Sunday Rant

Not so much anymore, but I used to regularly vent anger or frustration in response to something I'd hear on the Sunday morning NPR news. I enjoyed doing it, kept me in touch with Ciceronian rhetoric. Sometimes it could be quite funny, Mad-Hatterish. Alexis ('I ward off'), is the patron saint of hermits and beggars, according to Brewer, quoting a 13th century manuscript, "he lived on his father's estate as a hermit until he died but was never recognized. He may, in fact, have never existed". This is why I read in Brewer almost every day. Met TR for lunch and we talked music, then stopped at B's on the way home and had a beer. We talked about bad writing. I picked up a few ticks, from his bushwhacking clothes that were draped over the chair I foolishly sat on. Driving home, I was thinking about the deep south, the time I spent there as a kid, and then later, when I spent a decade grubbing out a living. Time well spent, Post Doctoral studies in human interaction; and the beginning of fifteen years with goats. I don't begrudge a minute of it. Paula Poundstone famously said "I was born in Alabama, but I only lived there a month before I'd done everything there was to do". Not to beat a dead mule. Another line of storms moving through, tonight and tomorrow. Hollow soundless flashes of light to the northwest. I set out my kit, a headlamp, a candle, a double Irish whiskey, my tobacco, the book I'm currently reading, and arrange a small platter of finger food, kimchee, olives and cheese, some very good salami, pickled hard-boiled quail eggs. I cover it with foil and wait for the lights to go out. I have some very good unsalted tortilla chips, free-range, shade-grown, 100% organic, passed through the gut of a pig, eaten by a chicken, passed again, roasted, and sold as premier aged coffee beans. Wait. What? Twice shit and labeled as new. I was never sure there was a contract. I just keep on, as if there was an agreement. I laugh and have to go.