Normal Activity

I operate within constraints, it's hard not to. I cleaned up a bit, before going in to town, a clean tee-shirt (IN COD WE TRUST), which is completely threadbare. On the way in I noticed the special of the day at the Buckeye Dairy Barn was a large serving of hot wings. I like hot wings, but don't make them often because of the mess, so decided to get some on the way home. Even just eating hot wings is difficult, so I plan ahead. Run all my errands, a pint at the pub and the men's semi-final in water-polo. What a brutal sport. And women's wrestling. At Kroger I got some slaw and baked beans, which means using a fork, which means eating the wings with only the left hand. Of course I'm reading a book, held open with a triangular rock, and I have to occasionally turn the page. Ripping flesh and cartilage from the bone, the sauce is flying, but I protect the book I'm reading with a plastic shield. A simple device, a sheet of plastic that protects the book. The wings come with a small container of ranch dressing to which I add half-a-cup of blue-cheese, and several squeezes of lime juice. They're quite good, the beans and the slaw, some olives, some pickles, and those deviled eggs. Ronnie makes the best deviled eggs in the world, but these are pretty good. I was reading the latest Easy Rawlins, and it'll cost me a dollar in fines because I did get a spot of sauce on the damned thing. The largest fine, at the library, that I ever received was $3, for spewing coffee on a Calvin Trillin. I'd been looking at pictures of dwellings on the plains of western Russia, eastern Europe, where there were no trees, but not enough snow to build an igloo, so they framed the houses with mammoth bones and covered them with hides. These are intricate structures, taking advantage of the curvature in tusks and pelvic bones, the hide covering weighted with rocks along the edge, sophisticated and functional. And they had fire, so they could burn dried dung, eat dried meat, and stay alive during a brutal winter. I keep a fire going, with few exceptions, from December to March, November to April, something like that, at least one day a month the temperature rises above fifty and I can shovel ashes from the stove. Maybe keep a fire going from embers. I don't derive meaning from this, it's merely the way the short stick falls, that life-boat from the Essex, or playing first clarinet on the Titanic. In the middle of the night, I get up and eat the left-over chicken wings, every olive and pickle in sight, and a piece of cheese my Mom would have thrown out the window with a cry of 'gardy loo'.