Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Local Time

Fried green tomatoes and scrambled eggs make a great breakfast, and I wanted to hike down to where the two little feeder rills run together into a creek, and needed a hardy meal. A small pack, water, some trail mix, my usual tools: a magnifying glass, a plastic dish, a minnow net. I carry my anti-snake walking stick. I knew I was getting covered with ticks, but I needed a bath anyway, and I figured I could get them all off before any of them settled in. Needed a last long walk and good day in the woods. It's so beautiful, so lush and vibrant; I eat way too many blackberries, get slightly turned around (I was not lost) and get home late. I assume it's evening, rather than morning, it's difficult to tell sometimes. I spent several hours at a confluence that could be covered with a ping-pong table. Waving grasses in the current. Water flowing from every stratified layer, it percolates down and flows back into the cut-backs when it hits a layer of sandstone or shale. My condolences for my arid friends, but there is water everywhere, here, right now. It is literally flowing out of every pin hole. My creek, Low Gap, is raging, it must be six inches deep and twelve inches wide, I watch it with a kind of pride. I make a pie with green tomatoes and saltine crackers that is very good. A couple of days ago I was sorting through some writing, trying to make sense of the chronology. Reading some of the 1200 pages of rough draft for Text Toward Building A House, the precursor to the way I write today, and interesting writing, though there is too much connective tissue. It took several years at this to realize a reader didn't need that much connective tissue. We all make jumps in where we focus our attention, based on a thousand, ten thousand, variables. I get side-tracked into types of nails, or a specific glue, a new dense foam that has better insulation numbers and isn't flammable. Or a run of corrupt Popes, cults in California, congregations in Kentucky that handle snakes. Belief is a funny thing. It alters what's seen. History is the story of who had enough to eat, everyone else just dies. I'm reading this text for hours, actually for a couple of days, and it's quite intense, the nuts and bolts; it's odd because I recognize that I wrote it, but I don't remember doing it. I had a couple of apple crates, one was "full of shit" and the other was "completely full of shit" and I threw pages into one or the other. This is what we call the editing process. Later, I get four, then six crates, I can store a lot more information, but I don't know a fucking thing. Now, listen, Nixon, had four thousand hours of tape and thousands of pages of text. He was a very bad guy. I thought Dean's wife was hot, but the rest of the crew were idiots. Thunder storms all about, left the radio on, to hear the warnings; one to the north, one to the east, golf-ball sized hail. Though Frontier promised me my phone back today, I still have no phone. I do a five minute scene, that should have been taped, as The Irate Rural Customer. If I had a phone I'd call Frontier and complain. I do have to go to town and run some errands tomorrow, a new driver's license, firewood vouchers, the library and Kroger. And I'll damn sure call them again. Remind them that they are mandated by law to reduce my bill after three days without service, and it's been nine. I could have strung a new line, buried it with a mule and a plow, and still not have missed calls from my daughters on Father's Day. Frontier, in their corporate arrogance, don't really care about me or my daughters, I know that, but I can still be pissed. A rage of crows against a scrim of the modern world. I could fix the problem if they'd just leave me some wire and electrical tape. Where you live there might be 64 or 128 lines, but out here, at the end of service, there are only two, the white and the blue, and I could restore service in a heart-beat, laying the line on the ground and holding up the splices on bushes. I hate it when someone says something is difficult when I know that isn't true. Difficult is something that was previously impossible. I worked with a crew in the 70's that could actually do anything. We'd meet at breakfast, define the problems, solve them during the course of the day, meet for a noodle dinner, then go watch foreign films until we had to go back to work again. Thank god the opera season was short. Not that, wait a minute, it's strange we should actually have a word for real. When we talk about it later, we can't agree on a damn thing.

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