Nothing If Not

Caravaggio moved toward the real. It's the light, I think, and a simplification of subject matter (not polysemy, a clutter of symbolic crap). Not unlike Greg Brown singing about common things. Canning beans, or lusting after someone's ankles. For the last decade or so, I've tended to stay on the sidelines, see how things play out, before I say anything. Everyone is sensitive to criticism, it's a given, so you need to be careful about what you say. Usually I don't say anything, the safest route, but occasionally I have to say something, because of a transgression so grievous, and it usually gets me into trouble. People are so sensitive. I wouldn't deal with them at all, but you have to, to keep a foot in the world. I'm the perfect antidote or candidate for being a hermit, only stirring from my tree-tip pit when I needed whiskey or tobacco. Food is easy, I just eat acorns and jam, the occasional roadkill, wild mustard, a flour I make from cat-tail root. And I comment, when things reach a critical mass. When or how the rest of the universe operates, I don't have a clue. I assume some things. A system at play. I understand the theory, but I get no feedback, none. I get three or four messages a week from Kim, otherwise I go for days with only the occasional flyer offering a cut-rate on a cruise, or a pamphlet offering advice about Medicare. A data bank that knows nothing but my age. Most deaths, after 65, are a result of falling. I get it, falling is dangerous, I have places where I anchor my hand, set my nails, other places where I just let go. Read more...

Something Later

Three or four things happen at once: a massive clap of thunder, sheets of lightning, a wave of rain, I lose power (I keep a compact fluorescent light on, downstairs, to guide me when I need to pee), and I wake up, confused, not remembering my senior prom. Wait, it's coming back, Sandra Harper, her Dad was a fireman, she had a great taut body and told me that if I went away, to do a season of Summer Stock, that our relationship was over. I left the next day. Staccato drumming on the roof. I got up and put on the headlamp that Howard sent, I keep it on my nightstand, which is a cable spool my daughters decorated with text. Wearing a headlamp tends to focus your attention. What you're looking at. I write some words, in my crabbed hand, isolation, insulation, invitational, something else I can't decipher, maybe inviolate, but it could be almost anything. Text is become twitter. I noticed this strongly today (yesterday, now) because everyone was using electronic devises. I was just drinking a beer and wanted to go home, fuck a bunch of distractions. It was getting loud at the pub, tuning instruments and a bunch of adrenaline junkies that biked down the hundred miles from Columbus, a yearly event, god bless their calves. The rain picks up. The blackberries needed this, I foresee a bumper crop. I may have to can blackberry juice. Confusion has a name, everything has a name, right? polysemy, an ugly word, but there it is, a multitude of things. Awoke on the sofa, well after dawn, with a sky so overcast that it hardly mattered what time of day, still raining, and the green wall that surrounds me was vibrantly clean and dancing. The power was off in the night, I knew because the digital clock was flashing, but was back again when I finally stirred, so I turned on Black Dell to get the time, and noticed that I had started the first couple of lines of this block of text. Which brings us more or less up to date. Except for the several hours I spent looking at pictures, mostly Velazquez, thinking about his body of work. How it moves from the symbolic pictorial into the absolute real. Caravaggio had broken this ground in Italy, and I love them both, but the "Rokeby Venus" is the most stunning thing currently on my radar. Looking back, I think the word may have been 'involute' because I remember noticing a piece of cast iron trim on a old building. Tying up loose ends. Because Bastion is French, his using the word 'fuck' in every sentence isn't offensive, because it sounds like 'folk'. His current thing is that he says he's from Texas, and that we don't recognize his Texas accent. Like I say, he's very funny. He's clearly French. Read more...

What When

Endlessly talking logistics concerning the upcoming switch-over. All three of us guys at the museum. In the afternoon we talked through the entire condition report. Watched D, the new MFA, designing the membership brochure. We decided to have a beer after work, Bastion and Whitney would join us. It was fun, Bastion is French and very funny, the two of them are a striking couple, and both very bright. Still, rain forecast and I needed to stop at Kroger and get weekend supplies, and despite the fact that John Hogan himself had graced us with his company AND was playing and singing tonight, I just had one draft and shagged it on home. Circuitous sentence. I enjoy constructing them, they're an important part of the paragraph or the block or whatever I am right then thinking about a particular piece of text. I left out the comma, I thought about it for nearly an hour. A drink and several smokes, the answer was no comma. The reasoning being that continuity of thought superceded breath. I don't know why, I just stuck it in, and now I take it out, fucking commas can mess with your brain. I have independent evidence. Heaven forbid music was the cause of it all. The collapse of civilizational society. Everyone seems to be listening to something all the time. I don't get it. Not listening is so much better, a large percentage of what I hear is bugs and birds. Read more...

Iteration

I see myself on other people's screens, can't help but notice, these people are reading me. I'm just a janitor but I'm ok. Sara called with a janitor story that made the news, an immigrant that didn't speak English, got a job at Columbia University, night shift, and eventually a degree, in Classics. D got his MFA, thank god that's over, and is very tired. Being physically exhausted is a part, it seems, of the process. Any given week, a couple of days, I'm exhausted, when I can't sleep, and get up to write a couple of more lines, and that leads to several hours of serious contemplation about the human condition. Not that I expect a degree. At a certain point, nothing matters. Boone Coleman died, he owned most of the fertile bottoms in this area of the floodplain, and his heirs, all rich, don't see the need to work so hard. Some of the soybean fields are laying fallow. Which is cool, laying fallow. Especially in this one case, where an entire field, it must be twenty acres, is gone to wild mustard. You'd have to see this to believe it. The background, what you can see of it, is dark green (spring, the word green doesn't mean much) and the flush of yellow blossoms is off the scale. Really off the scale. Yellow to the tenth degree. It's a flood, an overwhelming avalanche. Not unlike that first acid sunrise. I just remembered that. I was on Cape Cod and someone, I don't remember who, sent me a drug that wasn't illegal at the time, and the sunrise, over the bay, was spectacular. Yellow is not my favorite color, blue is, but an entire field of yellow is something else. Read more...

By Extension

Something fairly painful. Like maybe you'd barked your shin on the edge of a bookcase, going out to pee, or stubbed your toe. Whether or not to drop a comma doesn't seem like a big deal. Coming out of Cincy, to the east, there's a diner I like, where you can get a good bowl of soup, and fried pickles. I stop there, whenever I pick up artwork, because the owner's daughter is a raving beauty and the soup is really good. Like something you'd fix for relatives. Chicken and noodles on mashed potatoes. A gravy to die for. Usually people die for better reasons, but a perfect gravy might be reason enough. Dawns on a beautiful day, severe clear, nearing full leaf-out, even the black walnut. I must have planted 100 of them in Missip. Their roots release a broad-leaf herbicide, to protect their mineral rights, so a stand of them is very park-like. In an old pasture I didn't need any more I planted 1000 yellow pines, not loblolly, and I'd like to see those today. I've planted trees everywhere I've lived, and it would be an interesting road trip, to visit them, see what survived. I generally add the extra comma, because I hear all this in a spoken voice, and now that I don't use line breaks as a form of punctuation, I add them for the speaking voice. Letting the line wrap was a great liberation for me, I didn't have to be so prissy anymore (just me I'm talking about) and I could build blocks of text. Tutored by one of the great minimalist, in language, of this generation, who offed himself, on my watch, and left behind five books, of which I hold the manuscript copies. I didn't ask to be put in this position. One of those guides had climbed Everest four times that year, talk about a record. A matter of course. Achieving the summit is a big deal, but maybe not, one Sherpa has done it over twenty times. Read more...

Survival Training

I have a problem with stupid people, I don't want to be around them. They bore me, and I want to shoot myself rather than talk to them; but you'll be in line somewhere, or waiting for someone, and find yourself talking to a person who uses words that don't exist. Conjugates verbs in strange ways. My first thought is to strike them with a blunt force object, a baseball bat or a bowling ball, but I usually just talk about the weather, whatever safe subject I can find, and stare straight ahead, as if I was deranged. People usually leave me alone. I've only ever been in two fights, the first I went down quickly, the second I broke his arm with a 2x4. But stupid people drive me over the edge. I like good conversation. Spent all morning and into the lunch hour with the elevator people. An interesting group, the boss of the company that got the contract, the boss of the security company that has to upgrade things that have to upgraded (since we'll no longer be grand-fathered), the state elevator inspector, and a board member who had recently installed an elevator using all of these same people. So the inspector, a woman, was telling everybody else what needed to upgraded, and to what level. Interesting, everybody taking notes. There are seven things that have to be done before the elevator guys can start, the parts are eight weeks out, the work itself will take six weeks. We have a window to do this in September and October, get May and June out of the way first. The high school show comes down tomorrow, and I have to cut a lot more cardboard, to pack the folk art show. Sharee had a reception and presentation in the theater, with finger food and punch, the back hallway is trashed, but it's not a big deal. There's another single mom working-for-food-stamps person that's taking care of the bathrooms and the floors. I don't like her mopping technique, but who am I to criticize, we're talking mopping, I don't know whether to be happy or sad. That I'd raised mopping to a new level, the Modified Chevron had become an issue. I steer back from this. Whatever praise. You know it's a good stroke, you can feel it in your wrists. Just saying. I ordered several books today, then got a couple in the mail, and I don't know where I can start another pile. All the spaces are filled. Make a note to congratulate yourself. What you achieved, and so on. I put no store in anything that can't carry the weight, check my record on this, but there's no room for another pile. Read more...

Never Nothing

If you're attuned to sound at all, any change is enough to wake you from what had seemed a solid sleep. With the windows open, I'd fallen into the insect drone of pre-dawn, when an isolated whip-poor-will got very close and it was like a bugle in my ear. I shut the window and turned on the radio. The dew was dripping from the upper roof onto the lower, and that provided a staccato rhythm. Drown out whatever. Sometimes the natural world is just too much. When was it, the other day, I was walking over to Kroger to get cream for our coffee, and the blackbirds were everywhere, singing the second part of the common wolf-whistle. I had to laugh, but I didn't want to appear an idiot, so I almost choked to death. I can count without conscious thought, 117 repetitions before that fucking bird flies away. Time divided by iteration. I could go crazy, but it's easier to crank up The Allman Brothers and lose track of whatever it was I was thinking about, the way a particular painter portrayed light. I'm thinking Rembrandt here, you can imagine whoever you please, Vermeer, even Van Gogh. Receptionist was a no-show and I had some things I wanted to look up in the library, so I sat at the desk. Rereading Michael Gruber's "The Forgery Of Venus", which is a great book, and I wanted to read about and look at pictures by Velazquez, ditto with Canaletto (who had a lovely written hand) because he painted so many bridges in his pictures. I love bridges. In Venice, of course, but also when he spent time in England. Finally got a little book about Teosinte, the wild grass that became corn. So my reading is rampant and eclectic, which is how I like it. One of Canaletto's bridges is held together with a hog-chain system very much like what was used on steamboats. Steamboats had a lot of rigging, damping the vibration. Canaletto is not much for capriccio, which in painting circles is 'made up stuff', he pretty much painted what he saw; the views are still, in some cases, essentially the same, and he is the consummate draftsman of architecture. You could recreate buildings from his paintings, down to the ornamental detail. Velazquez is often miraculous. The "Rokeby Venus" blows my mind. Spain was so deeply Catholic, that you didn't do nudes. But he'd spent some time in Italy, and there were all those nude statues, and there were models willing to pose. Read more...

Going On

Power was out most of the night, woke me when it came back on about four this morning, but I just rolled over and went back to sleep. Big rains over night, but the driveway was fine this morning, and into town in time to shave and clean up. TR had the Cape Kids in the morning, then had to take his Mom to the doctor; Pegi left early, to go to a conference with Sharee. I puttered around. Cleaned the theater. The piano tuner, Jerry, came in, looking for some of the hard rubber dampeners he uses on adjacent strings when he's tuning; and his glasses, which he was convinced he had left somewhere on the property. We searched for an hour. Unless something is going on, I usually just read from four until five. D and I learned years ago not to deal with art after four in the afternoon, you get sloppy. We break the rule all the time, but, as the staff reference librarian, there's a fair amount of work-related literature I need to read. There's a lot of crossover stuff, in addition: almost always something that I started reading about at the museum, usually a show that's long dead and gone, that I continue to have an interest in. I usually read this part of my reading on Saturday or Sunday morning, at home. Over an omelet, I could teach a good art history class. About what I like, I can be quite lucid (about what I don't like, I can be quite lucid), I can talk about product, and method, in equal degree. Which is a thing, you know, a divine intervention, I'm just looking at some pretty flowers. Fuck a bunch of history. Bonnie Raitt, "I've put them all behind... it's been you, right down the line." I'm listening to these Swedish sisters singing perfect California English. It's weird, nuanced, held together by a drummer, and the harmonies. It's like Woody singing about the dust bowl. And those Dolly Parton notes. I have Goya on my knee. I'm looking at the most difficult of the paintings. He was over the edge, Balthus was, sweet crazy Medi, all of the artists I've ever known. A tendency toward the extreme. Not that they were making a point, so much as they were saying something about the way things were. I trust the narrative, when it's given free reign. Most of my friends are crazy. In a recent survey I was judged the winner in a survey of a person having strange friends. I won. And I didn't even enter. Read more...

Specific Detail

I was asleep. You can't really fault someone for dreaming. Horses cutting caracoles. They woke me. I wanted to get up and go write, as I've been doing lately, but I fell back asleep. Another dream, involving that luscious Madonna. Finally did get up, brewed a double espresso, made an three-egg omelet with cheese and onions (caramelized), slab of toast with horseradish jam. Have to run the AC for Black Dell and there's a harmonic set up between it and the fridge, compressor music, it sounds a lot like church music and isn't half bad. Lounge around all day, listening to that, reading art criticism. Couldn't get started writing, so I took a walk out the old logging road. Blackberry blossoms are raining off and the fruit is forming, a couple more good rains, there'll be gallons of them around the house and along the driveway. Blackberry harvest is announced by seeing B walking up or down the driveway, a gallon milk jug with the top cut off, hanging around his neck, looking every bit like the Japanese Hermit, with a silly smile on his face. He developed a technique of marinating meat, leg of lamb, a whole loin, various wild things his brother traps, that I shamelessly started using, in blackberry juice. It can carry a very heavy spice load, I use three or four varieties of chilies, in excess, but I've learned they mostly cling to the outside, so you control the relative heat by the way you construct a bite. "Constructing Bites" isn't a bad title. Titles, generally, spiral into meaninglessness, sometimes they offer an entry, sometimes they just obscure what's being said. I don't trust titles anymore. I don't trust anything anymore. I never did say anything about anything, my hands are clean. Being obscure is just a way of hiding. There's a long history of this, consider most writing, the visual arts since the 16th century, fetish objects since the beginning of time. We admit collusion, but seldom reveal ourselves. Those small ceramic artifacts I collect, they're just a way of factoring time. Most things are a way of factoring time. Amselm Kiefer's work, by the nature of the materials, is designed to fail. A painting of his, still wet on the floor, fetches a million dollars. The molten lead doesn't adhere, the straw molds, the feathers fall off. Soon, you're left with a blank canvas, which may have been the point. I like his work, actually, if I had a million to throw around. I'd rather hear Jerry Garcia, one last time, if I had my way. Read more...

Exactly So

Yes, Linda dear, it is just the act of observation, and that, only because I slow down enough to see. My powers of observation are nothing special, but I'm rarely in a hurry and that allows more time to study the particular. We've never talked about this, directly, but it is a Zen attitude. Not something I ever approached directly. I sort of fell into it as a matter of circumstance. Your children are born and other people die. Some of them kill themselves. If we use today as an example: I'm looking at the Munch book and Mac emails, Sara calls, you make a comment (the embedded Linda) it's overwhelming, really, if you just pay attention. I'll make this as personable as possible, what used to be called a letter, where you expressed some aspect of yourself to another. I'm having trouble with commas again. I have to get up in the night to pee and I often can't get back to sleep. I'm writing more and reading myself less because I can't install a new printer because the CD port on my black Dell is dead. It's like that, or something. I like writing you directly. Like I say, I fell into it. How many people do you know could demand an explication. I know five, and you, Linda, are one of them. Read more...

Never Did

Didn't lose power, this time, because the front didn't get violent until it was well off to the SE and my power comes in from the NW. Rolling thunder, sheets of lightning, rain in discreet waves. I get back up, roll a smoke, get a drink, and sit in the dark. The thunder woke me, the way sound shakes the house, the base line. I put on Edgar Meyer, the Cello Suites, I'm nothing if not indulgent, and there's something about listening to Bach in the dark, with flashes of lightning, and rolling thunder moving off to the leeward, that leads to an introspection. Call it positive denial or 'need to know' but it's a very real thing. I have this in check. Three moves from now, you'll see how I achieved another stalemate. I rarely win, but I rarely lose, it's just something I learned to do. You could argue it was something I smoked, or drank, or otherwise ingested, but I hate to lose and I'm never proud of winning. Winning is always losing. Consider the odds. Not unlike something you'd imagine, once in a blue moon, when things were perfectly clear, a rare occasion, but something that occurs, now and again, but I could have won. I played to a draw only because it drew less attention. It's better to appear slightly stupid, a more believable character, than to always be the winner. I was staff today. TR at the desk. My phone was out at home, so I logged onto AOL to check my mail. I have the Messer book on Munch open to the full-page colorplate of "Madonna", there are a lot of them, this is the one that's at the Munch-museet in Oslo; and I get an email from Mac wondering if I'd seen Munch's "Madonna". It's a magnificent painting. Check it out, she's smoking hot, it's the one from 1893-94. Nice coincidence, Mac asking. Read more of Mary's letters, she'd finally had her hysterectomy, and was in the midst of a very long recovery. Boring, but nice little nuggets here and there. C sold 16 paintings at an exhibit (this was 1952) and I know he sold more the 48 the year before. Safe to say they were doing all right, but you wouldn't know it from Mary's whining. I haven't read any fiction in a while, which is strange for me, but I've sure been burning through the non-fiction, and because of poets I know, reading a lot of poetry. I'll hear something on NPR (I've always done this but it's become even more time consuming) and I'll make a note, then, later, make an effort to find out about whatever it was. The whole landscape of finding out about something has changed so radically. You can see the roof of my house on Google Earth, my fucking driveway; next they'll have stealth drones that can look in windows, see me pleasuring myself with cookies and milk. Munch painted (not the correct word, because he worked in so many mediums) a lot of vampires, also hob-knobbed with Ibsen and Strindberg, also worked on the edge of nervous collapse. Did break-down, 1908, and there's a great full-length portrait of his shrink. This period, 1880 to 1920, in terms of the art world, engages me completely. Representation was out, physiological insight was in, and expressionism burst onto the scene. Representation had ruled the roost for thousands of years, and suddenly, we had to deal with Van Gogh, and Balthus, for god's sake; the Impressionists, Picasso and Braque hit their stride. A complete shift in the manner of seeing. What is signified. I keep coming back to that. I could explain what I mean, over a pint at the pub, but it's more difficult, in the light of day. It involves both the iconic and the mythic, where you draw the line, and it's not a simple demarcation, but a gray zone between the two. Sara called, at the end of the day, as I was sure she would, and we agreed to work another extra day, the three years D has been pursuing his MFA I worked an extra 120 days, you know, filling in, and I don't begrudge that, I roll him cigarettes, and argue, just to keep the dialog alive. But this whole MFA thing is bullshit, a marker in a senseless game. Read more...

Writing

I was writing very well and then this book of Skip's appears in the mailbox. I swore I wasn't going to start on it until the weekend because I knew it was a black hole. But it's suddenly very hot and I have to run the window AC until the temp inside gets to 81 degrees or my black Dell is very unhappy, jets taking off the deck of a carrier unhappy. Very loud. Samara calls and we talk about fat people fucking, and what a strain that must put on a bed. I can say anything to my daughters, they can no longer be surprised. And finally it's cool enough to write. This book of Skip's is the cat's ass. I peeked, "Sheer Indefinite", you have to own this, he's one of the best writers writing, some of his work stops my heart. After writing I read him for another hour. A man with his hand on the pulse. He plays with language constantly, shocks and surprises. Heady stuff. Museum was a zoo of kinder-garden kids and their handlers most of the day, TR and Klaire (the intern's intern) handled most of it, Pegi and I holed up in our offices. I switched between reading Mary's letters, reading more about Munch and looking at pictures of his work. Strange guy, strange work. In the afternoon I sorted hardware and started a list of things I'd be needing. It's an odd list, but I've done this local show three or four times now, and I know we'll need monofilament line, several kinds of tape, plastic anchors for the drywall, maybe a box of those screws that have a washer pre-attached on the inside of the screw-head. Good for keeping a very light matted drawing from leaping off the wall at a clap of thunder. Monolithic buildings shake, the energy has to go somewhere. This is not a metaphor. My new cubby of an office has no view of the outside world, but I can always tell when a squall line is moving through. I usually walk into Pegi's office, to see what's happening, she has the only 'outside' windows, except for Sara's view of the alley, and base my plans on what I see. Have a draft at the pub, or hurry home, always an issue. I'd rather have a draft, with Juan of the two beauties, but he was either lost at sea or arrested by the FBI, and the storm clouds are threatening. Read more...

Small Stuff

The receptionist was a no-show, and rather than listen to any bitching, I took the desk. Fine by me, I wanted to read about Munch anyway, following last night's sale. First I looked at more Modigliani paintings. Beautiful portraits of Jeanne, his last and truest love, she, though pregnant with his child, committed suicide the day after he died. When people complained about him painting pubic hair, he is said to have responded, "Naturalia non sunt turpia" which teases out as 'Natural things are not bad in themselves'. Hadn't realized Munch worked in so many mediums, there are thousands of lithographs, etchings, block-prints, often studies for or from paintings. Anonymous sent me a link to a good article on pate. There was a recipe for a 'Country Pate' that's very close to the formula that I use. I had to actually look at the calendar, to get my dates straight, because Kim is stopping by for the night of June 4th, on his way to a F1 race in Canada, and I didn't know when I was going to make 4 pounds of pate, but I see I'm penciled in to specifically NOT come in that Saturday, the 9th, when the wedding that fucked the schedule happens. So I can make it then, make a note to get some money from Trish, and bring an extra five gallons of water from town, for the clean-up. I need to make an extra pound, to take to the pub, and I always give B some. And I want some, so maybe I should make six pounds. It wouldn't dirty any more pans. The timing is way better this way, I'll age the batch for five days under pork fat. Not everyone likes this, and I'm not an arbiter of tastes, but the people that like it tend to cluster around the source and gorge. I like it, or I wouldn't make it, mostly on saltines, my medium of choice, with black olives and gherkins. It's good enough to repay the cost of production. In that I have to clean the kitchen afterwards or ants are suddenly a problem: it means that I needed a day, and I have it. But I also promised Sara that I'd make some for the unveiling of the new Carters, which I now see as a separate operation. A small batch I can make with one cast iron skillet, a bowl, and the blender. Amazing restraint, not using another comma, which as Flaubert famously said, could easily take up a day; empowers me, in an odd way, to take up a day making pate. Funny, how things play out. I'm famous for something most people don't like. Go figure. Read more...

Looking Back

May Day. A sudden stillness. No wind, no rain, but a certain heaviness. The air is saturated. When I go outside to pee, the moisture clings to me. Four in the morning, but I made the mistake of coming fully awake, so I make a pot of coffee and read the Candy Section of "Gravity's Rainbow". It's one of the funniest pieces of writing ever. I remember Mac reading it to a bunch of us, maybe thirty tears ago, and we were all rolling around on the floor. As a Shakespeare scholar, and your run of the mill genius, he read with gusto and precision. Looking back, I've been read to by some of the best. Diana reading that wonderful chapter of the book she wrote about traveling alone, when she visited us in Colorado and we were castrating lambs. Skip and Steven reading poems, sitting around Joe Napora's kitchen table, Harvey reciting Lorca in perfect Spanish, Linda channeling Emily. A good run. I read back, over a couple of pages, because several people mentioned a particular post, and I wondered what the matter was. It was a good page, I see what I was doing, I understand the response; I write a lot of pages. I trust, when a select set of readers call attention to a specific post, that it had popped out for some reason, and I'm always interested in what that reason was. In this case, as is often the case, it was attention to detail. I've gotten good at describing things, not really surprising because I tend to look at things closely, and noticing detail is the name of the game: the stems in an oak leaf do look like the veins on the back of your hand. It's not arrogant, is it? to say you saw this coming? The narrator becomes a character and then there is a narrative. A story. That time Roy took me to a road-house in Cruger, a delta town, with a road-house painted purple. I was the only white person there. The blues were transcendental. As I live and breathe it was a mind-altering experience. Power was out when I got home and a magnificent squall line moved in from the NW, all the weather groups except for snow, earth-shaking thunder and almost enough lightning to read by, hail, sleet, rain, a tremendous display. I could get out, the next morning, yesterday, but the Mackletree was littered with branches and leaves. Early enough for ablutions, made a pot of coffee, served Pegi when she got in, and talked for thirty minutes about human nature. Gathered the trash and hauled it away, stopped by the hardware store for a packet of utility-knife blades. Coverts had blessed me with some cardboard boxes. Upper-end mattresses come in sturdy boxes, triple-walled, double corrugation, and I'll be using a utility knife often, in the coming weeks, cutting shipping panels for the Folk Art show. Lost another page, to a brown out, last night, when the temps climbed over ninety, and everyone turned on their AC. I need to work on a laptop that operates on a battery that I can solar charge or plug in, depending on what's available. Now I'm confused, because it's the next day, and I've lost my thread. Dawn is breaking, and the fucking Whip-O-Wills are going crazy, it's a madhouse outside, frogs and bugs and birds. I have to disassociate myself before I can even make a pot of coffee, it's raucous and intrusive. I should consider a cork-lined room, probably what my friends would call 'protective custody' but I'm not sure that's correct. Protecting who against what. Read more...