doubt that, there really is a lot of space that needs to be filled. Icons, whatever, things you need to see. A splendid day reading, the history of glass, by William Ellis, then onto "The Meaning Of Everything" by Simon Winchester. I'd previously read Winchester's biography of James Murray, the father of the OED, but this book is more a history of the project. Interesting to me on several fronts, not the least of which was William Caxton's codifying of the English language. When Shakespeare was writing, when Caxton started printing, there really wasn't an English dictionary; grammar and syntax were all over the place and spelling was a nightmare. The first dictionaries were mostly simple lists of 'difficult' words, borrowed and altered from Latin or other languages. As happens, a group of philologically interested guys got together for drinks and a meal once in a while and they eventually appointed an "Unregistered Words Committee" and they birthed the OED. It's a great story, and I love dictionaries. Remarkable, when you think about it, that on this ridgetop, in Appalachian extreme rural Ohio, between B and me, we probably own a hundred dictionaries, maybe two hundred. I've built and installed stands and ensconced unabridged dictionaries in more places than I can remember. A hardware store in Duck Hill, Mississippi; a book store in Winchester, Virginia; a barn in western Colorado. I need to find a place at the pub for one. Electronically, of course, you can correct yourself instantly; but the thing about looking up a word is that you stumble across all these others words. The cascade effect. Venn projections. It's interesting, the way things interact. I once had a chunk of obsidian that was almost a cubic foot, I left it in Utah because it was too heavy to move around. I wonder why I remembered that? Oh, right, I was thinking about flaking tools, how I might take that up, as a hobby, and obsidian flashed in my mind; reading about glass today, too, and remembering a place on the outer shore of Cape Cod where a lightning bolt had turned seaweed and sand into glass. Probably apocryphal, like that story about how the French turned several square miles of the Sahara into a sheet of glass when testing their nuclear arm.