National Security

I can't keep up. Congress is dumb and blind. I can't believe the stupidity of national politics. I try to not get unduly upset, but we're paying these people. Pisses me off. There's a gray squirrel that wants in the house and it's become absolutely fearless. It's become a fixture outside the kitchen, the east side of the house, where it seems to be gnawing at the window casings. Even when I go over and tap on the window glass the little fucker just looks at me. I'm a surprisingly good shot with the wrist-rocket, and I found a new source of ammo at Big Lots: the colored and clear marbles they sell to put into clear vases so you can anchor decorations. Dead branches and moss. I got about a thousand of these, and a clear vase, for three bucks. I'm 'seeding' the area so as to confuse the archeological record. I slipped on Wellies and went around the back of the house. I didn't want to kill the squirrel, I just wanted to run it off, so I hit it on the ass with a half-powered shot. Good shooting but I was only 25 feet away. Gray squirrels can get quite large, twice the size of a red squirrel, and their eyes are so large. It's raining very hard now, and I should go. I consolidate wash water and put an empty bucket out to collect another five gallons, another gallon I filter to use for making coffee. It's raining very hard. Maybe I spoke ill of some deity. I didn't mean it, this is excessive, the amount of rain. I apologize, for god's sake. There's no way I should be held accountable for the hours I was vacationing in the Catskills. I love those chairs. It rains through the night, at some point I nap for a couple of hours, but when I wake up to pee it's raining harder and my buckets are all full. I can only imagine the flooding downstream. An early flood of the Ohio means a huge debris field and the roads on the river will all be closed. Every plastic bottle between Pittsburg and Columbus will gather at Portsmouth, in that huge eddy there, The Sciota Backwater, that defies all logic. Fluid dynamics and rate of flow, you end up with backwaters where odd things happen. I got pissed off about something else today, some asshole on the radio, talking about using one of the drawers in a chest as a bassinet. Where I come from we all spent a couple of months in the bottom drawer. It's a test period, to see if you're a 'keeper'. If you're healthy enough, they fit you with a harness, and you pull a millstone for 50 years. Otherwise they cook you as a spring lamb. The word 'coddle' comes to mind. The bottom drawer in a chest, which is usually the deepest, is a perfect bassinet. Why would you buy another piece of equipage? I go off and read for a couple of hours. I read somewhere that Anthony Bugress is responsible for more new words in the OED than any other modern writer. A dead heat between him and Joyce. Can't get back to sleep so I read some Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire, then I read Baudelaire for several hours. Les Fleurs Du Mal, is amazing. I hear all these echoes. Not echoes, exactly, but that precursor to sound, the intake of breath, the adumbration of something about to happen. It's warm. 50 degrees, I let the fire go out, wrap up in a blanket and go back to sleep.