Various Projects

To reconstruct is never the same as to build; G. Spencer Brown, you can read the literature, there's a track record there, but what it says might not be true. That world, out there, might well be a web of lies. Everything could be false. I was walking with a magician once, on the outer beach at Wellfleet, when he pulled a rabbit from his hat. I'm used to magic, but this was a real rabbit. Knowing people like this, what are you to make of the nature if reality? It's a great mushroom year and I have these Porcini, a Boletus, that I slice into a risotto. Slept late this morning, exhausted from trying to make sense to the Chinese students. Cleaned the bathrooms, did some mopping. Trying to locate a piece of light track, to build a strip for testing lamps and bulbs. I know it's somewhere at the museum, just like I know there's an old 16 ounce Estwing hammer under something somewhere. Bolted from work as rain showers looked imminent. The driveway has been rebuilt three times, by three different people, and B put our name in with Scott, who is clearly the best; he handles a smallish bulldozer (a D 4, or a D 6) like it was an extension of his hand. It amazes me that someone can use a bulldozer with such delicacy. B reminded me to keep the gas tank in the Jeep filled, so that when Scott comes to do the work, we can drive up and down, to compact the surface. It's an important part of the rebuilding the driveway process. Then there's the ditch. If there's enough camber in the upper part, the ditch digs itself a bed, and B helps it along, by driving down with his truck's left tires in the ditch, but we'll have to dig the catchments for the culverts out by hand. The fines, until they all disappear, are a pain in the ass; heavy, and awkward to get at, but after mucking them out a couple of times, the culverts are self-cleaning. If the next rain is just hard enough. You can't control this stuff. Nature is a wanton and devious mistress, she'll always clip you from behind. Three crows at the lake, coming home, and I had a batch of buns, so I stopped to feed them, and gave the rest to a bunch of ducks, that had swam over to see what was going on. I like the ducks, because they're not aggressive, and some of them are beautiful. The colors are so vibrant. The absolute color scale is a mid-winter Pileated Woodpecker, in a stick-tree forest that is all black and white and gray all over, and suddenly there's this red crest, and it's extremely red. Shocking, actually. Like Taylor Swift's mouth, I saw a picture, waiting in line at Kroger, otherwise I wouldn't have a clue who she was. She's skinny. All the skinny women I've known had a problem, I assume she has several.