Justify

TR had asked me what a specific word was, and I couldn't remember, then it came to me in the middle of the night. He meant justified, both left and right, the letter-spacing would be altered so that all the lines were the same length: standard book text. Maybe a hundred characters and spaces per line, at a guess, I don't feel like counting, an average number. Hard left and hard right margins, the text actually looks like brick work. I work with a hard left margin, and let the right end float; the whole reason I work in paragraphs now, is that I let the computer wrap the lines. Freed me from the daunting chore of deciding where a line ended. Now I can just work at making everything sound like a natural voice. It's not, of course; it's an artificial construct I use to describe actual events. However many removes that might be. Everything conditional. If it doesn't rain, I need to do kindling tomorrow. Actually, even if it does rain, I need to do kindling tomorrow. But I have a stash of dry things in the woodshed, a chair, a table-top, some shelves, all hardwood and all bone-dry, for when I can't just collect twigs and small branches. I have pallets. I need to move some of the pallets into the woodshed. I need to organize the woodshed, it's a mess. What I need to do this winter is burn everything in the woodshed and start all over again. Burning mostly kinder-garden furniture for a year has warped my sense of wood protocol. One of those little desks? Rock maple for god's sake. I can bust one apart in maybe two minutes with a hatchet. An evening's firewood. Ultimately, we can't depend on burning kinder-garden desks, but pallets are ubiquitous, and, as I've said before, any firewood you can cut without using a chainsaw greatly extends your potential life. B drove me to the reading and introduced me. I was pretty good, Joe Casual. Jenny was the perfect hostess, bought B and I a drink, and we did have the end room, where a wall of glass opened out on the forest. An attentive audience. They laughed at all the places where I imagined I was being funny, and I told several stories outside the text, one of which Ronnie asked for, from the floor. TR and Megan came over, afterwards, and drank a bottle of wine, I fed TR a plate of Bridwell Thanksgiving food, and Megan had a piece of Key Lime pie. Great conversation. By the very nature, any performance is exhausting, and I'm not good in a self-critical mode, but TR and Megan said I was great, and that's good enough for me. I never thought I was that good anyway.