Clearing Out

One more trip should do it. Spent a hour going through things and brought another box of books home, threw away a great pile of old magazines. Winnowing the past. Lunch with TR. The library, Kroger and as there was nothing that needed to be kept cold, and it was Happy Hour at the pub, I stopped for a beer on the way home. A nice conversation with Lindsey, who graduated college last Saturday. I like her, and we talk easily about what comes next. Nobody's in the place, it's quiet and cool, it gotten into the eighties outside, and I ask her what she wants to do, now that she has her education. Training-wheel camp. She doesn't have a clue. And she knows she doesn't. Her Mom is a bleached-blond, with an enhanced body, who has done fairly well, one husband to the next. We talk about job opportunities, how you might do a dig in Mongolia, or bare your ass for an underwear shoot. Prey on the prey. It's a loop, a mobius strip, a Klein bottle. You end up being what you least imagined: the person they call when something fails. Bridges are an easy example, dams, the berms that are the foundation of the Interstate System. Borrow ponds. Barrow. Someone asked me about leeching acorns. The tannins are water soluble, and they stain the water like weak tea. When the water stays clear, they're gone, mostly. If you do this at a simmer on the cookstove, and keep another pot full of hot water, you can do it in two hours; the advantage being that they are also cooked, and ready to be turned into meal. Cold water methods take a couple of days, and they still have to be cooked and dried. I spent the entire day, using the pub as a base, to check out inter-net providers, finally, Cory, fingering his phone, said he thought I could get a deal if I just went with the phone company. Turned out to be true. Truth being relative. A few calls later and I have a high speed connection, DSL (which is what D said I needed) through Frontier, that's going to cost me $20 a month, and I can drop AOL, which costs me $35 a month. Means I'll have a new e-mail address, but I can handle that, if TR will come out and hold my hand. He'll have to set me up a new account. Spring hair-cut, short, off the neck and off the ears, the barber is quite entertaining and incredibly efficient. He was a barber in the army, Vietnam, and is about as far to the right as I am to the left, but he has the razor, shaving my neck, so I don't dispute his points. Back at the pub (a pay phone, for me, is someone else's cell) and Dr. John is there (PHD in education, an Appalachian-music collector and string player), with a woman I know, Sharon, and we talk about Roy Rogers (Leonard) because John has just finished writing a book about him. Then Andy comes in, another string player, and buys me another beer, and we talked about singer-song-writers. Andy plays by ear, and he has a perfect ear. John sings an old song "Gee and Haw" that makes no sense unless you've plowed with a mule. John and Sharon left, Andy bought me another beer, and we talked about music. I can't actually talk about music, I don't have the vocabulary, but increasingly I find myself with musical people and we hammer out a patois. 'A' natural, for instance, seems to be a base line. I knew a dancer once, who knew where she stood, the rest of the world paled; practice enough and the path becomes clear.