Hardly There

I never would have imagined. I'll let most of those lines go slack. I'm sharper than you think. The very fact that you recognized something. I'd seen the moves ahead. Just a bad dream, then a young war out at the compost pile. Three beagles and a black dog have treed a coon in the oak near the woodshed. A working definition of chaos. I restore some order with my slingshot and some cat's eye marbles. One of the beagles has a fine voice, but feral dogs count as wild, and I treat all wild animals as if they had rabies; so I run them off, with a couple of well-placed marbles and a growl of my own. Barking punctuated with that high-pitched yelp; like drainage, the soundscape is difficult to control. When I come back inside, I'm fully awake, so I get a splash of the Ardbeg single-malt, what did Luca Turin say about some failed perfume, that it smelled like a ripe mango smashed on fresh asphalt? It was like that. But if you take very small sips, a richness unfolds, under the creosote. My hands were damp with sweat, so I couldn't roll a cigaret until I washed my arms and hands and face with cool rain-water, dried myself completely, turned on the AC to drown out the fucking Whip-O-Wills. Then the radio, where I tapped into some very strange music, a sustained electronic chord augmented with other sounds. It went on for a long time, then some Miles from Kind Of Blue, then a Bill Evans piece. Songs without words. Sitting there, shimmering at me. Variability. No direct connection. Climate change. Explain the question better. Movement requires change (D leaving). Thought-streams as I sip the whiskey and have a smoke. Finally back to sleep and got up late for me, a breakfast of an egg on toast covered with morels fried in butter. A hike in the morning, then the Monday bath, then reading all afternoon. Mostly about the Phoenicians, but with a couple of major diversions; got out the 11th to read about tin, and shuffled a couple of stacks of printed matter, so that the OED was in front of the pile of manuscripts. Remembered reading that the definition for 'set' was one of the longest and made the mistake of getting my reading glasses and looking it up. Gathering dark, by the time I'd developed a headache from reading such small print, and I needed to eat, so I made a Mac-And-Cheese, with cubed cured ham, topped with bread crumbs and browned in the toaster over. Just one of my sinful escapes .I Iove this stuff. It's supposed to mean something, but it doesn't. I have to go, another line of squalls, the ground is shaking.