Progress

Almost giddy. Rodney finished the floor. I can already feel a difference in the way the house holds heat. Went to Kroger and replenished supplies. Talked with Jesse in the liquor store about attaching rafters (for an addition) onto a house-trailer. After a nap I was up most of the night reconstructing a paragraph I lost in yesterday's power outage. Another one today. Made some calls, to try and find out what was going on. My rural electric cooperative buys power from a middle-man, AEP, and they're upgrading some automatic relays. I'm familiar with the rafter-to-trailer connection, because when I lived in a trailer in Utah I was asked to add a deck roof, then several more around the trailer park, and got good at it quickly. Another treatise I could write: Rafter Attachment. I'm going to finish cleaning around and behind the stove tomorrow, and slightly reorganize the fire-starting stations. I've saved all of my butter wrappers and all of my cash register receipts for the last year, to see how far that could get me starting fires. The New Yorker, the London Review Of Books, you couldn't start a fire with them if your life depended on it. I'm often reduced to stealing newspaper at the recycling center. I usually read newspapers that are weeks or even years old, just before I crumple them and start a fire. Sometimes I pull out a page, for rereading later. Back on subject, I've filled my kindling bucket with receipts and wrappers and I need another Dollar Store waste basket for kindling and need to figure out where to keep the new container. Great kindling this year as I found a fat-pine stump. You can't not start a fire with fat-pine, and an old oak table top. In truth I never thought I'd get the floor insulated as well as it is right now. Celebrate with hot cornbread and beans with kale and sausage. Sunday I need to split some wood, the last of last year's stash, and rick it up in the house. I have the sense that I'm forgetting something, but for the life of me I can't imagine what it is; I'm backed-up on all the staples. I need to book a room at the Super Eight, so I can shower, then bathe, then shower again, and watch a movie on cable, with take-out Melina pizza (the feta/olive) and a wee dram. Scrub my back with a rough sponge and rub lotion into my feet. I usually just end up watching the weather channel. On the other hand, since I have a good supply of wash water, I could buy a great zinfandel and bathe in the sheep-watering trough. Almost freezing when I get up in the night and go outside to pee. Inky dark, thick air, the smell of something dead. I came back inside and turned on the light at my desk, got a drink and rolled a smoke. A little introspection is a good thing. Why am I here, why did I end up here, what am I doing, have I done more good than harm. I'm careful about doing no harm. I don't know where that comes from. I suspect it came from reading poetry, Robert Frost and choral readings, there wasn't any music in my family, and only a few books. We moved around so much I never had serious friends so I read books. Teachers were always giving me books to read over the summer. We'd move to a new place and the first thing I'd do is draw a map that showed where our house was in relation to the library. Read more...

Big Winds

Power was off for hours again today, two times in three days, and the weather is nice. Big winds created a leaf storm, and I put off a trip to town, stayed home and watched. Pretty spectacle. Rodney's coming up early tomorrow, to deer hunt in the morning, then finish the insulation. Either tomorrow or Monday I've got to suck it up and go wait in the waiting room at Family Services to get my vouchers. I put a book in the Jeep (a John D. MacDonald) for when I feel up to it and it's not too crowded. Rodney will cut and split a batch larger than a voucher load for $100 as a back-up pile. I need to clean out the woodshed. Crap accumulates out there, because there's a roof. An old semi-rotten oak table top I need to smash up for kindling, some sticks I'd dragged out of the woods, some burls. There's a brisk trade now in burls, I cut them out, dry them in the shed or under the house, and give them to people that turn bowls. Lathes always scared me. Of late, I won't take an elevator. In all honesty I even mistrust the ground I'm walking on. Reading a John Banville, he won the Man Booker in 2005. It's quite good, complex, and written in the slightly different English of the Irish. It's good enough that I decide at the first sign of bad weather I'll go to the library and get a few more of them. Reading matter figures importantly in the winter plan. I want to write a piece this winter, that in my head I'm currently calling Considering Baffles, which would be, more or a less, a treatise about cooking on a woodstove. I thought about that today because I was cleaning around and under the stove. Found a cast-iron restoration project I had forgotten about, another winter task; and I need to clean and re-season the six or eight pieces of cookware that tend to get left out during the warm months. The fried-egg skillet, the omelet skillet, the bacon skillet, and that new/old skillet, pretty funky, in which I've taken to frying potatoes in butter with various peppers and adobo. In winter these are all cleaned after use and hung from the beam over the kitchen area. In summer they migrate around to flat surfaces. I love seeing them all hanging. It's a comfort, or more likely a frolic. I had a small fire tonight, it was down to 38 degrees, and caramelized a pan of carrots; so good that I ate them all, even though I thought they'd do for two meals. I bought ten cans of sliced white potatoes, because they were ten cans for five dollars. These fry up very well, blot them dry and fry them in butter; I can always carry up a few vegetables to roast, a parsnip, some young turnips, a sweet potato; drizzle them with a little oil and a good balsamic, a twist of black pepper. I salivate at the very idea. Once the wood is in, I'd rather be left alone; I have an enormous backlog of things that need to be thought about. Oak Galls, And A Way Toward The Future; The Algorithm Of Faith; Whatever The Fuck You Believed. I'd rather just be left alone. Read more...

Realistic Solutions

Best, of course, is an elegant solution. A certain grace. When you build a two-story house you have to access the second floor. Early in the process you build a temporary set of stairs, these are completely utilitarian, built in a day. Cut a couple of stringers, 2x10 treads, eight inch rise, there is no thought to aesthetics. The "finish" stairs are often one of the last of the hundreds of steps involved in building a house. When I was building (I'll not build another set of stairs) I'd look at the space they were to occupy, every day, for months, always with consideration of the materials involved, then build them. I'm blessed (the set designer, Herbert Senn, was responsible for this) with the ability to see a particular project in three dimensions. I can visualize things really well. So, at night, with a drink and a smoke, often in the dark, I'd build whatever set of stairs in my head. I enjoy solving problems, so I'd consider every connection, every attachment, cut all the pieces; then, usually on a holiday weekend, when things were quiet, I'd install them. The last three or four were elegant. One of the great things about the building trades, is that if you pay attention you get better. Thinking something through, completely and rigorously, you know instantly when there is a glitch. You stop and think about the glitch, review the solutions, decide on a course of action, note any special hardware that might be necessary, get on with the mental construction. When the entire sequence goes smoothly, you're ready to build the stairs. I tend to work with exotic materials, not because I want to, but because people leave them on my steps. A figured log, some interesting pavers, an image of John Wayne on a tortilla. I'm the number one unbeliever. I don't believe in anything. Even the silly blue flowers, chicory and a weed that I can't identify. It pisses me off when I can't identify something. Read more...

Jump Start

Rodney called, ready to work, and he does work, hard, all day. Almost finished the floor insulation, then a couple of other little things. I go ahead and pay him the $100 we'd agreed on, and he says he'll be over soon to finish the last couple of bays, because that was the deal. He wants to come over and work-up some firewood for me, as an extra reserve, cut, split, and stacked in the woodshed. I agree, as long as he doesn't drink when he's using the chainsaw. This will complete a triple play for me, getting the yard cleared, getting the floor insulated, and getting the firewood. A month ago it looked impossible and now I'm feeling more confident about another winter. A few more things for the pantry. My water supply is good, and I've set up a 16 foot 2x12 with one end on a sawhorse and the other on the ground. This makes collecting clean snow very easy for wash water mid-winter. I filter it through pieces of old tee-shirt. I get eight filters from a tee-shirt, for my crude system, which is a strainer that's secured over another five gallon bucket, lined with a filter. I use this for everything except drinking and brushing my teeth. Water does become an issue, but I stockpile juice in the fall, and I can always boil melted snow. This time of year, every time I go off the ridge, the entire landscape is changed. Leaf-fall at about 50% and you start seeing things. A forgotten graveyard, a shelf of sandstone, the scars of old logging roads. In my positive glee at seeing some problems solved, I can't forget it's a long row ahead. More rain, and all of the saturated fallen leaves are soggy. You couldn't start a fire here if they paid you. Maybe the first job was the guy that kept the fire burning, the proto-priest, a deranged dude with a crooked smile, drying wood at the edge of the fire and adding it as needed. Or the witch with smoldering embers in her bag. Sometime, a million and a half years ago (the dates are all over the board) we started using fire and flaking crude tools. Our brain got bigger and we started carrying things around. Evidently, we've been on two feet for a very long time and no one knows why. Forty to sixty thousand years ago we ate the last of our ancestors and starting painting on cave walls. Soon after that we started fishing for trout. Then there was toilet paper, Spam, and Ramen noodles. Spam really caught on in Hawaii, it's not unusual to find a Spam and American cheese omelet on the menu. I have a love hate relationship, because I loved fried Spam and American cheese sandwiches, but I know they're mot very sophisticated. Spam is half-way between head-cheese and bologna. Essentially using waste products. The power went out for a couple of hours, but I'd saved this, before I went out on the back porch for a smoke. Breaking dawn is a lovely thing. Read more...

Rabid Coon

Short shrift. Dirty end of the stick. Either endemic or epidemic. Three in fifteen years, and one of the reasons I walk with a stout rod. It's a concession to the fact that I don't like to bend over so much anymore, but still like to poke at things, and serves to keep things at bay. There is no mistaking a rabid coon, aggressive posture, foaming at the mouth, lips curled back and bared teeth. Irrationally extreme in opinion or practice is the first definition, but when you live in the woods you think about hydrophobic convulsions. The one follows from the other. I make a note to look up rabies, because I don't know much about the disease, but it's been in the news, the last couple of years, infecting the local coon population. Transmitted by salivated fluids. Don't kissy-face a rabid dog. I was working the compost heap, burying some shit and covering it with ashes, thinking I might rake a few bushels of leaves on top, when this clearly psychotic fucking raccoon attacks. My weapon, at hand, is a shovel, and I knock the mother-fucker twenty or thirty feet away, then smash his skull with a tremendous blow from the back of the shovel. The whole incident is so fast, that the old part of my brain, fight or flight, took control; my hands are shaking so badly I can't even roll a cigaret. Tense is the least of it. That it would have been or that it was. That it exists at all is a testament to something. Darwin or Wallace. That when confronted with a rabid animal, you just use the weapon at hand, a brick or a shovel. Body disposal on the ridge means taking the carcass down the logging road, which is south and east, which is downwind, and the remains are gone in a few days. These little eye-of-round steaks, pounded out and smeared with adobo and chipotle, steamed potato browned in the same skillet, with eggs and toast, is one of my favorite meals. There's a nice piece on the radio, Adam Gopnik on salt. Then I listen to all of the Cello Suites, Rostropovich, while I mutter around, darning socks, clipping my nails, sweeping cobwebs off the ceiling; several times I literally plop on the sofa and listen to a section. If I had television I'd have watched a soccer game. Three guys go into a bar, an Irish priest, a homeless vet, and a Republican. The priest talks about the great famine, the vet talks about cooking a potato in the coals, and the Republican had already opened a fried potato joint in downtown Milwaukee. There's one priest in town that still wears a cassock, if that's the correct word, floor-length black garment, high-collared; a young guy, does community service, Thursday mornings at the Market Street Cafe, and once a month they have an open mike kind of thing at the pub, one of those "What Do You Believe" discussion groups. Though tempted, I've never gone to listen to one of the pub evenings, but I was often at the Market Street Cafe getting a cup of coffee when they started their Thursday meetings, and they seemed to be talking about interesting things. My idea of a good discussion group is four writers after a good meal with a couple of bottles wine, smoking, killing a bottle of single-malt, talking about commas; or discussing firewood with B, or Pinter with my daughter. I don't actually encourage idle conversation. Behind that gruff exterior there is a gruff interior, and it's not that I'm calloused, but more that I don't pay any attention to shit I can't do anything about. Crooked politicians and massive corruption are a fact of life. I'm not sure what the debt limit is, evidently it's paying the vig on a loan. I don't get it. The person with the greatest debt is the winner. Order me a Lear Jet. Read more...

Go Figure

Dripping rain all night and all day. Got up before dawn to pee and stayed awake, reading the end of a John Sanford novel. Very quiet and quite dark with the overcast. When it finally gets light I fill my large kettle with water, clean a couple of buckets, and put them out to collect water. Heat water and do some dishes, then heat some more water for a sponge bath, wash my hair, wash a few things by hand. It's interesting walking in the woods when there's a new deep layer of leaves, you can't see a damned thing underfoot. One uses a high-step in this terrain. If you keep a regular pace, you can step in the same places, which requires much less effort, in snow for instance. I think about dying alone. If you live alone then you can imagine dying alone and what a mess that could be. I just spent six days without much contact, Samara called, but she wouldn't be concerned that I didn't answer the phone, D called, but he wouldn't worry if I didn't answer, fact is I often disconnect the phone and flip the breaker for the fridge. In fact, I'm disconnected more than any one I know, not to prove a point, I don't have a point. I could die and it might be several weeks before anyone would notice. In one sense relationships are a way of obeying burial protocols. Grave goods can vary from a gold coffin to a handful of flowers. In a codicil to my will, I specify that I not be embalmed, that there be no coffin, and that my ashes be collected in a coffee can. It should be the cheapest, or you give your body to crows, which would also be fine, or let them dissect your body in a classroom.

In the cold fall rain
everything leads toward death,
nothing if not clear.

For reasons that escape me now, I was thinking about cannibalism, reading about the ratio of hominid remains in South African caves, the dramatic increase in brain size, the use of tools and fire. I had bought some very cheap reduced-in-price eye of round steaks. This is an awful cut of meat, but I had the new mallet from Kim and I beat them to hell and back, rolled them around an onion, kale, and veal force-meat stuffing and braised them in red wine with a splash of balsamic. I had this with black rice, which I'm not sure is actually rice, but was pretty good. Beef tacos served on a bed of grain, or the vegetarian version which is mushrooms in cattail cakes with a highly spiced salsa. Being a contentious objector most of my life, I don't buy that whole doing what you're told to do argument. It never made sense. Read more...

Squid

Cleaning out the pantry I found a can of squid (in its own ink) that was just about at its due date. Remembered a meal dear dead Harvey used to enjoy, stewed squid, in its ink, on rice. I read squid recipes for an hour, I have a lot of them because both my daughters have always enjoyed squid dishes. What I ended up doing was cutting the squid into bite-size pieces, frying shallots and celery, adding the ink and a bit of clam juice (I always keeps a couple of those little bottles of clam juice, some canned minced clams, and a can of sliced potatoes, which allows me to make a chowder in 10 minutes), and served it up on a lovely pecan rice. It was very good, I love the mouth-feel when it's cooked correctly. This needs to cook for 35-45 minutes. It was either a late brunch or an early dinner and I realized I didn't want to go to town. I do need to go, to get cash to pay Rodney (I suspect he won't show up), and I've made a note of several other things I need for the winter larder, but I can put it off another day. It's so beautiful outside, the slanted light, the color, the activity. Some of the maples are turning a lovely translucent orange/yellow, and some of the sassafras are bright red. The color is so lovely, especially as it opens into the black and white of winter. Rodney called and said he would be here tomorrow, if only to get started. It's a fixed price job, so I don't care if it takes two or three afternoons. It's going to make a huge jump in my comfort level, last February and March were quite cold, because some of the floor was hardly insulated at all. Goddamn dogs ripped it all out. I don't know what they were thinking. The next morning, today, I did go to town, bought supplies, went to the library. It was a lovely drive through the State Forest, sunlight filtered down through yellow and orange leaves. So many leaves, Jesus Christ, the verges disappear. The hillsides are awash with color. Life through a mercurochrome bottle, and a hundred shades of red, it's overwhelming, I'd rather just hole-up and slow my heartbeat. Read more...

Illogical Extremes

The best fried potatoes I've ever eaten, and they were a matter of laziness and happenstance. I'd pounded then marinated that cheap round steak in chipotle and adobo, fried it in butter. I'd just stashed the skillet in the oven. I wanted eggs and potatoes and I pulled that skillet out (it should have been wiped and re-oiled) added a large pat of butter and fried a steamed russet. There's not anything to compare it with. I fry great potatoes anyway, because I don't mind taking the time, but these, with crusted bits of smoked peppers, and the emulsion of adobo and butter. I have some of them left, for a breakfast sandwich. There are times when I can't believe how simple I am, that I could be looking forward to a fried potato fold-over sandwich with mayo, as though it were a kind of reward for doing something. A very good conversation with Samara, and I was thrilled that she and Scott had talked about living here, after I'm gone. I told her to become familiar with the book trade. Scott could teach theater at the college. There are obstacles: access, no running water, no central heat, bears. Still, they could do it. I've done it for fifteen years and there'd be two of them. I'd just curled up to sleep for a couple of hours when all hell broke loose outside. Caterwauling. I had to shoot a couple of marbles with my sling-shot to disperse them. Rival packs of dogs. Which woke me up, so I got a drink and rolled a smoke, sat in the dark and considered my failures. I live alone, don't have a boat, and only eat oysters once a week. What's germane? I hit the alpha-male in the ass with a marble, at fifty feet I'm deadly with a sling-shot, and the pack scattered. Completely lost myself, meant to go to town, but decided I didn't need to go, hauled some brush, read, fried some more potatoes. I was completely zoned out, at the island, eating egg yolk and the last of the potatoes, smearing any last anything up with a last piece of toast, when I realized I hadn't been off the ridge for five days. I hadn't even noticed. Bodes well for the winter. As long as I can eat and read. A can of bean and bacon soup, diluted with just enough water to clean the can, and a piece of cornbread, seems like a pretty good meal. Rice with whatever's left over is fine. A fried oyster burrito, in a bed of watercress, with a mango salsa, would be a good thing. Even tinned oysters fry all right for a sandwich. I was in Kansas once, or Nebraska, and someone asked me why I carried cans of sardines and tuna fish, certain varieties of hash. I blew it off as habit. Read more...

The Interruptions

First the phone, an old friend, in his cups over the death of his cat. Then the crows set up such a squawk that I finally took them some mice. The mice catching is going well, fourteen in the freezer. But the traps are another interruption. Then I hear a car laboring up the driveway and it's the engineer I talked with before, and he'd brought his wife to see my staircase. I made them coffee and toasted left-over biscuits. Interesting people, very bright. They left and I took a walk looking for late-season mushrooms. Interrupted by two good old boys with their bows, out scouting deer. They were thirsty, so we walked back to the house and I gave them a beer. Actually polite young guys, early twenties, not a clue; and they couldn't believe that anyone could own so many books. I told them they could hunt the far side of the opposite ridge and to not block the driveway. I had a lamb shank I needed to cook, so I seared it and put it on to stew with onions, adding potatoes and carrots later. I like to simmer this for several hours. Works well for me, because I don't have to use a knife and I can eat one-handed, which means I can hold a book in my left hand. I turn the pages with a bone folder held in my right hand, between bites, that I can easily clean with my napkin. Then my older daughter calls, which I had been looking forward to, and we talked about the play she's in now and how I couldn't get out there because I'm trying to get ready for winter. The pantry is looking good, and Rodney said he'd be out to finish insulating the floor on Friday, which means maybe within the week, and I go to Family Support tomorrow to see about the firewood vouchers. If I never have to use a gas chain-saw again it'll be too soon. I'll keep using the little electric one, it's more like a woodworking tool. I've cut some interesting joints with an electric chainsaw. One, in this house; there's a place where a natural dogwood post supports a walnut stringer and all the surfaces are irregular. The cut is very nearly perfect and I did it freehand, with an electric chainsaw. Ralph would yell at the end of a workday "good enough" and we'd all holster our hammers. Climb down and get a cold beer. If the owner was at all astute, there'd be cold beer. On Friday, we'd have a martini lunch with lobster rolls and deposit our checks. Read more...

Incunabula

I do possess one sheet of paper from 1500, but it isn't printed. It was a marbled end sheet from a book that I couldn't afford to buy and it fell out when I opened the book. I slipped it into another book I was buying. It's just about the only thing I every stole. I take it out once in a while (it lives between layers of archival tissue in a large Dore volume). It's a piece of paper, it's 515 years old, the colors are still vibrant. I learned to make paper, and then to marble paper, because of it. The best marbling is done with a feather. I used a swan feather (they had a nest near my house on Cape Cod) because they were large and you could marble a page in a single pass. Then you had to dry the sheets, and flatten them because they wanted to pucker. Making the cases, then making the paper for end-sheets, then marbling, then casing the books, just for a lettered and signed edition of a book, could take weeks. The "Gaelic Tales" took an entire winter, pin-registration for four-color wood blocks is a pain in the ass. It can take days to set up a single run. I don't believe I've ever found a mistake in that book, which is fairly unusual. Modern mass-market stuff has so many mistakes it upsets my stomach. I'm not a perfectionist, not even close, but I took great care making books. Then I fell in with these extremely good carpenters. Doing interior trim in a 1.4 million dollar house is pretty serious business. I hated the idea of ridiculous wealth, but I loved working with great materials. One winter I started all my fires with scraps of first-growth sugar pine. We'd gotten a bundle of salvaged wood, cut from logs that had sank, a hundred years ago, from a flotilla of logs going to a sawmill in North Carolina. It worked like butter. As I've gotten older I care more about the materials than I do about my own ego. I'm full of shit, actually; I know nothing about electricity and every internal combustion engine I've ever owned has failed. An axe is a reliable tool, a hatchet. Fucking chain-saw needs gaskets replaced, brakes need to be re-lined, eventually you need new boots. Thinking about shoes recently, because I need a pair of work boots, which is going to mean shopping, and I hate shopping. But work boots are critical for my life-style and they have to be considered. Also, I have to admit, I bought a log of Velveeta cheese and ten cans of tomato soup. A very cold winter day, a cup of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich might just provide salvation. I cook a pot of Dove Creek pinto beans, make a chili of lamb shanks and peppers, rice and chopped sweet onions, a thin pone of cornbread, life doesn't get better than this. Read more...

Bashing Elders

If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. That's why Myrtle (bible-thumping grandmother on Mom's side) ,cooked the big meal before mid-day and left it on the table. I always preferred a monster breakfast, a light lunch (a can of sardines, some olives), then a huge hit of carbohydrates in the evening, with a bottle of wine. Anymore I eschew the hard physical labor, leave it for the young bucks, I'd rather read fiction. I've lived a fairly natural life, chopping wood, hauling water, and at this point I'm worn to a nub. I'd rather pull up a lap-blanket and disappear into the history of dust. Listening to Patsy Cline, looking at the cobwebs and dust-motes of my life. Bonny singing with John Lee. The tension that creates, a black snake in the woodpile. I go about my business, humming an Allman Brothers tune, Duane on lead guitar, echoes of Boz Skaggs. Listen, even the fucking refrigerator hums a middle C. Excuse me while I re-tune the piano, Phil Oakes right? Camping in Comb Wash Bach is always in the background. It's Canyon Country and the sound reverberates. Change ringing. Nine Tailors for Master Mark. One doesn't walk widdershins, It's all left turns on the race track. Booby's wife, Diane, is absolutely petrified of the bear. She went into shock when she heard he had been under my house for several days. She strongly recommended that B and I both stay out of the woods. No chance of that, but it's nice to know someone cares. Actually, you can live your entire life and never see a bear in the wild. It's not a good acorn year, it's a two year cycle, and there is a decreased squirrel population. When you stare into the middle distance as much as I do, one thing you notice is horizontal movement. As the under-story opens up I can see deeper into the woods. There's always something going on. Sub-text, for instance, is a more or less constant background noise. I can distinguish specific animals from the way they sound walking on leaves, it's not a gift, it's something I've learned from hundreds of hours of listening, and I love starting fires with just a butter parchment wrapper and a few twigs. Simple pleasures. First fire of the season, so I make the first biscuits of the season. I have a little stainless steel pan with a long handle I use to heat sorghum molasses. A hot biscuit with butter and warm sorghum is a wonderful thing. Then bacon, a fried egg, and another biscuit to clean the plate. Now that Aunt Pearl is dead and Mom's in a nursing home, I probably make the best biscuits in the world. The secret is handling the dough as little as possible. A split and toasted biscuit, the next day, is as close to heaven as I ever need to be. Not that I wouldn't aspire to something heavenly, lord knows, ankle bells, fish eggs, and morels, but I sense my limitations. I would never, for instance, wear a tie. I was at some formal event recently, where my doeskin jacket and open collar denim shirt had attracted some attention. I'd traded a Purdey shotgun for the jacket. At that point I'd spent a year curing deer hides. Dog shit, brains, countless washings, and I never ended up with a single useful piece of leather. I've failed at any number of things. I set out to collect a cubic foot of various things and that ended up being a disaster; relative humidity in play. Even a cubic foot of clay is suspect. Read more...

Nothing Matters

Suppose to frost tonight and tomorrow night. It won't frost on the ridge because the cold air flows down into the hollow, so I miss the first few, the ground is still too warm. I went to Family Support to get firewood vouchers, but there were twenty of more people waiting and several babies crying, and I just couldn't take it. I figure I'll go back at nine in the morning on Monday. I split a batch of nice dry oak to get me through a cold weekend. Pork fried rice for dinner, I haven't fixed this in months, and it's wonderful, with hot sauce and kim-chee, made a pan of Jiffy cornbread, I have to admit to this, they were on sale two for a dollar, you just add powdered eggs and powdered milk, a little water, and end up with a cornbread-like substance. It's sweet to my taste, but it's hot bread, and there's a piece to slice and toast in the morning, butter and marmalade. I have a pan that I've altered to fit my toaster oven. I have to alter almost everything. Nothing fixed. Funny email today to go to a particular web site, which I was able to do for the first time in 6 months, and there was a new copy of "Cistern", in its hard to find original wrapper (Indian hand-made paper) being offered for $232.50. I was shocked. There were several copies available, the cheapest, used, was $42. A testament more to the content, about which I had little control, there's an intensity that's palpable, than to the production of the book itself. The printing is terrible, B and I had no experience with farming a book out to off-set print shops, and the result reflects that. I had reread Thoreau's "Cape Cod" a couple of years ago, left it out for several months, re-rereading passages, and I'd been struck with how callous he could be in his opinions. Then reading extensively about the family pencil business, and I've read the journals; then a recent article in The New Yorker which is a wonderful summation of how and why "Walden Pond" is in the canon. One thing that emerges is the question of Creative Non-Fiction. I drift toward the left here, I think almost everything is fiction. Even those videos that actually show real events in real time. I bought a slab of cheap beef, a round tip steak, and I know it's tough as shoe leather (recipes tend to be truth, in relation to news stories) so I pound it out, cover it with minced chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, sear it quickly, and serve it with caramelized onions and red peppers on wild rice. You don't need wild rice for this, but I was holding quite a bit, given in trade for designing a staircase. That Louisiana pecan rice would be very good, even a plain, simple risotto, or served on rounds of refried grits. Sliced and refried with cheese it'd make a great sandwich. The original meal was stellar, a very pleasing level of hotness. I'll make variations of this for guests in the future, very good and very cheap; with a drink, later, I'm doing the math, and I get four meals for seven bucks. In a small way I'm slightly famous, everyone knows where I live, and my cooking is notorious. A simple stewed lamb shank dish I do with new potatoes and baby carrots seems to be a favorite. I do a rack of goat, without intervention, interleaved slices of bacon between the ribs. A good vegetable might be Brussels Sprouts. Rhea pulls me aside, whispers in my ear, Dad, she says, that woman is hitting on you, she writes about cooking for the The New York Times. I was flattered, known as anything rather than a janitor was a step up, it's weird that I understand things so well, and yet I don't understand what's going on. Read more...

Getting Metaphorical

The leaf count is growing, the yard is covered, the driveway, and you can't see the edge of the road on Upper Twin. Leaves and new chip-and-seal (asphalt and limestone gravel), so driving out the back way is noisy. I went into to town for a few things, my firewood vouchers, a few groceries. I made a small batch of loose sausage and stuffed an acorn squash, then had a great sausage and fried potato burrito with salsa this morning. Damned Family Services place is closed on Wednesday. Who the hell closes on Wednesday? So I'll have to make an extra trip to town, but I will, tomorrow maybe, because we're supposed to have out first frost Sunday night, and I'd like to have a nice stack of wood. I need to split wood tomorrow, and I have the remaining oak from last year. I can get by for a couple of weeks just finding wood on the side of the road. Burning dried dung. I drove by Aubry's place, the firewood guy, and the pile of wood is impressive, the size of a football field, twenty feet high in the middle. He has small dump-truck but before he brings that up I want him to bring a load in his pick-up, so he knows where I am and what the driveway is like. It's a completely cash business, other than the vouchers (which are like gold, securities in effect), so I get some cash, in case I need to buy a load before the vouchers come through. I realized I hadn't bought any canned sliced white potatoes, you dry these and they fry up perfectly, and they were on sale 10 cans for $5. I bought 10 cans. Boredom can be an issue, the middle of winter, which is where the fifty or so books I collect during the course of things come into play. Mostly these are hard-bound books that I buy for fifty cents, a bag full, on certain Thursdays, for two dollars. Also I have my hobbies, inserting and removing commas, spending quiet time in my graveyard, micro-waving mice for three raucous crows. When the snow's deep, I back off, I don't have a generator, or a satellite or cable, I often can't access a road, but I've never been snowbound for more than thirty days. Emily lives on Mackletree and took over my old job at the museum, so she has to drive in the long way around every day. She said a sink-hole had appeared where the diversion channel had been used to dump the water from the lake when they were rebuilding the dam and wing-walls. I wonder who pays for the repair. A private company contracted by the state, working in a state forest, and a county road. Word is that CCC bridge, now just one lane and closed to trucks, is going to be converted to a walk and bike trail and that a new bridge is going to built downstream. The old CCC bridge is an almost handsome utilitarian affair. Asphalt paved over the original planks. The superstructure is wood. To walk underneath is a study in decay. Whatever they do, destroy the old bridge and build a new one; or build a new one and convert the old one to a new life, it's going to be very expensive and take a while. An April start, is what I hear, and that would mean Mackletree will be closed most of next summer. Has to be done, the old bridge is rotten, but it's going to be a pain in the ass for maybe a hundred people, the residents in a five mile stretch; but it is also one of the few connecting links over the ridge-line that connects the river with the interior parts of the country. These were important connections, and riverboats burned a lot of wood, stopped at every port-of-call. And the ridge-line 'Sunshine Ridge' runs almost a hundred miles, it's the outwash plain of the last glaciation. Getting goods down to the river was an important part of the local economy. Sending stuff down river, to Cincy. Before Chicago, hog butcher to the world. You can still get great sausage in Cincinnati, and some of the best bread I've ever eaten. End of the season vegetables. A pile of squash, fried green tomatoes, parsnips touched by frost. The conversion of starch to sugar, malted barley to beer, corn to whiskey, is such an elegant solution to storing grain. I was thinking about barrels and coopers, planing the perfect angle on a stave, how perfect a barrel is for rolling from one place to another. Water weighs 62.4 pounds per cubic foot, a five-gallon bucket, interestingly, isn't quite a cubic foot, but a 55 gallon barrel has to weigh at least 600 pounds, and yet you can control it with just a touch. Barrels are oblate spheres, foreshortened footballs, almost any direction is possible. I once found myself in line between Gordon Wasson and John Cage in line at the post office at Wood's Hole; they were arguing about free will, and the idea of rolling barrels came up. They pressed me, I was between them, I had to say something, and I told them you could slake the smell of kerosene with lime. Which is true, you know, if you dump a pound of powdered limestone into a barrel of kerosene, it doesn't stink on your fingers any more. Read more...

Loss Leader

A stump scout, I guess you'd to call him. We'd just bought the farm in Mississippi and were strapped for cash, and this guy shows up, jeans, flannel shirt, well-worn John Deer hat, and he wants to know if there are any walnut stumps on the place. There were, and he bought ten of them for $100 each, sent a crew in to dig them out, then filled the holes. He worked for the Colt company and they used the wood for pistol grips, left me a card. A year or so later I was having coffee with Troy, at the hardware store in Duck Hill, and two good-old-boys came in looking to sell a load of firewood. Cut and split Black Walnut; I bought it for fifty dollars. Stacked it in one of the numerous sheds and called the stump guy, Henry, he stopped by a week later and bought the wood for a thousand dollars. I did miles of fencing in Mississippi and used hundreds of cedar fence-posts. Cedar splits like a dream, but I always saved the butt log, four feet, knot-less and perfect, because the pencil guys paid top dollar. As it turns out, cedar is perfect for pencils, and I had a lot of it. My grandfather, Tom, the last ten or fifteen years of his life, retired from mule-trading, spent most of his time whittling cedar splits down to nothing. In the course of an afternoon, telling stories the whole time, he'd reduce a stick of wood into beautifully curled shavings. His knife, a Schrade Stockman, was incredibly sharp. He honed it every night while Myrtle read, out loud, from the bible. Their one decadence was a root-beer float after dinner. Dinner was actually called supper, because dinner was the mid-day meal. Myrtle was a great country cook, and she made wonderful cornbread. Home-cured ham and red-eye gravy, mixed greens cooked with salt-pork, chicken fried in lard (her chickens, she had a stump where she chopped off their heads), and great cream pies. She always had a Jersey cow and made butter. The last summer I spent with them, I must have been fourteen, Tom let me buy and sell a few animals at the weekly livestock auction. He had some holding pens, where we could keep pigs or calves and the occasional mule (he never quite retired) and I loved the wheeling and dealing that went on. It was extraordinarily complex, like playing chess. Who needs what. I hadn't thought about it, but I'm much more influenced by my grandparents than I am by my parents. My parents were digging out of the depression; my grandparents were still trading mules, grinding corn, and curing hams in the smokehouse. Yeah, well. I still like to fry up a piece of salt pork, a streak-of-lean, with a strip of skin that I can chew for hours. Henry David is credited with the invention of raisin bread. I'm not sure I believe this. As soon as I invented bread I'd start putting things into it. Stuffed crust pizza. Fried dough stuffed with bacon fat, duck or goose liver. Reading about engineering, I was thinking about the new work down at the damn and spillway, what McPhee called The Control Of Nature, and this was a very well executed project, good people, great equipment, and I'm sure it cost several million dollars. I met one of the designers, a hydraulic engineer. He came up to the house for a drink and we talked about stress failure. He was concerned about the wing walls at the spillway. He took about a dozen photographs of my staircase and thought it was remarkable, I pointed out several mistakes. Imperfect joints. I'd made a jig, for notching the posts, which gave me the depth and angle of the notch, but the two surfaces were both natural edges, uncut, so they didn't fit perfectly. I actually know several carpenters who would have made the joints fit perfectly. It's always good to remember that someone does anything better than you. I only notice the not-quite-perfect joints when I'm feeling maudlin and self-critical. Usually I just marvel that I built them. They're probably the best example of what I preach about letting the materials speak. It's not meant to be at all mystical, it's actually purely practical. If you're trying to build something square a post needs one flat side, a corner post needs two, a free-standing post doesn't need a flat side at all, it just has to carry the load. I like exposing a natural edge. I also didn't know that Thoreau lived in the Emerson household for a couple of years, running errands and such. I get a strong Melville, Hawthorn vibe off that; not that Melville would have gotten a coffee to go, or sat on a stake-out with Nate, but you get the drift. I walked over and looked at the pantry and I'm in good shape, I want to back up some of the back-up items, but I'd be fine for a couple of months. Black beans on corn pone, Spam with wild greens, wilted watercress (hot bacon fat) on toast with a fried egg. I have beans from Dove Creek and rice from Louisiana. I make a great sausage gravy. Once you realize polenta is just solidified grits, life gets easier. Read more...

Dark Matter

B said, and I trust him on this, that the bear probably weighs 300 pounds. Built like a fire plug. No waist to speak of and low to the ground. Black is a relative word, the crows for instance are somewhat more than merely black; stick trees, against a ground of winter snow, are dark, but all the colors of the universe are contained within. The pelt of a black bear is like that. Refract whatever light there is, and there's almost always some. I don't do caves or other close spaces, because I get anxious, but I understand the concept of very dark. I often close my eyes, to see something more clearly, but color bleeds through. And schematic drawings. Don't get me started. I design useless things as a matter of course. Today I was thinking about a press that would make black walnut oil easier to extract. What I'd like to do is fry some potatoes and then some fish in walnut oil. Some hush-puppies. My current method of expressing oil is primitive: I shell, then pound, and let walnuts sweat oil in sunlight. It's a laughable system, but I amuse myself. It's a very good oil for the final curing of cast iron cookware, and it makes a superior salad dressing. Reading a biography of Richard Hakluyt, then reading the explorers he chronicled; and taking the history of the pencil a chapter at a time, because I have to go back and read some Thoreau. He worked in his dad's pencil factory when he needed cash. I didn't know that Henry's cabin was on Emerson's land. It was interesting to read about his day pack, which was similar to my own. He was a damned good surveyor, and it was said he could pace off a mile better than anyone alive. I respect that, though I could never walk in a straight line, but that's my problem. I resisted the impulse to run back into town and get another dozen oysters, and just ate the last of the lemon sorbet. Read more...

Almost Cynical

Appropriate behavior is sometimes difficult to muster. Two fat people and their shopping cart blocking the aisle in Kroger, going over their shipping list, made me mad today. Really fat people take up a lot of space. Did a large shop, and I'll do another one next week. I think I need to take tomorrow off and just be quiet. It surprised me that I got upset so easily today. Again at Kroger, I was helping a very old woman unload her cart (she was taking forever) and the asshole behind me jammed his cart into my ass. I let fly with some expletives, creative ones involving camel shit and his mother. The cashier was choking with laughter. First thing this morning I was pissed because Mackletree is closed and I have to drive around. I go out up the creek, because it is the fastest and least hassle, and I haven't been that way in a year so it's an interesting drive. Do my business, the grocery shopping, the library, then visit with TR and he has the Petroski book for me, the history of the pencil. I've been looking forward to this, and my spirits brightens somewhat. I drive back on the river road, then all the way up the creek to B's house, give him back his battery charger, have a glass of water, chat briefly, then go home and stash foodstuffs. By the end of the day, I was feeling better, maybe it was just the Irish whiskey, but, hey, I have crows to feed. Another benefit of the recent yard work are the dramatically increased sight lines. Ms Fox came out today, for her apple, and she had two kits with her, this year's family; when I went out, to roll her an apple, the kits ran behind her. Surely I was being exhibited as the purveyor of apples. She held it as she usually does, in front of her nose, with her two front feet, the kits were at right angles, and they looked like a furry model of a cathedral. My weekly oyster treat was a new experience. I'd read in several places recently about using a dab of citrus sorbet as a topping, and I must say it's fantastic. I roasted them open on the grill. For the first time in six months I can see the other side of Low-Gap Hollow, just glimpses, but my universe is expanding. Also means direct sunlight through the tree-tops when I write in the afternoon so I have to prop a drawing or painting in the window to block the light. I dislike things that block the view, so it needs to be easily removable. Soon as the sun is past the window jamb I take whatever it is down, so I can watch the colors of the setting sun. I remind myself, as I'm micro-waving mice, that I'm actually not a strange person, I can explain why I do all of the things I do, none of them are mysterious or cause for alarm. It's true I know a fair number of strange people, in awkward situations I might serve as mediator, in a dispute, but my vested interest is that we survive below the radar. Those fucking black helicopters are a pain in the ass, but if I wear a wet-suit and cover myself with mud, it's difficult to detect me from the background radiation. I went over and looked at the cub-board today, and I felt pretty good about surviving for a month or two. Another big shop and I'd be good for the winter; get the floor finished, the firewood laid by, and all I have to decide is what to read. The obvious contenders. Pynchon, Infinite Jest, all of Barry Lobez. As well as anything I can plan, I know I'll reread Gunter Grass, The Flounder, and those early short stories by Hemingway. Read more...

Punch List

A little stir crazy, I go down and visit B. Coffee and conversation. One of the only people I know who truly understands the winter punch list. He's at 50% and I allow that I'm about the same. Still plenty of time. I'm planning a full-scale food trip next week, which actually should be great fun, hit Big Lots (where you really must check the dates) then Kroger for the bulk of the list. Jesse got me a case of whiskey. I hope to get sardines, and roasted red peppers in oil at Big Lots. I've experimented with making cornbread using powdered eggs and milk, and have an acceptable product. If I have to walk in, I can carry some greens, or some young beets with their greens. Lay the heavy stuff in before the snow flies, drinking water, juice, whiskey; a very good meal, maybe two servings, might only weigh two pounds, you can carry that in, but water is heavy. In preparation, I go through the cupboard, throwing away a few things, cleaning out mouse droppings. Soup and cornbread is the staple of winter diet, so I want to be able to make six or eight different soups. Canned and dried beans and vegetables. Even canned potatoes and carrots, so I can make a stew with jerky. I get the seafood guy at Kroger to order me some dried cod. I'd collected quite a few black walnuts, they're all over the roads now, an actual traffic hazard. I husk and dry them, then smash them with the great meat tenderizing mallet Kim gave me. I manage to make about two tablespoons of oil in a day. Not exactly a production run, but I do make enough to fry some potatoes and they're very good. A niche market, Wild Black Walnut oil. I need a gallon of peanut oil and bacon fat for the winter. My needs are legion, I prefer toilet paper to corn cobs. Wanted to go to town but it was supposed to rain, so I read instead. Then listened to Science Friday. Great report on The Center For Post-Natural History. Some very funny stuff. I spent most of the day reading about Lucy (the fossil), then some other things about dating primates. My books are all 25 years old so I make a note to pick up some newer information at the library. I'm hopelessly out of date, I can't imagine why one would carry a phone, texting, instead of looking for money in the gutters. I found $137 dollars last year, up from $116 the year before. Very tight jeans, because the back pockets are so molded, tend to squirt out bills. I like to park at the outside when I go to Kroger and walk between the cars. The other day I found $37, spent $42, and felt like a robber baron. I topped up the gas tank and bought some onion rings on the way home. Having to drive around Mackletree, I went down the creek. The woodbine and poison ivy are beautiful. I drive back and forth at the ford, to clean the undercarriage. There's a pool below the sandstone ford, where a shelf of slate has broken off, a waterfall of some 18 inches, and I take a quick cold bath. The footing was terrible, slick as goose shit, but I got back to the Jeep, which I had parked in the middle of the ford. I have this one huge Martha Stewart towel someone left at the house, stolen, no doubt, and I drape it like a toga. Rough rub myself. TR called from town and I agree to meet him. Tomorrow I work on the larder. I have a list. Going out the other way is shorter, but there are all those switchbacks, they make me sick at my stomach. Too much movement. Listen to Miles, almost nothing. Read more...

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. Read more...

No Wheels

Synecdoche. Back on track, but it took some extra hours. B came over early and the Jeep wouldn't jump-start. I'd had a feeling it wouldn't, but B had brought over his battery charger, we put it on charge, and he left. I read for four hours. It started, and I ran to town (whiskey and tobacco), just a one stop trip because I'm concerned about the battery. It holds its charge so I know it was a battery problem, but I keep B's charger, and if it won't start in the next few days I'll be able to charge it, so that I can get to town for a new battery. Isolated lives require complex logistics. I probably need to own a battery charger, and if I did, I could have a couple of lights when the power is out. As the crow flies, B is less than a mile away. A bear's range is more than a mile (a square mile is 640 acres) and Shawnee State Forest is 64,000 acres. (This is a large number in the east, out west I knew people who leased 640,000 acres.) Clearly I had run the bear away with the yard work B's place is the only house between my house and thousands of acres of wilderness. So B's in bed and he hears scuffling on his back porch. Flips on the light, opens the door and the bear is right there. The bear leaves. My experience too, that the bear always leaves. I bought a couple of different hashes, to see which one I wanted in the winter larder and ran a blind taste test, a simple burrito with scrambled eggs and salsa. The Kroger brand, at $1.99 a can, was every bit good as the premium brands. I get three meals out of one of those cans. In the remaindered produce section, as always, there were Brussels Sprouts, which I love, roasted, or fried in butter. Thank god I got out, as Mackletree is going to be closed to traffic for a month. Who knows what they're doing. It means going the long way around to get to town, an extra 16 miles per trip. A gallon of gas. On the other hand, either way I drive, along the river or across the ridge, it's terrain I don't see that often. I haven't been down the creek in weeks, and the ridge route goes through sway-backs that expose every possible slope, so I'll see hundreds of plants that I don't normally encounter in my cloister. Retreat, anabasis, redoubt. Mountain Laurel, the last wild apples, chicory, mushroom hunting ground. Tonight, for instance, a fine wild mushroom stew: chicken stock, caramelized onion, a meaty Bolete. My older daughter calls, wanting me to come to Denver to see a play. I'd love to, but it would cost me a thousand dollars that I don't have, and I have a bowel disorder that wants to make me to stay close to home. The body fails, what can I say? My feet are not as good as they once were, my stamina is diminished; even my sense of balance is called into question. I'm contained within this, the natural world, in which there are bears and a fox and black squirrels, the smell of fresh cornbread, and that lingering sense that my time might better be spent crabbing. Read more...

Free Radicals

It's all logistics. Get the Jeep into the shop, buy some groceries, get back home, then get back to town to get the Jeep. I know B's schedule, Rodney would ferry me one way or the other for a pack of smokes and a six-pack, I know I can work this out. Still, it's a pain in the ass. I have my routine, you know? I get up and do things, split kindling or shovel shit, whatever needs to be done. The bear seems to be gone, the yard work ran him off. The rain finally stopped but I didn't get outside, sick at my stomach all morning, something I ate. Threw up everything, then some more, and didn't feel like working. Finished reading through 1182 pages of Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase & Fable. It's a very good reference book, a ton of esoteric information. My copy will stay out at all times, at hand, literally. It found a home atop the pile at the left end of my desk/table, on top of the Webster's I keep there. I hate being indisposed, all the heaving left me with a sore stomach, and the sure knowledge that I can't leave food out. I usually leave left-overs out, covered with a plate, to scramble with eggs the following morning, but twice this year I've gotten sick. So I need to modify that system, I was cutting back on dish-washing as far as I could, eating on the same plate and other ill-advised practices, but I seem to have gone a bit too far. When I make cornbread, I flip it over, take what I need, and leave the rest of it in the skillet, covered, so the mice can't get to it. I made a small pone tonight, the six inch skillet, that I ate with soft-scrambled eggs, a piece of toasted cornbread with local honey. The only other thing I'd held down all day was plain yogurt. I had a couple of cast iron pans that needed to be re-cured. I'm going to get a steel and copper skillet for doing scrambled eggs, and a non-stick pan for doing scalloped potatoes. The crows are back, I don't know where they've been. Basho:

on a withered branch
   a crow has settled--
      autumn evening

One quite cool night and the mice are back in force. The crows will be pleased. I set some basic traps. I'll be listening to those snap in the night, in profusion, until the remaining few wise up, and then I'll set my more elaborate traps. B said he'd come up tomorrow morning and we'd see if the Jeep can be jumped, if not I'll take out the battery, borrow B's vehicle and run to town. The problem is that the damned thing was only a couple of years old, was a big expensive battery, and that's means there's an electrical short somewhere. I have to go turn in some paperwork for the free firewood, do some shopping, and strike a major hit at the library. It's funny that specifically when I need to be mobile, the Jeep won't start. I need to make four or five trips to town this month; then in November and December, I can back off, two trips to town; then January and February, I might only get out once. Potatoes, rice, and beans; tuna, sardines and hash. Sixteen pounds of grits and cornmeal, dried eggs and milk. Cream of Tartar is just dead yeast bodies, rising, or fermentation as a product of converting sugar into alcohol. And even before that, converting starches into sugars. Read more...

Out of Sorts

I wrote a book of that title once, being a list of sorts I had found or seen in a catalog of sorts. Odd bits of type to the printer. They were the source of much amusement. I've always liked a good list. I did a nice broadside once that was just a list of 126 cooking implements that was titled Professional Cookware, and it was actually quite funny, and not only to me, other people laughed out loud. The sorts book, read again now, reads like a diatribe against oppression. There's a strong cadence, in reading these pieces, that gives them the appearance of making sense. The book was punctuated which only enhanced the effect. The cookware piece was just three columns, no punctuation. Another completely rainy day, almost cool enough for a fire. The dripping is incessant and I usually love it, but it bothered me today and I wanted to escape into fiction. Reread Richard Powers' Orfeo, a wonderful, masterful book, and I remembered he had gone on at length about the Messiaen. A great choice. I made a grazing station at the island, cheese (a double cheddar), some pickles, some kim-chee, some crackers, and some of the pretty good Wisconsin pate. Drank hot tea, walked over for a sample, read a chapter. Repeat as necessary. I switched to whiskey late in the day, fried some potatoes, roasted some tomatoes. Later I made an omelet with the left-overs, the last of the pate smeared on toast. I spent some time trying the find out why a male swan is called a cob, and a female called a pen. Sortes is that divination where you open a book and put your finger on a line. Homer or the bible usually. I got stuck in the letter 's' and read a piece about Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale (suede was originally undressed kidskin, used for gloves, made in Sweden), and Swedenborg was a wacky mystic. Gusting wind was blowing crap around, leaves and dirt and ragweed pollen, but it was nice to get outside, take a walk. The smells are amazing. Green and fecund. After the first couple of fires in the cookstove, the house smells pleasantly of whatever I'm burning, and I love that smell too, bacon and tobacco and leather, a sassafras log; but I do love the way the forest smells, right now, early fall, green, but starting to decay. I've always loved the smell of rotting plant matter. I killed a bunch of spiders today, I didn't want to, but they were set to birth thousands more spiders inside my house, and I just wasn't ready for that. I vacuumed them up. I'd been watching them for weeks, I greatly admire their due diligence, and the geometry, the way the webs cleave space. But I don't want spiders running everywhere. In so far as I have any control. I run my anti-cricket campaign in the spring, I have a tennis racket to deal with the bats. I barely hold my own, but that seems to be good enough. Read more...

Something Simple

Split wood, haul water. Either mindfulness or mindless. I had a new five-gallon pickle bucket that had filled with rain water, and took a sponge bath, washed my hair. Imagined a cosmetic line. A rinse you might use to purge base thoughts. I just need to soak in a hot bath for an hour, then take a shower and scrub off a layer of skin. I can get a room at the Super Eight for sixty bucks, sushi from Kroger, a movie on cable (I haven't seen a movie in ten years), and rub lotion into my tired feet. I vacillate between thinking I indulge myself too much or not indulging myself enough. I steamed an artichoke, they were finally affordable, and made a ginger/horseradish mayo. This was so good I had to laugh. Artichokes make very good paper. Any fiber works, okra, sacred cotton. I took a nap, early evening, got up to pee and turned on the radio, middle of the night, and it's Messiaen. The Quartet For The End Of Time, second only to the Cello Suites on my all time list. I have to get a drink and roll a smoke, sit in the dark, and marvel at the way music can key emotion. Or the way smell can, and even sight. We only partially control this. The hard-wired shit we can't do anything about. Sex in new mown hay, the first time you looked up from your mother's breast and saw something else, a perfect martini with two olives. I seldom pre-judge anything. Tossing the caber, for instance, and whatever that large rock is called. Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. I usually come in last. It's not so much that I'm a loser as that I don't give a shit. The Messiaen was first played in prison camp Stalag VIII A, January, 1941. Violin, cello, clarinet, and piano. There's much documentation of the event, from the 300 or so prisoners and guards that were there. Even the circumstances of a documented event are questionable. I did an impromptu reading of a book of poems, A Summer In Hell, sitting on the tailgate of my truck, just before leaving Colorado. It was impassioned, there were six people there, it was snowing. I've heard several people describe that reading and I know they weren't there. Rodney yells from the driveway. You always yell, when you approach a hermit, from beyond shotgun range, lest you get shot. I pay him for the clearing and he's anxious to finish the floor insulation. We strike a deal, and I'm thinking the winter looks better. If he finishes the floor insulation, which he figures will only take a few hours, and I get the woodshed filled, the rest of it is just logistics. Shovel a path to the outhouse, a bag of potatoes and a few carrots. I actually save money in the winter because I can't get out to spend any. If I stay home, with a pot of stew and a dozen books, I'm actually making money. Enough, at any rate, to imitate a midge. Read more...