Tipping Point

I usually get up to pee in the middle of the night, two or three in the morning. It's a lovely interlude, especially in winter, when footing is an issue. If I have to come fully awake, as sometimes I must, I might not go, immediately, back to sleep. Sometimes I don't remember where I was sleeping and I have to retrace my steps. Often I get a short drink and roll a smoke, stare into the darkness, turn on Black Dell and write a few lines. No love's labor lost. This Greenblatt book, "The Swerve", is the best thing I've read in a long time, has me digging deep into the stacks for copies of things I'd forgotten. I can barely translate Latin, but it excites me when I get the point. The rules of language dictate meaning, the scrip. It's enough that someone merely mops. I'm cool with that, the way things operate. You need a system, parameters, within which to function. I consider the natural world my field, so I listen to the mice, gnawing at the insulation, and the raccoons digging through the compost. They tell me something I translate into action. Write a few more lines. My mandate. I had the best teachers in the world. They pretty much taught me to beat the shit out of a recalcitrant board. Later in life I came to the conclusion that the material dictated the terms. The board knows what it wants to do; your job is just to see it done. Everything else aside. Late winter my fingertips begin to crack, I use udder balm to relieve the pain, but I can't apply it to the two fingers I use for typing and every word becomes misery. Couldn't, rather, until last week. I was in the bank, depositing a paycheck, and the teller, noticing my name on the check, asked if I was that writer who lived out in the woods. I allowed that I might be, and she paraphrased something I'd written recently, yes, I said, that was me. There was no one else in the bank at the moment, so we chatted for a few minutes; she asked what I was working on and I described, briefly, the book about Janitor College and the agony of editing with split digits. She nodded sagely, opened a drawer and gave me a handful of those latex fingertip gloves (I'm sure they have a name) which provided immediate relief. The keyboard feel is not quite the same, and I make more spelling errors, but the pain is gone and I sound a lot less like someone suffering from Tourette's Syndrome. The real problem is that I pound too hard, when I have a thought, trying to keep up with myself. I wear out keyboards. A beautiful day, slight haze but a blue sky, and the world is shades of brown, rather than the mid-winter black and white. Green, I think, is not far off. Then there's the moon, rising through stick trees, so beautiful it breaks my heart. I feel like a well-driven mule, weary, chewing my cud, glancing to the side through hooded eyes. The epicanthic fold providing disguise. Content, actually, in the moment, smelling the manure, and thanking the higher powers that I'd spread a layer of straw. Best to keep one foot ahead. That last twenty vertical feet coming up the driveway is a challenge, most anyone would fall on their ass, I only stay upright by dint of a third leg, an aluminum mop handle I wield as a weapon. You really don't want to surprise me in the night.