Supposed To Be

Ground fog, thick as gravy, and I can't see across the hollow. It's not so much raining, as the sky is simply leaking. No discernable pattern, just clusters of drops, and the wind has died completely. Nothing stirs. I made a crock-pot of grits when I got up to pee sometime in the night, so I wouldn't have to be concerned with food, and that's working fine; I refry a hefty spoon-full in a six-inch cast iron skillet; make a depression in the middle and poach an egg. Steam an egg is probably closer to the truth, break an egg into the depression, add a squirt of vermouth and pop on a lid. I found a lid at the Goodwill that perfectly fits the six-inch cast iron skillets (I have five of them) in which I'm fond of cooking. One o'clock in the afternoon and the fog still lingers. Ten degrees colder and this would be a massive ice storm, or twelve inches of snow, but it's just a quiet afternoon, and I'm thinking about output, not input. Sargent did 600 portraits and I'm just getting started on the watercolors; Carter must have done several thousand paintings. And the prints, Jesus god, there are dozens of them, in editions of 50 or 100, mostly sold out, and the Newark Library system bought one of each of them. In a drawer somewhere. Collections. I have tottering piles of books, and a stack of manuscripts that probably qualifies as a collection, and several thousand pages of my own work in a cloud somewhere. My literary estate. I was working on the Janitor College book, WIP, "Modified Chevron" when the power went out today. Lost some changes, but the core is stored in several different places. I've lost more books to lightening than I can remember, so I tend to store things in more than one place. There's a thousand pages next to my printer that I need to put in the vault at work, a shelf of my own, I keep there, hoarding paper against the apocalypse. The suffering is acute but not life-threatening, more like the pain in your foot when you stub a toe. You walk around for a few days, limping, bitching about the slings and arrows, but that table has been precisely there for 13 years. Reading Walter Benjamin by candle-light, which should be a required course, and I realize the mall is his arcade. Strikes me that I'm slow.