Hybrid Forms

Abortive, actually. This time of year, I start noticing them. The failures. Mushrooms especially; they go off genetically, very quickly. I had to run into town for a few things, and ended up having a beer with my fireman friend, Josh. He's interesting to talk with. He listens to books, but doesn't read much. He's listening to Poe right now, and we talked about that. It seemed to me that listening to Poe might be a very good way of reading him. Sidney Lanier. Has anyone ever recorded those? I run my errands, stop at the library; I have cream, and some other things that need to be refrigerated, so I went home, first, and put things away, then headed down to B's place for a beer and conversation. When I got back home it was 83 degrees inside the house, so I turned on the AC and went for a walk. Black Dell balks at anything over 79. It's a riot of color right now, all the weeds and wild daisies. B said he loved preparing for winter, that it tied him to the place where he found himself. I agree with that while I smash an oak pallet into kindling. I have two 35 gallon trash cans, both salvaged, that I can fill with kindling, and on the way home I had stopped at the paper re-cycling station near West High School and taken a tidy bundle of newspaper, tied with jute, for starting fires. I don't read the paper, I'm remarkably uninformed; most of the news I get is at least a year old. I stop, to read an article in a sheet of newsprint that I'm using to start a fire: pain-pill doctors, abuse culminating in murder, what football team might go to the state championship, and I'm at a total loss. It doesn't integrate into my life. I'm trying to figure out where the crows roost at night. What caterpillar becomes a Luna moth. Whether or not I should be worried about not changing my socks every day. The world, off the ridge, is way too busy. Phone was out yesterday when I got home and it's still out today, but I certainly wasn't going to town two days in a row. I'll go in tomorrow, to call the company. I checked my extra phone in their transfer box and it's definitely their problem. I charged the cheap cell phone ($10) but I don't have a signal, not that I expected one. My travel expenses finally came in from Chautuaqua, over $300, so I can afford an extra lunch in town and still put $200 in the bank, which will cover the actual expenses. Lovely. I'm being encouraged to make another country pate, even to the extent of other people offering buy the $20 or so of ingredients that I'll need. B would even come over and wash dishes, which is a large part of it; but I'd rather wait a few weeks, until I can fire the cookstove. I begin to see pieces of the west face of the hollow across the way, through where the leaves are thinning, and the angled light is a beautiful thing. I wanted to call Glenn, before he and Linda retreated to France for the grape harvest, but my phone wasn't working. Live at the extreme edge, 'live' works well in that context. These groups, living on the open plain, in huts of mammoth bone, lived right at the edge of the retreating ice. Oaks had returned (the ultimate survivors) and the critters that ate acorns, and the critters that ate the critters that ate acorns, and the critters that ate both the acorns and the critters that ate the acorns. A killing field. Thousands of skeletons. Tens of thousands. I have to take a break. I was hungry, and the last time I was at Kroger, in the remaindered bin, there were a bunch of cans of Spanish sardines, lightly smoked, in oil. I love sardines. Made a piece of toast and dumped the can of fish on it, topped with chopped onion. This was bar food in the Combat Zone in Boston. The loading doors of our theater opened out into that colorful district, and the stagehands frequented a place just across the alley, "Zekes", often even during a show, between cues. The Stagehand's Special was a small glass of beer, Genny on tap, (25 cents) and a sardine sandwich topped with a slice of hot yellow onion (75 cents), they sold a lot of these. Sardines, in their little flat cans, come in cases of 96 units (24, 48, 96), and they went through five cases a week. My open-face sandwich is a homage to those days, but I use a sweet onion now. It's so good I want to call a revival, a tent service, maybe save a few pagans. When I go to town tomorrow, to call the phone company, I'm going to buy all the rest of the discontinued Spanish sardines, 50 cents a can, as a memory aid. I don't care if I smell like a cannery all winter, there's nobody around to complain. Tom? Sure, I knew him, he smelled like a horse-shoe crab in heat. Pulling teeth to get through to the phone company, then on hold forever, finally the poor guy, Chris, said that, because of the holiday weekend, they couldn't get out here until next Wednesday. A week plus without a phone. My readers will think I'm dead. Oh well. Used TR's phone at the museum, chatted with him for a few minutes, then came right back home. No beer at the pub, no lunch, pissed at the phone company and wouldn't have been good company. Besides, I'd been to the library and had a book I wanted to read, another old Elmore Leonard I'd missed. It's very calming to read a decent book at a single sitting. Left-over steak and baked potato for dinner. There's less chance three points could be in a straight line, much less four. First you'd have to believe your level or transit as being absolutely (and I don't believe in that) accurate; and then the curvature of the earth, and the curvature of space-time. I'm sure there's an algorithm. The Fuck-Up Factor looms large. But I just lean back in my chair, and all I can see is confusion.