Beal Street

Electric blues after midnight. I got up to stoke the stove and I was hungry. Turned on the radio, silky, hot blues from Memphis. Made a great cheese toast topped with a perfect egg, salsa, half an avocado, and electric guitar played very loud. It's snowing again, I can hear the flakes almost sizzle against the ground. All winter I keep three gallons of wash water on the stove. There's a stone side counter, where I set it when I'm cooking, but usually it's on the stove, I can dip out hot water as I need it. I'm so careful with water it's ridiculous, but it's not a carbon footprint thing, it's just that water is heavy. Right now I have about twenty gallons of wash water, three gallons of filtered drinking water, five liters of enhanced (B vitamins) water, and several half-gallons of juice, when there's snow, I melt a gallon of water a day. That's ten or twelve gallons of snow. It's a messy system, using a specific dust-pan for shoveling the snow, stamping off my boots, but the house needs the moisture, so I don't mind making a mess. Carrying in an armload of wood every day adds to the amount of crap. I keep after this, like an old cripple, sweeping up little piles of bark and feeding them to the stove. Reading about Dante, the eternal exile, already writing on paper, 1310, earlier than I had thought. Dipping a quill into ink (oak-gall and soot) and drawing squiggly lines. What signifies. The modern world is born in the High Middle Ages. Language is codified. I always forget how the first skiffs of snow reveal old logging roads and the contour of ground. An ephemeral smear on the landscape (depending on how you define ephemeral in terms of time) that provides access from here to there. All us animals use them because it's less of a hassle. Joel called, wondering if I was dead. I hadn't posted and he wondered what that was about, he (and several other people) thought I needed to go with the satellite option. I do miss not being connected. On my terms, I don't want to be interrupted. God knows I don't need TV, unmediated reality is more than I can stand. I barely have time to read a few hundred pages before I have to get up and eat. Then it's stoke the stove, dump the piss-pot, pretend you remembered someone's name. There's a place between Monticello and Moab, way off the beaten trail where I'd found a little spring.