Easy Day

Take it slow and easy. After coffee and a protein shake I split some wood, go look at what arrangement I'm going to make in the woodshed. A Pileated Woodpecker sweeps in and lands on the other dead tree I want to harvest. I'm dressed in extremely grubby clothes, they'll never see the washer again, with the baseball cap my girls gave me that says 'Porn Star', red on black, when the State Police officer showed up. He was in one of those new cars, I think they're Chevy's, goosed up, with superior suspension. I read about them somewhere, they stopped making whatever had been used before. Anyway he was grinning like an idiot, because he'd been warned about the driveway by the forest service guys, but it wasn't his car, exactly. So he took a run up the hill, to see if he could make it. If you can't, you just back down, it's not a big deal. He wasn't going to walk. The stolen vehicle thing seems to be getting out of control and the county called in the state. This guy was using GPS to check long driveways that apparently went nowhere. He'd checked in with the forest people, and they had tried to call me, to warn me he was coming, but my phone was out. It didn't matter, I don't do very much that's illegal. I don't steal vehicles, but I did make a very nice pun about my chop-shop. I think he missed it. He couldn't wait to get turned around and away. When he first came up I had a hatchet in one hand and a maul in the other. I put those down, right away; he was cautious, a Glock on his hip. I really don't want to get shot for splitting wood. We had a friendly chat about stealing cars. Still no phone, which seems more and more incredulous. Just enough rain to keep me from working outside so I read the book B sent over (Rise Of The New Sciences, 1400-1600). I'm chewing it slowly. What it is, I think, is an update on what might be called the sociology of scientific knowledge. And it's a period I'm becoming more interested in. Something to pursue this winter. A walk out the logging road, then back along the driveway. Found several ginseng plants but didn't dig them, I don't need them right now. I did look at them closely. It's a nice little plant, very slow growing. Winded, from a uphill slog, the slope very wet and slippery with leaves, I stopped at a convenient stump and rolled a smoke, dug out an ashtray in the duff, with the toe of my boot, and sat there for a long time. We're so alone, well and truly alone. There's great hoopla, and nachos, in the next room, you don't have to suffer the death of ten-thousand blackberry canes to know it's excitation, but the fact is each of us is a monad. I only use that word because it's available. I tend to think in terms of seed. You and me Babe. I have to go, I need some sleep. There's a lot to think about. The Dark Ages were essentially a crisis of language. Consider walled cities, the plague, most of the oaks had been cleared so grain could be cultivated, and almost everyone had forgotten how to read, so the great classics (Roman and Greek) had been lost. The vernacular wasn't established until moveable type, 1450. It's all about codification. To my mind, Caxton is the most important figure in history. I'm just a printer but it seems to me that communication opens out, as Olson said, and we must, then, face our devils. Fixed versus whatever passes as the creole of the day, the patois of the moment, I never understood a word you said. It didn't matter. I really have to go. The light is gaining in the east.