Night Music

Left the radio on, took a nap, and when I woke up, what woke me, was some great blues. Son House, I guess, get up and turn up the volume. When the set is over I put on a Mississippi John Hurt CD, to contrast that electric Chicago sound. Delta slack guitar. Talking with Dr. John yesterday, we had compared recipes for headcheese, and this book (Cannibalism) that I'm reading now. Jerky, pemmican, really? Those early Catholics, in South America, destroyed almost everything. Aztecs made a kind of headcheese; the hams, you know, went to the clergy. Dried strips from the legs were trail food. Let me say straight out that I would probably never eat another human being, unless the circumstances were extreme. On a lighter note, I noticed the teasel and the chicory, growing in that waste triangle where roads meet, it has a name (of course) but I can't remember it, and I pick a batch of greens. I have one of those orange cones that I set out to look official, and put on my flashers. I look completely natural. It's a talent I've honed. Barn owls being silent? I can do that. Eating my weight in bugs, no problem; it's all in the way you fold the wings. I have to explain again, I don't do any social media, none, I can't open files or photographs. None of it works in the middle of a state forest. I have a bare connection that allows me to send and receive emails. For all I know these are sent in Morse Code. I'm fine with the system, most of my friends are not. They actually don't believe it. But I've had serious IT people out, and they agree there isn't much I could do. Maybe an antenna of some sort, with a booster, and it wouldn't be dependable. Much like the system I have. A beef stew can, wrapped in a coil of wire, sticking up in my yard on a peeled poplar pole, with a wire running to a potato. I have a fair amount of rain water, so I pour a gallon over my head, lather up, and rinse with another gallon, heat another gallon and wash dishes. An enormous spike in my water use, most days I use less than a gallon. Most days I eat for three or four dollars, though I do invest a fair amount of time in eating cheaply. Not that I consider time to be money. I could tell it was Saturday by the NPR programing, a beautiful and cool morning, after the mist burned off it was severe clear, blue and bright. Walking down the logging road I thought about John Cage and what quiet was. I listen to nothing most of the time, but it isn't nothing. In the dark, when I usually write now, the bugs are a cacophony; birds during the day, and the occasional extraneous sound: a logging truck down below, a med-vac air-lift to Cincy. But a Saturday morning, it's very quiet. I have several stumps where I often stop to roll a smoke. It's a ritual, symbolic, probably iconic, especially now that I've stopped shaving (which saves several cups of water a day) and I have this full gray beard. Every once in a while I trim the edges with scissors, powered by my hands, which can't possibly leave a carbon footprint, and I no longer resemble the picture on my driver's license. Two things. One, I would fabricate, if I needed to make something up I would; and Two, no one, even me, would know. Play it close to your chest. It's difficult to disappear.