Moving Things

Started the day loading out Mark's paintings. He came to get them because they open in another show on Monday, which he's helping to hang tomorrow. D brought his slightly sick daughter to work (a cold), and she went to lunch with us, first time sitting at a bar. She amused herself almost as well as my younger daughter, Rhea (who actually disappears), and it was nice being around a kid. After lunch I took down the print show, and got them all downstairs; D was going to load them in the rental van after I'd headed home, on my winter schedule. From three until a little after four we loaded out the eight wall panels into a low-boy trailer in two batches and sent them over to Pegi's studio. Some of the Cirque people helped and it went smoothly. I always shudder at moving awkward heavy things with people who don't know what they're doing, but we got it done. We now have a new storage area. For the sound system on a cart, and a portable bar, which we'll design and build. I didn't need anything at home, though I felt a bit guilty about not carrying something in to the house. So it was just a light pack, a couple of books. The walk is getting easier, and I love the way walking-in mediates between town and country. I leave the house in winter, all the components for starting a fire are right there when I return; I keep those stations of the cross stocked. And now I turn on the new heater, over where I write, and I am, as they say, a happy camper. Interesting: if I flush a toilet or urinal three times a day at work, I double my water use. It's crazy, all the nutrients wash away, AND I double my water use; the logic defies me. Three in the morning and the dog pack was back, which isn't all bad, because I needed to stoke the fire. They'd cornered a coon on the compost pile, but none of them are fools, they must have gotten the memo about coons and rabies, so it's a stand-off. I'd replenished my store of throwing rocks and scattered the dogs, the coon slipped off, down the path to the graveyard, and quiet was restored. I've found a perfect bed of throwing rocks, in the flood plain of Mackletree Creek just before it flows into Roosevelt Lake. Fines are consistent, considering all the variables; but the angle of the creek bed, the degree of fall, is nominally the same; and the funneling effect of the bed itself, given a hard rain, tends to drop a particularly sized rock in a specific place. I've walked this creek bed for half a mile, and the same size rock occurs upstream, jumbled in debris, but there's a stretch where almost every rock is the same size. I can half-fill a five gallon bucket in just a couple of minutes. They're sandstone and shale, palm-sized and three-quarters of an inch thick, and the edges are all rounded, from the tumbling, so they don't cut your hands. They tend to sail, but at twenty-five feet that's not an issue, and they fit my hand so well. They're a joy to skip. A life-long interest in slingshots and throwing rocks has uniquely prepared me for the apocalypse, talk about low-tech: a pocket knife, an inner-tube, and a pile of rocks. I can make a kind of bread from cattail flour, and I've seeded certain wet areas with watercress. I hoard bean seed, as a matter of course, and I could live on acorns and roadkill until I harvest a crop. Survival is not the issue. It's the reason for survival. Sartre, all those existentialists, are correct, questioning the foundation. I'd rather die than live in this world, or I 'd rather live in this world than die. A choice you have to make.