Trapped

Stayed in town to listen to some live music at the pub, Jack Vetter, a guitarist I like very much and a couple of his friends. Up too late drinking with TR, but the music was fine. Slept well, went out for breakfast, headed home. Got a couple of miles out of town and the truck made a horrible rumbling sound. I pulled over and the noise stopped, so I turned around, going slowly, limped back to town, got to a parking lot. Maybe I can limp to a repair shop tomorrow. Bummed, I walked below the flood-wall and examined detritus. Found a spot in the lee of the world's ugliest jetty. Since I had dressed for the hike up the driveway I was comfortable enough to stay for a while despite cold temps and a biting wind. Ice, anchored to the bottom of the jetty was filled with river trash (I know the spot is an back-eddy from previous visits), and a muskrat worked the unfrozen edge for anything edible. As the ground was frozen, I could wander into the copse of trees that fill the first terrace. It's a wonderland of river tossed sticks that always tickles my imagination. Walked all the way down to where there's the rusting hulk of a barge with trees growing up through where the bottom used to be. By then I was cold, and I headed for the museum, to use my computer there, to write. I stupidly write in an AOL file, I've been meaning to change the way I work, but in the meantime it does allow me to access posts I've sent, and the Apple is about 50 times faster than my PC at home. Walked over to Kroger and got an avocado, a small can of crab meat, and a piece of English double-cheddar. Made a very good tarter sauce with leftover odds and ends from the kitchen and stuffed the avocado. There are always packets of crackers kicking around the upstairs common space, the excellent cheese, an idle hour watching a soccer match on Hulu, and I feel I can deal with my probably dying truck. A sequence of steps: get it to a shop, find the problem, estimate the expense, make a decision. Decision-trees are how we end up where we are. At every bifurcation you have to decide. You choose. It happens on a more-than-daily basis. You decide you can live with something, or you can't; the rock and drill might be more than you can handle, or you might be able to calm a horse with the touch of your hand. Mostly we're stuffed into casings based on a kind of profiling. I view any time I can add or subtract a comma as a positive situation. Un-needed notes. Fuck a bunch of scribbles, what I send is the best I can do right then.