Still Crazy

Rain comes in, staccato beat. I got up, to put out a couple of buckets, after it had rained hard for an hour, washing the roof of spring debris, catkins and pollen, the remnants of vegetable sex. I'll need to filter this water through a piece of tee-shirt, four pieces per shirt, that I push-pin to a frame, into another bucket. It's a good system, if you live alone and don't care that much about personal hygiene. I'm clean, generally, and my particular body smell doesn't seem to be offensive, a kind of musky tobacco scent that most people dismiss as a farmhand. Which is fine. Might be that I was mucking out the barn (conditional, do I have that correctly?) or any of the various chores that put me in direct contact with shit. Roy Blount Junior called his music "hard listening" which I think is a fair assessment of what comes to pass. Weekends especially, when I tangle with the beast. I never could understand why you needed to go somewhere else, addressing my ex-wife here, when we had everything at home. Which is, of course, the flaw, the something in the ointment. It's fine now, I don't care. What I see, actually, is that we are alone. Not a cause for alarm, we've always been alone. I can't turn on the radio because the news is sentimental. Finally I turn everything off and roll a smoke in what passes for silence. A distant Whip-O-Will, the drops of rain, frogs in that distant puddle. I pride myself on being fair. It's tomorrow, I have to go. Sleep usually helps. This time it doesn't. A branch breaks off a tree and sounds like a howitzer in the dark. I sit up so quickly I pop my neck, that top vertebrae (the Atlas?) grinds against the next one down with an actual sound, it doesn't hurt, any more than what I'm used to, I assume a certain amount of pain as part of the cost of doing business, but I do think, for a moment, that I might have broken my neck. How silly to die over a broken branch. I test various body parts and everything seems to work ok, so I just get up and roll a smoke. Fuck a bunch of grinding neck sounds. Cavalier in my thoughts, once I would have thought it might make a difference, what you might accomplish within a given timeframe, now I know it doesn't matter. Doctor John. Looking in from the outside. Clown college. Between rain showers I walk out the ridge beyond the graveyard, just at dusk I find a couple of very large morels, six inches or more, dark and earthy. I have enough small, lighter colored ones for brunch tomorrow, so as soon as I get back to the house, I clean them with a napkin (flecks of leaf matter), slice them into rings, and put them in the dryer that Mister Barnhart, in his wisdom, gave me a few years ago. It is possible that dried morels, reconstituted in Sherry or Madeira, are even better than fresh ones. I intend to research this issue the rest of my life. Mad-Tom, by the way, in addition to being the subject of several British ballads, is a species of catfish, of the genus Noturus , having a poisonous pectoral spine. Don't know why that came to mind, a friend in Colorado called me that, to distinguish me from the other Tom on the three man crew that we assembled once a year to build a house for someone. When it was Tom, Dennis, and me, we were a great crew. We were the go-to guys when another crew had really fucked up and didn't know what to do. Staircases were our specialty, but we could do anything, actually. Dennis once spent an entire winter building a set of bunk-beds, that could be broken down into a set of sticks and reassembled in minutes and contained not a single ounce of metal. And when it was put together, it was rock-solid firm. Attachment. At The Opera Company Of Boston we used coffin-locks a lot. Look them up, they're wonderful recessed cam-driven units that provide absolute closure. We used them to secure scenic pieces down to a turn-table, for instance, because they could be released so quickly. Half a turn with whatever that tool is called, the female Allen Wrench. I'm not sure I ever knew the name, we just referred to it as the Coffin Wrench. Friction and inertia, being what they are, a very tight attachment will hold almost anything, physical things I mean, not marriages or sanity, I can't speak to them. Securing a piece of scenery is fairly straight-forward, attach A to B. A broken marriage is a whole other kettle of fish. The dead and dying litter the floor. I usually advise that you scoop everything into a doubled trash bag and throw it away; sometimes you need to poke it with stick, to be sure, but you can omit that step if it looks like shit, and smells like shit, Chances are.