Story Board

It starts raining in the night. Cool enough, when I get up to pee, that I shut some windows, and put on my bathrobe. I'd been working on a paragraph for several hours, trying to align punctuation with what was said, had drifted off to into a consideration of the ambiguity of language. How emphasis is enhanced by structure. How structure is achieved. Finally nodded into a dream where little people were stacking large blocks of stone to build abutments for a bridge. Hours later, when the rain reminded me to pee, I picked up the thread of what I had been saying, saw clearly that there needed to be a comma before the conjunction. I often enjamb beyond my intent in the interest of being clear. The nature of the affliction. Joel gives me a raft of shit, well deserved, because I often fail to see the pile of yak dung. He calls while on dialysis, which sweetens the pot. In training for being blind, I seldom turn on any lights for mundane chores, going to pee, getting a drink, rolling a smoke. Rolling a cigaret in the dark was by far the most difficult. You need to know which edge is gummed, but there is a pattern and that's the key. The gummed strip is always on the inside top edge of the fold as it emerges from the pack. Learn to do this with your left hand, so that with your right hand, using a thumb and two fingers, you can pick up just enough tobacco for a smoke. When I succeed at this, more than half the time (54%) I'm proud, if I have to light a match or a candle, it's no big deal. As a test to my faith, the goat-suckers are out in force. I swear, when they were goading me down the stairways of hell, shackled like a slave, the soundtrack was always those goddamn Whip-O-Wills. Listen, I love a few things, the Cello Suites, Greg Brown, those last drawings Modigliani sketched without second thought; and I don't like other things, pretense, bad pottery, inexact language, so I figure I'm nearly normal. You like some things and don't care for others, welcome to the game, or the race, or whatever it is. It cleared a bit in the middle of the day, found a few morels and made a nice tapenade, clouds move back in with thunder, I shut down and took a nap. Rain on the roof wakes me. My earliest memory is of rain on a Quonset hut, last time we lived in one, on a Naval base in Maryland. Mom says this isn't possible because I was not yet two. Leaf-out is probably 25% on the ridge, nearly 100% along the river road into town. Saw a river tug pushing a load of road trusses up river. These are made at a huge yard outside Cincinnati where I've often stopped to watch them move very large things. They also make pre-stressed concrete roof panels which I figure are quite heavy. The weight limit must be whatever the weight limit is for the road that gets them to the river. Around here it's coal trucks, and I think the load limit is between 100,000 and 120,000 pounds. Factored out per axle. But still, there's a section of road over in Kentucky, on my route to Florida, a dozen or so miles, between a power plant and a coal mine, where the ruts are dangerous. I did the math on this, back when I could do math, figuring the coal at about 90 pounds a cubic foot, specific gravity of about 1.5, though I have no idea where I got those numbers. They mound the trucks with a shape that roofers would call a 'pyramid-hip-on-a-gable' which I'm sure puts them ten or twenty thousand pounds over the weight limit. There are never any cops on this section of road. I go this way to Florida, because there's a stretch of the road in Virginia and North Carolina that is absolutely stunning, and I love the geography, on the high ground, until dropping down at Columbia, to the coastal plain. Then hundreds of thousands of acres of pine trees. Until I was 16 I was pretty sure I'd end up being a swamp rat. You could tie up a house boat or whatever hull you'd re-floated on hundreds of miles of tributaries to the St. John's River. Easy life, in some ways, no bills, no debt, but it's difficult to get a library card, and you have to dock close enough to a town to row in and get supplies. The ridge is a good substitute, the isolation, the quiet, the darkness, though I do miss the lapping of small waves. More than compensated by the wind in the trees. Rain on the roof, thunder, I'd better go.