See It

The moon must be full. It rises a little less than an hour later every night (it varies quite a bit) and I know by now, when it scales the tree line about nine PM, and looks like a ripe melon, that it's full, and that it does affect human behavior. I went outside and it wasn't actually dark, moon shadows. I don't have a mystical bent, I spent the day gluing pop-sickle sticks together, to see the way a joint might work. It's not a waste of time, I do find an elegant solution. It involves skills I don't have, but I can call a guy I know. Actually, I'm only interested in the idea, a nine-hundred square foot, full-hip house based on ten foot bays. Some interesting joints. Building from a model is such an old technique. Everyone at Kroger was on the phone. I was in the spice area, looking for generic coriander, and there was a man, talking to his wife (he had been sent to the store, she was home, cooking for an event of some kind, he was not used to shopping) and he couldn't find the fennel. I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out that the spices were arranged alphabetically. Spices have gotten very expensive. They always have been, but it's getting out of hand, like coffee. I bought a pound (12 ounces) of remaindered Kenyan that was supposed to be very good, but I still like my cheaper Folger Black Silk, (the two pound can became twenty-eight ounces, then twenty-three ounces recently, same price). And I didn't notice that it was any better. Darkening in the afternoon, a big spring storm moving in, so I batten down a few things. The Beaufort book is interesting and informative but not very well written. The new book of Harrison novellas is wonderful. The wind is picking up, a 'near gale', and the maple blossoms are swirling, so I heated some leftovers while I still had electricity, and ate an early dinner. But it's not survival now, it's just spending a night reading by headlamp. More akin to summer camp, than freezing to death. Waves of rain move through and I harvest enough extra to wash my hair and take a sponge bath. A cold rain, and it sucks the heat from everything, I end up putting on a ratty sweat-shirt and wrap my feet in a stadium blanket, reading Coetzee interviews. Supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow, and I'm good with that, I have some reading to do, and I wanted to think about self, and what that meant. Last week I spent an entire evening thinking about conjunctions, then I started thinking about articles. How they differentiated in subtle ways. You can spend an interesting day with the word 'ways', boats that were launched and sank, bridges that failed, or those great clippers. The book I've been working on, Access And Attachment, which is just a book of days, is going to drive me to buying a new computer and a good printer. I'm lost without hard copy, and I'm at that point, now, where I need to see the actual pages. The text would be 365 pages, each page a separate paragraph, simple enough. The silence woke me, two in the morning, the rain just stopped. Got up, got a drink, rolled a smoke, reading back over something, had the thought that there was, actually, a book of 3,650 pages, ten pages per day, plus an appendix of leap-days. I don't imagine this as a book so much as a pile of paper in a box, the sheets are numbered, the leap days are a fascicle, tied with a ribbon. Grace notes. Or Change-Ringing, or circle-singing an old hymn. I listened to the Cello Suites, and tried to not think. Blessed are those moments when we merely sweep aside whatever spider webs and whatever insect carapaces there might be. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised by anything. Beaufort sleeping with his sister, when she came in as the nanny after his first wife died, the value of gold at any specific time.