Something Later

Three or four things happen at once: a massive clap of thunder, sheets of lightning, a wave of rain, I lose power (I keep a compact fluorescent light on, downstairs, to guide me when I need to pee), and I wake up, confused, not remembering my senior prom. Wait, it's coming back, Sandra Harper, her Dad was a fireman, she had a great taut body and told me that if I went away, to do a season of Summer Stock, that our relationship was over. I left the next day. Staccato drumming on the roof. I got up and put on the headlamp that Howard sent, I keep it on my nightstand, which is a cable spool my daughters decorated with text. Wearing a headlamp tends to focus your attention. What you're looking at. I write some words, in my crabbed hand, isolation, insulation, invitational, something else I can't decipher, maybe inviolate, but it could be almost anything. Text is become twitter. I noticed this strongly today (yesterday, now) because everyone was using electronic devises. I was just drinking a beer and wanted to go home, fuck a bunch of distractions. It was getting loud at the pub, tuning instruments and a bunch of adrenaline junkies that biked down the hundred miles from Columbus, a yearly event, god bless their calves. The rain picks up. The blackberries needed this, I foresee a bumper crop. I may have to can blackberry juice. Confusion has a name, everything has a name, right? polysemy, an ugly word, but there it is, a multitude of things. Awoke on the sofa, well after dawn, with a sky so overcast that it hardly mattered what time of day, still raining, and the green wall that surrounds me was vibrantly clean and dancing. The power was off in the night, I knew because the digital clock was flashing, but was back again when I finally stirred, so I turned on Black Dell to get the time, and noticed that I had started the first couple of lines of this block of text. Which brings us more or less up to date. Except for the several hours I spent looking at pictures, mostly Velazquez, thinking about his body of work. How it moves from the symbolic pictorial into the absolute real. Caravaggio had broken this ground in Italy, and I love them both, but the "Rokeby Venus" is the most stunning thing currently on my radar. Looking back, I think the word may have been 'involute' because I remember noticing a piece of cast iron trim on a old building. Tying up loose ends. Because Bastion is French, his using the word 'fuck' in every sentence isn't offensive, because it sounds like 'folk'. His current thing is that he says he's from Texas, and that we don't recognize his Texas accent. Like I say, he's very funny. He's clearly French.