Commotion

A feral dog and a coon on the compost pile. Four-thirty in the morning. The dog looks like a cross between a Pit Bull and a German Shepard, the coon is just pissed. Appears to be no game, the dog has a ten-to-one weight advantage, but the coon has the high ground. The dog moves in slow, snarling, the coon, spitting and hissing, rears up on its butt, rakes his front paws across the dog's eyes and bites it on the nose. The best defense. Dog runs away, yipping, and the coon goes back to his broccoli. Five-forty, no reason to go back to bed, I'd never get to sleep, so I make a double espresso and soft boil a couple of eggs. A perfect soft-boiled egg has a calming effect: it requires attention and the texture is soothing; a grind of fresh pepper, a heavily buttered piece of multi-grain toast with sharp English marmalade. I used to have some egg scissors, I don't know what happened to them, left behind, somewhere, forgotten, in that drawer relegated to implements of (generally) highly specific operations. In my head, I think of it as 'The Implement Drawer', but it probably has an actual name. Now I just knock the top off of them with the knife I'm using to butter the toast. The soft-set white and liquid yolk are a wonder. Andy, our light bulb guy (and a hell of a guitarist), supplies us with hot sauce. Both D and I have a Jones for this, so we're what you might call 'a hardened audience', looking for a balance of flavor and heat. He grows his own peppers and makes a great sauce, but he'd brought both of us a green and red sauce in little nip bottles that you could carry with you (I don't know about you, but I always carry a small LED flashlight, a small book, and a small bottle of hot sauce, wherever I go), with a heads up, that this sauce, from Belize, was very hot. When you hear the phrase 'very hot' everything depends on the source. Suzanne thought bologna sandwich's on white bread with mayonnaise were pretty exotic. I have other friends that nibble extremely hot peppers when they need to stay alert for a long drive. Andy's to the left of all that. I think he's one of those people that doesn't feel pain. This new red sauce is the hottest damned thing I've ever ingested. A single drop, on a tortilla chip, my standard method of testing, and I was crying. Diana, who I trust as a critic, said that I was writing well, I don't know about that, I just try and pay attention to detail. Leave out everything else. What you're left with is a residue, almost a resin, not unlike those back waters when the river floods. That seasonal sandbar has appeared again, downstream, where the Scioto flows into the Ohio. It represents the millions of cubic feet of soil washed away. It's all about fines, and specific gravity, where things fall.