Gazette

An abstract of current events, the exact sequence is a bit murky. Kim left this morning early, brushed his teeth and out the door. This is the way I leave places also, grab a coffee and a breakfast burrito on the road; a travel day is a travel day, and that means hitting the road. Great couple of days talking about theater (where we met), building techniques, brickwork, inter-personal dynamics, and F 1 racing. I'd been quite sick last week, something I ate, and was weak, still suffering intestinal havoc, when he got here Friday evening. Rallied, fixed dinner (chorizo, vegetables, saffron rice), he went for on walks Saturday and Sunday, I stayed home and rested so we could talk long into the night. Our history goes way back. Rained both full days he was here, so we just stayed at the house; we spent a fair amount of consideration on trying to establish a time-line. He's better at this than me because he took less LSD. He always brings a bottle or two of good whiskey (he has two drinks a year, both of them at my house) and more than pays his way. We're extremely comfortable with each other's company, which was always the key to success with the crew we assembled to do theater and opera back in the day. They were formative years for both of us. I did get outside today, walked as far as the head of the driveway, weak as a kitten, and it felt good, all sunlight and glistening leaves. Later ate some leftovers, started a list of foodstuffs I needed to replace, read back over a few things I'd been writing about, to try and find the thread. Before Kim got here, I'd marked pages in a couple of books, and set them aside "to be pursued later" and picked up the top book off that pile, which was The Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 11, and the marked article was on Gibraltar. I spend a couple of hours, following tributaries, feeling my working self getting back in gear. I remembered thinking that I knew nothing about Gibraltar, and it had been mentioned a great many times in the Nelson book. Thus the post-it. It is interesting, the location, the fortifications and I make a note to get a book on Gibraltar. I've read, though I'm not to be trusted on this, that it was a natural dam, in the beginning, that made the Mediterranean a fresh water lake, but that the dike broke during one of the warm spells between ice-ages. This event has been described to me as the Mother Of All Waterfalls, and I have an image of that in my mind. The straight was opened, the Med became brackish, land emerged, Crete, Corsica, the Greek islands, they got covered with guano and the first thing you know, civilization. We emerge from the shit of birds, it's like the last of the dinosaurs pass the torch, then we pass the torch, to whatever species can survive our pollution, rats, or ants, or roaches.