Dead Reckoning

Three in the morning and the rain wouldn't let me sleep, so I got a cup of tea and turned on the radio. Solid gold, Grateful Dead, "China Cat Sunflower", the version from Europe '72, which is on my all-time favorite list. Like any self-respecting Deadhead, I immediately listen to both of those CD's, then a couple of cuts off the tribute album, Deadicated. Looks like a couple of days of rain, deeply overcast, sunrise and sunset look the same, but warm enough to not need a fire. I needed a reading light in the middle of the day. Corned beef hash with an egg on top, toast with bitter marmalade. A friend called with a question about the hub, the apex, of a full-hip roof. I told him to call back in a couple of hours. Thought about the various solutions. The later phone call went on for some time, and was, for anyone listening in, quite arcane. I drop fairly easily into the patois of the trades. I actually know what a lot of those things are called: plinths, gringo-blocks, corbelling; and I've always over-built, by 50 or 100%. If code calls for 2x6 raters on two foot centers with half-inch plywood, I use 2x8's on sixteen inch centers with five-eights inch plywood, my floor is glued and screwed three-quarter inch tongue-and-groove plywood on 2x10 joists on sixteen inch centers. I could put a piano anywhere. Slightly lost in the woods today, I stopped to listen, heard a truck, down-shifting for the hill, and realized I was south and east of where I thought, but it didn't matter, the road is over there. Just enough information. Iron shatters bronze in any pallor game. Paper covers rock. Instead of walking down to the road, which would require walking back up the driveway, I followed the ridges to the graveyard, then home. Settled in with a drink and a smoke, reading yet another history of salt. The house was fairly warm so I just put on my bathrobe and forgo a fire. There are many salt-licks in northern Kentucky, as reflected in the names, and it's interesting that it was considered 'common ground' before white people started drying and selling salt. All of the native people, for many miles around, came and got what they needed. It was considered bad form to kill someone at a salt-lick. I remembered a story about Baudelaire that I finally tracked down in Walter Benjamin, that he had removed the hands from his clock. End up reading Baudelaire, and about him, most of the day; T S Eliot ("Baudelaire", Selected Prose), says "it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing". I have to think about that for a while. Fried a surplus of potatoes at breakfast, so a couple of times during the day I had fold-over sandwiches, mayo, potato, and a slice of onion. These are divine and always make me think about fishing, because they were standard boat fare when I was a kid. We usually had a wide-mouth quart jar of scrambled eggs, and one of fried potatoes, a loaf of white bread, and a jar of mayo in the cooler, with Dad's beer and my soda. When we had eaten it all, it was time to go home. We usually had a couple of messes of fish, which we'd scale and fillet, and freeze in half-gallon milk containers. When there were four or five of those in the freezer, Mom would solicit bacon fat (everyone kept bacon fat) and there would be a fish fry, with hush puppies and cole-slaw. These were a big deal, a real stretch on the family food budget, and as much fun as you could legally have. Home-brew, moonshine and music. Dancing in the car-port. Mom had a friend, Leslie, (whose daughter Starr was hot), and her boyfriend Eddie turned me on to pot and Kant. Kant is the starter drug, next thing you know you're reading far over your head, James Maxwell, and various Greek authors whose names you can't pronounce. This is good training, it's good to see that almost everything is beyond your understanding. I mean mine, of course, I only make it second person to make it a larger group. You and me. I'm rarely shocked by anything, static electricity, maybe, once in a while, but nothing serious; I once watched ball lightening roll down a tree and die in the duff.