Off Kilter

Coming down with something. Felt it in my throat last night, then running nose and general miasma today. Didn't feel like doing anything except to try and prevent dripping on a book. Don't have a clue where I picked this up. I drink chicken broth all day and don't want to eat anything. Thank god no one called or came by. Holed up on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, and read the latest New Yorker cover to cover, all the music reviews, the film reviews, the book reviews, the articles. Eventually I did eat a couple of scrambled eggs, with plain toast. Spring fly season. I don't know where they come from. I don't know enough about flies. What I do know, and it's why I love this life, is that there's a Fly Person out there, with a bevy of graduate students, studying flies. All I have to do is tap into the fly network. I get other people to do this for me, because I don't have a direct link, and it works pretty well most of the time. I had to laugh, 'pretty well most of the time' isn't a top recommendation. Still, TR found, within five minutes, the very edition of Thoreau's journals I wanted, unabridged, in two volumes, at 40 bucks each. Winslow had these books, on a shelf in Orleans. We actually tracked down specific quotes, drinking beer and smoking pot. I was winter house-sitting for his father, a house built for some magazine to photograph, a beautiful place, but extremely uncomfortable to live in, right on the water, a dock and a boat. Lean times, but dinner was always just a few hundred feet away; mussels, oysters, scallops, cod-fish cakes, and a couple of lobster pots out in the inlet. I paid the electric bill, and bought gas for the stove and heater. I can't remember exactly, what year this was, maybe 1969, when I first realized that seared fresh scallops on home-made egg noodles was better than tinned beef stew. Since then I've become a pretty good cook, mostly because I like to eat. I'll have to sign off again, thunder storms moving through, but not for a while I think. A footer, with sauce mustard and cheese, onion rings, and a vanilla shake, at the Buckeye Diary Barn. I nearly lost it at the Quick Stop (getting gas) where a fat lady was abusing a kid. I wanted to intervene, but I didn't know what to say or do. Fortunately another person, a teenage girl, got them apart and bought the kid a piece of candy. I couldn't wait to get home. New library books, rain on the roof, a clear path to redemption, I'm pretty much set. Remembered to get an extra pound of butter, for the morels, a country loaf they make at the bakery in town, a steak, whiskey, extra bag of tobacco and papers. Went to bed early, big booming thunder and rain, then got up when things quieted down, still had power, three in the morning, so I read for a while, then wrote, catching up. I'm sick so seldom that's it takes me a while to realize I'm not working on all cylinders. Coughing and sneezing, nose leaking like a faucet. Snow tonight and tomorrow morning they're saying, so I'll just retreat back into quasi-hibernation. Brought in an armload of wood, split a little very dry kindling. Thinking about tease and teasel took up most of my day. Those incredibly strong thorns can actually 'tease' out the fibers from raw wool. Once you've done that, a primitive loom isn't far behind and you're making cloth. Tartans even. Dyeing fibers must have been fairly early. There's evidence going back thousands of years. Realizing I might not get out for a few days I wash some underwear and socks. I put an extra five-gallon bucket on the back porch, let it half-fill with rain water and use a butter churn dasher to agitate, then dump the water and do it again, then a third time for the final rinse. I've stretched a clothes-line upstairs, in the girl's old bedroom. Domesticity. The phone has died. It gave out that little pathetic bleep land-lines give when they've been disconnected. Way too messy to even go outside, one trip to the woodshed tracks in more crap than the average house sees in a month: chainsaw debris, mixed with mud and crushed bits of leaves. It's best to let this stuff dry, before cleaning up. Just going out to the woodshed is exhausting, not eating enough and leaking fluids, so I come inside and drink some chicken broth, scramble a couple of eggs. The patter of rain reminds me of base military housing, which was often metal Quonset huts, about how loud they were, and how I learned to retreat into books. Dad was stationed in California and I was five, if I remember correctly, just starting school. A wonderful and beautiful black teacher, Mrs. Moon, and she recognized my connection with books, had me reading way over my head before I was out of first grade. One thing about being a military brat, was that you could reinvent yourself, or refine what you thought that you was becoming. I'm hazy on dates, but maybe 1959, Dad was stationed in Key West, the greatest tour of duty ever, as far as I was concerned, all I did was swim. I wore a swimsuit as underwear. I'd swim until I had to come home for dinner. There was no childcare to pay for, so Mom had a job too, and the family was climbing into the lower middle class; we were living off-base, and there were interesting people, there was a huge Naval base. Wave of storms, have to go. A fucking rain of hail, pea-sized, but the sound is like your drummer having a seizure. While I was shut down, I was thinking about Key West, it was such a cool place to be, the food (conch chowder, blue crabs, endless cobia and snapper fillets) and the endless supply of Key Lime Pies because we had trees in the back yard that supplied all our needs, lime-aid sweetened with Grenadine, and those pies. Mom would butter a pie pan, then crush graham crackers between sheets of waxed paper, mold them into the pan and toast it for a couple of minutes in a hot oven, add the custard, cook it for twenty minutes. I still consider this one of the great creations. What's not to love? The perfect marriage of egg, cream, and fruit. A tasting menu at Noma is $450, which seems a little steep, but cloud berries are hard to find, and they make a clear broth from barnacles that is very good. Donax (I think that's correct) was a similar soup in St. Augustine, that's made from those small shellfish that became the concrete of Florida. Concrete is one of those alchemical things, like gunpowder, you mix a few things together and you end up with something else. I go off to reference the word 'amalgam' and very quickly I'm side-tracked by 'algorithm'. Gardy Loo, as the Edinburgh ladies yelled, when they tossed the slops out the window. One assumes that the Glascow ladies said nothing, holding tight to the belief that if you don't mention something, it doesn't exist. The Ostrich Complex. It's difficult to avoid the political scene. Can Republicans actually endorse a Trump ticket? Is the fall-back ticket actually Ted Cruz, who is an idiot? Little or no snow accumulation, the ground is too warm.

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Phone is still out. It bleeped once this morning, like a wake-up call, but no dial-tone. Cold enough for snow but it's holding off, now they're calling for 'thunder snow showers' tonight and tomorrow. Clouds moving in, so I get out for a walk before the weather arrives. Several red-headed woodpeckers flash through the underbrush, they always seem to fly close to the ground, then swoop up onto the trunk of a tree. A flash of color. It's startling. I'm feeling fairly awful, but my nose has slowed down. I've sneezed more in two days than in the last two years and this seems like the worst of it, two more days, and then a couple of days to recover. Having a serious cold (or whatever) is exhausting. The phone is still out at five on a Friday, so I'm probably of luck until Monday soonest. I'll need to go down, with the phone number, and have B call it in the next time he teaches, though I'm sure they know, everything is monitored now, even the monitoring is monitored. I decided to buy the Thoreau journals, 80 bucks and I won't have to go the library next winter. I probably have everything I'll need to put them into library hard-bindings. To keep my hand in I rebind the occasional Dover Reprint into hard covers. Part of me is appalled to pay 80 bucks for two paperback books, though I did pay 40 bucks for the fourth book, in paper, of Levi-Strauss's great books on table manners. As I've mentioned before, the last chapter of the fourth book, the summation, the closing argument, is a brilliant piece of writing, and I got it off the shelf in case it snows tomorrow. No phone before Monday and I'm writing a novella. Nothing to be done. I needed to sleep, got a fire ready for the morning, a last wee dram, brain dead, slept until dawn; leaden light on two inches of new snow. Surprised it stuck, but there it is. Flurries, but the temps get a little above freezing, though it's supposed to get quite cold tonight. I forgot and left two buckets outdoors, now frozen cold-sinks in the back hallway. An armload of wood which I had thought might not be necessary. It's a mess outside. Holed up with a mug of tea, reading a Thomas Perry novel, a dead phone and an impassable driveway. On the bright side, it's very quiet. I listen to a couple of radio shows on Saturday and Sunday, and the time passes, which gets me thinking about time. With my new unlimited-calling phone plan, if I had a working phone, I would have called someone, to bitch and moan about the weather. A little rain, some broken sun, and most of the snow disappearing into ground fog. No wildlife, no birdsong, no sign that anything is alive. Some snow releases off the roof and smashes down on the back deck, it's loud and shakes the house, but I was actually expecting it, the conditions were exactly correct, so I knew, when I heard the snow starting to slide, what was coming. One, Mississippi, then a concussive event, very like an earthquake. Heavy wet snow slamming down from sixteen feet. I'm careful going in this way, because I know the icicles and snow want to fall; often, when I'm inside, I slam the door and all hell breaks lose. A game I play. `Weak as a kitten, but I feel better; I have to stick with light fiction as my brain still isn't functioning at normal speed, and I don't feel like doing anything, but I am better. Can't believe I'm back in fingerless gloves, bathrobe over clothes, Linda's hat pulled down over my ears, but I got into a writing rhythm and let the fire go out. The house was cold and I had to start heating all over again. Bad timing, but not a big deal, it takes an hour to stoke the stove and get it damped down. The comforting sound of cast iron heating. Within and without the world. I hear a snort and there's a big buck outside my window, handsome animal, horn buds just breaking through. It's the largest deer I've seen in a while, and in good shape for this time of year, now that the honeysuckle is thick in the hollows. If it doesn't snow again, I need a trip to town, for plain yogurt and fresh fruit, to get my stomach settled. And ingredients for a large pot of something, stew, or chili, or beans. Because the oven was hot, I made a pone of cornbread, in the next larger skillet, so it would be thinner and crisp; with butter and molasses it was very good. A discovery this winter was that most canned greens are not that bad, a little garlic and onion, some pork fat, they make a nice side dish with beans and cornbread. I had to laugh, clearly I need a better grill, larger, something that doesn't involve taking out the grate to add fuel. There's one grill, Chinese, that isn't expensive and offers promise, cast iron grate, accessible firebox, shaped so that things could be cooked off the heat, it even has a little stovepipe on the opposite end from where you have the fire, a nice cross draft. I was recently inducted into the Baby-Back Rib Hall Of Fame. We have a secret handshake. There are napkins involved. It's nice to be acknowledged, but I don't put any store by it. I do want to cook ribs soon, and I started a list of things I needed, or needed to do, to get ready for the rib season. The rub, of course, and I have some new things to add, California saffron, a Greek bitter pepper, and I spent an hour grinding four varieties of dried peppers from Arizona. A supremely aromatic event. The sauce must be refreshed. I have a quart jar of the mother, she's ten years old now, and I'll spark it up with various juices and wine, bock beer and whatever else is handy, but the real kick, for the sauce, is the liquid from cooking the ribs. The hybrid method I use to cook them allows me to collect all the liquid. Composed of pork juice, pork fat, and the rub. The fat congeals and you can just throw it away (I've never actually thrown any of this away, I cook potatoes in it) except for enough to seal the new jar of sauce. It's a great system. Side dishes are a matter of choice, baked beans, mac and cheese, certainly slaw, maybe a potato. Bread, to clean the plate. I lean toward a Cuban or French loaf, that has a crust, so you can apply finger-pressure for those last few swipes. My phone has been out for nearly a week, which is a pain in the ass, my friends think I'm dead, and the funny thing is I have to go off of the ridge, to phone the phone company, to tell them my phone isn't working, and try and figure out what's going on. I'm sure it's those tree guys with the contract to clear the easement down at the lake, they don't seem to know what they're doing. I run into this a lot anymore, people not knowing what they're doing. Dial-tone bleep. I'd better send.