Nothing Special

I'd just rather be left alone. I don't really like the way world operates, and I prefer my own system, where you throw out a baited hook and see what bites. My system has been proven a failure many times. The poplars are budding. First buds on the tips of blackberries in the sunshine. It's so beautiful outside, and I have a lovely walk, looking at buds with a magnifying glass and eating a few, to see what they tasted like. I carry a cup with me, because there's crystal water coming out of every cliff-face. The miniature flowers are coming out. You have to get down on your knees to see them clearly. Rodney did a good job on the driveway wash-outs. He's a chatterbox, but I can deal with that to get some things done. He's had an interesting life and tells good stories. A college degree, but he chose to move back here, live out in the country, on a few acres in a run-down house. Whatever the labor statistics say, unemployment in rural Scioto county must be 25%. Welfare and cutting firewood, dealing pain-killers, growing a little weed, robbing your neighbor, whatever it takes. Upper Twin is a tough nut. Hardened locals working hard to eat potatoes. It's obscene, that the coach of the basketball team makes four times more than the president of the university. Ten times more. I love soccer, don't get me wrong, but a 120 MILLION dollars for four years? Even if you have to walk with a limp the rest of your life you could afford very good take-out, have sex with an Argentinean model, or just bring the goats down the back way into the milking barn, studying, all the while, the way runoff was digging channels. I was looking at some sticks in the grader ditch, the way they blocked the flow; I poked them with my mop handle and they were sucked immediately out. I have a certain technique when it comes to clearing culverts, I allow the water to do most of the work, and I'm good at this. TR said the modem should be in tomorrow. That last cold snap brought another wave of field mice inside, so I set out all the traps and built my ingenious bucket trap over at the pantry. Cantilever out a shingle-shim and anchor it with a can of tomatoes, put a dab of peanut butter on the end and put a five gallon bucket underneath with an inch of water in it. This works amazingly well. Got me thinking about cantilevers, which I immediately started reading about. Galileo explored the structural mechanics in the 1638 book Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. I built a very nice house in Mississippi, from a modified pole barn design (the posts went from five feet in the ground to the roof line, 36 feet, 8x8 treated Yellow Pine) which is a design Frank Wright called a vertical cantilever. Late afternoon a serious wind comes up from the NW. Even the heavily stayed stove pipe above the roof, triple walled steel, moves back and forth a bit, enough to make a sound. Let's see, I can't control water, I can't control air, and I sure as hell can't control those slanted shafts of light that break through the clouds. The house shakes, straight line winds on the ridge top; it's warm though, and light enough to read. Later, I steam an artichoke and eat it with a pesto mayonnaise. I put the leaves in a bucket to rot, I'm pretty sure I can make paper from the fiber. I fed the crows a couple of micro-waved mice, they're terrible house guests, but they do love a warm mouse on a windy, early spring day. You could argue that I indulge myself too far, or indulge them, but the fact is that I'm going to the outhouse, and I have some dead mice I need to get rid of. What better way?