Inculcate

Term paper time at the University, end of the semester coming up, so I've been explaining Carter to a bunch of Art History students. Ended the day as the only staff person there, which will be happening a lot between now and Christmas. I'll take off some time in January and February, try to get The Janitor Book done. First chore is just to get the paragraphs cleaned of headers and footers, and stack them up. I read each one several times and make a few changes. When I make even a slight change, I have to go back and read it again; and, of course I change a lot of changes back to the way they had been, which also means rereading the paragraph again, to make sure I'm correct in my changes. An interesting process. I edit myself quite strictly, when I'm writing at night, but some errors slip through. B said that I was not to worry about the tense problem, the problem of tenses, that I was transparent and cogent. Which is what matters. One thing that strikes me, is that the voice telling the story is as close to my speaking voice as I've ever gotten. Strange that it should be comic. But I hit a kind of stride in these pages, and the cadence blows me away. The remembered past becomes the present. It all changes. Next thing you know you're a cockroach, a fly on the wall. Our narrator, Tom the Janitor, can generally be trusted, and is a kind of fly-on-the-wall; we don't know enough about his graduate studies, and he omits most personal information. But he's likeable and honest. He seems likeable and honest. And the research is pretty good, the Janus stuff, the doorway guardians, the way people die unexpected deaths. If you're deep into mopping, a perfect, ephemeral, modified chevron, and someone asks you a question, it sometimes takes a few seconds to get your bearing. I was mopping the main gallery, and this beautiful young woman comes over, Bev, at the desk, had sent her to me, and she coughs, to announce her presence, she needed to write a paper on one of the Carter's and which would I recommend. I took her by the arm, upstairs to the Carter galleries, and told her to pick her favorite, and then I'd tell her everything about it. I'm so conversant with these paintings. Read more...

Broke Down Palace

My older daughter enjoys The Grateful Dead as much as I do. Something woke me, a feral cat at the compost heap, and I went out on the back porch to pee, decided I could have a wee nip and rolled a smoke. Turned on the radio to the Athens NPR station. There they were. Garcia in good form, unraveling "Sugar Magnolia" and they glide right into "New Speedway Boogie", five in the morning and I feel like dancing. Stoke the fire and put my omelet pan on to heat, one of several 6" cast iron skillets I keep for specific purposes. They hang from nails in the beam that runs through the kitchen area. Kim made me a skillet. He pours cast iron. That skillet I only use for frying eggs, but I leave it out all the time, next to the cookstove, on the sandstone counter, because I like looking at it. The very idea that I know someone who could make me a cast iron skillet. He also carves the most beautiful spoons in the world. I have a wood-fired pot (I have a lot of wood-fired pots) on the glossy black lab-stone counter top, under which I keep dishes and cookbooks, that is filled with his spoons. I often just stand there, looking at one. He sometimes puts a full twist in the handle, other times he carves scales, he's always had this fish thing. The omelet pan is hot, throw in a walnut of butter (a unit of measurement you find in early cookbooks, a nut-sized chunk), two large brown eggs beaten with a dollop of cream, mushrooms and shallots, fold it over. There's a warming rack on the stove, so my plates are always heated, which is a nice touch for a hermit. Hot food hates cold plates. A cup of tea, a piece of toast; it's still not light but I've started the day. I surprise myself. Lucidity, I think, is attention to detail. Doesn't matter so much why, as what was noticed on the way. Heavy frost has penetrated all the hollows, nothing is green but the bull-vine, which seems to be made of leather. Ice around the edges of the little water-falls. I've never known the leaves to be so deep. One crow in particular seems to have adopted me, it took me a while to notice, it's just a bird, right? But it followed me around, squawking. The message was, and this is fabrication, that I was too obvious, that I should move like the wind in the trees. Right, sorry, can't do that, more like a thorn in your side, or a pebble in your shoe. Read more...

Living Alone

Home an hour early, my winter schedule, to get a fire started before dark. A small package of pulled pork in the freezer, from some event at the museum, so I caramelize an onion and roast a few cloves of garlic, mix everything together and serve it on mashed potatoes. Mom, the last time I visited, turned me on to frozen biscuits; they come in a bag and you can cook just two of them, if that's all you need. They're pretty good, as good as I can make from scratch (I'm not a baker) and they're very convenient. You can cook them in the toaster-oven, but if I have the cookstove going I just put them in there. I used one to clean my plate, and the other I had with the wonderful raspberry/jalapeno jam that Sara gave all of the staff. As close as I come to dessert. At home it was always a last biscuit with molasses. I swoon thinking about them. I do make the occasional Key Lime pie, but that's because we lived in Key West when I was maybe 12 and 13, there were Key Lime bushes in the back yard and they bore year-round, so Mom was always making pies. And it's easy. Use the recipe on the lime juice bottle, but I use whole eggs, instead of just the yolks, because I'm challenged when it comes to separating them, the single task I've failed most often in my life. That and relationships. There was some fish in the remaindered bin. That new generation of flash-frozen, sealed in plastic fish. It's good, it's better than no fish at all, and I bought a package of cod for tomorrow night. Lemon juice and a smear of mayonnaise, some roasted things, a piece of Texas Toast. If things work out correctly, there would be enough fish leftover to mix with the leftover mashed potatoes to make a cod-fish cake for Saturday morning, a perfect fried egg on top, and a piece of toast with some more of the jam. As Napoleon famously said, in a note to that fair Ophelia, "I'll be home in two weeks. Don't bathe." I took advantage of the slightly warmer temps, to stand in my washtub, next to the stove, and scrub off thoroughly; washed my hair in the sink, fresh clothes, my bathrobe (because the fleece cowl warms my neck) and I'm very comfortable in most ways. I'd like to have a warm ass to spoon against and someone to argue with; what I get is an extra pillow and an argument with myself. Not a bad trade, actually, because I don't have to justify myself. One of the perks, maybe the only perk, of living alone, is that you don't have to explain yourself.. Looking at a lovely portrait of Jeanne, that Modigliani did in 1919. He died in 1920. At thirty-four, I think; and today I looked at 400 of his paintings in thumbnail. The work from the last three years is breathtaking. He had made the move into the modern. His "Reclining Nude" from 1917 is one of the most beautiful things I know. Read more...

Gain Say

I'm struck with how difficult it is to be completely honest. I mention Janitor College and people leap up in their seats, correcting my memory. There were only eight people, at that last tail-gate reading in Colorado, in swirling snow. I know because I was the reader and I can count. I couldn't believe anyone was there, the night before a storm hit. Never address me as Sir, I'm always somewhat less than that, but Troy's son called. I'd built a house for them decades ago, a great house, I never expected to influence anything. An interesting house, a vertical cantilever, using the longest sticks of timber I'll ever again address. 36 foot 8x8's, notched for floors on four different levels, with a central staircase, and I can't remember where the idea came from, of floating treads made up of 2x4's glued on edge. I had a friend there, just out of prison, that had a cabinet shop, with a glue machine and more clamps than God, and over a weekend, with an ounce of pot and several cases of beer, we laminated 42 of these treads, each one composed of eight 2x4's five feet long, which then had to be belt-sanded and finished. There were no stringers, the treads just clear-spanned the space and died into the walls. You have no idea how difficult this was; but I was somewhat younger then and the impossible was merely a challenge. I remember going over the math night after night. The various treads were notched in at points that I scribed with a transit, working alone, as is my want, using an ice-pick, to mark the lines, and I'd frame in a support, as if I knew what I was doing. I remember, clearly, one day, Troy had driven up to the job-site, another ridge, god help me, and watched, while I made a mark, and asked if I knew what I was doing. Not really, I replied, but I was probably the best person for the job. Not that I believe in anything, but I was driving along the river road, the tubular fog was palpable, humming a Grateful Dead tune, "Broke Down Palace", and I was pretty sure I saw an image of the Virgin Mary, in an oil slick, as it drifted away. Something about the surface of the water, the way it rippled, seemed to carry meaning. Inadvertent key-strokes are the bane of my existence. I don't mean anything. Forget I mentioned it, just a butter smear I can lift out with a brown paper bag and a hot iron. Nothing, really. Read more...

Small Fires

It's not enough to be merely 'the fool'. To range freely, you need to walk about mumbling, often arguing with yourself, and striking out against invisible opposition. I'm good at this, because I studied with the best. Walking down Crow Pasture once (I'd made the walk a thousand times) with someone famous, a household name, it occurred to me that the terrain never changes, or rather, that the terrain is always changing. That, in order to stay aware, it was occasionally necessary to physically throw yourself against an immovable object. The result is, of course, that you're left broken and whimpering at the base of a great oak tree; and I asked this person, when we'd achieved the beach, after considerable bramble, whether or not it was worth it. We settled in the lee of a huge glacial erratic, out of the wind, sharing a thermos of hot tea and a handful of nuts, and she said she wasn't sure but that she thought it probably was actually necessary. The discomfort. The wind blowing sand like bird-shot. Did I mention I love this life? I make an omelet, with various mushrooms, it's not a political act; a piece of toast smeared with butter and that great jam Sara gave me. Set the stage, right? I can do this. Whatever the next thing is. Where it all comes in to play. I go back, reading myself is a pain in the ass, and add a semi-colon. Me, of all people. But it seemed correct. Periods are easy, and I spend a lot of time with commas, but semi-colons always arrive like a gun-shot in the night. Not to put too fine a point. I know, I know, if we open up the evidence to too close an examination we open up a can of worms. No, wait, I didn't say that. What I meant was. Spin this shit off. I have my best razor at home. I can shave myself out of this. Read more...

Considering Format

Two days off was enough, and I wanted to get back to the Carter Scrapbooks. Fascinating material. I get sucked into it and the degree of engagement is at a high level. I forget to eat. Strange. I've got the "Jane and Dora" painting, them walking down the train tracks, away from us, collecting lumps of coal into half-bushel baskets, documented pretty well. The Columbus Museum is interested because they have that painting on loan from The Met. Need to write up my notes. I could do an hour lecture on this painting. Also on "Chickens Behind The Window", one of my very favorite Carter's. A college girl came in today, Bev called me down, because this girl needed some information about "Chickens...", because she had to write a paper about it, and Bev told her she needed to talk to Tom. I gave her an intense thirty minutes, she didn't know what to make of me; the first thing I asked was how much information did she want. I can go on, in terms of explication. I have a knack for it, spiraling ever inward, and I needed to know how much time she wanted to spend considering that particular painting. I've looked at it twice a day for eight years. I know a lot about it. Nothing profound, just that I see patterns repeated, the way you amalgamate all those aspects. Phone calls tend to completely disrupt the flow of events. In this case either a great deal of luck, or borrowed time, but there you are. The flow of events I mean, the way one thing leads to another. I was glad to hear no one would be visiting soon, because the house is a wreck, and I couldn't possibly be decent company, because I'm so distracted, right now, with a couple of different projects. I hate when my thought stream is interrupted, because I can never remember what I was thinking about. Read more...

Dangling Chads

The Republicans should have won the election, they threw so much money at it. Emily Elizabeth, 1830 -1886, little note of the Civil War, she could have met Whitman, or Wyatt Earp for that matter. Always surprises me that my Dad was five years old when Wyatt died, honorary sheriff of San Francisco. Facts jam me up more than fiction. 93% of the universe is unknown. Great conversation with my older daughter (the comparative case is much more common in Latin, I like the way it carries information) and she's now searching for what I need, electronically, to simplify and guarantee my writing self. It'd be nice to be able to write from the field. Yesterday is a blur, I wrote all day, moved words around and deleted commas, then supped on fresh pasta with Newman's sauce and a couple of pieces of Texas Toast (which I always keep in the freezer, in my drive to gain weight) to pre-clean my plate. Listening to a dude today, talking about food waste, and, on average, it falls at about 40%. I try and keep it around .05%. I eat stuff I shouldn't, just to see if I can digest it. Acorn meal makes you fart, but that's not a problem if you live alone, and it really is high in protein. We used to have the enzyme that would allow us to eat grass, the good old days, when we could just graze, but now we require wheat or soy or diary or the eggs of the unborn, to see us through the night. Don't get me started, I eat dead animals I pull off the road, people leave dead animals in my mail box. Such is fame. The nose knows if something is too ripe, except for certain cheeses I avoid things that stink. It's breaking day. I have to watch this, ribbons of light, as Emily said. And a snake in the grass. Landscape and narrative. This time of year I walk the old logging roads with work gloves and a pair of clippers, to clear blackberry canes and bull-vine from what will be my winter paths. Spent most of the day reading essays by Barry Lopez, made a small pot of black bean soup, and ate the second half of an enormous baked potato. A lovely sunset, shot through with oranges and purples. Outside, for a last view of the deepening colors, I'm surprised by a huge gibbous moon. Beautiful and silent in the hard bright stillness. I keep glancing at it, out the patio doors to the left of where I write. Three-quarters full, and so bright I can see the other quarter as shadow. It's stunning. Earlier, I was wishing for something to watch, a sporting event or a movie, something to get me out of myself, but I got myself a drink, rolled a smoke, and watched the moon. There's a low light cloud cover, it doesn't even begin to diminish the bounced photons, but they form a halo, that goes mahogany at the edge, that I've never seen before. 90 minutes of rapt attention, but I'm probably not the target audience, a very slow movie about lunar effects has zero appeal, for any movie that does anything other than just be watched. I don't know, I have a degree in mopping, it usually serves me pretty well. I'm not intimidated by projectile vomiting or explosive diarrhea, but I have a problem finding the pulse of this culture I'm only a part of it by reflection, I look fairly normal, I wear jeans and denim shirts, I shield my eyes when I'm photographed in public, how insensitive, I could be wanted in other states, and wear a cap most of the time, to, you know, disguise my identity. Read more...

Further Thoughts

I'm awake now. Doesn't seem to matter what's being said. I just like setting in the writer's seat. A vantage. Reading myself, I come off as a comic character, which I maybe am, truth be told, but I think of myself as serious, nonetheless. I hate clowns and I hate those fucking balloons. Flowers are marginal. Sometimes a brochette, wait, that's not the correct word, but I love the way it looks. I avoid a great many things, I just stay silent. When I'm alone, of course, I talk to myself. A dialog that would mystify almost anyone. The grace is just that I don't fall. I reread McCord's "The Man Who Walked To The Moon" for maybe the tenth time. It's a beautiful read, one of my favorite books, it always drives me to the dictionaries, and I do love my dictionaries. They take me out of my body, a failing vessel if there ever was one, and allow some reflection. Reality is a shaggy dog story. A monkey goes into a bar with a tennis racket. I can't remember the rest of the joke. I made that up, there is no joke. Mumbling, I walk out to the Jeep and sit, with the heat running and the heated seats, and read a New Yorker. It's nice to have a vehicle that works. Three young squirrels announce the day; ephemeral, squirrels are, the way they dart from place to place. Incredibly stupid, the way they reverse course and scamper back under your tires, but watching them leap from branch to branch is not unlike listening to Greg Allman play on Boz Scaggs' first album. Or whatever example you might use. The cloud cover has been uniform gray, most of the day, but now, just at sunset, there are patches of blue, and the ribbons of light (Emily's phrase) cut across the landscape like a laser. A follow-spot that isolates a strip of real estate on the far side of the hollow. It's beautiful, the way things are illuminated. I was working in the Janitor Files today, it's slow going, because it was already pared to the bone, and what I think I need to do is add connective tissue but I'm hesitant to add anything. What I'm doing now is stripping away the headers and just stacking the paragraphs like containers on a cargo ship. Another title would be "Cargo Tongue" but that would probably be too esoteric. A pattern language. Patois. Cut me loose and I can blow a mean horn. Not unlike Bill at the convention. A saxophone isn't that different from a French Horn in the lower registers. Whatever you make of me, be advised, I've thought about that, otherwise I couldn't continue. Read more...

Lumbago

Slept wrong, got twisted, somehow, and I hate when my body fails me. Pain is a referent. Thanksgiving was fine except that the phone was out and I couldn't make the holiday phone calls. Read a John Sandford novel and ate a turkey pot pie. Didn't say a word to another person. The fox was at the bottom of the driveway this morning, she looked at me over her shoulder, and scampered up the power easement toward the house. I'll pick up a large bag of small, cull, apples, and carry one with me when I have to start walking in and out. Soon enough. Supposed to be cold and windy the next few days, so I've been bringing in supplies. I've got to bring in my winter drinking water, and a couple of extra half-gallons of juice, a large reserve tin of coffee. I need a back-up jug of whiskey, back-up pouch of tobacco and several extra books of cigaret papers. Chicken broth. OK on dried beans and rice (a great jasmine/pecan rice from Louisiana, long grain) and I already have a large package of smoked jowl (for cooking soups) in the freezer, and enough dried chilies to last for several years. I need to order grits, from that place in Georgia; and get a couple of mantles for the lamps. Pegi told me to leave work early, and I did leave at 4:00, to get a fire started in the cookstove before it got dark and the temps started to plummet. Worked perfectly and I'll leave the new electric/infra-red heater on tonight, so I don't have to get up and start another fire in the middle of the night I'm comfortable right now, which is odd to say (because I live a fairly uncomfortable life) but I know it's true because I have on only one layer of clothing, and it's windy and cold outside. I've got to watch my back on this, but I feel fine about the coming winter. Fuck a bunch of adversity. It's nothing new, pretty much what I expect. Nothing comes easy. I can't believe Jerry Garcia died 17 years ago, I can still hear him, in my mind's ear, taking a song out to the limit, then bringing it back. Clapton is probably a better technician, but for sheer joy, Garcia wins hands down. If Bach had had an eight track recorder, we might have the same record. A cantata a week, with the occasional fugue thrown in. A passion now and then. Like tonight. The perfect baked potato. I'd bought a large Idaho, not that size matters, and had a good bed of coals in the cookstove; washed and pricked, rubbed with olive oil, and wrapped in a couple of layers of foil. Scrape out a concavity, where you could reach in, and turn it, occasional, with tongs. I save the little containers of sour cream that other people throw away, in their 'to-go' orders from the pub, and I had a bunch of them. Butter, watercress (a funny story, I was following a rill over in what I think of as Pentecostal Hollow (though I'm sure it has another name) and found a pool where watercress was growing. There used to be a church there, is why I think of it that way. Fundamental. To the left of Baptist. No mediation at all. Talking in tongues, snakes, the whole nine yards) and I knew I was situated for a great potato. Watercress is my favorite herb. I roll the leaves with my left hand and chop with the right, then mince. Take a very hot potato, slice through the top skin and insert numerous pats of butter, sprinkle with kosher salt, many twists of black pepper, top with watercress, smear on the sour cream, and enjoy. Remember that potato is a heat sink, those first few bites will burn your tongue. Read more...

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...

Skipping Stones

Nothing like a freeze, to rid the forest of bugs. Not a single bite in the past few weeks. Liberal Independent is how I describe myself when asked. Only mention that because I've been asked so many times in the last few weeks. My rule for politicians is to not be any more of an asshole than you have to be. Fiscal times like these, you want a president who isn't out for re-election, then there's the Supreme Court. I could name some things. Recreational use of ganja in Colorado, and same sex marriage in Maine. The Republican model doesn't seem to be working. The people think otherwise. That rape guy was strung up by his balls. We ain't idiots, whatever the perception. I battle this all the time, because I act like an idiot, talk to myself and wave my arms. Other people tend to keep their distance and look away. You can avoid idle chatter by using an inappropriate word several times in quick succession. Usually enough of a distraction that you can slip out a side door. My strategy is to always defy detection. TR, D and I with our various punch-lists. D lays a new floor in the elevator, hard black rubber/plastic in 18" squares that inter-lock; a nice product, it should hold up well. TR mopping again, with that dreadful fore and aft stroke. I finished up the high-school show. Sara and Clay got back, for the benefit. Delightful conversation. Sara's thrilled that I'm doing a Janitor College book, I make her laugh out loud when I write one of those pieces, which usually arise from something that happens at the museum. Kim enjoys them too, he wrote a short gloss on something I'd said, and it was in Janitor College patois. Made me grin. Tomorrow we have to bring up one more piece of furniture from the basement, set up the tables and chairs, unhang the front wall (so that we can hang the art that's to be auctioned), and trouble-shoot the little things that go wrong. We need to get power, from the bar next door, so Wayne can cook crab cakes in the alley. I'm pouring premium wines, at $10 a glass for the event, and people just run a tab; I get one of Pegi's Circus moms to handle the tabs and the cash, because I don't want anything to do with that. I hate the way cash is handled at the museum, it's a system designed for pilferage, so I stay as far away from it as I can. I will, however, sample the wines, as I need to be conversant about the things you might be able to taste. I can do this very well, as long as Autumn supplies me with crab cakes on a regular basis. They had those boxes of dried salted cod at Kroger today, $15 for a pound-and-a-half of actual dried fish, but I sprang for one because they make delicious cod-fish cakes. I make a great sauce for these, which is just a garlicy tartar that I heat up in the microwave. The hot sauce seeps into the fried cake and the result is transcendent. I've made thousands of these, in hundreds of variations: any seafood, some instant potatoes, fried in butter, de-glaze the pan for a sauce. I take certain things to be self-evident. Read more...

Cleaning Mode

Finished installing the high-school (from the residency) show. Brought up two pedestals and a topper to build a display for the book, which is a bunch of folded pages, glued together, that opens out to a large oval (three feet by four feet) and has lots of pop-ups. Cleaned out the gallery. Signage and labels tomorrow, and set-up for the big fund-raiser on Friday. Museum After Hours on Saturday. Took three University classes through the galleries today, brushing up on my line of talk. I suspect tomorrow and Friday will be hell, and I'm just about all the way out there, fully extended. Pegi must have sensed that, because she and TR mopped the main gallery and back hallway. They're neither of them very good at mopping, but I'm grateful for their help. D saved and opened a working file for me, for the Janitor College book. I'm just at the stage where I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to work with that material. Read a few pages and laughed so hard I cried. Linda had some good titles, but I don't remember any of them. Spent thirty minutes thinking about the difference between this and that, reheated some dinner. In that last movement, when Zach is throwing the lentils, it all comes together. A strange show, but meaningful nonetheless. Meaning becomes the issue. I love the cadence of it, so brilliantly played. Neil, from the college across the way, loved the nuance, and we can provide that in spades. Read more...

Conflicted Interest

Too much hype and bullshit. I voted early so I could bury my head in the sand tomorrow and hang a high school show. Stopped at Kroger, to get cream, for my coffee, and noticed a dozen young women wearing tights that revealed every aspect of their ass. I wonder what I'm supposed to make of that. I'm still suspicious of daylight savings time. It's like there's a bunch of hoops and we're supposed to jump through them. The new phones are smart enough to change the time. While I'm manually rolling back an hour, in the kitchen and the common room, I think about time, and how arbitrary it is. I'll be late, for a few days, until I get the hang of it. I don't like these artificial overlays, they obscure what's actually happening. The days getting shorter. Comes down to light, and the angle. I don't believe anything anymore, as a matter of course, because reality is so easily manipulated. D can take any old photo and restore the values, sampling one thing for another. But the nature of things remains. I have to check that plural in the morning. What I miss, the most, and I've known them forty years, is the level of conversation. Linda says that between Glenn and me, we cover all the bases, which is not quite true. I know almost nothing about modern culture, for instance, because I don't own a TV, but Zach and Linda fill in the blanks, and we would be a formidable Pub Quiz team. I lose track of time, when I'm with them, and maybe that's the test. I was so sad to see them go, because it meant we wouldn't be focusing our complete attention on Emily. I'm wasted, actually, completely exhausted, emotional overload, with the attendant tics and twitches. The price you pay for paying attention. I'll probably call the janitor college book "Janitor College", and the cook book, after that, would be "Caramelized", the other two books on the immediate horizon are "Some Frogs" and 'The Verges" and I have copious notes toward several other volumes, a sequence of books that define life on the ridge. Docenting. The Columbus Museum is sending another batch of docents down, to pick my brain, I've become the Carter guy, by default. I put on white cotton gloves and handle the nude drawings carefully. Point out certain characteristics, the way he frames nature, and it almost seems I'm making sense. Read more...

Back Home

Post Emily. Stayed in town for a lovely dinner with the cast and Terry (the only board member to see the show), then saw Glenn and Linda off this morning and brought home all the leftovers. Enough food and snacks to last a week, plus beer and a bottle of wine. Seven (her real name) and Alan were at the show Saturday night and they want another Museum After Hours tour for several friends next Saturday. I'll need to clear it with Pegi, but I readily agreed. The matinee yesterday was wonderful, a good audience, several people back to see the show for a second time. Much conversation, at dinner, about doing the show at other venues. Glenn filmed all the performances and hopes to edit a version we can copy for all the schools in the county and sell to interested parties. B said there was six inches of snow last Tuesday on the ridge, and as there were still some leaves on bushes and small trees (protected in the under-story) I had to leave everything in the Jeep and clip a path to the house. Most leaves are gone now and the view across the hollow is stunning. Cold inside, but I burn another kinder garden desk and change into sweats, the winter mufti, settle back with an early drink to consider the past week and the week ahead. A school show to install, that isn't really designed for installation, by Thursday, then the big annual fund-raiser on Friday, and the after hours tour on Saturday. Then, maybe a week off to tease a book out of the files Glenn copied for me. Reading through some pages today, I realized it would be an outrageous book; and yet, a new reader asked me yesterday, where was this Janitor College, because she'd never heard of it before. As Emily is my mentor, a snake in the grass. Not to put too fine a point, the relationship is merely proximity. She rubs off on you. This past week was a kind of complete immersion therapy, what I now think of as The Emily Cure. When you become mentally obese, you hole-up in a tiny, sharply raked theater (seating 98 people) and listen to Emily, with this strange haunting music. I had never considered lentils as a musical instrument, silly me, but when Zach throws them on the cymbal and the table and the floor, they somehow manage to frighten you. Snare drum riffs and a gong. The Cincy Conservatory would be amiss if they didn't just grant TR an advanced degree. His teacher said to me, after watching and hearing the show, that that was what he was trying to do, and the cool thing, about being a teacher, was that occasionally a student would leap-frog right over your back. I don't understand why I'm in the position of getting this kind of thing together. There'll be stories, apocryphal, but we were actually there, and it was way beyond merely good. Zach and TR are in love with Linda, they worship her interpretation. And the music reflects that. Easy enough to force TR into a corner, where he had to compose his way out, but I actually hate the combined arts, where I have to compromise. I'd rather be alone. Yet the chance to work with someone on a similar lie is attractive. It's all theater. Read more...

Saturday Night

God help me, I got to telling stories, at the reception after the show. First though, the other part of the day, I wrote something and shipped it out, so I'd be on record, then Linda called and she was ready to cook. Went over to Sara and Clay's and we decided to go to lunch before we started the actual cooking and spent an hour at the pub. Hearty lunches because of the show tonight. Standard practice in theater (then maybe a light dinner after the show) where times are skewed by performance schedules. We cooked: I chopped, Glenn browned, linda directed. Three great hours, talking and cooking, and Glenn put together a Janitor College file, he'd read a few lines and Linda and I would fall over laughing. I can't believe I wrote some of the things I've written. He read a piece about how almost a generation of janitors were wiped out in WW2, because they were such good spies. The hook being that people assumed janitors could neither see nor hear; they were janitors, after all. It's a very good piece of writing. The show was better, tonight, and the audience was worse. The nuance was palpable, the interludes, so subtle; who would think, in normal conversation, that a word should be allowed space, but Emily demands, and if you have any sense, you listen. The reception, afterwards, went on and on, and I was too tired to join the group that continued the party elsewhere. One drink and I was out like a light. Read more...

Opening Night

We just handed TR his MM (Master in Music) degree. This was worth not writing for a few nights and the various other sacrifices. The best comment, one of, at the meet-and-greet after the premier, was by a seven year-old girl, the Barnhart daughter, and I would expect no less, considering her father and the music he makes, TR was his student, after all. She said "When the lights went out, it was like she closed her eyes." Which is exactly what we intended. Going back to Wednesday, I wasn't sure we could make it happen. As a side bar, I'd mention that I keep saying I'm not going to work in the combined arts but that I stumble on projects that interest me. I'm a kind of jack of all trades, so my span of interest is quite large. Linda and Zack were great tonight, a magic connection, she listens to him, he punctuates her. It's amazing, you're sucked into her world, what it's like to be Emily. It's what I wanted to do. I tend to enable projects, a tic I picked up early; and this was a cool project, getting into Emily's mind. Linda is such a dream to work with, and Zach is a percussive genius, my job is staying out of the way. If I do my job perfectly, you'll never know I was there. It falls seamlessly into the framework that I knew exactly what plant that were talking about, I mentioned the name, more or less casually, and they both looked at at me as if I was a savant. It was a Night Blooming Cereus that John Cage had given a cutting from to Al, and it bloomed spectacularly the night Cage died. Hey, I read a lot. The weather was awful, the first part of the week, so I had come to town with several changes of clothes. Six inches of snow on the ridge, and I couldn't chance getting trapped. A roof leak at the museum, so I cleaned up the mess and made some phone calls. The boilers were not on, so I made some more calls, worked on the logistics for the coming days. Rain. Lunch on Tuesday Barb said I should come over for a drink with John after work, and we drank Irish whiskey and talked about Emily. Board members and facilities discussion all day Wednesday. More rain in the morning, but clearing when Glenn and Linda arrived, dinner at the pub, then Glenn and I walked over to Kroger and got a bottle of Bushmills, went back to Sara and Clay's apartment and talked for a couple of hours. Thursday, set up for the show, Zack arrived, set up the instrumentation and ran a technical rehearsal. Rusty, from being away from it for a few weeks, but knew we could run a dress rehearsal Friday afternoon, which was pretty good, and last night it all came together. Read more...