Maximum Effect

Thinking about this piece of music that TR wants to do, what my part might be in that. I know he wants the conversational voice, which I've worked long and hard to find, but I haven't read for other people in a long time, so I read a few paragraphs, out loud, to see what they sound like. I'm not particularly tied to any specific meaning, Cold, when I got up to pee, so I turned on my reading light, stoked the fire, and read Thoreau for a couple of hours. When I got hungry, I fried some potatoes, added some homemade chorizo, some onions and peppers, and scramble a couple of eggs on top. Enough left-over for a burrito tomorrow. I wonder what they eat at a White House breakfast, how do they brew the coffee? where does the coffee come from? are the eggs free-range? what about bacon? This leads to thoughts about lunch, snacks, and dinner. I'd like a tour of the kitchen, how large is the staff? There must be a raft of freezers and refrigerators to prepare a dinner for 2 or 3 hundred. I can barely imagine. I can fix dinner for four or six people, a few times I've cooked for 40 or 50, but only if I could farm out all the side dishes. Not undoable. Ronnie makes a great potato salad, Dennis makes great baked beans. Dawn or Zoe would make cole-slaw. A good conversation with Kim in Tallahassee and we agree in most of the particulars about building an extremely durable house, concrete, half under ground, skylight, one door and maybe a tunnel. The skylight would be fixed, bullet proof glass (which is now clear aluminum sulfite, the space-age finish they use in floor coatings) fitted into a steel frame. The door, another fetish of mine, would be substantial, maybe the hatch from a submarine. Honda makes an air-to-air heat exchanger. Kim calls back and he's talked to one of his brothers. Seems you can buy a shipping container, two inch thick oak floor, steel construction, for $5,000. Two of them would make a 16x20 space, which is what I figure I'd need. Kim warns about moisture and my books, but I can deal with that, ten years in an art museum after all, phase-change salts and a small pipe, disguised as a root, to vent the various gases. Attachment (ain't it true) is always an issue, but I'd just run cable down to serious anchors, weld everything in place, them cover it all with dirt, grow some grass, raise some sheep. Disavow that I lived there. I know that guy, to nod in passing, but he struck me as slightly crooked and I didn't want to get involved. He was known to rant, on a Sunday morning, that the artichokes were unacceptable. I'm not sure I have adequate documentation.