Solid Particularity

Up at one, writing for four hours, then back to sleep at five and back up at nine. Feeling a little stagnant, I cleaned up and went to town. Lindsey behind the bar and a European Cup match on TV. Portugal and Armenia. Reynaldo (?) scored twice for Portugal, both of them lovely things. Grace is wonderful, wherever it occurs. Stopped at the Marina Dairy Bar and got a footer with onion rings, went down to the parking lot to look at the boats. A footer, with sauce (ground beef and tomato), mustard and cheese is a completely delightful lunch, especially with onion rings, at a picnic table under a shade tree, watching people play putt-putt golf. A Saturday afternoon in America. Bought several books at the perpetual sale in the library and I'm starting a new pile of books to be read next winter. This is low-grade ore, but I need a hundred or so to pass the time, when the snow is deep and I'm trapped. I don't need much: booze, tobacco, food, and books, beyond that, your projection probably misses the point. I'm a Jesuit monk, for god's sake, I only document hybrids. They let me skip that earliest call, usually I'm up anyway, and listen from the back hall. These guys are seriously good. Matins in a stone enclosure. I was listening to Philip Glass and thinking about Bach. Glass studied with Nadia, which means Mahler comes into play. Another brick wall, as my cd player had died, but when I talked to Glenn and Linda they said they had a unit they didn't need anymore and were going to send me. This is in a nick of time, as I wanted to listen to Bach right then, and my player refused. I listened to all of the Mahler symphonies, one day, in Temple, Maine, with Ted Enslin, while he explained cutting winter ice to me. He had an old ice-house and still put up ice for the summer. I'd go up there once a year, I must have published six of his books and we were good friends. I'd take a five gallon bucket of oysters, a couple of pounds of fresh ground coffee, and bourbon; we'd talk into the night. He'd play a piece of music, then expound. They had a freezer full of fiddle-head ferns, and I steamed some, with a cream sauce, and slow cooked a pork shoulder, Ted made a couple of calls, and there was soon a jamboree going on with home-brew and back-door whiskey. None of his neighbors knew him as a writer. He was just another guy, in a hard-scrabble world, barely getting by. Cut ice, cut hay by hand, used an out-house, burned 10 cords of wood in the winter. Killed a hog and a steer in the late fall, made head-cheese and sausage. He moved back to the coast, I think because scrounging life in the littoral is so easy, and we lost touch. Actually, we lose track of almost everyone. I know less about my brother and sister, than I do about the guy that washes dishes at the pub. Go figure. I can stuff it into a couple of lines:

Mountain Laurel shines,
I thought at first it was something
but it really was nothing.
Read more...

Affect

Spent all afternoon making a rice dish, and then a chicken dish; ended up being enough to feed six or eight people. I moved my reading over to the island, so I wouldn't forget what I was doing. I made a pot of Pecan Rice (one of my favorites, from Louisiana) with finely minced shallots and red pepper; then started the chicken dish. I don't eat that much chicken but this was 1.88 lbs of boneless breast for $3. I brined it, dried, then rubbed with a spice/chili mix, seared them, then braised in a bit of orange juice and butter, set aside. Caramelized a very large onion, then a red pepper, cut up the chicken and stirred it all together. Next time I think I'll brine, then partially refreeze, then cube, and fry the chicken in a very hot wok. I'm still trying to get the mouth-feel right, the texture. Since I'm from the south, that would involve a certain crunch. By affect, and in fact, I'm a pretty normal guy. A couple of early encounters with the law: having sex on the golf course, drag racing down Beach Boulevard, juvenile shit. I think for most of the formative years we merely battle. Not what I'm fed, not what history is become, you can't believe anything, but it's instructive. If you don't die at 28 you've got a good shot at 82. Editing today, and I had to get up and go for a walk. Removing articles and changing commas requires full attention, intense even, and I'd cramped-up, mentally. Walked part-way down the driveway, turning over large rocks that had been pushed aside in one grading or another. Looking for salamanders. I just like to see them; I don't do anything with them, collect them, or pickle them or anything, but I find them oddly beautiful. Slick and colorful. Don't get me started on odd and colorful, most of my relationships, nor the barge I barely pushed upstream. Walking home, considering failure and success, I'm mostly contained within myself. Curl up and read a book. Read more...

Aluminum Oxynitride

Chemists are clever bastards. I knew there was a clear version of aluminum but was under the impression that it had to be fired to a very high temperature under a lot of pressure. High tech, clear (no refraction), bullet-proof sheets. Now it's a floor finish, on wood, so they must have found a way to liquefy it. I'm amazed at the new generation of floor finishes. I spent some time at the library (I can't do a search on my land-line) and realized quickly that I wouldn't understand anything that I read, except that, yes, they had learned to liquefy it and bond it with a polymer. A catalytic action for drying. It's a hell of a product. I've talked with guards in several art museums about traffic and maintenance, and they swear that it's truly the cat's ass. I haven't had a chance to look up "cat's ass" but it is the actual phrase one of the guards used, and in a positive sense. Not unlike that use of the word "shit" in a positive sense. Shit must have been one of the first words, Old Norse, Old English, shit was always a fact of life, then, at some point, much later, superior stuff became good shit; then pot, where there is good shit and everything else, then you drop the good and it becomes "That was the shit, man." Did my usual routine in town, library, pub, Kroger, then stopped back by the pub for a beer with Loren. We sat out back and smoked, talked about theater. On the way home I'm thinking about Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse (about which I know nothing), the word "fuck", and how, right up there with "shit", fuck was important. It provided a time-frame. Gestation, for a sow, is three months, three weeks, and three days. A careful analysis yields almost nothing. I subscribe to several old proverbs, most of which are built on stilts, but I like the way they sound. Cory was at the bar and there was a new waitress, Sandy (I think); Cory introduced me and told her I had free run into the kitchen and behind the bar. The new office for the Ohio FBI is just across the alley from the pub, and there's one guy, gun on his belt, gold badge, who I run into once in a while. It was school break and the place was quiet. I was sitting at the bar, eating clam chowder and watching ESPN, trying to catch up on sports. Everyone, all of the staff, had come over and talked with me, I was clearly a crowd favorite. He'd been sitting at a table, and came up to the bar next to me, to pay his tab. We walked out together and I sat down in one of the three chairs the pub keeps for smokers and instead of walking back to his office, he sat down next to me. He wanted to know how it happened that I was so good with people. I had no answer for that. I told him to lose the gun and badge and undo at least the top button of his shirt. I have a tendency toward losing causes. I worked for years, establishing credibility, leaning on a mop, watching stupid people be stupid. As it happens, I'm not far removed. Just another stupid person. You see the drift here. Read more...

Midnight Scramble

The rain tapers off and the entire soundscape is composed of drips. Over the course of the last few days I'd fried a pound of bacon and the house smelled great. I tend toward reading myself into a coma, and I had taken a nap. When I woke up to pee I decided I was hungry and I knew there was a skillet with bacon fat, so I nuked a potato, a baker, then fried three slices. When they were nearly done, I cut them into cubes, right in the skillet and finished them with a pat of butter and black pepper. Top these with a fried egg, a piece of toast, thick with bitter marmalade. I was thinking about how bitter is an acquired taste, when chaos erupted at the compost heap. I was sure I heard the bobcat, a single dog, a beagle probably, and something else, a raccoon. Turning on a light doesn't interrupt a young war. Red eyes burning in the night. I just want them to go away, so I can go back to sleep, so I throw out a firecracker. Black Cat firecrackers clear the playing field. Of course I can't go back to sleep, so I stayed up most of the rest of the morning reading a guide for Field Amputation (Civil War to WWI), gruesome stuff, but interesting. After Bull Run and Gettysburg the field Docs were doing a hundred amputations a day. A team with a system, seven guys, six holders and a surgeon. The time for a field amputation was measured in seconds. Cauterize the wound with hot tar or an iron plate heated red-hot. At some point I switch over to coffee, fry potato slices in bacon fat, fry a perfect egg, and I see the light gathering in the east. I knew it was supposed to get hot, so I took an early morning walk. The bugs are bad in the hollows, so I walked the ridge tops, west. The rattlesnakes were taking advantage of the heat to move down slope, they seem to migrate about half-a-mile, to the bottoms. There was a female today (thinner and longer) that stretched almost all the way across the driveway. I carry a mop handle to which I've affixed a broken "V" from a dead Chevrolet. It's a very good attachment. I put a saw kerf in the end of the handle, wedged in the V up to the crotch, so that I was able to wrap it tightly around the shaft and through the crotch. Wet rawhide. Nice lashing, though Kim, a lasher of note, would have probably wrapped in a Double Round Overlap or some damned thing. I have a ferrule on the handle end, to use it as a walking stick. Neptune, with a horribly amputated trident. It's the Spreading Decline, I swear. Late spring and then again in the fall it's my walking stick of choice. In winter I use cross-country ski poles. In the early spring I use a mop handle with a narrow paint scraper secured in the end, that I use to flip away shit, to look and see whether or not I want to squat down. I'm more judicious with my squats now but not much has changed.. I love the change in smell, from fecund to seductive, and I love the way everything sounds different, and I love the way I can go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that I'll probably wake up tomorrow. Read more...

Country Forcemeat

A goose had been hit by a car down at the lake and I stopped to drag it off the road, then went back and cut out its liver. A little leftover filet, some reconstituted mushrooms, onion, some apple brandy. There was enough of this for two sandwiches, with sliced red onions. Actually I was surprised to end up with two sandwiches, but a goose liver is rather large. I'd saved the rendered fat from the bacon wrapping the filet right in the skillet (which I store in the oven to thwart the mice) so I cooked everything in that and added half-a-stick of butter. Lots of black pepper. The worst aspect of this is cleaning the blender. But the sandwiches, by all the saints, were incredible. I lightly toast the bread, smear on a coating of pesto mayo, and build what is certainly one of the messiest sandwiches in the history of sandwiches. I eat them hunched over a paper plate so I can field dribs and drabs with a finger. I reread John McPhee all day and he is a delight, holding to the issues at hand. On the Vineyard our place was about fifty feet from the maximum edge of the terminal moraine, the back yard was a tumble of rocks that had been rolled down from Newfoundland. In the out-wash channel and out to the beach, very hard rock had been tumbled round. A lot of the rocks looked like stone heads and I collected them. I suppose I could be arrested for that. Rain all day. My work chair window is usually in the lee, so I can leave that window open, the smells are lovely, and the sound of it is wonderful. The leaves all clean and gleaming. I reread McPhee all day, Oranges, The Crofter And The Laird, The Pine Barrens. He mentions the big freeze of 1962 and we were in Jacksonville at that time. We could get oranges, south of town at Mandarin (Parson Browns) and there were large groves west of St Augustine. They were all completely killed (some rootstock survived further down in the state) and there were never any oranges north of Daytona after that. And I had forgotten the name of the citrus disease "spreading decline". What a great combination of words. So sorry to hear about your spreading decline; Jesus she has one hell of a spreading decline; when you get down to the spreading decline ski over to the tree-line and you should hit virgin snow. B stopped over to ask if I could stop by his place and help him install his island/counter/table which had grown rather large and awkward. Happy to, after the trip to town tomorrow. He'd bought a thousand feet of poplar, for his ceiling and trim, ten feet long, a uniform 4/4, random width. Eight or ten of the boards are 16 inches wide. His island top is two boards, joined; an apron, framing, and it has grown heavy. Cleats, on the posts, where they need to be. Easy job but it actually takes two people for a minute and a half. One person could do it alone, but it would take an hour to rig it; and why not engage a friend in an interesting installation. He knew I wanted to see it installed. Afterwards, we'll probably get high and talk about a dead poet. We do this, time and again. My dead poet and your dead poet going to set the night on fire. I've done this kind of installation many times, and you only hope the width measurement isn't very much smaller anywhere between where you tip the counter into position and, then, down into place. If it is, that you have to take a skosh bit off, then sand it underneath, so be it. We all make adjustments, and I don't mind admitting my own stupidity, that's not the correct word, my own culpability. I don't think I'm eccentric at all. Read more...

Tickled Pink

I would never skin pig ears. What we have here is a crackling with some body. Clean your ears well. I soak them in salt water for a few hours, then simmer them for a couple of hours, dry them well, cut into thin strips, dip in egg, then fine bread crumbs, then either fry or bake them. If you bake them, cut them into larger strips. They're great with mustard sauce and a cold beer. Or with a pesto mayonnaise. It's overcast all day, and still. I walked down to the mailbox, poking at things with my mop handle, and there's one place where I tried to repair an erosion channel, by filling it in with rocks and covering it with compost and bags of leaves I'd picked up in town (why would someone who lived in the woods haul bags of leaves from town? because they were there.) and there's a nice harvest of Inky Caps. Coprinus Comatus. You have to eat them immediately, because they cycle so quickly to rotten, that I just fry them in butter and eat them on toast. Moving into warmer weather, my diet tends toward Spanish bar food. A bite of this and a bite of that. I had a moment of panic this morning, because I couldn't remember something that had been very important to me, just before I fell asleep last night, then remembered that I was going to take the day off, just read fiction, maybe strike out a few commas, nothing I couldn't handle. I get samples of adhesives, long before they're on the market. There's a sealant/adhesive (this is an interesting field) out there, I think probably to repair sneakers, and it's a very good rubber sealant, it bonds completely. Having a large vocabulary is both a blessing and a curse, and a fake-rubber company wanted me to write text for them. The Handyman's All Purpose Adhesive Sealant. I'd like to, but I can't. A duxelle, a mushroom hash, is much more interesting. I was going to go back to town, for the farmer's market, but I heard on the radio that Philip Glass would be featured on Ira Glass's show later. This American Life. Glad I stayed home to listen. A short, very funny opera about a woman trapped in a closet. The text was mostly the woman singing HELP with rapid repetition (a cello line, a piano line) bridging her despair. It's interesting that a piece of music can make me laugh, that it can engage me that way. I chuckle at some songs, smile when I listen to Zappa, and there's a place in a certain opera where I always laugh, but it has nothing to do with the music. Backstage games. But the fact that music can elicit a particular emotional response. Or that text can. I was rereading some passages from Skip's Wired To Zone and was amazed at how it took me out of myself and into this bizarre set of circumstances. When Dolly dies, at the end, I'm beside myself with grief. If I knew how to cry, I would. Maybe just a keening, but the text is pregnant with feeling, a call for help. Another Luna Moth and I catch her (or 'it' more correctly, but I assume it's a female, because it carries certain characteristics that usually are identified with a particular sex. I'm not a judge, I'm not a lawyer, I only speak a patois that I learned from fishermen. Shit I never ended that: "n't", it takes me a while but I finally see where this/that was headed. I don't have any idea where tomorrow leads. Read more...

Much Later

I thought my concerns were silly. I'm not even privy to most information, but something struck a wrong note, and I was wondering what that was. If one thing then another. If not one thing. I could never hit a major-league curve ball, I always flinched with a hard ball coming at my head, backed out of the batter's box. But Kim agreed that I was being, what's the correct word, 'studied' by someone. Investigated. Not much to find, truth be told. Marinating animal parts and a rubber suit. I did kill a rattlesnake, about ten years ago, but I think the statute of limitations has run out on that. Fog, running up the hollows, it reaches the ridge then dissipates. Heavy air, the bugs and birds are slow to get started; then a flash of red, then another, as two Pileated Woodpeckers move in to work the trees. It's so green that their crests are like blood-spatter. A cup of coffee and a morning smoke out on the back porch, the noise level rises as the natural world wakes and shakes off the dew. Still Spring, cool, the vaporous mist; Impressionist, with a sound track by Phillip Glass. I must have sat there for a hour, another cup of coffee, another cigaret; absolutely serene space. Varieties of experience. I could hear equipment down on the road early, and the road is closed (they would have let me out, but I didn't want to get tar on the car) so I stayed on the ridge. Supposed to be open again tomorrow. I might go into town, because Scott said he wanted to get some soft-shelled crabs for fried crab sandwiches. I need to go to the library. Puttered a bit outside, then came in and picked off ticks, then did a little cleaning, making piles for Good-Will, and for recycling several hundred pounds of paper. Time is an interesting construct, and something got me side-barred on that today. The Luna Moths are back, maybe that was it. One came when Kim was here, and a huge one tonight, spectacular creatures. They factor time. So do oak trees, the rocks at Arches, and the screen display on everyone's cell phone. It's slippery, that whole continuum, past, present, and future. I wear knee-boots, and step carefully. The world is in a terrible state of chassis. When very bad aid (85% profit for a non-profit) finally reaches the ground, there is nothing left; if I feed you ten million, then you should certainly feed me back a hundred million in return, because everyone would think we're doing something noble and should get a billion from the EU. We're bad, no doubt about it. But I'd never do that. Read more...

Data Breach

Interesting phone call from someone who wondered if I was the Tom Bridwell that wrote Ridgeposts. I admitted I was, and decided to chat because I wasn't doing much anyway. Overcast and very quiet outside, cool and still. I had an extra cigaret rolled (my phone cig) and had just rolled one, I had a drink. I was reading a book, but I had a bookmark. The guy is Daniel, Portland, Oregon; he'd been reading me for a while and realized I'd be pretty easy to track down. He advised me to lose the land-line, but I explained the situation. He'd run into the GPS anomaly, Kim and I had talked about it, but that it wasn't difficult to figure out, more or less, exactly where I lived. During one of the phone-line sagas I actually gave accurate distances, it's the only driveway within a large target area. More important though, is that I do have a land-line and am in the book. Still, I'm so remote, everyone would advise you announce your presence with a yodel if you didn't want to get shot in the ass with rock salt. Much safer to call from Oregon. It was a fun conversation. I think I may be his thesis. He asked good questions and I answered mostly truthfully. I told him I'd send him some books and that in the future he should call on Sunday mornings, when I'd normally be drinking coffee and listening to NPR. Otherwise, I don't do anything but eat and read. It takes me a day, after a visit from a close friend, to re-assess and consider. Reading calms me. I can't or don't go off on my various fantasies with most people, during mundane exchanges it would only confuse the issue, muddy the waters, and I'd rather explain something to someone who might understand. Or at least appreciate the effort. So expounding my theory of the inter-national tin trade during the bronze age requires a certain amount of effort. Bringing things to bear: information, the physical load, emotional baggage, a shopping list, commas. I need a break, so I read pulp fiction and imagine warm sand between my toes. I could be on a cruise, I could be teaching in Prague, I could be sweeping the floor in Bloomington. The ridge is my current keep, no palisade, no moat, but I do control the high ground with a potato canon, and I could always release my marble collection and make the footing impossible. Mostly, I need a few hours sleep. Read more...

Green Flash

Studs on the wrong side of the line. Kim and I had been telling war stories. Talked and ate all day Sunday. One of those running conversations, bouncing around between shared history and shared interests. My first set at FSU, fucking Aida for god's sake, and he had worked with me on that (a 32 foot turntable) then came to the Cape Playhouse and we worked together there, then the Opera Company of Boston. I used his visit to motivate a rash of spring cleaning, rebuilt the kitchen drain, cleaned out the shop-vac and made a first pass around the house. Just sat and talked. Kim went for a walk while I caught up on mail, then the fillet dinner. He'd brought a couple of maple flavored whiskeys, and we sampled them generously. Memory and reality, parsing the past. Late night and then Kim up and ready to hit the road, which he does before the rain sets in. I went to town quickly, the library had called, stopped for a cup of soup and a draft, bought a few supplies, since I was there; but leftovers to eat, and got back to the ridge before the rain turned serious. The green jungle. It completely canopies the upper driveway, and most of the lower reach. Mackletree is a tunnel of arching oaks. The large bottoms, on the flood plain of the Ohio are being planted and there's already a flush of green. The banks of the Scioto are in full riot. A wet spring, and the green responds with a thousand shades. Another result of the lushness is that the hair-pin turns on all the back roads become truly blind. I'm impressed that the phone line was restored so quickly, which required inter-agency cooperation and boggling logistics, on a weekend. Probably became a field-test for their emergency response team. There were only four phones affected. Four. And they brought out the troops, Friday night and Saturday morning. Couple of new poles, half a mile of new line, cleaned up the mess, and it looks like nothing happened. A repair that must have cost between five and ten thousand dollars, for a couple of old coots at the end of the line. Makes me proud. I expounded my whole "migration of the Phoenicians from the Indus valley to Easter Island" theory to Kim, which took several hours, and then felt a bit foolish; I'm just a magpie (as Enslin said), after all. We talked about brickwork, he's laying a garden wall now, it's beautiful; and we talked about salvaging useful stuff from the trash. A sidebar on hinges, the various clips that held a building together, bolts, and the hardness scale. I'm fortunate to have friends like this, we talked about it, how there is someone to call if you don't understand something. The network includes engineers and physicians, carpenters and masons, a janitor at the Vatican; bottom line: almost everything is bullshit. Read more...