Up Here

Fall fog rolling into the hollows. It's an amazing phenomenon, watching the fog rise like a tide. There's a point, which I've actually experienced a few times, when you can actually feel the layer of more condensed moisture. Fog Whisperer. I've noticed a pattern recently, that I turn off the radio and kill the breaker for the refrigerator, sometimes I take a walk, I've never taken a walk on the ridge-top logging roads that I didn't notice something; Komma, I thought, the dark goddess of punctuation. It was immediately apparent, to a type-setter, that you had to break the phrases apart. Ancient Greek, and who ever thought leaving out the vowels was a good idea? Printing codified language. On a break from anything serious (string theory, the heat-death of the universe) I was reading a totally captivating novel by Thomas Perry. He's a good writer. I don't have the exact numbers on this, but I was doing a tofu study, there was a scale of some sort, one to ten, a mouth-feel study. I was at the island with several bowls of tofu and mozzarella in various balsamic reductions, reading the latest Perry novel. It was raining, a lovely patter on the roof, and I had the radio on, turned down low. An old Grateful Dead song came on, and I cranked up the volume. China Cat Sunflower from the "Europe, '72" album, a favorite tune from the distant past. It was all so perfect, cheese and fried bean curd in a blackberry balsamic sauce with late-season vine-ripened tomatoes, a glass of whiskey, the patter on the roof, great music. Lulled into a reverie. A visit to the middle distance. I used to listen to this Dead album often, when I was printing or binding books; and all of the other sensations, the smell of the rain, my addiction to balsamic vinegar, the patter on the roof. I remember so many things, all at once, that I'm overwhelmed. I certainly don't mind sitting back with a drink and a smoke, probably I was designed for this task, just reviewing some events with nothing much in mind. I enjoy watching and listening, slicing open oak-galls to see exactly which insect is represented. For a year or so, living in a rented room, I bicycled everywhere, I lived on wild seafood and potatoes. Then cooking once a week became my rent, then cooking might have become more than that, but I really wasn't interested in cooking for more than six or eight people. I lose interest in proportion to the quantity necessary to prepare. There are exceptions, I can do ribs for twelve, B and I once cooked pork loin for seventy, but in both cases someone else handled the side-dishes. I was thinking about patois, the way language develops. Starts with nouns and simple verbs. I mostly use two dictionaries, both American, Random House 2, and Webster 2, and I spent several hours today, checking words from Anglo-Saxon translated into modern American English. Fuck and such. I'm easily amused, so it's an entertainment for me. I talk to myself and chuckle occasionally. Realized that there was form involved in referencing a word. If I'm merely looking up a word I stand at the dictionary table (a three foot by six foot slab of sandstone lab counter) but if I'm going to research a word I have to sit on the sofa, where I have good light, and read the book open, with reading glasses, across my knees. Big heavy books, some of these dictionaries weigh more than a fat raccoon. You can't hold them like you hold a novel. I don't want any domestic animals, I'd rather just trap mice, and feed them to the crows. Dogs and cats scare all the other animals away.