Thunder Storms

Let the first line of squalls clean of the roof. Supposed to be waves of them tonight and tomorrow. I need to collect wash-water. Used a lot cleaning up the force-meat mess. Read the Mark Twain Autobiography all day. Big, well edited, scholarly book like this, I always enjoy reading the 100 pages of notes at the end. Wet and boggy outside, so I skipped the hike, read, and ate too much pate. The book's too heavy to balance on your belly for very long, so I ended up sitting in my writing chair most of the day. Cramps. At dusk I finally do go outside and walk the driveway. My caloric load and saturated fat intake is maxed out, so I forgo any further food. Continue rummaging around in the pages of text. I have all three thousand pages together now, from the museum and the pile here. I'd asked a few close friends what had been their favorite paragraphs over the years, pages I might read up north. Since they're all sent as e-mails, they're date coded. I can actually find them. This is ten years of work, and it's like a romp through my recent past. Right, right, I'd already forgotten that. Forgetting is a part of history, what we leave out. Selective memory. It's safe to say that I've forgotten more things than I remember. Reading Twain, dictating his autobiography, getting side-tracked, pasting in bits of the local post. "Politics is always local." Not that I ever talk politics. You live long enough and words change their meaning. Fast food, and gay, and libertarian; even what the whip-o-will sings. Twain had one of the first typewriters. About 1900, letters became something, text, that was typed and signed, rather than something that was written. There's a difference. Poggio, writing on velum, is not the same as a ink-jet printer. An Iris smells different than a day-lily. Ten years of applied dynamics and I can now write honestly about being attacked by a goose. Being noble is usually a wild-goose chase. I prefer the village idiot, with his incantations. Or something a complete stranger says. For my part, it's a Mocking Bird singing a Towhee song, and I wonder about the nature of reality. Dawn comes to the ridge, and the birds are singing, well enough on the ways.