The Usual

Black Dell confuses me. I thought I was done. Got up in the night to pee, check the phone, as is my want, and there's a dial tone. I sent whatever it was I wrote yesterday, without reading it, leery that the service would fail again. Remembered that today was my birthday. Just at dawn I make a lovely three-egg omelet with caramelized onions and a very good British cheddar. My bread had gone moldy, but I had some biscuits in the freezer that Mom turned me on to, that I could bake in the toaster over, and a wonderful marmalade from Spain that a friend had sent. Spent the morning rereading Barry Lopez's "Arctic Dreams", one of my favorite books. I'd picked up, at Kroger, a package of bones being sold as doggy treats. Beef shin bones, ripe with marrow. I dust them with pepper in a throw-away aluminum pan I rescued from the trash at the museum, pour about half an inch of chicken broth in the pan (I don't like beef broth) and cover them with foil. Start a small fire on one side of the grill and put them on the other, spin them, whenever I think about it, and cook them for several hours. The last thirty minutes, I add some damp hickory chips to the fire and take off the foil. Split a couple of biscuits in half and toast them. I have a interesting marrow spoon I hammered out of an old wooden-handled screwdriver. One decants the cooking liquid and adds a shot of brandy, a heady and probably lethal beverage, and spoons the marrow, bite by bite, onto the edge of the toasted biscuit. This is so good, atavistic, that it is best eaten alone in a cave or a tree-tip pit. It's the only meal that makes me growl. Three days alone and the dailiness morphs into something that exceeds the actual events. All the paraphernalia and junk that accumulates, mentally or otherwise, comes under scrutiny. I spent a long time looking, but I didn't find anything. Doesn't phase me. Marrow might be a Tupi word for fat. I love the Tupi, they're one of those island tribes that took one look at a boat full of white guys and disappeared deep into the Amazon. A pickle fork would probably work pretty well as a marrow spoon. Off my feed, as they say. There's an ancient hush to the forest tonight, nothing you would notice right away, but I live here, and it seems almost oppressive, like the demands for sex from a former lover, or water over the dam, knap: didn't we agree to a truce? I would never expect you to bet the family jewels. The full panoply. There's a word for this, in some unwritten tongue. Mareco, a type of squash, pointed at both ends. Yet another oblate spheroid. There's a certain sense in which all of life is just a rugby game. There's the scrum, some open field shit, then we just rip off each other's ears; no, wait, that was what passes for music. In preparation for going blind, I do things in the dark. Tonight, I rolled a cigaret. Granted it wasn't one-handed on horse-back, but it was in the dark, and when I turned on the light, to see what I had done, it actually looked like a cigaret and smoked just fine. Have to think about that.