Using Bembo

Typefaces are personalities. I like reading a 42 line page, the first bible that Gutenberg printed; in an old-style type by candle-light. Meaning is enhanced by presentation. Great books and certain strippers I've known have a way of making a particular moment special. Not unlike watching a gang of turkeys work their way through the underbrush, or the way light plays with reality. I'm just an aging hippy, and I make no claim, but there are patterns in the way people behave. Mostly I watch their eyes. Deceit is always evident in the eyes. Green eyes I find particularly problematic. Counter-intuitive. Certain traits we could do without. Neil Young, any number of songs later, the sun comes up. I wanted to sleep in, but I'm spent, not sleepy, so I get up, make coffee and a large breakfast. Retreat to the sofa and read a Thomas Perry novel. Recharge my batteries. I have a battered music stand I got out of a dumpster at the College, an older one, when they were heavier and had a bigger lip at the bottom, and I use it as a portable dictionary stand, so I can keep an unabridged dictionary, currently, on that stand, is the Random House Second, which fits the stand perfectly, close at hand. I have a reading lamp, at the end of the sofa, which serves my reading purposes, but when I lean out of the light, to consult the dictionary, which I do a lot, I'm often in the dark, so I wear a LED headlamp at night or when it's overcast. There are four dictionaries opened right now, at the various stations. The Random House, a Webster's on the sofa (I had retreated to my writing chair), Barry Lopez's great "Home Ground", a dictionary of the earth under your feet, on a pile of manuscripts on the side of my desk, and the fourth is a slang dictionary, over at the island. I know where everything is, and I have a head-lamp. I still don't know how to make sense of anything (that's not a complaint, by the way, just a comment) and spend a huge amount of time staring off into space. Sundays I seldom do anything other than read. Late afternoon I treated myself to an Angus porterhouse and a baked potato, with an old vines Zinfandel that was large enough to engulf planets. A Ridge, York Creek, 2004, I found in Columbus, a BIG complex wine with notes of asphalt and fruit. I love porterhouse steaks, for that medallion of rib-eye, and they were on sale, which is confusing, when the corn crop has failed. I put the potato, wrapped in foil, right in the coals of the firebox and grill the steak for four minutes a side on a very hot grate. The potato with just butter and sour cream, kosher salt and maybe twenty grinds of black pepper; the steak I have with a raspberry/chipotle salsa that is stunning. I didn't keep track of how I made the salsa, it involved fresh tomatoes, late season raspberries and water-cress. I remember throwing in some dried cranberries at the end, to soak up the liquid. Cranberries are good with any red meat. I didn't seed the peppers. A meal fit for, you know, a king, which I merely keep in stride. That's arrogant, Howard is 80, he still herds wild turtles.