Otherwise

Stayed at work for an extra hour after TR and D left yesterday, to let the driveway dry a bit, then came home, where, of course, the power was out. I almost turned right around and headed back to the museum, but I wanted to be at home. Cool enough to start a fire, and I wanted an omelet with what could be the last morels of the season. Fired up the oil lamps and lit a couple of candles, read at the island for a couple of hours. No way of telling when I went to bed, it was dark and I was tired, crawled into my mummy bag and went out like a light. Still overcast this morning, but the power was back on and the soft greens of spring were glowing in the diffused light. Greeted by a Pileated Woodpecker on the white oak outside my writing window. Along with crows, my favorite birds, always solitary and intent (crows, on the other hand, I generally see in 3's and 4's, bitching about something); and I was fascinated with the efficiency on display of a powerful beak that is disconnected from the cranium. A nose that knows. D was awkward and funny yesterday, preparing his thesis installation, finishing the written component; he's getting anxious, worried (needlessly) that his work won't be up to par, despite the fact that he carried a 3.9 grade point average through grad school. He still managed to get the next museum News Letter off to the printers, and designed a nice little flyer for something else. The main item on my list was to get the theater piano (we have two baby grands) moved onto the stage so Gerry could come and tune it, whenever his schedule would allow, for the Chopin Competition next Sunday. Sometimes it's hard to keep the thread, especially when I miss a night's writing, because there are too many things, and the time line is skewed. Tense becomes an issue, and then there are the commas. Skip said, when we talked the other evening, that inside every comma there's a coma, and inside every coma there's a comma. I wrote that down and push-pinned it to the wall. I post, it's what I do. Patter of raindrops and maybe a little hail, yesterday, and I threw on my clothes and beat it down the hill. I was not going to miss the Saturday burrito and I wanted to shave and wash my hair with running water. Moved the piano, dumped the trash, could have gotten home early, but Billy, at the pub, had finally made his chili, we'd been begging him for weeks, and I couldn't pass up a bowl of that, and I wasn't actually working that day, so I had pint of bitters, watching the top ten plays of the week on ESPN, on a wide screen over the bar with no sound. It's an abstract reality. I wanted to read Mary's letters from the last part of 1951, because there was a show in Elmira that I was curious about. I know a particular watercolor (we have it, it's hanging currently) and I was trying to nail down it's history. I just went back and added a comma, but I'm not sure about it. I only achieve whatever I do by not thinking about it. When I'm at my best I'm completely disassociated. I just went back and took out a comma. Punctuation establishes syntax, thinking about B's train and track, the guy is a fucking genius, it doesn't matter what I think about his personal hygiene. That's and in-joke about not having running water, it sounds important but it's not. The real issue is whatever you were thinking. Skip and Steven are way ahead of me on this, read them, if you can, but they are both so difficult to understand because they're trying to be clear. Even Pound, at his most difficult, was trying to be clear.  Even my personal demons, Levi-Strauss and Wittgenstein's various wonderings, are simply fence posts. We should talk about this, if we ever had a chance. I'm sure the divorce is final.