Playing Deep

TR came out and we had good conversation, then a decent meal. With a goddamn paper-clip he opened the CD player on my computer, which will allow me to install a new printer. I haven't been able to print hard copy for a year and I have a file of 174 pages that I need to print. It's difficult for me to work without tangible text. It was an interesting few hours because we talked about dozens of things, scenarios, staging, his passion for lamps. He wants text, and I think I finally heard, or understood, what, more or less, he requires. It occurred to me, when he was talking, that we might use a lyric composed in fourteen line stanzas. A song cycle. It would allow us to be quite liberal in terms of subject matter. Snakes and frogs, the fox and drainage, fireflies. We made a foot-hold. I told him to write the overture and I'd try and get him a few pages next week. One thing I realized is that I need to let the line open out, like I did twenty years ago, instead of the density of conditional and specific that has involved me for the last 15 years. I'm reasonably careful, embrace and enjoy trying to nail down a fact. I'd rather spend the afternoon at the library, thank you very much, than doing almost anything else. I just can't buy the package, never did, and TR's right on the edge. Do you go back and get a doctorate, go into serious debt, or do you hole up in the woods and eat road-kill. A more important decision than might have been necessary in any previous generation. Because I'm simple. Someplace between a rock and a flaked point. Playing deep, you cut off the alley. TR brought two gallons of drinking water, I don't think anyone has done that before. Water is a big deal. Two gallons of drinking water is a big deal. Read Edward Abbey. I lived in Moab for a while, and it's incredibly dry. You can't even spit. Here, though, a terrifying thunder storm moves in, actually just missing the ridge, the power goes out and it rains strongly but only for a few minutes. I'm reading recipes in the failing light; thinking about herring roe and wild asparagus. Cape Cod in the spring. I'd bought a package of chicken thighs, the last main meal thing I need to eat before the refrigerator change-over. Three in the package, which I thought was odd. Skin them and fry the skins, marinate the thighs in papaya juice, with lemon, tarragon, and sparkling water, braise them, reduce the cooking liquid, scrape up the font. The skins are great, I swear I almost swoon when I'm eating fried chicken skins with a light sprinkling of salt. In Mississippi Walt McCool would bring over his propane unit and ten gallon iron pot, and after Roy and I had skinned out a 250 pound hog, to make sausage, we'd make cracklings and drink a case of home-brew. Hot pig rinds with a dab of Dijon mustard. Roy always filtered the rendered fat through several layers of cheese-cloth, and sold the lard over in Babylon. He liked my lard, because the pigs free-ranged and ate mostly acorn mast, their fat was firm and set-up well. The fat from a penned pig, fed on corn, is somewhat less discreet. The chicken thighs are wonderful, a small mess of greens I'd cooked with salt-pork, a piece of bread. There aren't any leftovers. Potatoes and eggs for the next few days, with healthy servings of mushrooms. Limping along, and the ridge is almost completely leafed-out. It's beautiful. The blackberries are blooming.