Nuts and Bolts

The small feeder creeks are truly lovely, flowers and grass on the banks, the shrubs, the wild fruit trees in bloom. It takes me a couple of hours to get seven miles through the forest. In the loop back home, I could have stopped at the Dairy Bar and gotten something fried for lunch, but it's Friday and I'm sure Scott has made a chowder at the pub, so I detour into town for a pint and a bowl of soup. Excellent decision, because I get a free sample of a very good melon gazpacho. I'm going to stop reading about the early Catholic clergy, because they're such arrogant assholes. Indulgences are bad enough, but declaring that rabbit fetuses were not meat is a stretch. What? They turn into geese? And another thing I'm getting sick of are basic mistakes, in main stream successful fiction, about building techniques and nomenclature. The best non-fiction writers, McPhee, Kidder, Barry Lopez, don't make dumbass mistakes when it comes to specific detail. But even very good writers of genre fiction, Lee Childs, John Sandford, Thomas Perry, don't know squat about construction. And it's such an easy problem to correct, you buy a carpenter a case of beer and talk to him for a couple of hours. Pisses me off, when I'm reading along, good plot, good characters, the psychological profiles are believable, and suddenly I'm confronted with the impossible description of something. No, I think, you couldn't do that, even in fiction. Plywood comes in sheets, not boards; it's a 2x4, not a 4x2. Almost nothing is built on eight foot centers. I spend an hour or so putting away books, then another couple of hours reading in books that I found while I was putting books away. This is just one of the weak links in my system; another is staring off into the middle-distance. The word 'blue' doesn't occur in Homer. Red, of course, and the wine dark sea, but evidently you don't see blue unless you have a word for it, otherwise it's just white or maybe green. Post modern, the Allman Brothers, "Blue Skies" and, of course, "Judy Blue Eyes". I'm thoroughly engaged by blue, and the blues for that matter, so I tend to see things as black and white and blue. For ancient Greeks it was black and white and red. This might mean something or it might be bullshit. Cones, and the perception of color. A prism shows you a limited scale. The colors you can see. There might be more colors than that. I read recently that we hold a hundred or so colors in our short term memory. Phlox and Chickory, or a very small iris, Jenny called it a Miniature Iris, are all clearly blue. A prison tat, using a Bic pen, or a glimpse of the ocean at sunset.