Funny

I would talk about my failings, with hardly a backward glance. We all know where the beaten path mislead. The bifurcation at which. We're clear at what point things become illusion. I can tell, from a glance at the calendar, that I'm the butt of a joke. Goes with the territory, as a park ranger said: somebody is always on call. Doctors are the worst, because they're self-important, and reek of expensive after-shave. The truth is closer to the bone. Something to do with the actual reason you're standing in the rain without a slicker. I know, and it drives me crazy. The point is lost in the gutter. Where the four winds blow. I can't begin to express myself, a pregnant pause, and then a comma. Living alone isn't so bad, you can think about things. Actual expression becomes a riff. A Blue-Tick hound howling at your grave. No carburetion. I'm not sure that's a word, but you know what I mean. Holding a breathe forever. A lot of deer moving about, because of the hunters in the woods, so driving through the forest I limit myself to about 20 mph. Had to stop and pull two dead off the road this morning, within a couple of mile stretch. One was small and recent, still warm, so I took a hind quarter; just dragged him over to the shoulder and skinned just the one haunch. As I was finishing a park ranger stopped, agreed it was fresh, impact to the head only, little chance of bile from a ruptured spleen, and allowed he'd take the other hind quarter. I told him there was another one down the road, killed last night, and that I had opened her up so the scavengers could clean up the mess. He asked if I was Tom and I said I was. He'd heard about me and wondered how I was going to cook the hind-quarter. I'd already decided that I was going to de-bone it with a single cut on one side and a little finesse with a sharp knife, then I was going to soak it in several changes of salt water, to get the blood out (he hadn't been properly bled), marinate it in wine and herbs overnight, stuff it with cornbread/sausage/ cranberry dressing (cranberries go with venison) and grill it for several hours away from direct heat. The ranger took notes. Told him how to tie it, to blot it dry and rub it with a mixture of ground peppers and cumin, and to bard it with bacon. I keep a gallon of water, a package of hand-wipes, and a few other things, in a milk crate in the back of the Jeep, so we were able to clean our hands, then I rolled us both a cigaret, and we sat on his tailgate and talked about hawks. The Peregrines are back, on the roof of the Masonic Building, and when I tell him that, he sits up straight, asks me how sure I am they're Peregrines, and I tell him I'm absolutely sure, that I've watched them dine, on several occasions, from 15 feet away. I told him about the Red-tail Hawks eating the bull-frogs (Jenny says they're leopard frogs, and she's usually correct when it comes to flora and fauna) and about how I'd gotten interested in hawks when one fell out a tree, when I lived on Cape Cod, and the tribulations of getting it back to it's nest. I bear scars from a sparrow-hawk, an older sister, and a cousin that liked to humiliate me. Otherwise, I'm fine. A reconstructed geek, an aging hippy, I answer to almost anything. I spent the entire day going through Mary's scrapbooks monitoring Carter's career. And I'm not done, there are still file cabinets that no one has gone through. She kept everything, every mention of him, as if to prove to her parents that she hadn't made a mistake, marrying an artist. Which is usually, let's face it, a mistake. Broody awkward types that don't spend enough time in the sun; but Cartie, as his friends called him, often just wandered about, with his Brownie camera, snapping pics. Often with his Kentucky buddy, Jessie Stuart, who won a Pulitzer for a book that holds up pretty well, a bit sentimental, but I tend toward fights with beans at close range. The percussionist said the composer was obsessed with legumes, and that he never knew exactly what to do, how hard to throw them against what. I'm sympathetic, because I find life like that. What, exactly, am I doing? I have to grin, the same thing as before. Two mules go into a bar, a nun and a priest are talking in the confessional, a rabbi and a really hot young lady arguing in the aisle. That's three things, right? I'm trying to play by the rules. Three things make a list. Then a chorus, what condition my condition was in. The outside world is a pain in the ass. Read more...

Idiopathic

Waking up in the night, I'm sure it was a sound, but the sound's gone by the time I wake up. It's not an animal moving about, the leaves would tell. A single scream, like a cat, maybe the yip of a beagle. The house is warm, I started a fire so I could make an omelet, and I have the new heater blowing toward where I write. Not of sound mind. Sometimes the sensory information builds up, but it doesn't really make any sense, just a kind of white noise. Then someone throws lentils against an overturned pan and it all comes into focus. It's like, why didn't I see that before? The answer, of course, is because it was hidden, but I should have noticed, clearly there was someone behind the arras, that bastard. The demon for me, the devil, I've only read Hamlet a few dozen times, it's always Polonius. Say what you want. It's a new game after that. Sara and Clay left for southern climes at noon today, Thanksgiving with Liza and Liz in New Orleans, then Hilton Head for the winter, she pointed out some other Carter materials for me to look through while she was gone, scrapbooks and such. I'll be the only staff at the museum tomorrow, so I'll start looking through it. Being alone at the museum means staying in the offices, to field phone calls from the front desk. It'll be a perfect day for reading. Then Turkey Day off (I have my pot pie) and the yearly Houndog Harrison concert on Friday. Then three days off, so I went to the library and got a couple of things (Best Essays and Best Short-Stories from 2011) and took home a book on Bellows from the museum library. I've been bringing in food and juice and drink for the last several days, an extra pouch of tobacco, an extra sleeve of papers, a surprisingly interesting Gnarly Head cab. Still have some good beer from when Glenn and Linda were here. A conversation with Linda about the lack of support. Glenn came in from work, just as she was going to hang up, so I got to talk with him about the video, and sundry other things. I love talking with them both, the conversation is often elevated, nuanced. I crave that conversation, it's a mainstay. Nice image, mainstay: what holds something (me) vertical. Against the forces, right? and the forces can be severe. Imagine the worst scenario possible and multiply that by two, it becomes a design criteria. Very large cables anchored in bedrock. A hold in an execution would also be a stay, a week-end at a B & B on Cape Cod, a command to a dog to remain where it was. Late Middle English, staien, that's as far as I've gotten. Trying to track down a word, before the language was codified, is impossible; two grunts and a click. Drives me crazy. I can get slippery tonight, but tomorrow, I'm going to be invisible. Listen, a coyote in the night, such a lonesome sound. Read more...

Foster Care

The radio is driving me crazy, so I turn it off, flip the breaker on the fridge, sit in dead silence and listen to the blood coursing through my veins. Not a bad strategy. In an aural hallucination I often hear songs I recognize, Greg Allman or Mississippi John Hurt. I sit very still and listen to the wind in the trees. By ten or twelve I was already who I was, I could have been raised by wolves in a cave, not to diminish that I was raised in a functional, loving family, but I left that life as soon as I could, struck out to discover the world, because my interests were never the same as the people I was raised among. I talked with my sister at length tonight, about our parents in hospice, and she was dealing with that. She does it all, my brother is off surfing, and I'm 500 miles away, so she takes them to doctor appointments and buys them toothpaste. I couldn't do it. My capacity for compassion is limited, I'm too distracted to be a "care giver", but the good news is that Mom is comfortable in hospice, she likes the way people treat her, but she, and my father more so, hate the food. To be expected, you take a legendary southern cook and make them eat someone else's cooking, and nothing is going to be quite right. I can cook for Mom but it's a struggle and I never make her anything she ever fixed for me, except biscuits and cornbread, which I do exactly as she taught me, though they're not quite up to the standard. Which always seems to be over the next ridge. She'd like the pot-roast sandwich at the pub, otherwise, she's pretty picky. Nothing is ever quite good enough. They're both very frail. I think about them for awhile, can't not. Finally snap that train of thought, wrote for several hours. Had to do the laundry, the house smelled of dirty socks (I could prevent this, I know, but it reminds me to do the laundry) and stopped at Kroger for a few things, my turkey pot pie, for Thanksgiving, and a bottle of whiskey. Bought several protein shakes and smoothies that were remaindered, and the makings for a soup, I have everything for cornbread. Eating is cheaper for me, in winter, because I eat mostly roots and beans, and I don't mind eating the same thing several times, if it's good. Nice to know there's a pot of soup in the fridge; leftover corn sticks, heated in the toaster over, with butter, are one of the greatest things ever. A dessert corn stick, smeared with apple butter, is sinful. When I can get pure sorghum molasses, the last biscuit or corn stick was always drizzled with that, an earthy sweetness unlike honey. Read more...

Vertical Integration

I used to know the rules, but, at some point I stopped paying attention. Diana noticed I was confusing the possessive, and reading back, I see she's correct. But walking over to Kroger yesterday, I found a small book, Webster's Concise Dictionary of Grammar ("clearly explained entries with examples") and I intend to get back on track (grammar is the train, syntax is the track). I'll task Sara with proofing "Modified Chevron" because she's a stickler for detail, and Glenn, ditto, because he made the book possible. Warm day, mid-fifties, and I walk over to the graveyard. Months since I've been there and the declivities are darkened pools of rotting leaves. Found one of those 60's office chairs, steel frame with barely padded arms, brown vinyl, and a barely padded seat, in the dumpster behind the bank, and I hauled it over with me. As I usually visit the dead in the afternoon, I found a good spot to the west of the graves, that gives nice slanted light and better reveals the contour of the ground. Counting graves is an ancient sport. A single crow joined me, singing a discordant song. I already had an ashtray over there, a coffee can half-full of sand, that I kept next to the stump where I used to sit. The stump had rotted, and been torn apart, probably by the bear, and I needed a place to rest my sorry ass and roll a cigaret. At first having a chair and ashtray at my personal cemetery seemed a conceit, but now it seems perfectly normal. I went back, a second time, as the sun was setting, and it was a great place to have a chair and an ashtray. The second time I carried a small flask of whiskey, and I was enormously content, the way the light was playing, warm gullet from a shot of spirits, a cigaret, my ashtray. I'm sitting there, this is all true, with my legs crossed, my head and shoulders bent slightly forward, watching the play of light on a particular leaf in the declivity that is Maddy Blevin's grave. It had an oil-like sheen that was fracturing into a prism. Quite beautiful, in a simple way. It has happened before, that someone would stumble across me when I was doing something that didn't seem quite normal, watching tadpoles or imitating a fox, so, naturally, a deer-hunter comes up from behind me. He coughed, to announce his presence, though I knew he was there, and asked what the hell I was doing. I didn't feel like explaining myself, so I just quoted Emily's last words, got up and headed home. He called out that he hadn't meant to disturb me and I called back that the damage had already been done. A mug of silky squash soup, saltines with a modest pat of butter on each one. Buttering saltines is a tricky art, but I've mastered it, through due diligence and many failures. A degree in theater prepares you for almost anything. A DVD of the Emily project should be available soon, Glenn thought it might take a month or two to edit and splice the sound correctly. He'll probably post it on the web site (ridgeposts.com) and you can download it there. However that happens. I'm blissfully unaware, we could be an inter-net sensation and I wouldn't know. Plink, a penny in the well, as Bill said, after that it's anyone's ripple. I erred on the side of roguishness. Not a bad place to be. I live among relics, books, and pieces of stone that are flaked into use, so the desire for something to be useful is the only criteria. Books totter and atl-atl weights hold down the loose papers. Too much history. Dick and Jane went up the hill, enough said.

Tom

You would assume copulation, but it's more confusing than that. Assumption is the greater part of valor. Read more...

After Midnight

I don't know what it was, by the time I dragged my sorry ass out of bed and got a flashlight, it was gone, sounded like a cat, some small mammal defending it's turf. Nothing happens here that doesn't happen there. Five will get you ten, get out there and dance. Doctor John, Little Lisa Jane, a New Orleans sound, loose, with horns, oh little Lisa, little Lisa Jane. I keep having this dream where people tell me I don't belong, I used to be able to breathe without explaining the process. Doctor John again, Stagger Lee. A late night stumble. I can't understand the words, but it sounds about right. The way he rolls the piano. They're running a special on Doctor John. Patois, talking about hey now. My little girl going to set your little boy on fire. Blow wind blow, all my troubles away. Blow wind blow, until judgement day. The Wabash Cannonball. Bob Weir, really? The hills of wherever that is. The race is over now. Listen to the jingle. You could be sad, play a few diminished chords on a mandolin, I meant what I said, when I said I could get over loving you. It's not that simple, but it's possible. The Dead taking "New Speedway Boogie" out to very limit, then bringing it back, as if that was a normal thing to do. And Greg, I mean, come on, the thrill is gone. Buddy Guy, deep in the blues: I confess, there's nothing I'd rather. I regret some of the things I've done, but by and large, it's a wash. Show me how to live. Sugar Magnolia. She can dance sunlight daydream. Lately, it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it's been. Busted down on Bourbon Street. What a long strange trip it's been. My marbles have all gone down the drain. I'm in need of something, will you do the trick? Till the morning comes, make yourself easy. What you may win, what you may lose. Read more...

Small Rewards

You wouldn't have thought that I would have noticed, but I did, because I tend to notice things, the way you reached down to straighten your skirt. What shoes you wore and the way they made your feet look. I am, if nothing else, observant. With a straw between my teeth. Glenn said something, this was years ago, about Melville, the way he made you see certain things. White is white, like that, the way things are defined. Went in today to spend a little time with D, to find out why everyone at the museum had their panties in a wad. Nothing serious, but petty bickering drives me crazy. Rene, I think her name is, at the Market Street Cafe, fixed our Saturday burrito, and after a great many attempts, D and I got her to smile. Everyone else was cracking up, but she did smile. Drove the long way home, up the creek. Enough water at the ford to clean my wheel-wells, and watched a flock of turkeys tearing up the mast maybe fifty feet away. A couple of them looked to go twenty pounds. I love watching wild turkeys, there are always two or three on guard duty, while the rest of them root around. Back home, I make a simple cream of butternut squash soup, chicken stock, squash, salt and pepper, a few grates of nutmeg, and add a squirt of the Umami paste that Linda got for me. One of the best soups ever. Read through the Janitor College WIP, "Modified Chevron", and it reads pretty well. I'm going to have to add some connective tissue, because some of the leaps leave me baffled. One of those young squirrels that have taken up residence in my yard was particularly noisy at dusk, and I had to go outside and throw a few rocks. A varied life. And not without interests. Who could ask for anything more? Soup and cheese and crackers for dinner, a few olives, reading Proust at the island. Maybe Faulkner wrote some sentences that long, but gosh, I've never seen so many subordinate clauses. Maybe, if you're locked up in a cork room, that's just the way you think, it's not a guise or a trick you've mastered to get free drinks. At the end, Proust was fairly strange. But we all are, it's part of the condition. What condition your condition is in. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. I amuse myself with flourishes. Really, that was a Caslon dingbat? I thought I knew Caslon fairly well, and I'd never seen it before. Seems there's a whole page of dingbats I'd never seen before. I'm not so paranoid as to think you'd keep it from me, as a kind of joke, but I do wonder why I'd never seen that page. The past-pluperfect. Check out the commas, I think they're perfect, I worked on them for a long time. Read more...

Simple Pleasures

Small chores, a punch list, because there's a brunch and music thing at the museum on Sunday. Quick shop at Kroger (the place was swamped, Friday afternoon before a holiday) and I left work an hour early, to better consider my fate. I don't know what to think, I'm preoccupied with several things, and my older daughter reamed me out about not staying in better touch. She's correct, but I've had a lot on my plate. I begged forgiveness and promised to be more attentive to my fatherly responsibilities. But, you know, they can call me if they want to talk about something, and I hate calling anyone, anymore, because they're always driving and talking on a cell phone, and I'm afraid I'm going to hear them die because of my call. A thin sliver of moon, I love these, you can almost feel the shadow. A ghostly galleon. Tilt your head, it's a boat upon the sea. I often just look at patterns, as if they carried meaning. I'm very happy that Mr. Rove ended up on the chopping block, they thought they had the superior machine, and they were wrong. Sinners and saints. There was some ground pork in the remaindered bin at Kroger and I decided to make some chorizo sausage, not in a casing, scrambled, with a couple of eggs. A friend had sent some very good paprika and I had, on hand, some excellent ground chilies, kosher salt and some freshly ground black pepper, lots of garlic (five cloves for a pound of pork), and you have four servings, two eggs each, either rolled in tortillas, or with toast on the side, smeared with butter and hot pepper jam. So good I forget what I was thinking. I had an old vines zin I was saving for a special occasion, and I realized this was the occasion; so, at two in the morning, I find myself at the island, drinking good wine from a tumbler, and enjoying a great meal. Go figure. Reading a New Yorker article about campaigns won and lost. Thank god I never ran for office, to count myself among the other meaningless assholes, not to put too fine a point, but it's all wasted on me. I'd rather watch young squirrels scamper. Read more...

Bench Marks

Story poles, or story sticks, a journal of the plague years, a cryptic few notes, just a sequence of stick figures on a rolled-up buffalo hide, whatever tells the tale. A record of high and low temps, a calendar of lunations, marks on a cell wall. It's history, not matter how it's framed. I was wiping off the bonnets in the artifact exhibit yesterday, looking closely at a couple of things. One was a hollowed rock that served as a small basin, a mortar, probably, for grinding acorns; and the other was a ceramic vessel, made from coils of clay, and fired. Making something out of clay and then firing it is a major leap, and seems to have happened many times in many different places. You can see how this would happen, crude huts and open fires. That little Venus with the drooping breasts and the shocking vulva, that someone sculpted as a household god might be the only thing that survives a mid-winter conflagration. Coil pots stick figures, fertility cults, caves. Not really a sentence, but my sentiments at the time. Just a janitor, you know? cleaning off the flat surfaces. I find myself going back and taking out commas, it's become a kind of game, in which I try and maintain sense with the fewest diacritical marks. Sense is relative and depends on what woke me up, a bear at the compost pile or the patter of rain on the roof. Everything is affected by everything else. Not unlike, and you could fault me here, I do tend to over-think things, when you shuffle your footsteps to confuse any pattern. Just saying. High water mark, average yearly high water, global warming. I'm glad I'm old and dying, I've dealt with what I've dealt with, shit in the toilet and vomit in the hall. Frankly, I don't know how you deal with this. I guess I'd move to high ground and keep a shotgun at hand, which is actually where I find myself. By default, not through any intent. I would always rather slink away into the shadow. Something made me laugh. That fucking janitor is a hoot. It's all my own fabrication. You realize that, late at night, and there's cause for concern. Just puttered at work today, but many things to get done tomorrow. Between now and Christmas everyone is taking time off and a look at the calendar indicates I'll be alone at the museum quite a bit. Everyone else has family close by, I generally spend holidays alone, so it's no big deal. Maybe I'll make Buffalo Turkey Wings, or maybe I'll rent a motel room, eat out, take four or five baths and watch a ball game of some type, preferably soccer, then a movie, because I haven't seen a movie in years. I like to visualize for myself, so I'd rather read a book. Talking with Cassidy today, a retired shrink, and he thought we were living in a Post Literate age, where people did nothing but text acronyms. At the pub today, having lunch at the bar, almost everyone was fiddling with their phones. I don't have one, because in the middle of a 64,000 acre State Forest, there is no reception; maybe satellite, I don't know, but I doubt that one of their panel trucks could make it up the driveway, to give me their free installation. But I do have to upgrade my computer system, because this one is dying. I'd like to be able to write when the power was out, and for me that means two batteries, because I'm very slow, I have to look at the lines as they build. Just the way I work; maybe satellite is a better option, I could meet him at the bottom of the hill and ferry shit up. Installation seems a small price to pay. On the other hand, I get nothing back from you. And what does that mean? Read more...

Something

Not like nothing. A scream in the night that's definitely cat-like. The adjacent rustle of leaves. Accompaniment. You get used to it. What goes on, beyond the mouth of my cave, is what goes on. At 2:46 in the morning, it doesn't affect my well-being, but it wakes me. The merry dance between inside and outside. I make a cup of tea, I have some great black tea, that I take with cream and sugar, I don't remember where it came from, people send me things. Comforting to hold a substantial wood-fired mug of hot sweet tea on a cold night. I need to talk with TR about how a dash is different from a hyphen. Comes down to notation, no way to program the nuance. Best you can do is leave a mark, in the margin, that means the performer extends whatever it is for a few bars. Lingering sound. Throwing lentils at a cymbal. How cool is that? Zach is the best musician I've ever worked with, the tension between him and Emily is palpable. Was. That's done, now, and we're on to another project, the janitor, in space and time. One thing that bothers me about the janitor stuff is that it floats in tense; you don't have to get very deep into this before you realize the past is the present, and the notation is critical. B thinks it's clear and that I shouldn't worry about it. Sara loves the idea of the book, insightfully said today that she likes the way the tone of my writing, which is more likely to be about food or nature, doesn't change at all when I shift to the janitorial material. I usually don't know when the shift is coming, although occasionally, something in my actual janitorial duties strikes me, and I make a note. It's way too much fun going back through. 278 entrees mention Janitor College, most of them average half a page, but they're all single-spaced. The one about the dude killed by a sugar-beet while driving his convertible during harvest season in Michigan is hysterical. The new heater is great, and has a built in timer, so I can set it to come on before I get up in the morning and before I get home in the afternoon, which will eliminate building fires in the morning, and ease the pain of coming home to a very cold house. The phone company, Frontier, has finally addressed the issue of outages on Mackletree, and there are three crews from Nelson Tree Removal working toward my place. They're two-thirds done, but the last third is through the forest, and will take them two weeks. They use a boom truck with a giant circular saw blade on the end of the boom. Two trucks to grind and haul, but they don't have to haul it far, as everyone wants a load of chipped wood; another utility truck to keep everything running, seven guys, four weeks. Probably between $25,000 and $40,000, I can't imagine it being any less. An expensive piece of work to provide service for three homes stretched over several square miles. I have several acorn squashes that I rescued from the outdoor display at Tim Horton's before the first frost, but I'm looking forward to the ham and bean soup next weekend, the squash will keep and the cream soups they offer, what I want is bean soup with ham and corn sticks. Read more...

Refugium

All is not lost. Not easily offended. Retreat to the ridge. Finally bought one of the new generation infra-red heaters, see if it makes life any warmer. Next week-end I need to spend on firewood. Hopelessly behind. Emily and sundry things intervened, and I tend to let things slide. More so, recently, reading the Janitor College WIP (which I might call "Modified Chevron") and trying to keep up to speed on everything else. I missed some tells, the lovely lady from DC was flirting with me, and I probably could have kept her at the museum for a few hours, talking, drinking a bottle of wine. I do love conversation. But I was fixated on getting home. Bought a bag of frozen meatballs, some Paul Newman spaghetti sauce, and a package of fresh egg noodles. With a couple of pieces of Texas Toast, this is surprisingly good. It's important that I eat, and if I have something like that around, or one of those frozen Thai meals (they're great), I'm more likely to stop, read for thirty minutes, and ingest something. I think I'll make a navy bean and ham soup next week-end. With corn bread sticks and slaw on the side. Sounds good. I need to assemble some ingredients. Living, as they say, day to day. Read more...

Ephemeral Stream

Because of the camber in the driveway, trapped but fleeting freshets flow in the ruts, dropping fines in the flats. I have to walk down on the median which quickly soaks the bottom of my pants. Wet clothes hanging everywhere, and the house smells like a damp dog, so I decided to cook the squirrel that Joel had left in my mailbox (he called, thus the walk down and back) right away. There's no privacy anymore, the mail-carrier left a note for me to enjoy my dinner, that it was probably illegal to leave a squirrel in the mailbox, and how was I going to cook it? I caramelized a large yellow onion, then browned the squirrel parts (six pieces) in olive oil, added the onion and a goodly splash of white wine left over from the benefit, scraped the brown bits, put on a lid and let it simmer for an hour. Took the body parts out, thickened the gravy, de-boned the parts (pulled squirrel), mixed it back into the gravy (much black pepper) and served myself on toast. I used a healthy squeeze of #5 Unami paste in the gravy. Linda got it for me in the gourmet shop at the airport. I'm rapidly becoming the king of pastes. Being Southern, where gravy is a beverage, it's great fun to extend the limits of 'sauce', which reminded me that I needed to tend my special sauce and that because I was currently collecting weeks worth of rainwater, I had plenty for the clean-up that inevitably follows any serious work in the kitchen. I have various salsas, a great raspberry/chipotle jam, and the tail-end of several bottles of wine. Buffalo Trace is great bourbon and I pour an inch in the jelly-jar I use for casual drinking. Then set to work. I keep the sauce in two jars, in case I drop one, so there's always a mother, under a layer of congealed pig fat. The famed Sauce Confit. Break off the layer of fat and boil the sauce, clean the jars, get out the blender, caramelize another onion; before I wash anything I rinse it in left-over wine, add everything to the mix. Run it all through the blender, then reheat to boiling, then simmer for an hour, to reduce, then pour into jars topped with melted, home-made, seasoned lard, and, after cooling, stash in the fridge. Takes all afternoon, but it's a pleasant task, the way the smells and tastes intrude on the sensory self. Reading at the island (trying to make sense of myself, I haven't edited a book in over a decade) I'm struck with how I use linguistic devices, the clustering of consonants, the uncertainty of tense, a general buffoonery, to write the way I do. It's all about the spoken voice. When I write the best, it's like we're having a conversation. I have hours of silence on tape, just to show that I wasn't wasting my time. Waves of rain from the northwest. What's love got to do with it? Everything, probably, but there's no hard evidence. What is love, really, other than fleeting pain. Tom This was meant to be the third paragraph in a twenty-four hour period, one per shift, but the phone went out, and I couldn't send it. Now, instead of being the last paragraph in a sequence, it'll be the first in another. Strange, how that happens. I had every intention... but then. Read more...

Surface Tension

Any sexual dynamic sets a certain tension. I noticed it twice at the pub this week, two couples that couldn't keep their hands off each other. Then felt it last night. I lightly touched her back, to steer her in a certain direction, and I got an electrical pulse through my fingertips. A cluster of chords. Captain, my captain, I try to do it right. She looked back over her shoulder, one of those moments, said she didn't know anything about me. I said that was probably for the best. Doctor John slurring his words. We all need someone to lean on. You can rest your weary head on me. It's almost like having it all. BB King, after the move to Chicago. Anything in G. Real players are like that, they specify a key. Broke down palace, a Dead song, Hunter/Gracia, rock my soul. Listen to the river sing sweet song, to rock my soul. Anything I have to offer is old and broken. I'd be a sorry mate, because I'm so used to solitude, it defines my space. On the other hand, like a Chinese painting, reality emerges. Weep no more today. Two birds. The old Kentucky home far away. Miles and miles between us. The place where I trace my bloodline to, said. Get behind the mule and plow. Keep your hand on that plow and hold on. Any one of those house musicians at Muscle Shoals could rock your soul. You can't lose what you never had. I nod off, but someone hanging out on extreme guitar, wakes me. I left the radio on; any more I can't remember anything. It's not a dream. Almost has to be Dicky B playing guitar, no one else plays that way. Train off in the distance. Inside your head. Jockey about. Three crows, it's not brain surgery. The same situation. Rock yourself to sleep. Read more...

Docent After Hours

Appropriately, listening the Barber, "The Hermit Songs". Beautiful morning, supposed to get into the sixties today, then back down to 28 degrees by Tuesday night. A walk down the logging road accompanied by three crows. The leaves are thick on the ground, and will be, until flattened by snow. Thinking about Cape Cod because Seven and Alan want to retire there and were asking me questions last night. The Museum After Hours went well, they brought me a bottle of Buffalo Trace whiskey and it lubricated the tour. Two hours went by quickly. I talked about Carter's family, got some things out of the vault. I think I'll be going through the Carter archives the rest of my life, because they exist, and we have them all. Mary saved everything. It's very cool to know the absolute provenance of a painting. The day by day account of getting a particular painting finished for a particular show. 1943 he was painter-in-residence at Chautauqua, where I'll be strangely following him; June, that year, he was finishing one of his most iconic paintings for a show at Carnegie. Won best in show, we have it, and I look at it every day. I know way more about that painting than I ever did about my wife. The covert woman from DC is in love with the idea of me. It's not the same, of course, that would be too easy. But it's in the changes that you learn, so it's better to lose face, once in a while, than to play shuffleboard and not have a clue. I'd rather be beaten with a bamboo stick. My left-handed curve ball is completely obvious: all of my life is, actually. To set the record straight, common red brick, has a specific gravity of 1.92 and weighs 120 pounds a cubic foot. Just so you'd know. Read more...

Flying Squirrel

A lot like having a bat in the house. I get the tennis racquet, my weapon of choice, and start poking into corners, looking for a flash of movement. Under the cookstove, I keep the most recent acquisitions of rusty cast iron cookware. I'm a sucker for rusty cast iron cookware. I soak it in lye-water, scrub it with a wire-brush, wash it in several changes of water, let it dry, rub it with walnut oil and bake it in the oven. The squirrel was hiding in a casserole. What you do in a case like this is open an exterior door and get the critter moving in a circular motion until they exit; sometimes it's over quickly, and sometimes it goes into overtime. I don't hesitate to kill a bat or mouse or flying squirrel, but it's difficult to get a clean shot, with a tennis racquet, inside a dark house, at night. I've broken enough things to not swing freely. The dance of the squirrel. I think it's a female, in nature females tend to be compact, males are long and lean. There's a high-pitched squeak attached to flying squirrels, unique and bothersome. There was a guy, at Janitor College, Sven, who kept beetles in a terrarium, he fed them spinach and kale; they made a keening not unlike flying squirrels looking for a way out. Janitor College is more than just a joke. Odd, how it mirrors life.The cookstove isn't drawing correctly, and I suspect a nest, of some kind, blocking the flue. Not that difficult to correct, but a dirty pain in the ass. Showered in nest parts and soot. I mingled, at the benefit, Pam poured for me, so I was able to mingle, talking about art with various people. What I have at home is a large pile of pages. You know way too much. Read more...