Ships Passing

It was pleasant, talking with people. I told Cory that I was not so much growing a beard as not shaving. Any one of the staff at the pub would have driven me to get my vehicle, they wondered why I hadn't called one of them to pick me up in the first place, rather than walk across town with sleet in my face. A building fell down, over at Court and Front (just inside the flood wall), and it's a very large pile of bricks. I stopped because there was a dumpster and picked up some pieces of old oak baseboard to split into kindling. Stress failure is why the building fell. You can't take out a wall that carries part of the load unless you redistribute the weight. It should have been obvious. I poke at the rubble, The exterior walls were three layers, the inner and outer faces raked and workmanlike, and the middle layer was broken bricks and left-over mortar. Strikes me that this isn't a bad system. Bury your mistakes. Just give me the strength to carry wood tomorrow. Seriously. All I want to do is carry wood from one place to another, no mind, no mediation. Navaho time. A fire at the mouth of a cave will keep the big cats at bay. Best laid plans. Must have eaten something bad, sick at my stomach all morning but better by afternoon, don't get a damn thing done. Beautiful day and I never got outdoors. Drank tea, finally held down some chicken broth, started rereading John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor. Being ill is a pain in the ass, a circular nightmare. I know I'm better when hunger drives me to make a small pot of pasta shells and cheese. It stays down. The Barth is good, he's such an elegant writer. I had to stop and think about the word 'elegant' for quite a while. After a second nap I felt well enough for a wee dram and a smoke. What, in Ireland, is called "fully recovered"; but I lost a day, and I do hate losing days. I don't even remember what I was thinking about before I was distracted. Firewood, right, but tomorrow's supposed to be nice, so I should be able to catch up. Nothing lost but one more layer of my invulnerability. Eventually there's nothing left, an exercise I think of as 'peeling the onion'. You know where that leads. To an absence of anything at the core. I can keep notes in the margin, draw cartoons in the gutters, but I can't change anything. I'm the guy that had to stop feeding humming birds because they were so fucking brutal.