Fake News

Post-truth era. Even with my extremely limited bandwidth the bullshit is so deep I can't find the ground. I can barely listen to the radio, though I trust certain radio people more than I do others. I've almost never had a TV. Glenn bought one, when we lived on The Dump Road, to watch his future bride, that was forty years ago. Actually I had never owned a television, you can't read and watch at the same time. Clare brought one into the house but then she left and they changed frequency or something. I watched a little Hulu, when I was trapped at the museum and I did notice that they'd gotten much more sophisticated than the episodes of Gunsmoke I remembered from my youth. I've never gotten a paper except for the New York Times book review. I've seen maybe three movies in the last twenty years. But still, the outside world filters in, phone calls and conversation, an hour every two weeks to catch up on sports watching ESPN at the pub. Brady in another Super Bowl. I'd bet on dirty sheets later. The girls can bring in chunk wood while they're here, stack it around the stove, which would help me enormously, and maybe we'll be able to get to town. We don't play any games (except for Scrabble) but we do ask questions from Trivial Pursuit and debate the answers. My concerns were never about what we would do, they were only ever about the weather. I don't have to be anywhere, I can mope about, in my bathrobe and slippers, I might not get to town for several weeks, it doesn't matter, but for more tightly planned schedules days seem to signify. I was reading about a Siberian enclave, a couple of houses, 15,000 years old, the frame was mammoth mandibles and it was covered with raw leather, and lined with bear hides. Heated with mammoth dung and lit with mammoth oil lamps. The largest of these houses seem to be circular, about 16 feet in diameter, one of them used 167 mandibles in the frame. Locked together in a herring-bone pattern, the sophistication indicates a language, at least some nouns and verbs, to get anything done. A hearth, a bone midden, a cache protected from the Dire Wolf, and I imagine an outhouse, a small palisade of mammoth femurs. There must have been some early maps: where the reindeer crossed the river, when fish clogged the stream. Time factoring was a feature of cave paintings, a certain plant, at a certain time, in a certain place. It's interesting that the caves at Chauvet, which are older, are much more sophisticated in detail; by the time we get to Lescaux, the drawings are almost crude, we were already telling stories by then, locking knowledge in alliteration, no longer needing the drawings on the wall. At Chauvet, which was only discovered in the 1990's, they've been very careful, they don't even walk on the floor of the cave, and there are footprints of kids and hand prints of infants, a family affair. If you'd just killed a mammoth, you didn't have to worry about dinner for a few days, so you could take the clan deeper into the cave and add a glyph, yes I was here, full moon after first green grass, and the reindeer crossed the river. I read several references to ice bears (European, Lakota, Innuit) and finally realized it was literally an ice-covered bear. An armor-plated monster. He'd chosen a bad spot, poor drainage, had gotten dripped on, and was coated in a sheaf of ice. Arrows tended to bounce off. Dolni Vestonice, 26,000 years ago, was a happening place. Fired clay and woven cloth, talents to be lost for 10,000 years. Everything had to be reinvented three or four times. Cod fish cakes for dinner, just enough mashed potatoes to hold the fish in place, with some canned mixed greens I'd stewed for an hour with salt-pork and minced onion. Making cornbread I was struck with how flexible a cornmeal batter can be. I usually cook a thinner pone, at fairly high temp, but most recipes call for a thicker cake and lower temps. And I can do that, because a split wedge of cornbread, buttered and drizzled with sorghum molasses, is very good.