State Fair

I'm not going to the fair. We went to the County Fair, when the girls stayed summers with me, a couple of times, and ate our way through the church dinners. Creamed chicken on egg noodles on mashed potatoes, baked spaghetti with an inch of cheese on top, various things on sticks. The traffic jams were horrible. One of my rules was that you always carried something to read, a book at hand at all times, and we carried a stack of those Trivial Pursuit questions to amuse ourselves while waiting in line. Up most of the night, to work in the relative coolness, then slept until the phone rang. Another of those touching-bases phone calls. I shouldn't marvel anymore that everyone is so easy to find. My phone comes from one direction and my mail from another, so I'm harder to track than most, and it is difficult to actually find me even if you know the general area. Not so, of course, with the locals: park rangers, hunters, people related to people in my cemetery, they all know who I am and where I live. They know too that I look like a madman and shouldn't be disturbed. Joel is right, I am gregarious and enjoy good conversation, but idle chat leaves me cold. I had a dozen oysters, from the last trip to town, steamed them open on the grill and ate them with just a bit of salsa and a squirt of lime juice, remembered the many thousand of these that we roasted on Martha's Vineyard. There were times, September through Christmas, when we had all we could eat, and the driveway was paved with oyster shells. Free-range oysters is a difficult concept to wrap your head around. All you can eat. Oyster Croquettes, oyster stews, an absolutely fabulous Oysters Casino that I now make with a bit of pesto and a sprinkling of green stuff. Fried oysters and onion rings. Oysters in stuffing, raw oysters with just a squirt of hot sauce, a fish stew that featured oyster and crab. Crab is an interesting word, to move sideways. I prefer crab meat to lobster, if it came down to a choice, a cup of crab meat with a walnut (one of my favorite units of measurement) of butter, salt and pepper, on a piece of toast, is about as good as it gets, maybe a vine-ripened tomato in sherry vinegar, a few gherkins and black olives, some of that Irish cheddar. Troll, it seems, is to trundle a hoop. I was confused by this until I remembered playing at hoops (I can't find the name for the baton one uses to keep the hoop rolling) in Birmingham shortly after the hula-hoop was introduced. I suppose early hoops were fashioned from wood but I can't imagine they lasted very long. Our rental house in Birmingham was right across the street from the old deserted campus of Howard University and there were miles of paved walkways. Perfect for trolling. The whole campus was the greatest playground in the world: a medical building, a gym, the blackboards in classrooms still covered with mathematical formula. I had several deeply protected redoubts. stocked with food and water, where I figured to survive nuclear war. Tang and Neco Wafers. Now I keep rice and beans, some salted meat, some dried onion and garlic powder, instant potatoes, some dried herbs, at hand. Some pemmican, some dried fruit, still, it seems clear, I'm going to die. Read more...

Harvesting Water

I need to stop by Goodwill and the get the year's supply of tee-shirts to be cut into filter-cloths. What I should do is recycle my current collection and buy some new ones, but I can buy a bag of clean ones at Goodwill for $2 on any Thursday morning. Some of them would be in better condition than my ragged pile, and I switch them out, the worst of mine for the best of theirs. Of my three all-time favorite tee-shirts, one remains: the "Amanita Trails To You" that Jude made me decades ago. The "In Cod We Trust" and the "Stop Plate Tectonics" both died and were turned into paper. Mostly, now, I wear feed-caps and tee-shirts that don't say anything, or say something I don't agree with, which I collect because they're free. I have to filter things all the time, mostly dirty water (that I boil before using, just for washing) but also various tinctures and condensates. The life of a creek-bank alchemist. It's amazing how close to a river rat I became, moving further up the creeks as society extended. Run a string of crab pots and a trot line or two, you can live for nothing on the water. Samara calls and is worried about my well-being. She's quite concerned and wants me to visit in the fall, to be sure, somehow, that I'm OK.. I agree to visit, when I can drive out at my leisure, maybe spend a second day and night in Nebraska, a state I dearly love; I could live in Valentine, if someone else would cut my wood and do my shopping. The Niobrara is beautiful and the native fish are feisty, a ten inch trout on a slender pole (I have a seven foot bamboo rod that is perfect for fishing under brush), 2 pound-test monofilament that is almost invisible, and it's an interesting battle. Stopped raining long enough for me to get out, stopped and got some daylily buds, mailed some bills, whiskey and vegetables at the store, lunch and a beer at the pub, books at the library, then stopped at the Diary Bar for a shake. A kind of normal day, out in the world. Read more...

Hot Spell

Another day of brutal weather. Even a small walk has me coming home and pouring a gallon of water over my head. Picked enough blackberries for a yogurt/granola bowl and listened to the rehash of speeches from the Democratic Convention. There are several words for the round stick used to stir porridge, if you'd been best kid that day, you got to lick the thibble, which certainly sounds better than licking the spurtle. People ask me what I do with my time. I have several hundred new words which I haven't run through the OED nor any of the other dictionaries, Oldest English Words, Slang And Unconventional English, Webster, Random House. An average day, I probably spend a half-hour or an hour looking up words. The last couple of weeks, that dictionary from Jude, Glenn's visit, words are all but consuming me. I've been spending hours a day with heavy books on my lap. I get up and walk around, go outside to pee. Got just a wee dram of the Japanese single-malt, Hibiki, it's great whisky (without the 'e' in Scotland). I couldn't access the inter-net, I'm in the one percent, so I called a friend, and he fed me information. Said he'd print out a copy, and leave it in the usual place. A rubbish bin on Sixth Street. B is already ahead of me on this, he's made a tubular pillow to distribute the load. A fucking book pillow, why hadn't I thought of that? It's the perfect solution, also, to raising the book a couple of inches, to prevent that crick in the neck. You could spend an hour on 'crick', which, by my standards would be an hour well spent, or you could wonder how to slide printed data into a hole in the wall. Glenn mentioned data several times, and I get it, the way information is parsed, but I use a false identity when I buy anything, pay cash for almost everything, and never use my real name. No one can say it anyway. A guttural that means dried dung. I don't actually mind being called a 'small white turd' though it might be considered hurtful, it seems to me a term of endearment. Storm front moved in and I had to shut down. Rain all night and then a fairly violent front in the morning. I needed water, so I cleaned and sat out three buckets, cleaned my water-heating pot, and got rather well rinsed in the process. The greenery is all drooping and a haze fills the hollow, not as thick as river fog, but dense enough that visibility is limited. Quite comfortable in a wet tee-shirt and boxer briefs, Shoeless Joe, I get together another load of recycling and stuff it in the Jeep. Dripping rain on the roof, the leaves are all free of dust, and there's a wonderful bright sweet smell. Between showers I leave the back door open. Still aware that I could lose power, I made a salsa/cheese omelet to have as a sandwich later. I'm experimenting with a Styrofoam cooker that I tricked up with ethafoam and duct tape. I remember seeing something like this on Cape Cod. Laminated together four pieces of the foam, cutting a hole in three of the pieces that snuggly fit the pot I use most often to cook a pound of dried beans, made a tight-fitting lid of foam, dished to accept the pot's lid, and wrapped everything in a couple of layers of duct tape. Soak a pound of beans overnight in salted water, with a diced onion and a cup of cracklings, bring to a roiling boil and put the pot in the Styrofoam cooker. I lined the inside of the cooker with canvas, but the great thing about ethafoam is that it doesn't pill and flake off. The bad thing is that it's quite expensive. It's used in the art trade as archival packing, and I had saved what I could salvage over the years at the museum. My thinking on this cooking method is that on marginal cold days I usually let the fire in the stove go out after breakfast. First mess of beans are damned near perfect, eight hours. They might have been done in four hours, but I didn't want to break the seal. You could, I think, improve the system by using a ceramic pot and sealing it with a rope of bread dough. The version of this I saw on Cape Cod was a wooden chest filled with either sawdust or hay. The ethafoam works very well. Next experiment is going to involve ox-tail and root vegetables. There's so little energy invested in this system that it's amazing to me. The issue becomes not making heat, but holding it. Boston baked beans, or even something as simple as chicken broth. One hit of heat, while I'm frying an egg, and dinner is simmering. I eat three or four bean meals a month, Great Northern, Black Beans, Pintos, Butter Beans. Beans and cornbread, with fried salt-pork, a couple of pickled hot peppers, is one of great meals ever. Read more...

Piers Ploughman

Almost unreadable, but he uses quite a few archaic words, so I dig him out. In my dotage I'll probably sound like him. Loot is the preterite of let, to permit. "Ye've loot the ponies o'er the dyke." Burns. When I walked up to the window at The Dairy Bar the other day, one of the girls had already made my shake. She said she saw me get out of the Jeep, and that I always got a large vanilla shake. Orlings are the teeth of a comb. "He dragged his fingernail across the orlings of a pocket-comb as though it were an instrument." Bridwell. That luxuriant tuft of grass, where dung has been deposited? a tath. A threve (or thrave) is twenty-four sheaves of wheat. After mounding a threve, one imagines standing and stretching your back. I'm a cheap date, get me a shot whiskey and give me a dictionary. Restoring order I held out the book of Sinhalese proverbs and read through them. Proverbs are a window. "The adz which straightens timber is itself not quite straight." "The barking dogs will not frighten elephants." You don't want a mad elephant. Slodder is sticky mud. Sperage is asparagus, or 'sparrow grass'. Heat index tops out over a hundred again, and aside from an early trip to the outhouse I stayed inside, reading Thoreau and grazing on pickles and cheese. I'd picked up a very good zin, an old vine Lodi. I killed the breaker to the dying fridge. Very quiet, no bugs, no birds, rain coming. Grilled a small steak and cooked a sweet potato in case the power goes out. Grilled the sweet potato until it was about half done, then sliced it into rounds and caramelized them in butter. These are incredibly good. With corn bread and fried salt-pork, it's a meal for the gods; thin shaved steak, tomatoes and mozzarella, a few green leaves, it's out of the park. Read more...

AC

I'd gone to town specifically to buy a window unit for Black Dell, she needed cooler temps. We're operating at the very limit here, and I wanted more flexibility. I talked myself out of buying it because last night was very hot and I could only write between midnight and eight in the morning, but I made some notes. D calls, out of blue, and he has a new window unit he scored at an auction and wants to bring out and install. I mean, really. So he does, it means an extra trip to town to dispose of the packing, but Jesus Christ, he brings an AC unit, a fan, a quart of good balsamic, and jars of pickles. He does all the work, takes out the old unit (which I could not lift) installs the new unit and drinks a hard cider, which he brought. Before he leaves the house is already down to 78 degrees. Black Dell is pleased as punch. And though I'm now part of the strain on the electric grid, I'm comfortable, and D did all of the heavy lifting. After he left I got a wee dram of the Japanese single malt and cooked the week's oysters, steamed open with a dollop of salsa, and a nice avocado with lime juice. D also brought three gallons of drinking water, which only he and TR do, knowing how much water weighs. I'll stash them away against winter. In the old shower, from back when I had running water. I built a lovely shower stall which I now use for food storage, drinking water, dry tee-shirts. It's folly to imagine sense. Picked up the new Freeman book Searching For Sappho, and it's quite good though, of course, we actually know almost nothing about her. Still, a new complete translation of her work, plus some excellent research on the period. Then back into my study of the American Tractor. I only owned tractors for the ten years in Mississippi, first a John Deere tricycle, and then the 8N. I had a wagon ($100) with two axles and four car tires, so I used the tractor most days to haul stuff from one place to another, and for clearing brush. Breaking new ground occasionally, to extend the cornfield, and harrowing land to plant a forage crop. The AC unit goes in the window next to my desk, over the top of my dictionary table. The table is a 30 inch by 5 foot stone black lab counter, with matching two-drawer filing cabinets as a base, and installing the new AC unit means moving piles of reference books, three piles, each about a foot high, and the surrounding smaller volumes, Sri Lanka proverbs, Anglo-Saxon dictionaries, various field-guides, and a bone-yard of antiquated books that were once current. Which means a day of restoring order, and order is not defined. I keep Home Ground on top of one pile, the Yale Shakespeare on another, and the third pile is currently topped with a dictionary of Americanisms. I'm still involved in making cakes from corn. Found an old piece of iron, hammered flat, and use it to make an unleavened corn-cake, as close as I can come to an actual hoe-cake, my current hoe is steel and has a plastic handle, so it wouldn't work very well. It's difficult to make a hoe-cake, they mostly fall into the fire. I recommend a shovel-cake, which works pretty well. On several occasions I've made acceptable bread in a foil boat I seal up and bake right in the coals. It's more like polenta, but goes fine with Cut-Throat trout. Wherever you go, always take a lemon and a few of those little packets of salt and pepper. D had also brought a pineapple, they had been decoration at a festival he and Carma attended. Mid-afternoon I attacked it with my large knife. I did this outside, put a couple of servings aside, sucked the juice and ate what I could from the rest of it. I was so sticky I had to rinse off twice. Heat index above 100 degrees again, but the new AC gets the inside down to 78 degrees, and it's fine, parading around in my underwear, acting like what I imagined a normal person acts like. Read more...

Cello Suites

A couple of hours before I could turn on Black Dell, so I laid out on the floor with my camping pad and listened all the way through the Cello Suites. Rostropovich. Nearly two-and-a-half hours. Yo Yo Ma plays them faster. Didn't go to town for the AC because I had some reading going on and I needed to keep after it, before I forgot what I was looking up. Making notes in longhand that I'd have to decipher later. Subject of the moment is the plow. I was reading about the John Deere Company, they made the steel turning plows that broke the prairie. Then tractors to pull the plows, and all those feed-caps so common in farm country. Their colors, as are the colors for other brands of equipage, are patented or copyrighted and you have to buy from them, which is why my 8N was purple (left-over paint at Rip Raper's Body Shop, Duck Hill, Mississippi). I was at a tractor show in Iowa and actually touched a Minneapolis-Moline UDLX Comfortractor. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen; a sedan model, with windshield wipers. And that great golden yellow paint. There were only 150 of these ever built. Too comfortable for comfort, you needed shit in your face and metal seating, to know that you were working. What is that crap that accumulates? Swarf. The grit worn away from grinding stones, later it becomes metal shavings. A squintard is one who squints. A staithe is a wharf, a stent is an allotted portion of work, I knew that; many a stent I've worked for other people, when they needed to be with family for one reason or another. A stent is a unit of work, you can trade it for a carton of cigarettes. A clear problem with looking something up in many reference books is getting side-tracker by neighboring words. I usually post a small note on the upper left corner of the screen. The current one says Plow (Plough) and has already proven of use several times. At some point I was reading about yoking yak in Tibet. Which led to a brief study of various harness. Which leads to an early drink, and a consideration of what book I might write that would be titled It's All In The Rigging, thinking about the title for B's collected poems, coming out maybe next year. I eat another of the Angus Patties smothered under chilled tomato, mozzarella, and a good balsamic, then clean the plate with several of these wonderful and simple garlic toast/crotons. These are usually quarter slices of bread, smeared with butter, sprinkled with garlic salt and run through the toaster oven; any kind of bread, but B's French loaf is particularly absorbent. The pre-washing aspects of this are important, as water is always an issue; it's a strong argument for keeping a dog but I'd rather the crotons. Plough, of course, in the Britannica, and that side-bars me into 'ough' as an ending. A location, certainly, borough, slough (usually pronounced 'slew' in the south); and I finally look up, from a dictionary of Americanisms, where slew can mean a mess, and remember that wasn't what I was trying to find out about. There are Egyptian depictions of plows, but then the ground being plowed was all alluvial silt and a fire-hardened stump crotch could last a couple of years. There must be a bronze-edged plow in a tomb somewhere, iron held a better edge, but steel, that was the thing. I have to read about making steel, forcing carbon into the mix under higher temps, coal into coke to provide the extra push. I've only ever made small quantities of charcoal, but I'd like too make a large serious pile, one I could walk on and poke with a stick. All Universities with a ceramic program have an accumulation of dead clay. I could cover a charcoal mound with clay and have tight control on the burn. It's fair to say, that if I put my mind to it, I could make very good charcoal. Which would allow me, with a bellows, to make bronze. Four or five to one with tin. Bells again. The sixth seems to be written for a different stringed instrument, a cello with five strings. Go figure. Read more...

Accepting Fate

Had to pay land taxes, so I'd gone into town earlier than usual, prepared to wait in line, but I was in and out in just a few minutes. Buy the Daily Times and a cup of coffee and go below the floodwall to read the ads for window AC units. Looks like I am going to have to drive to Lowe's, as they have just what I need, cheaper than anyone else; also I could buy some extra light-bulbs, for next winter, and a few of those small drill-bits that always break. From the remaindered bin, I bought four Angus patties, and some Mozzarella. I love these early tomatoes, with diced cheese, balsamic vinegar and a goodly twist of pepper. Spoffle is to make one's self busy over a trifle. Too hot to think. Even with an overhead fan and a small desk-top unit, sitting perfectly still, I sweat. I'll go out tomorrow and get the AC, but today I have to finish reading Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, which I didn't read when it came out a couple of years ago. But now, with Trump being nominated, paranoia seems in order. Bloody hot by mid-morning and Black Dell is bitching. Basho:

firefly viewing---
the boatman is drunk,
the boat unsteady

As Pynchon says, "There are always secular back-up stories." Trifle and folly are both diminished in the way they morph in definition. Something about the abject Christianity of the RNC is driving me crazy. I can't listen to the news so I read another old thriller, Erskine Childers' Riddle Of The Sands, 1903 (I thought it was 1908) and it's still a riveting read. Childers was dead by firing squad after the 1916 rebellion. The boletes are fruiting, with rain and hot days, and I harvest a mess, to make a mushroom gravy for one of the Angus Burgers. Excellent fare. Jude pointed out that 'mess' was also a call to dinner, the officer's mess, for instance, in addition to being the meal itself, a mess of greens, a mess of clams or oysters, enough for a meal. My solar shower got too warm, and I used it to wash some dishes, refilled it with room-temperature water and rinsed off after a walk. An Angus Burger, I suspect, is a Scottish yahoo from Worcestershire. I was laughing out loud when a phone interviewer ask me if I would vote for The Donald, no, I told her, I'd rather vote for Nixon's dog. Read more...

Preterite of Mash

Mush. A porridge of oatmeal or corn. As muss is a scramble. Heavy blast of rain in the morning. I'd gotten coffee and was rereading myself, sieving for extra commas. I'm up to 'T' in the dictionary Jude sent, reading it as a narrative, thar is to need, theak is to thatch, and theat, a word I've never heard, means close or sound, as a theat barrel is one that does not leak. Well after dawn I'm reading by headlamp and shut down everything when the leaves turn inside out and a big line of wind sweeps in from the NW. A violent front, then pelting rain, twenty minutes later it's dead calm and the birds come out, perching on the sumac and shaking water off their feathers. That beautiful sparrow hawk came back, to preen on the branch of a hickory, quite colorful when a woodpecker comes to check for bugs flushed out of the bark. Quite surprised by the fact that Joel played tuba in the high school band. Nothing should surprise me anymore, but almost everything does. Go figure. Last time I was at Kroger and Yoder's Cornmeal Mush, in a plastic tube, was on sale. This is as good as I make, a basic simple thing, so I bought a couple. I fry two or three slices in bacon fat or butter, top them with an egg, a piece of toast with bitter Scottish marmalade. It's one of my favorite meals, maybe add sausage or bacon on special occasions, a slice of ham, a hash of chicken gizzard and shallot. Also I like all of those cream soups served room-temperature or cold, squash soups or berry soups, the green one I make from watercress and sorrel. Looks like pease porridge cold, but with a dollop of sour cream and a few grinds of black pepper, it's a whole different thing. A new window AC unit is on the list because the heat is getting to me. Black Dell is being cranky. B stops by, a rare visit, to say he and the boys enjoyed making music for Glenn and me as audience, which is cool, because we enjoyed being there. The last thing Glenn said to me was that he had to work on his calluses. I call Jude, to thank her for the dictionary, and we talk about Cape Cod, in the day. Everyone played music, everyone read Greek and Latin, Harvey was always speaking in Spanish, a neap dish, mashed turnips with pepper and sea salt, I love this with lots of butter and a flash of apple brandy. Read more...

Passing Strange

Thump in the night and I go outside with a flashlight. Something had hit the back wall of the house. A dead baby possum with an owl sitting on top. Must have been too heavy. I turn off the flashlight and go back inside, never one to disturb an owl's dinner. Got a wee dram, made a snack of goat cheese and sweet gherkins, then read Thoreau for a while. He just got back from the Maine woods. Got another load of recycling together, and various clothing items to take to the Goodwill. Need to let the back thresh-hold dry completely, before I dig into the carpenter-ant damage. I need a rooflet over the back door. I meant to get out, drive down and look at the new bridge construction, but I got into a groove of thinking about various things I needed to get done, the back porch, the thresh-hold, changing refrigerators, stocking the larder, so I pretty much sat still, the entire day, visualizing projects. Putting a small roof over the back door will be an interesting project. As a challenge, I only want to use materials I can fashion with a hatchet and a draw-knife. I need two brackets, crotches or knees, however you want to go, and a miniature roofing system (maybe the plastic coffee cans), and it wouldn't matter if the whole thing leaked a bit. Things leak, it's a fact of life. It would need to be stout, what with the ice droppage in the late winter and spring, probably a metal roof, the plastic coffee cans wouldn't last a year. I think I'll just build up the thresh-hold with a couple of layers of synthetic wood and screw a compressible gasket on top of that. The back porch is no big deal, I'll pay Rodney to screw it down. Glenn thought the dying fridge could be a storage closet, a back-up pantry, so I'm going to save it for a year and see if I use it. Put it against the NE corner of the house and it would never be in the sun, a great place to store corn-meal and grits, cured smoked hog jowls, a host of beans, wasabi; and parsnips in the late winter, when the sugars are converted. I've been eating a lot of sweet potatoes recently, with butter and black pepper. I make some chips, with parsnips and sweet potatoes, in used peanut oil, I'd already cooked flounder fillets and hush-puppies, and they're excellent, when I dip them, warm, into aioli, there's a phase change. More thunder moving in, I'd better go. Read more...

Dating Events

I'm not very good at this, too many places, too many faces, so I rely on people with better memory. Glenn, for instance, can actually remember things in context. Jude too, and TR, B has great recall (to call again, G. Spencer Brown), but I can barely remember where I was. So a visit with Glenn tends to put things in perspective. For instance I had recently decided I wholly fabricated an event, removing the broken bell from the church, but it turns out that it did actually happen AND more or less as I imagined/remembered. Mildly shocking. Fritz setting his sport-coat pocket on fire with a lit pipe? It happened. Herbert drawing perfect free-hand circles on scraps of Upson Board (a wall covering composed completely of glued and pressed paper), he did. That the whole sick crew, for a few years in there, was as good as I imagined/remembered, it was. Now I'm beginning to think there was a Janitor College, and I was trained as a CIA agent to infiltrate a foreign country as a custodian that didn't speak the language. Next thing you know I'll be playing the guitar. What did Kevin say? I have large palms and little fingers, so I tend to finger the chords differently. I have to cut back on the radio, the political bullshit is just too deep. Best just be a hill-walker and keep the pantry stocked. B and Ronnie picked five gallons of blackberries on Thursday, and Ronnie was quite bloody from a thousand pricks, sitting at the end of the bench down at B's, playing guitar and dobro, then banjo, singing with his eyes closed. Ronnie did the math and after buying the necessary sugar, he stood to make maybe $50. His jam sells for $7 a pint. Not a great profit margin. I've been watching wasps build a nest in the space between the thermo-paned window. They have an access port, between the sashes, come back to the nest and vomit paper. I'm completely fascinated. Once, in three days of close observation, a wasp comes back to the nest with a bubble of paper foaming out of its mouth. I've been saving wasps' nests, to make a sheet or two of paper. There's quite a bit of particulate matter that needs to be removed (by soaking) and it seems fairly delicate, but I'm sure I can make a couple of sheets. It might be a good medium for block prints. It's a very weak fiber but I could make it fairly thick, and make a small press with a little 3 ton jack to compress it. Some Indian paper is polished, by hand, with a smooth stone or a bone folder, and that would further strengthen the sheet. It's a complete folly, making two sheets of paper from wasp's nests, but it seems like an interesting thing to do. Glenn brought several single-malts and we didn't drink half of it. One of them, a 16 year old Lagavulin, is a winter sipping whisky, set aside. So much peat as to turn your head around. Also one of the Japanese single-malts, quite light and very smooth, and another, cask in used sherry barrels. The Japanese bottle is lovely. Tricked-out a nice new shower, with a shipping pallet as a base, a pulley and tie-off cleat for the solar bag. I have a black square of plywood I heat the bag on, and I keep a five-gallon bucket of ambient temperature water at hand, for the occasional douse. I like using a liquid soap, so I don't have to waste water lathering. Another thing I noticed, having people over for dinner, was how much water we used. 25 gallons in three nights just doing dishes. In my primitive mode, this is a lot of water, water weighs a lot, 62.5 pounds a cubic foot, moving it around is a pain in the ass, I'd rather not move it twice. Five gallons of water is just short of a cubic foot. Despite visual evidence, it's difficult to translate a cylinder to a cube. 2.4 comes up a lot, hectares and centimeters, two clicks NW, on the weather channel, later I avow any knowledge. I thought I made that up. Read more...

Landform and Drainage

Glenn came over from the lodge late morning, and I'd performed my ablutions. When I'd finished a few things, cleaning out the passenger seat of junk mail, dishes from last night, we were off to town, stopped at the pub, for a beer and lunch, then at Kroger for a few things, prepping for a couple of guests. Ribs tomorrow, with Drew and B. B agreed to make a loaf of bread, Drew is bringing another bottle of wine. Glenn had brought a bottle from the vineyard where he and Linda pick grapes for a month in the fall. All I have to do is cook the ribs, which I certainly can do. Of course B will make a loaf of bread, though it is not nothing, but he does it well and wants to contribute, his answer is immediate, as is Drew's to bring a bottle of wine. Tomorrow night should be good. Will be, actually, because it's a great chemical mix, history, drainage, and whether or not. Tuesday night is B and Drew and ribs, slaw and bread; Wednesday night is TR and a pork tenderloin, tomatoes and mozzarella, sweet potatoes; Thursday we eat a late lunch at the pub, go down to B's and listen to home-grown music, with Ronnie, Kevin, and B on bass. Great conversations, music, poetry, state of the electorate, world history, life on the creek. Glenn comes back in with me, after the improv music session, even though it means another walk down the driveway by flashlight. Uncommonly, we talk politics. He and Linda will vote by mail and be in France when the election comes down, not a bad strategy, and I'll be replacing the back thresh-hold, which rotted through, or replacing the trap for the kitchen sink. I have a cushion, several years actually, that I've squirreled aside, rice and beans, some seeds; a slightly Mormon drift; Boy Scout crap, be prepared. Glenn left right from the lodge, so I slept in, made a nice omelet with goat cheese, read for an hour, then went to town. He paid for everything while he was here, and I needed some supplies, another ream of paper, a couple of sweet potatoes; and I wanted to spend an hour at the library, getting back into my groove, flirting with the reference librarian while we tracked down a book; and I didn't want it on his tab. Cory had two new beers on tap and he wanted my opinion, happy to sample a micro-brew, I voted against the lemon shanty and for the hoppy porter that was like an IPA with body. I'd already eaten in town, still stopped for a large vanilla shake, and got home, primed to write, when a vicious thunderstorm moved through. Mid-afternoon dark. Pelting rain. I listen to the radio until the power goes out. I think about guard-rails, because Glenn said there was a crew, out on 125, and we passed them several times. They had a trailer mounted stop light they moved along, photovoltaic, to control traffic, and they were very efficient. Still, there were side roads and driveways, cars going the wrong way, so it became an adventure. Read more...

Gloss Over

Reading Basho. I'd gone into town and bought groceries, three meals at least. I had no list, so, of course, in forgot some things, the pub doesn't open until four on Saturday and TR wasn't at the museum, so I was in and out pretty quickly. Stopped for my large vanilla shake, and Jesse, from the liquor store was there, we talked about his building project; stopped by B's to tell him Glenn would be here, unloaded and put stuff away, turned on the radio and got a drink. 70 years old today and damned if I don't feel it, parts wearing thin. A particular poem I was looking for, after the trip to town, looking at the flooded lowlands:

in summer rains
the crane's legs
become short

That's from the summer of 1681. I do a rearrangement of books, so that the books on the floor ALL have their spines facing out. This would seem common sense, but I seem to have formerly, I would never do it now, just thrown books in a pile. Doesn't past muster with my new sense of quasi-organization but I'm dowff (dispirited, weary) and I'd managed to put off building another bookshelf, so there are four piles of books, not more than a hundred, that needed to find a place. I moved the boxes of recycling into the back of the Jeep, I cleaned up around the stove. I'll spend an hour vacuuming tomorrow morning, and sling-blade the path to the outhouse, then I figure I'll be ready for people at the house. I need to clean the junk mail out of the passenger side of the Jeep. I'd thought if I used nothing but junk mail to start fires, I'd be able to keep up with it, but I mostly start fires anymore with butter wrappers (I save them all year, in the freezer) and Kroger check-out receipts that I just wad-up and toss in the kindling bucket. My kindling is so dry, from it's final time on the plate-warming rack above the cookstove, that one receipt or butter wrapper will start a fire. Also I need to organize the area where I'm storing the plastic coffee cans. Frogers "Black Silk", which is great in my espresso maker. I didn't think I drank much coffee, two cups a day usually, but I drink it very strong, and it adds up. These are quite cool plastic cans and I want to reuse them somehow, as a form for cast concrete, or as a roof for the sauna I've been thinking about. Idle curiosity, but it is interesting to save some aspect of your trash, just to see what there is. Starbucks coffee cups, or snuff cans, or candy wrappers, soda cans, used condom wrappers, those small white bags that once held a footer and an order of onion rings; it's an intimate look at yourself. For myself, I realize I eat quite a bit of butter and I drink more coffee than I thought. Read more...

Unknown Words

This book from Jude is excellent, The Lost Beauties Of The English Language, is a real hoot. I'd expect nothing less, as for several years I was the only recipient of her "Bizarre Book Of The Month Club" which included a field guide to amputation. 'Deave', for instance, means to deafen, stun, or perplex with loud noise. I just read, in another context, that the military was pursuing a sound loud enough to kill an enemy, or in their words, to turn the gut to jelly. Running a chainsaw can be 100 decibels, 150 decibels can do serious damage. A strong storm moved through today, I saw it coming, and closed down everything, and sure enough lost power for several hours, so dark I had to read with a headlamp, 'deftster' is one who is deft. Of course. I have a lot of dictionaries, you wouldn't believe, and entire table, because most of them have to stay flat because they're so large, and what I find is that most of these new words (I'm sure I'm to become insufferable) fell out of usage before 1900, except for a lot of the Scottish words that came from the French. I come back, many times, to how difficult it must have been to codify English, a vernacular language that borrowed from everywhere. Those early printers had work to do. A dene is a woody valley of small extent. Rain hammering on the roof, an early glass of whiskey, and I spend the whole day reading words. Edward Gorey told me once that you should everything as if it were a 19th century novel. I called Glenn, for an ETA, and he'll stop south of Indianapolis for the night and should be here Sunday noon, so I'll need to go to town tomorrow, to lay in supplies. He'll bring a couple of good single-malts and I've arranged a couple of meals in my head, ribs, tenderloin, a chorizo dish, and I can get most of it tomorrow, but we'll have to get to town, to see the exhibit at the museum and stop at the pub. I'll be off-line for a week, it doesn't mean that I'm dead, it just means I'm having a conversation with an actual live person. Call it a vacation. Writing is so difficult and I write so fucking slowly, it'll be a treat, to engage with such a sharp intelligence. Mostly I talk with crows and rabid coons. The coons I kill with a steel spade that has a five foot handle, the crows I run off, when I want to be alone, and turn off the radio. Everything is interference. Twissle is that place where a branch emerges from a tree. Read more...

The Crows

So much moisture that the under-story is growing like mad, the blackberry and sumac, my patch of black cohosh is knee deep. Between showers the crows came back, the three of them looking like battered soldiers in a retreating army. They perched on the dead poplar near the outhouse and started squawking. I micro-waved mice for them, and they shut up right away when I came out the back door, they do love their warmed mice. These are old crows, I've known them for years, and they recognize me, they follow me on my walks. Like with the fox, this is not domestication, it's just critters sharing a piece of real estate. The crows should be down at the lake, eating hot dogs and potato chips, but the road is closed and no one uses that facility, building the new bridge; across the lake there are paddle-boats and canoes, grills and picnic tables, a nice campground; but my end of the lake, is cut off and isolated, old crows can't compete against the younger generation, so they stop by here, to see if I have a mouse. Mid-morning I take a nice walk down the logging road, there's some young poke, I like to roll it in very spicy masa and fry it in corn oil. The clear weather holds and I make a quick trip into town. Mostly I want a milk-shake at the diary bar, but it's Thursday, fresh seafood day, so I go on in to Kroger and get oysters, steam them open, and make a perfect oyster stew. It's takes about ten minutes, I dampen the coffee filter, to strain the liquids, with bottled clam juice, wilt some minced onion in butter, add the broth and cream. I have a couple of things I must do before next winter, put a new top on the back porch, change out the fridge, install a back porch railing so I don't fall on my ass, and build another bookcase in the girl's old bedroom. The book situation is reaching a critical mass. Jude sent this great book of archaic definitions. Covine, for instance, is just a deceitful practice by which two or more parties screw a third party. Stopped at a traffic light, I look out the side window, wondering who had screwed who. A small field of tansy. Another thunder storm, I'd better go. Read more...

American Tractor

Excellent book that is a history, with photographs and specifications, The American Tractor. The Model T Ford had a four-cylinder engine that was rated at about 20 horsepower; in Mississippi I had a 1955 Ford 8N tractor that was rated at about 26 horsepower. It is said that you could still assemble an 8N from available parts for about $4,000, new it sold for about $750, I paid $1,000 for mine in 1982. I had to get Rip, a great farm mechanic, to come out to the house one time, in nearly ten years, to replace a fuel line. Rip had gone over the entire thing, steamed cleaned, and painted it, when I first got it. I loved that tractor and used it almost every day. It had PTO (Power Take-Off), so I could cut brush, drill post-holes, plow, cultivate. Quite safe on level ground, so everyone that visited wanted to drive it, and I'd use the free labor to cultivate new ground, or to drag firewood to the woodshed. I moved the entire print shop down to the new house, when I finally got it built, and I used to move the chicken house on a regular basis because chickens completely denude a piece of ground in a hurry (and they compact the soil) but I could move the house, disc the former plot, and plant tomatoes, which can stand very hot (nitrogen rich) soil. The chickens would could over, from their new location, and eat all the bugs. We had dozens of systems and sub-systems in Mississippi and lived on no money, none, until Samara was born and I built a couple of barns and houses for other people because we needed some actual cash flow. We produced a surplus, especially the first five years, because there was a land-contract with a single annual payment ($5,400) due in the fall. We made this nut by saving cash, it was a strictly cash economy, that we had saved selling milk and beer and various other things. I'd pay Joe Couch in cash, and he'd sign off, he never thought we'd make it and that he'd get the place back. Early, the fifth year, we paid the note off because I'd started to free-range pigs, letting them eat the acorn mast and I had 20 or so prime animals that sold at auction for over $100 each. Big Roy and I were making sausage, we made a lot of sausage, and when we'd locked orders for 100 pounds, we'd kill a pig, save the prime cuts, and turn everything else into sausage. We'd make a hundred dollars each, cash, and have excellent pork, and pork fat, and cracklings for several weeks. Roy was the resident butcher for the black section of Duck Hill, locally called Babylon, and he loved to call me to bring my tractor and cart over, to haul a dead animal. I was always the only white guy. We'd skin out a steer, and I'd cut it in half with an electric saw, carve out pieces which his wife and oldest kids would wrap and label. He had a meat band-saw on his back porch, which I thought was incredibly cool, and a meat grinder, and several freezers. We could process a lamb or deer in an hour. If we had a project that was going to take several hours, he'd start a pot of meat scraps cooking, throwing in potatoes, carrots and onions, a calf's head, pig lungs. His wife, Mary, had her hands full with kids and grand-kids, and I'd help her put them to sleep, reading stories, then we'd drink a little moonshine and tell lies around a fire. Mary would make a couple of large pones of cornbread and we'd eat "Slaughter Stew". We knew it would end, all things, as they say, and Colorado was the promised land, somewhere you could actually get dry after a shower. When I got up this morning, my desk was wet in condensed moisture. Where I rest my arm, and the body oil is thick, moisture collects on the surface; you can see this, it isn't an illusion. I just wipe it off with a paper towel and get down to business. Read more...

Stress Failure

Technology advances from mistake to mistake. Reading about bridge failures and aqueduct failure. Perfect day for it, rain all night and all day and I can't help but think of all the canceled cook-outs. They'll probably cancel the fireworks on the river in town. It's cool, when they have them, I hear them an see flashes in the sky from the house. I actually went once. Too many people, too much noise, but exciting. I read about the Chinese invention of gun powder and fireworks, one crazy dude strapped 15 rockets to a chair and blew himself up. His descent would have been by parachute, which the Chinese had a thousand years before the west. Rubber was first known in Europe when Columbus came back the second time, he'd seen some natives bouncing balls. The bouncing ball entered Europe about the same time as popcorn. They probably had an air-filled pig bladder or something before that, but no rubber. Rubber is interesting in many regards, specific gravity of .95, 59 pounds a cubic foot, but it doesn't absorb water, so you could float it downstream. Started raining quite hard in the afternoon, so I shut down and sat in the dark. Harvest enough rain to do some dishes, take a bath, and wash my hair; clean a bucket and catch an additional 5 gallons. A story by T. C. Boyle in the New Yorker, I like his stories but I'm not a fan of his novels. Sitting on the sofa, I haven't gotten dressed for days, reading with the headlamp even though I can see by the little green light on my monitor that I have electricity. Thinking about that old Tom Rush song, Driving Wheel, and I put on some music, Skip James, then Greg Brown. Reflecting. Then I hear them, the cloud cover is too dense to see, but I hear the celebration. The Fourth of July, bombs bursting in air, the rain held off for a while, so they could do the rocket's red glare. It's good that people not be disappointed. I'm slightly pissed that I can't grill the Chorizo, I just slice it in half, fry it in bacon fat, with a perfect sunny-side egg steamed in vermouth, and have it with buttered toast. It's good, but it's not what I had imagined. Jesus, if I'd have bought artichoke futures, last spring, I'd be a rich man. Read more...

Cast Iron

Cleaned and re-seasoned a couple of skillets; write a post-it note to myself to remember to stop at the used appliance store and get a couple of the cast iron 'eyes' from a gas range to fabricate a new grate for the cook stove. You wouldn't think the firebox would get that hot, but they deform and melt a bit. Stanley Waterford makes a replacement grate, of course, they know it's going to fail, but they're over $200 and I can fabricate one for $10. The fox came for a visit, barked her demand for an apple, and it was a lovely diversion from the history of technology. Then talked with TR about upcoming grad school, we never mentioned Poe, but we did talk about bells and change-ringing. He mentioned a Scandinavian composer (living) that works with bells. I found a beautiful arrowhead on the driveway, what I call a bird-point, a completely intact piece, which is quite surprising because it had been dug out of a creek bed, then spread on the driveway, then graded a couple times. After I soaked it in water and cleaned it with a soft toothbrush I could see where every flake had been popped loose. Masterful pieces of work. Folsom points are elegant, the absolute connection between European stone work of the time, Magdelanian, corresponds almost exactly with Folsom stone-work. I tend not to believe in coincidence, as a matter of course, but that would require an east to west expansion, following the ice-front in hide boats, the Shetland's, then Iceland, at an early time. My personal belief is that different people were here, 25,000 years ago, on both coasts; a Japanese boat blown off course, a Viking hunting seal: it's difficult to miss a continent. There was a dig, recently, on the islands off California, which gave dates 20,000 years old. There is no way that people could have gotten all the way south in 12,000 years. The Amazon is too difficult, even with that tool kit, stone axes and fire; and then establishing a culture, high in the mountains, based on freeze-dried potatoes. Those tall natives are a different race. Evidence of that whole culture, Oz, in the middle of the jungle. A nap, then back up at midnight to catch Beal Street on the radio, a wonderful shit-kicking couple from Alaska, a peddle- steel, and a mammoth Stratocaster, excellent stuff. Fully awake and stuffed full of sweet potato, a smoke on the back porch in the dark (not wanting to attract bugs) listening to night sounds. Extremely dark, a little tree-rain, and a sweet smell coming off the forest. Could be honeysuckle, but it smells a bit more jasmine-like. I have no idea what it is, but it's a lovely scent. I was down in a little State Forest plot of walnut trees, maybe five acres, planted in a grid (government work) checking out something I had read about walnut roots emitting a toxin that kept down the competition. There were no other tree saplings, none; and there was an odd smell, just a little nasty and not at all like the smell of oak trees and fern. Not strong, but a little under the tongue and distasteful. This test plot of trees is over on the river road, and while they're building the new bridge I'll be going into town or coming home that way fairly often, so I stop by, look and smell. I realized that I'd never been in a grove of native Black Walnut trees before. Individual trees, certainly, and I've harvested and used the timber, but never in a dense stand of artificial-wild trees. They need thinning. On the other hand, sometimes it's good to just watch what happens. Still, in this case, planting on a grid and all, it probably should be a managed forest, so it needs thinning. Late at night, the only light is my computer screen, so there's a bug issue. I clean the screen with Bounce sheets that I get out of the dryers at the laundromat (I hate the things, they make me break out in hives) because they work very well and the smell keeps the bugs off for a while. But since I started washing my underwear and socks in a five gallon bucket with a butter-churn dasher, I haven't been going to the laundromat as often. I can't believe I just said that. It took me about thirty minutes to figure out what I wanted to say, and then what language would allow me to say. I did buy a dasher, at the junk store, and the pub supplies me with five-gallon buckets, the pickles come in them, and it rains all the time, so there's water. The fact that Bounce sheets serve as an anti-bug agent should make them suspect. Moths don't like the smell. It was B, I'm sure, that said I could just wash my socks by hand. The next thing you know I'm down on the riverbank pounding my tee-shirts with rocks. Of curse, course, right? I can't possibly testify to what you remember. We ate some codfish cakes with aioli, we all agreed they were pretty good. Read more...

Just Thinking

More traffic than usual, then I realized it was Friday, before a three-day weekend, and it was the first of the month and many people get a check of some kind. Kroger was swamped. Saving grace is that most everyone was filling their carts and I only needed a few things, the self-checkout lanes were open and I got out quickly. Celebrate with onion rings and a footer, in addition to a large shake, at The Buckeye Diary Bar on the way home. People out and about. I stop to collect some day-lily buds, and find a nice batch of cattail sprouts. One great thing about holidays is that almost everyone is busy so there's very little chance of interruption. I was, though, interrupted, while pulling cattail, by a park ranger. He pulled over to ask what I was doing and I told him that I liked to eat the sprouts; after he told me that I was actually breaking the law, he asked how to cook them. He pulled a mess too. Mess is an interesting word. Being raised in a military family, mess-hall, mess-call, mess in general, were words commonly used. Also mess as indicating enough of something for a meal, sometimes meaning a surplus, we caught a mess of fish, for instance. Stopped at the bottom of the hill, coming in, I'm not going to go out again until Tuesday soonest, so I breathe a sigh of relief. Copious reading matter, a great huge timeline of the history of technology from Joel, some manuscripts, and, thinking about Dorothy Sayers, I thought about that Irish writer, executed for insurrection, that wrote The Riddle of the Sands, also an excellent book, and I have a copy somewhere. I'm sure I can find it. It's blue. The driveway has taken a beating, the last few weeks of rain; the drains are still running clean, but the grader ditch clogs with silt. It's no joke to say that a clog often starts with a stick and a few leaves. When I walked in and out more often, I'd use a hoe as a walking stick, and break up any small dams that had developed. Recent years I tend to just batten down, eat from the larder, don't venture out, wait for the snow to melt, pick a good time, when the driveway is either frozen or dry, and make a run for supplies. In the mean time, little dams have diverted water over into the ruts and they've eroded away. The ditch has jumped, and water, when it has its way (as it usually does) can do enormous damage. Going down is easy, point zero, zero one miles per hour, but coming back up you have to use the gas, and control becomes an issue. You don't want to power over the edge, which you could easily do, if you bounced out of the rut. It's just another thing to be anxious about. So I always stop, at the bottom of the hill, and collect my wits. On average I make the trip, down and up, 52 times a year, but I could easily cut that to 12 trips, then four, then two. A sign at the bottom of the hill might say Diminishing Returns. High rise buildings are dependent on elevators so it's interesting to see how that technology developed. Read more...