Wild Dogs

Shawnee Dingoes. All of them half-breeds, bred down, for the most part, from dogs people just dump out in the state forest. Most of them die the first year, victims of parasites or vehicles, but a few survive, the smart ones, and form into packs of four to six. Imagine a map, with overlapping Venn circles. I live, on this map, where two different circles overlap. One pack is Black Lab derivative, and the other is based on Hound and Beagle. I don't like them and they don't like me. I used to throw rocks at them. I was in Big Lots, the last time I did my laundry, and they had these large bags of marbles: transparent, colored, designer marbles. Intended, I think, to fill a dish, and then, maybe, you'd stick something in them. Marbles as decoration. Cheap marbles, as it turns out, and I should have bought them all, but I did buy one bag, and it's a lot of marbles. Count me among the blessed. Figuring to recover some of my spent shot, ever frugal, I set up a little shooting range, for those of us who have advanced from throwing rocks to using a sling-shot. New rubbers on my wrist rocket, thanks to Kim, and I'm pretty good. The shooting range is a tree-tip pit, and most of the marbles bury into the root ball. An enigma for some future historian. A cluster of blue glass balls at the base of an oak tree. Must mean something. Anyway. After my stint at the range, where my target was a Neco Wafer, balanced on two nails stuck into the clay, I was walking home, and I heard the Hound pack coming toward me. The Alpha Male of the Hound pack is a Blue-Tick gone wild. A feral scary dog. When he peels back his jaws to reveal his teeth your first inclination is to foul yourself. I hit him squarely in the chest, with a blue marble, and the game was over. I win. You'll never queen that pawn. It says something else, about accuracy. What can I say? I'm good with a sling-shot. Up most of the night, editing myself, which mostly involved deleting words and considering commas. Writing for clarity, a first draft always is heavy in repetition, at least in my case. A tendency to repeat either the subject or the verb. I tend to catch a lot of this, as I'm writing, because I go back over any given paragraph so many times, to see where the narrative is going. I get so engaged in the subordinate clauses that I lose the point. Sometimes I make a note on top of the folded pile of papers on the left-hand side of my desk, knowing I'm about to digress, but I often just repeat the punch line as if it were a mantra, which, of course, it is. As Goethe said, "All forms are similar, and none are the same./ So that their chorus points the way to a hidden law." Thinking about that, I forget the exact context, but it had to do with something Levi-Strauss had said about mediation; and spending some hours with this beautiful book Neil had sent me, "The Glorious Nothings", a facsimile reproduction of Emily's jottings on envelopes; and considering a question TR had asked; I concluded that, in fact, the shape of the envelope and the seams, did, in fact, affect the text. It's on a par with rocket science, trying to be clear. Ezra was just trying to be clear, the fact that he's so arcane is mostly just a slight on our reading habits. Olson. "A Bibliography..." and McCord's great gnomic list: they require that you read. Copiously and endlessly. After being stuck in the elevator twice, I always carry a book with me; something to read can be the difference between night and day. A quiet couple of hours in the elevator can actually be a pleasant experience. This new Zinfandel, that TR recommended, is quite good, after a few hours of being opened. It's quite tannic, but after a while the fruit becomes apparent and it has a great mouth-feel. I'd better go, while I have a connection.