Mare Turba

I couldn't decide what I meant, you could translate what was said one way or another. I have to go to bed, but I wanted to leave a marker for myself. Memory tabs. Mostly my notes don't make any sense to me. A Latin word or phrase, 'Mare est in turba', which means, literally, 'the sea is in turmoil', but my high school Latin teacher, Miss Craig, used in a colloquial sense to mean that she was displeased with a translation. Colloquialisms are a problem, a difficult aspect of language. What is said doesn't mean what is said, there's no indicator; and they're specifically regional, so if you move around a lot, as I've done, there's a confusion about what's meant. TR, a local, used the phrase 'I don't care to' today in a way that meant he'd gladly help with whatever it was. Almost anyplace else in the country, if you used that phrase, it would mean you didn't want anything to do with whatever it was, but he meant the exact opposite. A good example of this, in the modern media, you can find in that female character on NCIS, she misuses words and phrases in a charming way, but speaks impeccable English otherwise. My control on this is a consortium of waitresses and bar-keeps, dudes that make their living trapping animals, and the occasional good old boy I meet clearing a fallen tree off Mackletree. Language, meaning, is a slippery slope. Context is everything. Hard off an early morning I spent deep into consideration of certain teleological issues, why I was here, stuff like that, and I'm driving out, glad to have the early morning cool blowing away the cobwebs, and there's a dead tree fallen on the road. I could drive around the other way, there are options, go back home and take the day off, but the point is, I don't have a chainsaw with me and I can't deal with the situation. Just then a good old boy in a beat to shit pick-up truck stops from the other direction, and he does have a chainsaw, in the back of his truck, and we clear the road in just a very few moments. We communicate mostly by grunts and nods. What needs to be done. This is the way language evolved, I think: first nouns, then verbs. First you name something, then you do something with it. D and I hang the two new Carters. There's an Art Camp going on, and a concert for kids in the theater, so I holed up in my office and read about Carter all afternoon. Delightful. William Robinson wrote the excellent text of the big "Snapshot Show" that Sara put together. He's one of the curators for American painters at the Cleveland Museum. At one point there were 51 curators there. They have their own shop for building shipping crates, full-time carpenters; I imagine their janitorial staff is huge. So the show went there, of course. D and I had built all the shipping crates (on the floor of the shop in the theater building at the college) and after it arrived and they had installed it, Bill called Sara and said that the preparators had told him that it was the best packed show they'd ever uncrated. High praise in small circles. We knew we had done a good job, because most of the paintings were ours and our priority was protecting them. After work D wanted to go for a beer, it being way too hot to even consider yard work, and after a quick check of the weather channel on his IPhone, and there being no squall lines in sight, I agreed to a cold pint before going back to my house, which I knew would be sweltering. Black Dell is a demanding bitch. I can turn her on at the lower end of 82 degrees. Took two hours to get the house from 90 degrees down to the lower part of 82. Probably, this time of year, I should write in the early morning hours. The waiting is too painful. I read the text on a tube of yellow rice, I read several essays in the London Review: I read an entire issue of the New Yorker, ads and all, killing time. All I want to do is write, this intervening shit is a pain in the ass. I made a great pork fried-rice, I have friends that would kill for this recipe, but there isn't a recipe, exactly, just some things I throw together.