Supply Chain

These were pond-raised frogs from France and the legs were huge. Two pair in a frozen package for less than five bucks. I made red beans and rice, with kimchee as a side. Anthony has promised to throw me a Chinese fermentation pot. TR says he wants to come out Sunday and work on the opera. I just fry the frog-legs in butter, adding some crushed garlic at the end, making a quick pan gravy. Excellent, and enough for another meal tomorrow, so I decide to do some serious cleaning, and I have plenty of water, to clean myself later, topped out: 25 gallons of wash water and five gallons of drinking water, a six week supply for me. I'm sympathetic with the drought out west, but I use less than a gallon of water a day. I wash my hair, I used to shave, I soak my feet. Brush my teeth and make coffee. Goddamn early wasps are a pain in the ass. I hate to kill them, but they're stupid, and stupidity has always bothered me, so I kill them, knocking them out of the air and squashing them underfoot. I hate getting stung, and I'm still quite good with a fly-swatter. It's all in the wrist. I love these back-country wakes, Uncle Morris crushed by a coal-truck, Marvin suffocated under a mound of wheat, and the most common, in timber country, is getting killed by a tree or a log, one way or another. A double funeral, last week, going out of town, and I had to stop at Bolan's to let them pass. The Sheriff had stopped for a Coke, and he said it was two boys killed in a ATV accident. The wake, a BBQ and keg affair, was being held out on Cary's Run. He had arranged designated drivers. The problem, he said, with young drunk drivers, was that were seldom killed, but they killed other people. No traffic, once I was back on the river road, and I was able to drive slowly, pull off often, and look at the flowers. Then the drive in on Upper Twin, which is a lovely, curvy road without much habitation and several abandoned house-sites. Every one of the bottoms sports a few fruit trees and a dense border of daffodils. A couple of places where an extended family has collected several trailers and built a couple of rough-sawn sheds, collected every appliance, vehicle, and tire they could find, and built them into a kind of garrison. It's a shade of the medieval, poking into the modern. I run through the first ford several times, to clean salt off the undercarriage, then stop in the middle, I always do this, to roll a smoke and look around. The creek is six or eight inches deep, rolling over a flat sandstone ledge, maybe thirty feet wide; and it's completely wild on both sides going downstream. The flora is so thick and diverse it's difficult to tell one plant from another. A bone to pick. One of the reasons I had gone to town was that the public library had called and they were holding a book for me. The second volume of a trilogy by Greg Iles. This is a problem because there is no way (though clearly there was) that they could have known I'd read the first volume, since it had been sent to me, media rate, from Utah. The sender and I had exchanged TWO emails about the book. Neither of us thinking much about it. And now the Public Library is holding a copy of the second book for me?