Overwhelmed

Too much beauty. Blue flowers in the grader ditch, the dogwoods dropping their blossoms for a blush of soft green. Off the ridge for the first time in a week, and the green is nearly total, and after so much rain saplings hang down into the back roads. A very pleasant drive into town. The pub crew is happy to see me, and several customers shout out greetings, which perplexes the other customers, who wonder who I am. Why are all these people so happy to see a scruffy old guy in overalls? Whiskey, tobacco, and a great deal of food, head home, grinning, at having negotiated another round of the social contract. Stop at B's for some of the left-over meat, and he had saved me some potato salad, plus an extra loaf of french bread. When I get back to the house, I have to arrange an order of meals in my head because I have so much food. As soon as I get home I slice some of the beef, dip it in light soy sauce and dehydrate it into jerky, it'll make a great stew next winter. Put everything away, then dine on thin beef slices on French bread with butter, and potato salad. I can do this with Thoreau propped against my desk. It's difficult to describe, but I feel good about who I am and where I am. The test is that I feel so comfortable. Start a small fire, listen to the crackle, put on my bathrobe and slippers. It seems to me I enjoy great freedom by not being answerable to anyone else's demands. Despite the fact that it means I have to live alone in a cave. You spend a couple of hours hauling logs, to keep a fire going, to keep the tigers from eating you, and you find enough to eat. I heard the phrase 'fat chance' and the phrase 'slim chance', in context they meant the same thing. It must have a name, the rhetorical device whereby opposite words mean the same thing. If you translated them into Chinese, then back into English, what would they say? Something like 'the next time I call rooster, you'll hook up the plow'. Translation is difficult. With dictionaries and a grammar text I can almost handle Latin, except, of course, I miss most of the nuance. I spent several hours teasing out the sense of a couple of lines in Old English. From The Seafarer. About the way a Viking boat moved through the water. The train of thought had been the different ways you could build a boat from oak. I've been thinking about this for years, about how fundamentally different the Nordic boat was from what developed in Western Europe. The Nordic longboat is a flexible skin with a light frame, a ship of the line is a massive frame with a rigid skin. The battle was won by the 44's and the 88's, control of the high seas. Manifest destiny. Could Donald Trump be worse than Andrew Jackson? The real issue is the Supreme Court. The next president stacks that. Don't get me started.