Looking Back

May Day. A sudden stillness. No wind, no rain, but a certain heaviness. The air is saturated. When I go outside to pee, the moisture clings to me. Four in the morning, but I made the mistake of coming fully awake, so I make a pot of coffee and read the Candy Section of "Gravity's Rainbow". It's one of the funniest pieces of writing ever. I remember Mac reading it to a bunch of us, maybe thirty tears ago, and we were all rolling around on the floor. As a Shakespeare scholar, and your run of the mill genius, he read with gusto and precision. Looking back, I've been read to by some of the best. Diana reading that wonderful chapter of the book she wrote about traveling alone, when she visited us in Colorado and we were castrating lambs. Skip and Steven reading poems, sitting around Joe Napora's kitchen table, Harvey reciting Lorca in perfect Spanish, Linda channeling Emily. A good run. I read back, over a couple of pages, because several people mentioned a particular post, and I wondered what the matter was. It was a good page, I see what I was doing, I understand the response; I write a lot of pages. I trust, when a select set of readers call attention to a specific post, that it had popped out for some reason, and I'm always interested in what that reason was. In this case, as is often the case, it was attention to detail. I've gotten good at describing things, not really surprising because I tend to look at things closely, and noticing detail is the name of the game: the stems in an oak leaf do look like the veins on the back of your hand. It's not arrogant, is it? to say you saw this coming? The narrator becomes a character and then there is a narrative. A story. That time Roy took me to a road-house in Cruger, a delta town, with a road-house painted purple. I was the only white person there. The blues were transcendental. As I live and breathe it was a mind-altering experience. Power was out when I got home and a magnificent squall line moved in from the NW, all the weather groups except for snow, earth-shaking thunder and almost enough lightning to read by, hail, sleet, rain, a tremendous display. I could get out, the next morning, yesterday, but the Mackletree was littered with branches and leaves. Early enough for ablutions, made a pot of coffee, served Pegi when she got in, and talked for thirty minutes about human nature. Gathered the trash and hauled it away, stopped by the hardware store for a packet of utility-knife blades. Coverts had blessed me with some cardboard boxes. Upper-end mattresses come in sturdy boxes, triple-walled, double corrugation, and I'll be using a utility knife often, in the coming weeks, cutting shipping panels for the Folk Art show. Lost another page, to a brown out, last night, when the temps climbed over ninety, and everyone turned on their AC. I need to work on a laptop that operates on a battery that I can solar charge or plug in, depending on what's available. Now I'm confused, because it's the next day, and I've lost my thread. Dawn is breaking, and the fucking Whip-O-Wills are going crazy, it's a madhouse outside, frogs and bugs and birds. I have to disassociate myself before I can even make a pot of coffee, it's raucous and intrusive. I should consider a cork-lined room, probably what my friends would call 'protective custody' but I'm not sure that's correct. Protecting who against what.