Ipse Dixit

The puppy brigade was back. I feel sorry for them. They're fine now, the height of summer and living is easy, but they'll not survive the winter. It's a single litter that someone dumped, and they are as cute as you might imagine, but I run them off. They scare the wildlife, and they're generally a pain in the ass with their yapping. Silence, I think, is an important element of living in the woods. You need to hear what's going on around you, and you can't do that if you're yapping all the time. Just before dawn, if you go outside and sit on a stump, and stay very still for a few minutes, the character of the world reveals itself. Twin diesels pushing a tow on a river far away, a falcon striking a hare, morning birds, and the regenerative smell of over-night rain on leaf-litter. Veronica, in the opera Gardy Loo, sings a lament in Old English, that wrings your heart. Nina Simone. Zack plays this out on a horn-pipe, dribbling lentils on a cymbal. Much later, I wonder if any of it matters. Ipse dixit translates as 'he himself said so' used as the implication that there is no guarantee that what he says is true. Took me an hour to tease that out of a sentence from Cicero. The willowy and attractive new owner of the pub, newly divorced, saw me sitting at the bar and asked me about the writer's workshop. My lifestyle precedes me. Everyone knows how I live. Power was out for a long time last night. Rereading Joyce Cary's "The Horse's Mouth", which is one of the best books in the language, by headlamp, and it was a pretty funny scene. In my skivvies and a sleeveless tee-shirt, reading glasses (the type is very small in the Perennial Library paperback) and headlamp, holding the book in my left hand, eating olives with my right. I kept my drink and tobacco at the island, so every once in a while, I'd get up and go over there. Incredibly quiet, with the electricity off, no breeze, the last of the tree-drip, very dark. I had the back door open and a bat got in. It was a merry chase, but I finally caught the damn thing in my butterfly net and got it back outside. Like the man says: split wood, haul water. For dinner I had a thick slab of fried bologna with a pesto mayo and a thick slice of raw sweet onion between two pieces of multi-grain bread. A sandwich for the record books. Small gherkins are good with this. You can grill a slab of bologna on a very small fire, I've cooked several of them on abandoned bird's nests. Once, out of sorts in Utah, I made a fire of grass, it wasn't even hot, it wouldn't burn your fingers right away, but I was able to heat a skillet and fry a slab. Campfire cooking. I've cooked a great many native Cut-Throat trout on a grill I weave from green willow branches. I usually take a baby-food jar of bacon fat and a few peppercorns when I go fishing, living up to the motto of the Boy Scout I never was, and I sometimes carry a lemon. Usually, you can find what you need, pepper grass or water-cress, but it's always good to have a small jar of bacon fat. I was reading St. John of the Cross, a passage in The Dark Night Of the Soul, where he was struggling with the demons. Where you are is most often defined by where you aren't. Gardy Loo met a tinker on the trace, you know when you've met your match. You hear her voice, over the top, crying for justice, and you fish for native trout. Nothing makes sense.