Ephemeral

Fleeting pain. Sure, I hurt; anyone that crawls around under a house is going to be sore. I need to get a tetanus shot sometime soon, for now I just flush minor wounds with kerosene and scrub out the dirt with a finger-nail brush. Damaged goods. Nothing special. But it felt good, tending my needs, and on my breaks I was reading an extended essay about Braque and Picasso, 1910, cubism, how the world, our perception of the world, was changed. From my position, on all-fours, it seems perfectly natural, the way I glide from one thing to another, like there was a path, or at least an inclination. Something was being transmitted, a high-sign, or something. I figured four more hours under the house, and would have finished, but ran out of staples. I knew I was going to run out, so I had stopped and picked up an extra box, but my hammer-stapler (whacker-tacker in the trade) is a Bostitch H-30 and will only take staples up to three-eights of an inch and I bought half-inch ones. I've owned this tool for twenty years and I must have known, but I haven't used it much in the last decade, so I had forgotten. An hour shy of stage one. Still the house is noticeably warmer. I need to clean up and eat but I blow that off for a while, get a drink and roll a smoke. A small celebration for getting off my ass and getting something done. While under the house I discovered that the gray-water system had burst at a fitting, probably last year during one of the below zero nights. Easy enough to repair, though it does mean another couple of trips down on all fours. Goddamn I am sore, but with any luck, just three more trips, maybe six, will see the job done. This progress, and it is progress, has only cost me the time it might take to read one book. Not even a good book, just something I'd picked up at the library, to idle away an evening. So it's a fair trade, you exchange a certain amount of time for goods or services. We trade time, there's more to it than that, of course, it would be nice to be fully or even partially engaged. Words take my breathe away, for some reason I was looking up the word syllabus today, and it's a ghost word. There is no etymology. The word was made of whole cloth, by Cicero, translating something, wanted the word sittybas, which is "label", more or less, and miss-spoke himself. Mistakes happen. Ghost word, I like that usage. What I thought I was saying. Later.