Background Noise

B came over, wondered about my truck, which was in a slightly different place as it had rolled backwards when I'd tried to start it yesterday. He had a battery charger in the print shop, so we pulled the battery and put it on charge. Nice conversation about a poetry conference he just attended in northern Ohio. Stephen Ellis was there, one of the great writers working today. B read a piece on friendship and solitude that I'm anxious to read. He's playing with Ronnie and Kevin at the pub on Thursday evening and I'll probably stay in town to hear them. B said they're doing some Robert Johnson. I need to get a new CD player/radio but I finally do get mine to play some Skip James. I do love those Delta Blues. Though I don't listen to music much anymore, I still hear it in my head. It's not just the solitude that's required for me to write, but the absence of background noise. Increasingly drives me crazy. Tripping the breaker for the fridge seems extreme, but then I think about Proust and realize I'm not that extreme. Kim will be here, a week from today, and I'm sure I won't write that night either. Language is a mystery. When B came over I was reading essays about Wittgenstein. Who does that? I was actually enjoying myself, submitting commas for review. Meaning is what you make of it. The entire grid must have gone down yesterday, because Pegi calls and says the AC is off at the museum, which means that either a breaker or a fuse tripped, but it's a holiday and I'd already been drinking so I didn't want to drive into town. I call D and we decide tomorrow morning is soon enough to tackle the problem. I'm pretty much on call 24/7 but after the incident a few years ago when I found myself at home without knowing how I got there, I will not drink and drive. Though my horse, as John Wayne said, knows the way. Speaking of horses, I do need a newer vehicle, that I can trust, and I'm looking, I'm a couple of thousand short, which isn't a problem, because I can advance myself that on my Visa and be paid off within the year, no foul, but I don't know what vehicle I want. If not a pick-up, then at least a hatch-back, because I have to haul things. Nature of the beast. Hauling. Months without an 'r' I have to haul water, pollen and leaf-litter would mean filtering rainwater through an old tee-shirt, and, eventually you run out of old tee-shirts. Did I mention that the water from town is green? Seriously. I transport wash-water in five gallon pickle buckets from the pub and they are white plastic, I mean WHITE, and city water is always tinted green. When I leave a bucket alone for a month or more, which is fairly often, there's a precipitate, and I wonder what that shit is. I'd rather drink water from a wet-weather spring. Rather drink rain water. Rather drink piss, filtered through a sheep's fleece. Chlorine, it drives me crazy. Just saying. A list is merely three things. They don't even have to be in order, just three things.