Overdose Reversal

Read and wrote all night, no concept of time. Sometime after five (Morning Edition) I turned on the radio and took a nap on the sofa. News dreams ending with me in a bar, but someone had stolen my wallet and I couldn't buy a drink. I seem to remember Richard Burton reading the NYC yellow pages. Went back to sleep, after assuring myself that my wallet was on the corner of the table where I always unload my pockets as soon as I come in the door. No more dreams, and I slept soundly until noon. First thing I do is go out and start the Jeep. Starts fine. Canned hash with a fried egg on top and toast smeared thickly with a caramelized onion and Blood Orange marmalade. A test batch. Bitter-sweet. Finished reading an old Tony Hillerman novel that I'd found at the library sale. I recommend him. Maybe because after the broken marriage I lived for a while in a trailer park on the Navaho reservation. This novel happens in the area between Bluff and Mexican Hat in southern Utah and I know the area well. I'm not one of those gringo Native Americans but I do enjoy rock art in much the same way as I enjoy those caves in France. There's a seep at the southern end of Comb Wash where I used to camp, about eight miles in, but you didn't have to carry much water because of the seep. It was in a small canyon and the Anasazi ruins were in two tiers accessed by holes carved into the rock face. I referred to them as a ladder, but an old Navaho man I met at the laundromat in Monticello, told me that they were more correctly called 'climb-ways' which is the Navaho translation of the Anasazi word for holes carved into the rock for accessing home and the storage bin. This old guy, who preferred to be called Ben, became a friend and was my introduction into the Navaho sense of time. He was absolutely completely incapable of being any where on time. He would show up, a couple of days late for a hike we had agreed to take, and just say that something had come up. He never explained himself, and was never angry. If you talk with an older Navaho, there are long periods of silence. At his request, I once drove Ben out west of Comb Wash, to a place his family owned. No one lived there anymore, the seep had dried up, but there was a great wall, protected under over-hanging rock, that was completely covered with paintings. We sat there for several hours, drinking Rolling Rock and eating jerky, and he explained what he thought some of the glyphs might mean. Don't know what brought it to mind, but I was thinking about eccentric characters I've known. Blessed in that department. Poets and crazed chemists, suicidal savants, all the stations (why 14?) crowded with marginal personages. A great noise in the night, after I settle my heart rate and listen, I construct what I'm hearing to be the bobcat playing king of the hill on the new compost pile. It is. I think it's a he because I read about them, the males are longer and lean, and the opponent is a scrawny coon. They both slip into the dark, under the beam of my flashlight. My basic rule here, if it's before five in the morning I get a wee dram, roll a smoke, and write; if it's after five I make a double espresso, roll a smoke, and write. It's difficult to go back to sleep after you break up a fight. I'm rereading all of Bruce Chatwin and I get totally caught up in his fabrication, he's such a good story-teller. The border line between fact and fiction. For the most part, I don't argue this any more, what might have happened, I just read and split kindling. Occasionally something happens, I have blinders on my eyes and don't notice anything other than the furrow. Mostly I sit and think. Drink single malt and listen to Bach.