Dark Quiet

One last round, two, actually, of polenta, with butter and maple syrup. I don't know what got me up, an errant sound, but I did need to pee and the vault of sky was oddly clear considering all the coal-fired power plants in the area. I read back through some notes and they didn't make any sense. Almost no verbs. A mass of carefully noted things. There's a neat pile of folded papers I use for notes. Mostly, they're reject sheets from the recycling bin at work that had some blank space I thought to fill. I'll jot something down, "the role of distortion" for instance. I know what I mean, in a vague way, it's something I want to think about, and the note is a reminder. Coffee, cream, avocados. That's misleading, it's not a shopping list. But there are those too. Word lists. Any given folded sheet might yield nothing but some things I needed on a particular day. Not much of interest, but interesting in a distracted way. I try and stay ahead, with certain commodities, coffee, peanut butter, saltines, so it's necessary to make lists. And when I'm home for long uninterrupted periods of time, I can burn through the coffee and cream, the peanut butter and saltines, the eggs, for god's sake. When I make polenta, I'm a fool for eggs. It's so quiet, four in the morning, that when the refrigerator kicks on I go over and kill the breaker. Sound pollution is a very real thing. My black Dell hums, I can live with that. It's cold outside, but I have a good fire going and I open the window at my desk, so I can hear the natural world. The litter layer, the duff, is extremely sensitive to movement; when I'm attuned, I can hear the worms. You can always hear the bugs, moving about, dislodging the dry leaves on top. And when a deer makes her hesitant step you have to turn down the amplifier, mute the reverb, because it's so goddamn loud. I listen, closely, in the dark, building this sound-scape, that may or may not represent a specific reality. The world as I imagine? It hardly matters in the great scheme of things. I don't want to sleep, I've had enough of that, so I take my sleeping bag and foam pad out to the edge of the clearing and intend to listen to bugs until sunrise. I did nod off, and when I woke up I was completely disoriented, outside, in a mummy bag. Jesus, what was I thinking? I stumbled inside, suited up in the bag on the sofa, pulled Linda's hat down around my ears, and slept for a fitful hour. That horrible recurring dream about being atop some very unstable scaffolding. My mouth was dry, even water seemed medicinal. More and more time to dawdle on the way in to work. Went below the floodwall, hadn't been in a while, and poked around in the debris piles. I started collecting doll parts. One thing I want to do is put a doll together from the wrong parts. Also, I'd like to arrange dolls as famous sculptures. I'm putting out a call for old dolls and doll parts. Didn't get much done today, I kept getting sidetracked, the elevator guys came over, I talked with a student concerning a paper he needed to write about a Carter painting, cleaned the kitchen, tightened up the lock-nuts on the faucet for the upstairs bathroom sink. I need to go to the dumpster tomorrow. Ronnie and the band playing in the theater on Friday night, and that's a beer drinking event, so I want all the trash cans empty. Wouldn't mind staying for that but I'm already committed for a couple of nights in June and I don't like to be over-exposed, taken for granted. People start thinking they know you, and the troubles begin. Relationships are the bane of our existence. I think everyone should be assigned a cave, where they live alone, of difficult access, carrying water for hundreds of yards. But that's just me. Designing a perfect world. I thought that was funny, the very idea that you could design a perfect world. I have a lot to learn.