Electrical Display

Amazed I still have power, but the storm today, a phenomenal event, was a bit off to the south and my service comes in from the west. I shut everything down. It was so close, and so concussive that the house was vibrating. Enough hard rain to put out any lightning fires. Joel is looking in Atlanta for my U.S. Robotic 5633 modem, Michael and family are moving to town and I fear the modem he ordered might be misplaced. Hot and sultry after the storm, but the house has cooled and Black Dell doesn't bitch too much. I talk sweet to her. Not much left, in the way of food, almost out of whiskey, almost out of tobacco, but I should be able to get to town tomorrow and haul in supplies. The driveway has taken a hit, with these summer squalls, but the new shocks on the Jeep have made a world of difference. My grandfather, Tom, only green-broke mules, to get them to accept bit and traces; he never trained them to the plow, or to skid logs or pull a cart. He had a black man that worked for him, Wiley, one of those great natural talents with plants and animals, and I spent more time at their house than I did in white Pentecostal bullshit. Wiley's wife, Alma, was a great cook, and I loved helping her prepare for a wedding or a funeral. Greens, pork shoulder, slaw, corn bread, a few cute things, pickled okra, a relish. Everything was local, nothing had been bought. Wiley could talk to mules. I plowed his potatoes once, with a Hinny that was older than me. He was the first person I knew that talked about inanimate objects as if they had personalities. I've never known if this was African or Native American, Wiley was part Cherokee. He, as many others, escaped the pogrom by sleeping next to an open window. It was years later, in a roadhouse on the delta, listening to John Lee Hooker, that it all made sense. That I'm white is only the luck of the draw. A neon sign, right? LIVE BAIT. And a somewhat smaller sign advertising a 12 foot Boa Constrictor. Ribs on Friday night, and live music; everyone sat in, John Cage explaining to Beverly Sills where opera could go, Carlos fingering John's guitar, later Mulligan played a set, I remember this now, in which he left out almost everything. Miles is the master. Another monster thunder cell moves through. George calls, in transit between Charlotte and DC, taking the third daughter off to graduate school. He'd been to Cape Cod and wanted to catch me up on all the old acquaintances. It's been so long I had forgotten some of the names. Talking in the dark, because the power had gone out again. Did get to town, spent an hour at the library, a bowl of great chicken gumbo at the pub, a careful shop at Kroger. Lindsey, who is quite shy, talked to me for a while. We talked about money because her college loans are coming due. She has $28,000, in fact the last four recent graduates I've talked with all fall right around that amount, which is, I think, about the current average. So how do you get out from under and start a life? First you find a place, I tell her, a life is the product of being in a place. Get handy, I told her, learn how to saw a board and pound a nail, learn how to wire a house and plumb a drain. Plant a garden and compost everything. Never trust a musician. Stay below the radar. The fog flows in with the morning light and this is my morning news: fog, half way up the Hickories, make what you will. I viewed it as a positive sign. At least they didn't get it all. That prison escape in Mexico, when you look at the logistics, is amazing, they figure it cost at least five million dollars. I could do it for that, but I'd want another five for profit and another five to keep the hell-hound off my trail. If you have billions of dollars, spending a few million doesn't seem that important. Besides he's short, and hovering over his Ducati, or Black Lightning, or whatever, down a mile of tunnel, I'd bet he was one smiling motherfucker. 17 steel doors and several hundred guards, just took that off the table. Drop down thirty feet and take off. There were lights, there were oxygen tanks, there were snack bars with jerky and cold water, and there was a track. A couple of questions are left unanswered: what did they do with the dirt, and how did they control the drainage? The answer at hand. You sell the dirt to the Chinese, who are building islands in the South China seas, and you pump the water out and sell it to California. Win Win. If that's not enough, you sell your tunneling technology to the various groups that want to tunnel. Tunneling, as a method of illicit commerce goes back a long way and it runs the gamut from very crude to very sophisticated. The Romans were devious. The Egyptians, because it's difficult to tunnel in sand (it can be done) often built their caves above ground. The maze, of course, is a tunnel. The tunnel itself is sometimes just a cigar. No, wait, what I meant to say is a tunnel is sometimes just a tunnel.