Merely Tell

Baudelaire, blowing off realism, said of Flaubert, that his writing was "minute attention to trivial detail". I would actually consider that praise. I should have gone to town because I needed some back-up things, but I got up at five (flopping mouse-trap), made a double espresso and continued reading Benjamin. One of the great modern thinkers, and I love his work in all its confusion. Needed a fire which means I needed to cook in the morning, so I cooked a small pot of greens (mustard and kale) with chilies and garlic, baked a pone of cornbread, and seared the veal chop that I remembered was in the fridge. Had that for lunch, which seemed extravagant, but the food was hot. Drizzle all day, and harder rain tomorrow, so I probably won't get out until Wednesday, but it looks like this first winter storm is going to miss us, so I should be fine. I'd be fine anyway, but have to use more canned or dried foodstuffs. The last time I was at Kroger I scratched a parsnip and it was quite sweet, they keep well, I store them in leaves, under the house, so I bought a few, thinking a parsnip risotto. I like to mash them 1x1x1 with turnips and potatoes. Wonderful in stews, and I was thinking I might cook a stew next week, a ham and bean soup the week after that, then the garbanzo bean / kale / chorizo soup.Then something with tripe, a fish soup, and clam chowder. Just need to get me through the night. The whole fabrication is bullshit, I know that, but I just want to go to sleep. I've learned to duck below the bar, often, all you have to do is play dead. I was taking apart a lock mechanism for a door, it was just a joke, not even a joke, I was just taking it apart to see how it worked, too attentive. Did you know that you could know be faulted for being too attentive? When they came in, with their vests and guns I told them that there had been a mistake. Surely they intended to corner a criminal. I wasn't it. Read more...

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. Read more...

Self Conscious

I don't know why it happened, but I was listening to Beethoven, the last string quartets, and I was crying, they were so incredibly moving. I had the thought that music, like smell, was capable of cutting to the core. I knew there were many things at play, my circumstance, Dad dying, the onset of winter, the fact that my body was failing; global warming, melting permafrost, rising sea-level. Reading today that if the temps rise four degrees most of coastal China is under water, several hundred million people, makes Middle East Migration look like a walk in the park. My redoubt is well above the high-water mark, I protect my boundaries with a potato cannon. Thanksgiving meal was excellent and filling, and I have pecan pie for breakfast. Three kids, eight adults, three dogs, lively conversation; great family with excellent communication skills. I stayed a couple of hours, got home before dark, and had a stiff drink to transition back to ridge time. Big moon rising. Warm enough, with no heat, to crack open a window and smell the outside. I mostly sat on the porch at B's, which was very nice, the comings and goings, chatting with people that went by. I try to interact with people four to eight hours a week, to keep my finger in the pie, watch ESPN at the pub, for thirty minutes a week, to know what sport is in season, engage innocent civilians in conversation. One of the places it happens for me is the line at Kroger, I'll help an older person unload the bottom of the cart and we'll talk about cabbage or pickled herring. I hate the whole Salvation Army gauntlet I have to run, getting out of the store; they now have a group of clearly autistic people, wearing felted antlers; and those fucking bells, that drive me crazy. A flock of turkeys work across the yard, two mature females and about 18 yearlings. They're so loud I can hear them in my closed up house, and their path of destruction through the understory is not to be believed. They scratch and peck at everything. I've watched their feeding habits for 35 years and it never gets old. Interesting to note that for 35 years I've lived in places where I could watch feeding wild turkeys out my window. Zoe's former husband, Josh, still part of the family, was at the dinner. He was reading "The Cistern" and had questions for me about how I could be so open in my writing. There was an interesting woman, Worms, sitting in on the conversation. She's from the music scene in Athens, Ohio, and used to a much more manic environment, considered this laid-back family holiday dinner to be a respite from her normal life. I explained to her (and Josh, but he had to run off to prevent the twin boys from destroying something) that being in the company of any other people, even this laid-back family affair, was pretty extreme for me; that I usually went four or five days without seeing another person, or talking to anyone. She wondered how that was possible, and I told her that most of my endeavors required solitude. Even the one-mile drive home mediates outside and inside. When I'm back on the ridge, with a wee dram and a smoke, I can breathe a sigh, and settle. It sloughs off, the layers of the outside world, like cold on a frigid day, when you peel off layers and stand close to the stove. (I spent an hour on the word 'slough', and made a couple of notes about things I need to find out about.) I spent hours reading literary criticism, the Post-Modern Canon, then a thriller Jana had recommended. A good day, I'd judge. I didn't drive anywhere: if I don't leave the house I save $20; that's automatic savings based on a yearly average. If I stay home I save twenty dollars, if I go out I spend money on lunch and things; gas, a beer at the pub, a milk-shake at the Diary Bar. A great day, actually, because the second hour of Science Friday on the radio, is a replay of The Ignoble Awards, which is my favorite award show. I was drained of energy, from being around people yesterday, fell asleep on the sofa, and woke to rain, a patter on the roof. Poured off some wash water (for doing dishes tomorrow) and cleaned the crap (power plant ash and leaf-mold) from a bucket so I could collect some clean water. I'm fairly obsessive about water use. I use 365 gallons of wash water and 100 gallons of drinking water in an average year. I carry all of this by hand, mostly in pickle buckets. A mathematical friend was visiting once, in Mississippi, and he estimated I had carried a million pounds of water. All of it, isn't that the way, uphill. Good springs are always in a hollow. I only know of two exceptions, one is an artesian well on a back road into Utah, and the other is a spring that flows at several gallons per minute out of a cliff-face outside of Moab. Truth is, I've been obsessed with water use for a long time. I can't even remember when I first realized that shitting in water was a dumb idea. Now I just keep a trenching tool at hand, and a roll of soft paper. Read more...

Severe Clarity

This time of year you take any trip to town you can get. I got a piece of veal and a sweet potato in case I end up staying home, but I'll probably go down to B's for Thanksgiving. I picked up a few things, but at this point I'm backing up the back-ups. I went right to the library and got a few things. Justin was at the pub and he poured a free holiday beer. Stopped at the Buckeye Dairy Bar for a footer and onion rings, with a small shake. I like to take this meal home. start a fire, and eat at the island. Quiet when the wind finally dies down, just the sound of cast iron expanding. I set about rereading John McPhee. I have a couple of signed first editions, that I read very carefully, with gloves. Usually, when I have a first edition, I buy a paperback as a reading copy, but in two cases I don't have a reading copy, so I'm just very careful. The plastic handles on my one gallon pot, stainless steel, which I use all the time, broke, and I spent several hours fabricating new handles out of rock maple. They end up being quite comfortable. Tinker Tom. It feels good to solve a problem, to make something you need. I have to haul a load of New Yorkers and London Review Of Books to the recycling center, the piles in the living room are become unseemly, and I need to bring some firewood inside. Supposed to warm up through the weekend, but there's almost always a cold snap between Thanksgiving and Christmas, then survival mode for a couple of months. Firewood, things to read, things to eat, things to drink and smoke; my fall-back position is a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Sitting in the sun outside, having a smoke, staring into the middle distance, when I hear a vehicle struggling with the driveway. Just a couple of good old boys looking for a place to hunt. I tell them they can park down on the road and hunt the far side of the opposite ridge, that it merges into State Forest and there's a clear-cut where the deer feed in the evening. They promise me some meat if they score and we had a beer. The standard pick-up truck, here as in Mississippi, is equipped with a cooler and a case of beer, almost always Bud or Bud Light. When they leave I can't remember what I had been thinking about, roasted vegetables I think, or the principle of leverage. Later in the day Samara calls and talks about their holiday plans, their house this year, and how Scott was obsessive about preparation. He was actually cooking a practice turkey today, so everyone could go home with meat for sandwiches. We exchanged recipes for Brussels Sprouts, and gossiped a bit. Her Mom has separated from another husband, and the house Mark designed and built for them is on the market. It's an elegant small place, completely self-contained, a marvel, actually, heated by sunlight with these heat-transfer panels he builds himself. I'm not easily impressed (because I don't believe in anything) but this was an impressive house. On the other hand, I've given up three houses that I thought I would live in for the rest of my life, and I'm not dead yet. I've never been comfortable sleeping under a rock ledge, I always think the roof is going to fall. It's all self-conscious crap, the writer writing about a writer writing. The truth is, when I dry a fly with a couple of back-casts, then lay it in a ripple, I'm just pretending to be a bug. I know I'm imitating nature. My yellow stripes mean I'm poisonous, I have a spot on my ass that looks like an eyeball, no one messes with me after dark because they know they'd get shot, and that seems like a good balance. Read more...

Night Noise

Reconstructing what I know must have happened. Once my heart beat is back to normal and I realize I'm not be raiding by some government organization. Four in the morning (perfect time for a raid) and very dark. A mouse trap, but then what? Remember I had left the spatula in my fried egg skillet and one of the traps was next right next to it because I hate it when mice lick that skillet. Strength of the new trap and death throes had bumped the skillet and the spatula had fallen to the floor. The very idea of a raid had energized me, so I knew I was going to get up, but I was serenely tangled and warm, wrapped in a blanket, so I put it off for a few minutes. Knew I'd have to pee, knew I'd have to get up and start a fire. Wearing pajama bottoms (Indians and buffalo), my cashmere sweater and Linda's hat, pull on my bathrobe and go outside to pee. Cold and frosty. I'd usually pee in a coffee can or something, but it's nice to go outside if you're already awake anyway. Which means I'll probably get a wee dram, roll a smoke and put off making coffee for a while, read what I was writing last night, make a few changes. Which means I'll probably blow off the day, maybe split some wood, carry a few loads into the house, walk out to the graveyard and think about the dead. I know I'll get side-tracked by something, pull out a few books, mumble, have a sexual fantasy, consider alternate universes, eat left-overs. I ended up giving myself some grief about this, my failures and the pain I'd caused. Not that it was any big deal, but it was interesting to note that failure was a better way to learn. One thing I've learned is that if things are going smoothly nobody is learning anything. If she leaves you, takes the pick-up and the dog, it's fifteen degrees and you're living in a tent, you've got some problems. It's not a good time to roll into a ball and play the hibernating bear. I tend to read and write my way out of logjams; running works, building a staircase, fly-fishing, I have a friend that lays brick and carves spoons. Glenn called, to tell me that my inflatable globe had been delivered, UPS had notified him that the package had been delivered, which in my case means that it's hanging from a tree at the bottom of the driveway. I've never owned a globe, though I'm crazy about maps, and I envision many happy hours looking at the relationship of places. ("In his later years, it's said he befriended a fox and played with a beach ball.") Glenn was much taken with my mouse morgue and the death shrouds. It struck me as funny too, even while I was doing it. I thought at the time that it would be very funny (if the plastic would hold up to be frozen) to put one of those organizer units, with the small drawers, in the freezer, and have the mice in individual trays, so I could bring in the grieving family and have them identify the corpse. As it is, what I do is line them up in two rows on a piece of 1x6 I keep in the freezer, and I never used to wrap them because I didn't care about freezer burn, but they are attractive in their small death shrouds. If you let the mouse freeze solid you can reuse the shroud. I've written for fifty years to be able to say that. That's part of it, what I was thinking about before Glenn called, amusing yourself. I'm a cheap date, watching coal barges push upstream is pretty exciting for me, I swoon at the idea of jalapeno poppers, I can no longer fly or ride in an elevator, no higher than sweet corn, no lower than a sweet potato. B calls because his daughter had asked him what he thought I'd be doing for the holiday, and they ask me down. I'll probably go, not so much for the food, which will be very good, but for the company. I can duck out when the kids wear me down. Stimulation in moderation. I design a railing for the simple two-step up on the back porch and make a list of the couple of things I need to buy, a bag of concrete and a four by four, the hand-rail itself will be a lovely bent dogwood I found in the woods. It'll take me a couple of hours to put together. Any more, when I'm bringing in an armload of wood, it's nice to be able to touch a railing. I need to get a can of silicone/air for the wheelbarrow, the tire always goes flat but one can gets me through the winter. It's nice to wheelbarrow wood to the back stoop. I feel like a technological genius using the wheelbarrow. Three wheelbarrow loads is two ricks, two ricks is four days' wood even if it's very cold. You can only burn so much wood. Quality of life is directly linked to the size of the fire-box. Mad Tom's Algorithm. Linda saw immediately that the little shrouds would be quite mysterious hanging on the line. Sure as shit someone would show up when I was ironing them, and I'd have to explain what I was doing. Well you see... It's just an installation for me, some dead mice, some funeral shrouds. If I run this show all winter, it might be seen by one or two people. Glenn thought I should photograph it, but I don't have a camera. It's twelve mice in two rows of six, tucked in their death shrouds. None of these mice have died and gone to heaven, most of them have a broken neck and a drop of blood at the corner of their mouth. " Food for worms, dear Percy". Nothing is almost as good as something. Dark matter. Read more...

Staying Warm

Now that the floor is insulated with high-density foam and I wear a cashmere undershirt life is different. The last two winters were hard, brutal even, but I'm stubborn, and don't easily admit defeat. This winter looks to be somewhat less stressful. I did forget a new snow shovel and back-up batteries for my head lamp, but I'll get out again within the next couple of weeks. The ground isn't cold enough for the snow to stick. This week's oysters I chopped into a stuffing for pounded pork tenderloins, mock enchiladas, with cornbread on the side; it was very good. A famous person asked me if I always ate that well, and I told them no, I usually ate left-overs with an egg on top. Hash puddled with a poached egg. I make this one cup of cornmeal bread fairly often; in a six-inch skillet it's a cake, in a ten-inch skillet it's a pone. On a lark I cut some white tee-shirt squares, to cover the mouse bodies, death cloths, and I had barely set the new traps and turned off the light before all hell broke lose. My freezer looks like a morgue. The crows, who are probably the intelligence behind this, indicate a preference for spicy brown mustard. I have a couple of packages of Brussels Sprouts, the produce guy gives them to me, and I love cooking these with pasta and butter. Up most of the night, so slept in, completely overcast, little snow showers, easy enough to roll over and sleep an extra hour, but by then the house is quite cold, so I get up and build a fire, then doze off again. Breakfast is mock enchilada omelet with corn bread and honey. Set about researching the Newport Tower, which was found by Verrazano in 1524. It's pretty amazing, a circular tower, twenty foot diameter, twenty feet tall with eight very nice arched doorways, excellent stone work. Pesky dating problem. Mid day I have one of my favorite sandwiches, a can of sardines on toast with a large slice of onion and hot tea. Work on punctuation for a couple of hours. Reread The Riddle Of The Sands, took a small walk. The carnage continues with the mice. The new traps are wonderfully successful, the springs are strong and fast, and I can't let these little fuckers get into my food. I have to get into town once more before Thanksgiving. I'll just have whatever's on sale, maybe a butter-flied pork tenderloin stuffed with chutney. Holidays alone, I usually take a long walk, maybe a bottle of wine while I'm cooking and eating, and I'll end up listening to the Cello Suites. It's supposed to warm a bit, which would be good, it's in the teens now and that seems premature. The house is warm, burning knots like lumps of coal, and I have my small radiant electric heater over where I sit. I'm so comfortable I almost feel guilty. Joel feels that I need to move further south, and he's probably correct; the problem is that this place is paid for, and it's cheap to live here, I can't give it up for a whole new set of unknowns. And I'm comfortable, for god's sake, I carry in a few armloads of wood, and read a book. It's as good a slice of reality as any other. Joel and I both laugh. We're both still standing, which is amazing, when you think about it. Read more...

Hung Over

I know how it happened, but I never have a hang-over, so it caught me off guard. I'd had a great day, accomplished everything I intended, picked up everything on the list, a little social contact, a pleasant drive home up the creek. Stopped at the ford and drove through a couple of times, to clean the undercarriage and the wheel wells. When I got home I put on The Dead quite loud and set about some minimal housekeeping, There was a paragraph on the screen of my computer that I had started the day before, and at some point I stopped cleaning (fucking dust bunnies) and sat down to look for comma violations. A violation is when a comma intrudes on sense. Got an early drink and rolled two cigarets, the second one in case someone called, and wrote for a couple of hours. Someone did call, which doesn't happen that often, an old friend who'd moved to California decades ago and I hadn't spoken to in many years, and we had what I would call a fairly boring conversation. I don't actually view some of the pranks we pulled in school as being the high point of my life. I couldn't begin to list the high points of my life, even I wouldn't believe them. What happened, as I attempt to reconstruct events, was that I had several more drinks, remembering the past, had some soup and took a nap. Awakened at two in the morning by a squabble at the compost pile. I haven't moved the compost pile, though I've thought to do so many times, because it is such a source of entertainment. Dispersed the pack of wild dogs and a very large raccoon with my slingshot, and got another drink, wrote for another couple of hours. Several drinks, and a few sentences later I took another nap, and woke up with what I knew to be, from the description by others, a hang-over. I had nothing better to do than to get over a hang-over. I don't keep aspirin around, so I heated some chicken broth which I spiked with a shot of whiskey. Read most of the day. Alternately wondering about fact and fiction. Read more...

Check List

All good. Laundromat was empty, chatted with Richard about floor-finishes. Library, stopped at the museum and talked with TR and Emily, poked my nose in at the pub to re-hydrate, stopped at the ATM. Picked up a few things at Kroger, back-up whiskey, cigaret papers, tomato soup, a steak, and some new mousetraps. The only other thing I have to do is bring in the buckets of wash water, twenty-five gallons, which is, by my standards, a lot of water. I have five gallons of drinking water, and I've already cut my tee-shirt filters that will line my new sieve (that I got at Goodwill for fifty cents) turning winter snow and sleet into drinking water. I stopped by the beer and wine store, to get some sulfite, and bought a four-pack of very good beer. I'd ordered the appetizer of fried calamari, to go, from Melina's, and gone below the flood wall. I love watching traffic on the river. I've made my preparations. I'm sure I've forgotten something, I always forget something. I need to split wood for an hour or two tomorrow, kindling and starter sticks, and I can do it while the house is heating up in the morning. The usual heretic, I'm not sentimental. Scalloped potatoes and a piece of fish for dinner. The fish was good, flounder, cooked in butter with slices of preserved lemon (Big Lots is close to the laundromat, and during the wash cycle I'd found a jar of lemons for cheap) but the potatoes were great. Nothing special, fall grown baby Yukon Golds, layered with onions, cooked in chicken broth. A lot of fresh-ground black pepper. Feeling a little too good, actually, I have to remind myself not to kick up my heels. In my simplistic view, the fact that I have water, wood, and whiskey bodes well. Joel thinks I should move further south, that the winters are going to kill me, and he's probably right, but I enjoy (that's not the correct word) or at least am fully engaged with getting home, building a fire, cooking potatoes. I have an old chair I pull up close to the stove, it has arms and an angle of repose, stare into the middle distance, stick trees and muddled foregrounds. Late Turner. The sky. If all of this was destroyed in an instant, where would you be? I have a tree-tip-pit to which I can retreat. Fuck the cares of the world. Read more...

The Wind

Not a day you'd want to go outside. The noise for one thing, it sounds like a train station; and the air is filled with blowing detritus. The ridge in a full gale. The trees blowing around at different frequencies depending on their height and girth so there is a loud scraping of branches, and snapping, like gunshots, when something breaks off. A wild and wooly ride. I'm engaged all day by a book on machicolation. There's a lot of hokum, but it does support my thoughts about Phoenician travels. There's quite a bit of physical evidence from South America. Also connects (as I had, from different sources) an early Indus Valley script with that of Easter Island. And those pesky Olmec heads that clearly depict a different race. I should have published that essay, "Some Thoughts On The Phoenician Diaspora" but I left the only copy of it in a Doctor's waiting room. He'd agreed to have lunch with me to talk about tropical diseases. I pulled this same stunt with Gordon Wasson, the only time I ever had lunch at the Harvard Club (we ended up spending several hours talking about the Amanita family of mushrooms) and one of the best conversations I've ever had. Thinking about The Laws Of Form today, and I can't find my copy. I hope to god that I didn't lend it out. I don't think I would, but I might have. Call and recall. I have a condition whereby my neck oil rots collars. It's been explained to me as either poor personal hygiene, or a genetic disorder. My Mom, an excellent seamstress, used to turn the collars of my shirts when they were worn through, now I buy one new denim shirt a year, and the rest fall into rotation. Just when I think the roar of the wind has reached a maximum it blows stronger. Sometime after dark it starts whistling. Warm enough that I don't need a fire, which is a good thing because even the stove-pipe is singing, which it almost never does. When the wind blows like this the house moves little, breathes in and out. The load is perfectly carried, but you can see the stress work through the posts and beams. A little flex is a good thing. Viking longboats took full advantage of this, moving like a porpoise. In the course of an hour I trap three mice and a fourth one knocks the spatula out of a skillet on the stove, and I have to laugh at myself, what serves as my entertainment. I listened to some great blues guitar, Dwayne Allman backing up Boz Skaggs. Made a great casserole, noodles, ground lamb, onion, tomatoes, several cheeses. This is four or five meals, with garlic toast and a salad, and tasty to boot, and it ends up costing $1.36 a serving, which saves enough money to buy this week's oysters. I'm on top of this. I track the economics because I need to, it's interesting, and I'm really good with simple arithmetic. Anything up through geometry, figuring the angle of a roof; I'd never actually needed algebra, figuring for the unknown, until Marilyn wanted a divorce. This casserole is so good, and it's supposed to be cold tomorrow night, I want to bake it with another layer of cheese on top, and eat an avocado. Then maybe a key-lime pie. The oven was hot so I cooked a corn-pone. The house was warm enough to take a sponge bath and wash my hair. Snow showers forecast for Saturday night so I'll make a run to town tomorrow, spend a longer time at the library and get a few extra books. I was reading about some artifacts found in the last couple of decades, now that a metal alloy can be specifically sited. Copper from the UP in Michigan turns up in Asia, tin from South America turns up in the Indus Valley. I need to read this guy, Jared Diamond (a Geographer, of course) because his name keeps coming up. Guns, Germs, And Steel is referenced in several different fields. B can probably get it through the university library system. And I need some light fiction, to take the edge off a cold day. A big biography of someone I don't know much about, another Greenblatt book, another Petroski, the history of something. I think I have a history of glass in the Goodwill pile. The mice are driving me crazy and the traps have all died, so I make the famous walking-the-plank trap, over near where all of the skillets are piled up, two-deep, nine skillets. I used the five gallon bucket, with a couple inches of water, taped a shingle-shim over the top, and baited it with peanut butter. Backed it against a shelf and turned off the light. Three mice by midnight. When we old trappers get together, we talk about nights like this. I'm working on a trap that'll fling the mouse against a backboard, which will light up, and drop it into a basket. I'm using a rat trap, which is sprung by a mouse trap, I've hurt myself several times, and I'm having some difficulty with accuracy. Dead mouse, feet per second, x number of foot pounds, blunderbuss, 147 pigeons at a single blast, all of that, but I wanted to tell you, the wind has died down, and I feel pretty good. Read more...

Perfect Pitch

Foiled. Got my act together, list in pocket, laundry and detergent in the Jeep. The laundromat was closed, getting the floor redone, so I spent some time at the library, then went and had soup and a beer at the pub. Lively chat with Justin. He's a funny guy. He's always in such a good mood that he makes everyone around him seem like garrulous bastards. He wants to come out with his two band mates. He'd bragged on my cooking. Kroger wasn't crowded, and I remembered a couple of things that weren't on the list, light bulbs, and a pound of Kosher salt because I needed to clean some cast iron cookware. Jesse, at the liquor store in Kroger, wants to come out on Sunday, so he can test his vehicle against the driveway, and I tell him to bring what he wants to drink. I topped up my potable water supply, and because it was on sale, backed up my back-up coffee supply. It took several trips to bring in the groceries, I'd stopped at the Dairy Bar for onion rings and a small shake, there was an armload of books, several gallons of water, back-up whiskey and tobacco. I'll go back into town, to get the laundry done, it's best to start winter with everything clean, and I need a new package of three mouse traps, because the damned things break. Things with springs often break, and you either have to know how to repair them, or know someone who does, and be willing to trade in kind. Got a fire going and roasted some vegetables, fried some thick-sliced bacon. That Treatise, "Pork Fat And The Beginning of Democracy" was meant as a joke. I had been thinking about rendering and cracklings, rereading that section of Moby-Dick about the try-pots, and also, I had found a quart of lard that was several years old but seemed to still be fine. It was sealed and still tasted sweet, so I fried some potatoes, and they were great, bursting with flavor. I turned a deal with one of the meat persons at Kroger, and I now have a good supply of pork fat. Crackling corn-bread could make a grown man cry. The wind woke me, and the scattering of leaves, a thousand fleet animals or just a natural sound. The surface is so dry leaves skitter. Underneath, of course, is the rotted depth of ages. Damp and dank and smelling of moldy cheese. Read more...

Useful Fictions

Graces of simplicity. Scales, for instance, are invented boundaries. Reading about P.A.M.Dirac, it was said about one of his equations "that it made up in brilliance what it lacked in plausibility". Reading about Wave Theory, but I no longer remember why. Cold again this morning, so an early walk. Completely blue sky, naked trees, and I can see through the woods again. Back home a hardy breakfast of cheese grits with reconstituted dried apricots. I'd left out the books from last night, book-marked to whatever I was reading, thinking it would give me a clue toward where I was going, but I couldn't find the thread. Still, interesting reading, as I put books away. An older couple showed up today, wanting to visit the cemetery, so I took the clippers, walked them out there, and left them. They stopped back by the house for coffee and chatted family history. Ira said that sometimes, mid-winter, you'd have to build two bonfires to thaw the ground to dig a grave, and that they used a sled (he said sledge) and a mule to get the bodies up here. He was just a kid, but he remembered. When they left, I couldn't remember what I had been doing or thinking about, so I vacuumed up a bunch of spider nests and webs in places where I wanted to stack wood, and go look at the wood pile, high-grade out a couple of billets that will make fine starter sticks, set aside a couple of difficult crotches to split mid-winter, tidy up my act. I'm not a fan of Kraft, but as a fan of cheese I like the fact that the white extra sharp cheddar has a shelf life of 60 days, so with some black olives, sweet pickles, and maybe a few sardines, some shreds of watercress, I can make a meal. A lot of the cheeses I like don't keep well. I make a sauce for pasta from Gorgonzola that smells terrible, I always think it must be like eating Durian. Town tomorrow, it's been a week, I need some stuff, and the library called, they're holding a couple of books for me. I use the reference desk quite a bit, because I'm not very good at looking up things on their system. They're always glad to help. Eighteenth century flatware, sure; the roof of Westminster, no problem. I keep an index card with books they help me find. I come off as slightly eccentric but non-threatening. They sometimes ask me questions, like why I was interested in Eighteenth century flatware, or why was I suddenly interested in Black bears. These are sprite conversations, the reference crew at any library is going to be bright and quick. Traits that usually diminish as you move further into the hills. It's so much more difficult, living a hard-scrabble life, to think about doilies and trappings, the meaning of meaning, or to spend an hour thinking about a specific comma. Shovel a path, feed the goats, cook slop for the hogs, make cheese, bind books, read, try to write a simple paragraph. I still don't understand how you could possibly wear a starched white shirt and get through the course of a day. I sometimes have to throw away my clothes, and my only monogram is the name Frank on one of my heavy canvas shirts. I think he worked at a car-wash, there was some evidence of detergent, but he might have just been doing the dishes. The last of the re-fried grits, with an egg and toast. I haven't had a decent conversation with B for several months. He took on a brutal teaching schedule to pay for a new roof and I'm hesitant to go down there. He's spending more time with the grand-kids. I seem to be doing week-long retreats as if I were in training for something. The long haul. There's only been a time or two that I couldn't drive out and back in within a four-week period. Also, I must confess, I keep another plastic container, sealed with duct tape, filled with Ramen noodles and instant mashed potatoes, a few cans of sardines, and some corned beef hash, in case the weather turns off bad. I can always make cornbread. Simple enough, the usual one cup of cornmeal recipe, I can do it when I'm drunk; the difference, of course, is always the diameter of the skillet. A six inch skillet produces a cake, an eight inch skillet produces a pone. If you have a lot of skillets (I have a lot of skillets) you can end up with something approaching a tortilla. This is sinful, but I fry them briefly in peanut oil, and wrap them around a country pate, then bake them with cheese and watercress. Read more...

Twisted Trees

Sassafras is very flexible when it's young, it's not unusual to find them twisted around another tree. Cold night (first frost on the ridge) and the routine is to start a fire, get it damped down, and either take a walk or split kindling while the house warms. These woods are vast, and it's quite easy to find new places. I was in a thick stand of sassafras this morning and I found one that was a complete corkscrew, five full twists around a poplar. I might harvest it later, for one reason or another, or I might not. It would be cool to have it in the house, just leaning in the corner or turned into a lamp, on the other hand it would make an interesting tree. I'll probably leave it. I was going to go to town, library and laundromat, but I blew it off, stayed in the woods for several hours, mostly because I had gotten slightly lost; and I was starved. When I got home, and re-stoked the fire, I heated tomato soup and made a grilled cheese sandwich, and then I just wanted to read, sit still. I called TR at the museum, and told him I wouldn't be in town, but that I thought he'd want to know I'd gotten slightly lost. When I remembered it was hunting season I cut out to the NW where I knew there was a road. The area I wander around in is only a few square miles. Booby's son Michael had gotten his first deer and it was hanging in the shade down at their stable. They have a tractor with a bucket, and the carcass was suspended from the bucket, lifted above the dogs. I had a great gambrel in Mississippi, the pulley rigged for getting hay into the hayloft. Perfect weather for hanging a deer, nights just below freezing and days in the fifties. Fog rises up the hollow. It's lovely, that whole ethereal vibe. Unlike on the coast, where fog rolls in, here, the hollow fills and the fog rises. Some saturated days, I've watched fog meet low clouds and the rain starts at about my chest. I do get the laundry together, including a couple of winter things that have never been washed: a very thick sweatshirt from Iowa, and a fleece-lined heavy denim shirt that I wear all the time when I'm inside. Also the somewhat thinner sweatshirt that I wear under the thicker sweatshirt. Might as well start out clean. The smell of fresh laundry is a boon. Hot ironed sheets, perfect rolled collars, those very large towels, usually I avoid that stuff, I'd rather sleep on the sofa, and be gone before you got up. I don't want to be any trouble. Clean laundry is a wonderful thing, the smell, and warmth from the dryer, it's hard to resist a Grateful Dead tee-shirt heated thus, or a pair of warm socks. Read more...

Domestic Economy

I reuse paper towels, generate almost no trash, compost my shit, and don't have running water. I darn my socks, and have a clothing budget of maybe $50 a year. I only go off the ridge once or twice a week (by the time winter is over the average will fall below once) and my average food budget is $3 a day. I've never played a video game, and haven't been to a movie in twelve years. I haven't had a TV for twelve years. I've read 15 or 20 thousand books. Looking at the sun sometimes makes me sneeze. Amanda asked me about my life. In real time, I couldn't find a copy of Farina's "Been Down So Long..." which I wanted to reread, and I remembered I had a first edition in the box of books I'd put away. It's a pristine copy so I put on museum gloves to read it. Farina was famously killed via motorcycle on the night of publication, and Pynchon dedicated Gravity's Rainbow to him. Wildly comic. I was looking for the passage about a tripped out meal that ended with a dessert of blue pears, then reread the amazing section of Pynchon about the banana breakfast. This led to Dinesen, then some Jim Harrison. I got side-tracked by frying a large pan of potatoes with chipotle in butter. Simple pleasures. I had to take a nap, and when I woke up I didn't know if it was night or day, 6:20 and barely light, but I didn't know if it was morning or evening. It's not so easy to tell, sometimes; if it's overcast and the light is dim, I have to listen to the radio to tell, and if the power is out I have to watch for a few minutes. I can't escape the image of this dumb shit reject who can't tell sunrise from sunset. I re-treated a couple of skillets; retreat, and think about rereading Zenephon. D said there's a new sporting goods store in Chillicothe and I have to get up there, I need new rubbers for my slingshot, and I'm interested to see what kind of dried eggs they might have. Camping food has improved dramatically in the last decade, now you just add water and end up with beef stew that is better than anything you can buy in a can. It'd never bought much of anything in cans before, but now I do, for the winter larder, and the cans bothered me, as trash. I started cutting off the bottom and flattening them, and I'm using them as shingles, to protect the windward side of the woodshed. I peel off the labels, to start fires, and the cans are a uniform gray. They'll rust of course, disintegrate, but I don't care about that, oxidation is entropy in the field. I just like that I don't have to throw them away. Even an old shoe can yield a couple of leather hinges, there's a Treatise I'm not sure I wrote, The Gate Swings Both Ways, which delves into the particulars. It's actually a simple piece about gates, but it seems to imply something more. Janus, or some fucking thing, looking backward and forward. Read more...

Sweaty Palms

Eccrine glands. Produce a sticky substance in the palms of monkeys, that in moments of stress and fright allows a sure grip on branches. We, The Select, no longer living in trees, just get sweaty palms when we're nervous. I was smoking a cigaret in the approved smoking area behind the pub, last time I was in town. It's near the back door, which is the door almost everyone uses, and whenever I sit there, someone usually sits down next to me (there are three chairs and a huge ceramic ash tray) and asks me something. A woman I don't know that well, I see her at the pub and we have some friends in common, sat down next to me. She said she had heard I was a writer and had 'looked me up', had read some things, was curious about how I spent my time. She knew I had stopped working at the museum and lived alone. I told her that I wrote very slowly and read very fast, spent most of my time reading and writing and walking logging roads in the woods, that I cooked and ate and slept very well. It took me a while to realize she was flirting with me, and when I did, I told her I was suffering from a degenerative sexual transmitted disease. She saw through the bullshit and asked me why I avoided relationships, and I tried to explain my sense of time, and the sundry compromises. She gave me her card, wants to meet me for a Guinness the next time she's in town. Her Mom's in a rest home here, she's doing post-post Doc work in California on dementia. Later, I'm perplexed why anyone would not find a Pileated Woodpecker amazing. Amanda had never actually noticed one, and I knew she'd never understand rolling an apple to a fox. Active and independent living. I'm ambivalent about social networks, bailing out people that build in flood plains, and subsidizing questionable crops (wheat in western Colorado, soy beans in fields that seem designed to fail), on the other hand, I'm drawing Social Security. Read more...

Pileated Woodpeckers

Lunch in town with D and TR. Town is mostly shut down, for the holiday, and the library is closed. Lively conversation, everyone coming over to see D, who doesn't get down this way much anymore. I picked up a couple of things at Kroger, back-up butter and black pepper, a couple of pasta meals, but I'll have to get back to town this week for the Library and Laundromat. I keep the radio on quite a bit in the morning, listening to the weather forecast. First mention of snow and I'll run in for last minute supplies. I've paid for Rodney's help and the larder mostly in cash I'd squirreled away, so now I should actually start saving money again, which is good because car insurance and land taxes fall due the first of February. I'm amazed that I can float my economy, but it does seem to be true. I never thought I'd see the day. Eighteen months since I left the museum, and probably I'm better off in almost every way, my finances are stable, despite new shocks and a set of tires, a new gas tank, paying for yard work and firewood, buying another four-pack of underwear. I like getting up in the middle of the night, for whatever reason, and reading or writing for a couple of hours. It's nice, not having to be somewhere. It's nice to just stop what I'm doing and listen to the rain. TR's music is informed by the rain. Rolling thunder, rain on the roof, and a train in Kentucky. What is especially nice is not having to compromise my time. Any relationship requires compromise, it's the standard coin of commerce. The great thing about being a recluse is you don't have to pay much attention to all that other crap. I could have stayed in town, had another beer, but I just wanted to get back to the ridge, where I might see a bear, and the fox needs an apple. Big winds and the trees are being stripped bare. The verges on Mackletree have disappeared in mounds of leaves and vehicles are trailed by rooster tails. The Pileated Woodpeckers are everywhere. I see six of them on the way home and there are three on the ridge. Find a picture of the skeleton of one of these birds and notice how the beak is not connected directly to the skull. Good engineering. An interesting run of research all afternoon. I was finishing a book on cooperage, amazed at what a difficult trade it was and is (though mostly done by machine now, there is actually a stave mill nearby) with a usual 7 year apprenticeship. The history of the barrel, which is a truncated spheroid; easy to move around, but wastes a certain amount of space. The forklift changed everything, there was no longer a reason to waste space. So, that line of thought led me to think about something I had read, and I couldn't remember if it was Descartes or Pascal, which had led me several times half-way up the staircase where the 11th Britannica lives. Somehow got side-tracked into a long entry on Galileo. When he died one of his fingers was cut off and preserved, it's on display at the Science Museum in Florence. Maddeningly, the article doesn't say which finger. The next time you're in Florence, drop me a card. This led to a history of embalming, which is ancient, but got a big shot in the arm during the Civil War, to be able to send bodies home for burial. Of course, fortunes were made. Legally, you don't have to be embalmed in Ohio, and you don't need a casket; you can be incinerated or buried wrapped in a rug, and I make a note to add that to my will. Dress me in a bathrobe / roll me in a rug / it doesn't make any difference. In the interest of propriety, you might include a plank, to stiffen up the bundle, it's always embarrassing to drop a floppy corpse. Fairly late I realized I haven't eaten enough, so I made a butternut squash risotto. This isn't difficult, it just requires some time, and I can read while stirring. It's quite good and very filling, and there's plenty left-over for fried cakes in the morning. The wind continues to howl a gale. The trees are stick figures bending through 45 degrees of arc. The house groans a little, but it accepts the wind; it's loaded so well and so over-built, a full gale isn't much of a problem. From inside it's a kind of muffled video, outside, shit is blowing everywhere; my Weber grill wraps around an oak tree, my dumpster folding chair completely disappears, the leaves are blowing into windbreaks. I go outside and put a large rock on the metal roofing pile. One keeps metal roofing to cover things, it's a habit, like collecting five-gallon buckets. I go into this in my treatise "The Recluse And His Place In Society". The wind is howling, the ridge allows full access to this, a wind that tumbles off mountains and roars across the plains. Three things, actually, when push comes to serve: a bottle of whiskey, a pouch of tobacco, and a pork loin. I assume beans and rice as a matter of course. Read more...

Harvesting Rain

I'd set my internal alarm clock to go off when the rain started. I needed wash water. Dust accumulates, so I let the first hour wash off the roof, then consolidate my store and put out a couple of buckets. Earlier, I'd finished a page, and I was hungry, made a very nice potato soup, which I had with Irish Cheddar, a damn fine cheese D turned me on to, black olives, and some small sweet gherkins. Two in the morning (pouring off water, cleaning buckets, and sticking your ass outside, even for a few moments in a cold fall rain, tends to wake you up) and I got a wee dram of whiskey, to shake the chill, and rolled a smoke. I feel moderately successful, in terms of preparation, and actually I'm probably too optimistic, when I found myself singing (I sing very badly) an oratorio about potato soup, soft water, and the healing powers of pot brownies. Someone had left some brownies in my mailbox. You don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Three in the morning and I'm not paranoid or anxious, I actually own the darkness; listen to some delta blues, think about people that are dead. The rain beats a patter on the roof. Meaning comes into question. Harvey always took the position that nothing meant anything, and even though I always felt that anything meant something we found common ground. I think about Harvey almost every day and he's been dead for thirty years. Especially I think about him when I'm sitting in the dark. He would recite vast stretches of Lorca in Spanish, late at night, after a huge scrounged seafood meal and way too much homebrew. An early walk, before the sun had cleared the ridge, and the leaves are ankle deep everywhere, and several feet deep where there's anything to pile up against. Starved when I get back home because I'd gotten side-tracked (another good title would be Side-Tracked, which has become an almost steady state for me) so I finished the potato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich. This soup is a winter survival food, reconstituted dried onion flakes in chicken broth, a can of whole or sliced potatoes, and a couple of tablespoons of powdered milk. Lots of black pepper. Whole pork loins are on sale and I'm going to get one to cure, maybe next week; it'll provide me with meat for a month. The great thing about curing a whole loin in the fridge is that you can cut off a couple of slices anytime and just coat the cut end with the curing mixture. My curing mix is always changing, I just keep a pint jar about half filled with a mixture, 2:2:1, kosher salt, light brown sugar, various ground peppers and whatever herb has struck my fancy. This is so easy, it's ridiculous, you rub the meat with the mix, put it on a rack in a pan in the fridge, rub it down every few days, then lightly smoke it, in whatever contraption you can devise. Freeze it in quarters, slice them before they're fully thawed. It's the very best breakfast meat of all time, and so lean it has to be fried in fat or oil of some kind. When Dad died this year, at 95, one of the first things I muttered, was that the bacon fat finally killed him. At the end he drank his beer on ice, with a sprinkle of salt, and lived on cornbread crumbled in a bowl of milk. Light rain dripping on the roof, and it's seriously dark. I listen to Bach, heat some water, wash some dishes, read about the joints used in constructing the trusses for the roof of Westminster Hall. They've carried the load for 600 years, which is no mean feat, and they're now half rotten, but they still carry the load. Overbuilding we call it, in the trades; not being engineers or mathematicians, we just muddle along. Read more...

Public Opinion

There's this cute, young, anorexic woman working in the produce section of Kroger. We chat about vegetables. I was examining some very nice eggplants, and she asked me what I did with them. I mentioned a couple of things and she said I sounded like a cook. She had a break and I bought her a coffee at the in-house Starbucks. She's gay, and we had a funny conversation about gay couples in which neither of them had ever learned to cook, in which the Family Meal from KFC was pretty much the bar. I don't pretend to much, and I'm done with the cares of society. But I do feel that the bar should be set higher than that. I had my weekly dozen oysters and resolved to make a stew. A simple and quick dish. I've done this so many times that I don't even think about it. Like watching my mother make biscuits, which was unbelievable because she only measured by hand and eye, and they were always perfect. To do anything well is a testament. Rodney showed up (he needed the rest of his money) and there's a great stack of wood in the shed. Neatly stacked. I feel surprisingly fine about this: a full larder, some firewood, the driveway in decent shape. When people ask me what I do with my time I have to laugh. One thing, I usually say, leads to another. I'd left a note for myself, to research the word 'petrichor', which is the smell of rain on parched earth, and that lead to research into certain watersheds, and that led to what you call a thin cake of baked cornmeal. I have to take a walk to clear my head. Now that the leaves are mostly gone, I see different things, oak galls, and where damaged branches have healed. It's the... what? Ongoing internal conversation? Waiting in line to buy some groceries, being slightly paranoid, I can't wait to get out of the funnel. Caught between breathe mints and scandalous mags. The natural world, teasel, say, at the verge, where two roads cross, is much better than being caught in the line at Kroger. Coming home it's so lovely across the river, in Kentucky, that I drive the long way around, then all the way up the creek, literally all the way, since the creek starts at my hollow. The working title for the ridge book seems to be "Low-Gap Hollow" as that's the way I refer to it when I talk to the two or three people I talk to about it. Observations and reflections on things that usually remind me of other things. I like the way the text jumps from subject to subject, which reflects the way I think, and I've spent a lot of time cutting out connective tissue; though in truth I haven't worked on it much for the last couple of months, getting ready for winter. But I am almost ready for winter. Wednesday I'll have the money for the new used fridge and I'll be able to freeze a few things, some salt-pork, a tenderloin, a couple of steaks. When I do have to walk in, all I'll have to carry are some greens and maybe a couple of parsnips. Young turnips, cooked with their greens, are very good. Joel, ever the realist, thought I might be wandering afield, but we agreed on certain food-writers. John Thorne is the best. Read more...

Possessive Case

Another flurry of activity, Rodney splitting up the rest of the tree after a dawn spent hunting. He says he'll haul it tomorrow. Rain all morning then heavy overcast. The air feels very thick outside, but inside, with just a few fires, the house is dry. I'd bought a package of flounder fillets, thinking to pan-fry them, but ended up making fish-cakes because I had some leftover mashed potatoes. I don't like using egg as a binder because then whatever it is becomes an egg dish. I was reading today about conventions in punctuation and how they had been affected by printing. Codifying language was an enormous task. It still is, the way words morph. Good shit is now excellent reefer. More rain, it moves across in waves, like the Mayan sense of time. A carpenter friend called with an interesting building problem: how to fabricate a stringer for a set of stairs ('set' may be the longest definition in the OED) and we talked for nearly an hour. Took a while for me to fully visualize what he wanted to accomplish. Half-log treads that died into a curved plaster wall and a curved stringer that would be fully visible. One way would be to rip the stringer into strips and glue them, in place, into the desired form, which would require maybe fifty bar-clamps and a week of labor. Another, that I recommended, was to walk the woodlot and find a tree with the appropriate bend. I've had great luck doing this, strange as it might seem. On occasion I've carved a small model of the desired piece and carried it in my back pocket. You can usually find what you need. There's an oak tree across the hollow that would work perfectly for a curved set of stairs. Notching the treads into the stringer would be the tricky part. So I think about that, fitting together two natural edges in three-space. I can actually do this, with an electric chainsaw and some chisels. If you scribe a line with a sharp tool you can cut right up against it with an electric chainsaw. I'm pretty good, but I've known masters who could disappear drywall into logs. I'd put that on a par with levitation. Harvey often operated a foot off the ground. Smoke and mirrors. But I do miss those conversations. I needed to get some cash, to square up with Rodney, but I didn't expect to see him as he and B were going to be involved in a fairly complex plumbing issue. Still, I hadn't been out in days and wanted to pick up whiskey and tobacco. Picked up a couple of other things, but the larder is mostly full. Rice and cornmeal and beans, oh my. I have to get to the laundromat and go to Big Lots. I need roasted red peppers in olive oil, and olives, and I can usually get these at Big Lots for half-price. Stopped down at B's on the way home and they were deeply involved in the plumbing issue. I could have figured it out, if I'd wanted to, they were using one well to flush out another well, and they had plumbing parts all over the floor. I just gave B the New Yorker article about Thoreau and left. On the way home I had gotten some onion rings and a vanilla shake, and all I wanted to do was to be quiet, read a book, slurp that last corner of a milk-shake. Read more...

Preparations

It's a mantra, beans and corn, beans and corn. Like most kids I hated lima beans, but especially baby limas are now one of my favorite things. So buttery and sweet. If dried beans are old I do soak them, otherwise I don't care how long they take to cook, as the stove is going anyway. If I'm pulling out all the stops, going for the perfect bean (though I know perfection is beyond my grasp) I mince a large onion and cook it with some salt-pork, add the beans, chicken stock to cover, and set it on the off edge of the stove. A normal day, I'll let it cook for 8 or 10 hours while I read and muddle about, adding more chicken stock as needed. At the end of the day I need to make cornbread: a cup of cornmeal, baking soda and powder, an egg, two tablespoons of powdered milk and water. If you make this in a six-inch skillet it's more cake-like, in an eight-inch skillet it's more a pone. Pone I define as a flat cake. You can spend hours reading what various varieties of cornbread are called in different areas of the country. Nomenclature is interesting. I spent several hours with the Dictionary of Americanisms that McCord had rescued and sent me from Bowling Green. Preservation became the issue, with all the grains. If you extracted all of the oil, and the germ, it keeps quite well. Or you could malt it and make whiskey. Now, though, I can get very good cornmeal, whole grain, but I have to keep it in the freezer. I wrote these people, Logan Turnpike Mills, about needing a finer corn flour and they immediately sent me a sample of their masa. I made pancakes, and realized (the pancakes were very good, with sorghum molasses) how close I was getting to a tortilla. Non-leaven bread. It's a Jewish Catholic thing. Fish sticks on Friday. According to the Catholic church a rabbit fetus is not meat. Nor are barnacles, which hatch in the far north as geese. When you start to think about whiskey as condensed corn you start to get the picture. Weak beer and cider are certainly better than dirty water. Read more...

Autumn Wind

A steady fall of leaves. An early walk, just over to the head of the driveway and back. Stopped at the print-shop porch and rolled a smoke, sat and drifted off. I need to spend a day splitting kindling and starter sticks, bring maybe a dozen ricks of wood inside, so that the surface moisture will humidify the house. Too warm for a fire so I eat a plain yogurt with a piece of toast, then sit down to do some editing. I get into it, spend most of the day trying to figure out if the words mean what I thought I meant. Play fast and loose with some commas, thinking about the spoken voice. B had said the only thing he didn't like about canned hash was the grease, but if you serve it on a piece of plain toast, with a fried egg on top, and a dollop of salsa, it's pretty goddamn good. A good night trapping mice, I caught three and didn't bother freezing them, thought I'd give them to the crows "fresh". They were sitting out, dead, on a plastic grocery bag, and for reasons that escape me, I decided to dissect one. Mostly what I wanted to know was what was in the stomach. I've taken apart a great many animals, so I don't have a problem with that, and I wanted to know what the mice had been eating. This is a legitimate question. Using a pair of scissors and a sharp paring knife I opened one of them and removed the stomach. This a lot like being in Biology class, but better, because I'm more interested. The contents are mostly grass seed. Nothing that I didn't expect, but still, I wanted to see it for myself. I clean up and take the mice out to the outhouse roof, a treat for the crows when they return to the roost. I suspect they spend their days down at the lake. I'm staying away from town more and more, five or six days at a time, a retraining course for the winter ahead, and it helps me remember things I usually forget. An extra tube of toothpaste, kitchen matches, a back-up grinder of black pepper. A great many things don't go on the list (the endless list) of needed items until you use the last of whatever it is. You need to avoid that situation if you live in isolation, and, also, it's nice to have some creature comforts. Toilet paper, for instance. A couple of years ago I ran out of toilet paper during an ice storm and I had to cut up all the cotton socks with holes at the heel and several old tee-shirts until I could get to town. I wrote the previous sentence, originally, with a couple of commas, over the course of an hour, rather than shoot myself, I took them out. I had to laugh, because I actually enjoy my internal discussion about how meaning is served, what punctuation might do to influence what is actually heard. I read a few pages out loud and they sounded pretty good. Even a half-ass lyric, with a steel guitar, can sound pretty good, your dog and that train. I listen to some Norman Blake, then some Leo and I swear the notes are so perfect that the harmonics cascade. Slack guitar, like Delta Blues, is fuzzy, Mississippi John Hurt, or Son House. I listen to Clapton, or Santana and it's a completely different sound. I'm sorry I never learned to read music. Read more...

Copacetic

Beautiful leaf-fall. I can see across the hollow now and it's a lovely sight. Trees that are red and trees that are orange, but mostly shades of yellow, the poplars and oaks. I remind myself to remember the colors, soon enough it all becomes black and white. It's all to the good, cleansing the palette; this time of year I'm drying peppers and mushrooms, I have a cold-frame where I raise bitter greens. A very exciting day is when I cook chick-peas with greens and sausage. If I make a pone of cornbread, this could be an exceptional day. Town, for back-up whiskey and tobacco, pick up a few other things, exotics, canned tamales, a couple of dried Thai things; and Justin, at the pub wants to come out, bring a band mate, eat, drink, and talk. I tell him to give me warning, a couple of days notice, and we'd cook a meal; but he'd have to bring two people and one of them can't drink. They've opened Mackletree again, two weeks ahead of schedule. It looks like it was a sink-hole where the overflow at the spillway undercut the bank. I'll find out. It was funny, I'd been to town, I'd stopped at the Buckeye Dairy Bar for a footer and onion rings, a small vanilla shake, and I wanted to take them home, eat at the island with a good book, so I zipped right by where Mackletree had been closed off for weeks. I was half-a-mile down the road before I realized the barricades had not been in place. Turned around, went back, and yes, there were no barricades. Went home the old usual way, everything familiar, every curve, despite being knee-deep in leaves, absolutely instinctive. I don't even unload the car, I just go inside, prop up a mystery, and eat a footer with onion rings. The vanilla shake is because one of my favorite large persons works at the hardware store and he told me that if I was serious about gaining some weight, that I needed to drink as many milk-shakes as possible. I'm going with peanut oil this year, because it was about half the price of olive oil and I love it. There was a display, because deep-frying a turkey seems to require peanut oil, I got two-and-a-half gallons for $28. I prefer peanut oil for frying potatoes, if I don't have bacon fat. I watch a young doe, about eighteen months old, root around in the leaves. There's still green stuff under there, and she noses it out. Plump, as she should be this time of year, her coat is sleek and full. She's lovely. A walk in the afternoon, all the way out the logging road, examining tight little buds that hold the promise of spring even before winter begins. I collect some dandelion greens and a couple of late Boletus mushrooms. Experimenting with a couple of recipes, a bean soup and a stew, that you can make with canned and dry ingredients. A chili made with jerky. Jerky is expensive, but it keeps really well. And I have some packs of cured ham bits that are dated out several years. I need to buy a couple of gallons of Arizona green tea because I need the containers for drinking water. Filtered drinking water is just 39 cents a gallon in your own container. And I keep forgetting to get a back-up battery for my headlamp. I have to do some laundry and plan my under-layers. I found another cashmere sweater at the Good Will, it had a turtle-neck which I immediately cut away. I hate things around my neck. And I was left with a very fine under-garment. Listen, yea motherfuckers, I'm wearing cashmere, and I'm eating real butter. Beat your head and appeal. I tried to complain once but clearly that would never go anywhere. At a minimum 2.4 percent of what you ate is human. In some cultures this rose to 50%, boned thigh and polenta. Read more...

Too Much

Just when I'd settled in Rodney called and wanted to come over, split and haul wood. I couldn't say no, even though I wanted to, but this is another $100 contract and I wanted wood in the shed. So he came over, with his cousin, and they split and stacked a load before dark, then had to come in for a drink. I feel over-integrated, too much connection; Rodney doesn't have reverse in his small truck, so we have to push it back, so he can get out, it's all too much activity for me on a Sunday evening. They finally leave and I make sure the cousin is driving. The silence was deafening. Like being buried in cotton bolls. There is, by god, wood in the shed; and the fourth thing, I remembered, was getting a new used refrigerator. The old one is nearly dead, labors to keep butter solid, but I'm on this now, because everything else has been addressed. The larder is good, wood in the shed, the brush is cleared away, I could hole up for three or four weeks if needed. Reread Proust. I'm now mildly optimistic about the winter ahead. I'm in better shape than I've been for several years, not physically (I've gone to hell in a hand basket), but the floor is insulated, and I have plenty of food, I can make cornbread with powdered milk. I need at least to partially clean out the downstairs studio room, it has a work counter and I need to bind some books this winter. I seem to be holding a fortune in unbound books and need to spend some time sorting them. A good winter project. Also need a new printer because I love hard copy. I still burn an oil lamp and a candle when the power is out, to be able to find my way around, but I always read with the headlamp, because the light is better and it's cheaper. The battery is expensive, four bucks, but it lasts a very long time. Mid-winter, if the power fails, I go to bed when it gets dark, and get up when it gets light; I'll stay up for a couple of hours, reading by headlamp, if something interests me, but usually I just go to sleep. It's raining again. Read more...

Politics

Most of the opinions I hear are third hand. Even at the pub, where I, after all, reupholstered all of the seat cushions on a Sunday, when I could have been fishing, the scuttlebutt is mostly bullshit. Rodney came up again, and dropped a large dead oak, cut it into rounds. I'm pleased, in that it's a lot of wood, and he owes me another half-day, hauling and splitting, but I find myself almost resenting the intrusion. I've gotten to where I don't like to be interrupted. Even when it's in my own self-interest. I'll bite the bullet at least twice more, for Rodney to haul and split, and then for another afternoon with his buddy Danny to come up with his little tractor and clear the brush on the other side of the house. I'd then have a complete fire-break around the house, which I thought I'd never see. That'll be another $100, and I'm dipping into the reserve here, but it seems like money well spent. But then I want to be left alone, I don't want to be a member of the good-old-boys network, trading hunting stories, talking trash. I'd rather be alone, which is not the same as being lonely, at any given time I'm doing two or three different things and reading a couple of books. What I think of as being fully occupied. I don't want to discuss potholes or bodily dysfunctions, we have Congress for that, rewarding farmers for what they might have grown. This year, for instance, the family of Boone Coleman will be richly rewarded for a crop they don't produce. Soybeans drowned after planting. Not only that, but they're a lost cause, so they don't even have to farm them, they can re-pave a road or build a small bridge and make a fortune, and still be subsidized for producing a crop that doesn't exist. I hate that shit. And ethanol is a stupid program too. Rain wakes me. I'd fallen asleep on the sofa, reading an essay about cannibalism. Honestly, grumpy as I'm feeling, I should probably be reading a romance novel. I do actually pull out a "Jeeves" and turn on a light in the kitchen. Hash with an egg on top and a piece of toast with blackberry jam. The sound of rain calms me. I think I was upset because I was expecting a quiet day and ended up listening to a chainsaw for hours. Being an idiot, at which I'm accomplished, as it is the wood that I require being sawn. I just thought it was going to be done on Monday, I had imagined a Saturday hanging around in my bathrobe, reading, talking back at the radio, writing a paragraph, roasting some root vegetables; but Rodney had a free day and needed to make use of his time. It ended up being sprung on me with no warning, so I was off-balance all day. I couldn't think straight. Power out again, almost all night, and I read with the headlamp until it gave me a headache. Incredibly dark. Just before daylight the power comes on and, of course, I left some lights on, and my computer always says "Please Wait", so I got up and stayed up. More rain, so no possibility of interruption, don't need a fire, sit around in my bathrobe and read; try and figure out if I'd lost a couple of sentences or not. Amazing the house is still warm, I only had a small fire last night, to chase the chill. Fucking crows set up a din and I finally nuked a couple of mice for them. They can be so demanding. Read more...