Hard Copy

I don't have a word for it, the way things interact. It's probably a German word, though I'd hope for something French, to lubricate, from the Old English concerning lanolin. Don't go there. Bestially is seldom attractive. It's morning, I can tell because it keeps getting lighter, and I vow to take the sling-blade to the path, on my morning walk to the outhouse. It occurs to me that I've never had an outhouse with a door. I've always lived in the woods, and a door was always unnecessary. I don't read anything serious in the outhouse anymore, since the incident with the snake. I do take junk mail out there, and the Parade section of the Sunday paper, though I'm always several weeks behind, because I don't actually get the paper and generally retrieve the Parade section from someone else's trash. I don't know who any of these people are. I picked up a nice folding canvas seated bench, I'm sure they have a name, and it's great, for instance, for watching salamanders. I've always done this. I built a bleacher, once, just for watching the sunset; it's probably still there, overgrown, looking out across the terminal moraine. And now that I think of it, I've usually lived just south of the terminal moraine. Kettle ponds and kames: those little hillocks of debris deposited by retreating ice-sheets. A glacier picks up a pile of shit on it's leading edge. All that organic matter. Joel went on about how he didn't think anyone, much less me, could have written "The Cistern" and I had to agree, I don't know how I wrote it. I do remember the physical act, but I didn't know I could reveal myself so completely, and not be shamed into silence. It was just something that needed to be said, and right then, I could say it. Frankly, when I read parts of it now, it scares me. Flirting with the edge. But I had to, then, explore that delicate ground, between sane and not. Sometimes it's best to back off the greater questions and just concentrate on where you're putting your next foot, but occasionally you have to ask yourself why you're climbing that mountain in the first place. I don't pretend to know. When things get difficult I tend to sort hardware. Commas, for god's sake, or 'J' hooks for a very heavy painting. It's interesting, isn't it? the way we become enmeshed in a world..Justice will not be served. Look at past history, wallow as you will, it's never just two points we're trying to draw a line between. It's always more complex than that.