Too Cool

Three freezes in a row and the bugs are gone. Took me a while to realize how the silence was different. Barely below freezing when I go outside to pee. No stars, and I can feel the moisture in the air. A buck snorting, down the logging road, and something on the compost heap, but I don't turn on any lights, go back inside and get a drink. Light the votive candle I keep on my desk so I can see well enough to roll a smoke. The candle doesn't even flicker, which is a good thing, means there's not a lot of air infiltration. A testament to the new floor insulation is that I don't need to start a fire and I haven't started wearing long-underwear yet. You probably don't need that last hyphen, long underwear, but it dances close to what I think of as the pantyhose precipice. At some point it becomes longunderwear, which actually sounds Icelandic. Which amuses me, and I like being amused, by the way words work. Eat more tomorrow, man the barricades; my plan is to eat breakfast, drink some coffee, and read an Elmore Leonard novel. For lunch, I'm thinking sardines on toast. And for dinner a braised veal shoulder with roasted parsnips. Pull the plug, I have to go, too many plates in the air. The perfect burrito probably exists. In the infinite burrito, string theory, alternate universes, black-holes, everything makes sense. Incredibly dense fog this morning that actually hung around for half the day. When I first got up visibility was about fifty feet, it settled right in with a strange blue-white light that seemed to come from everywhere. Reading about tidal bores and the various attempts at harnessing that force as electricity. A book on tides I'd picked up at the Goodwill. The idea of 'tidal nodes' has bothered me for decades. I've camped on the Bay of Fundy, with forty foot tides, and lived, as a kid, in Key West, where the tide was often measured in inches. Clearly a dynamic involved, but I had no idea what it was. You can imagine the scene: a madman (you can tell he's mad because he's in his bathrobe, his hair, greasy and in much need of a barber, has not been combed for days) flat on his back, playing with an inflatable globe, reading a book about tides. I begin to understand the movement of large bodies of water, I'll never understand it completely, not even close, nor do I care to, but I did want to understand the basic elements. For various reasons, and you can read about it for days, the effects and rotations when you spin a large body that is mostly liquid. The beach ball helps. American Veal is a meaningless phrase, young beef would be more accurate, a cow you didn't have to feed through the winter, but I've been eating a lot of it because it's remaindered. And sweet potatoes. Jesus god a steamed sweet potato, with a tablespoon of hot bacon fat and a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper, is at the very pinnacle of human experience.