Two Objectives

Paint the blue wall in the small galley (I taped the baseboard and door trim yesterday) and pack up the Cake Show. Mary Poppins' walk down to the truck, twirling my umbrella. Hard rain in the early morning and I have to stop at the lake, experience the spillway, set out a couple of roadkill squirrels for the crows. They watch suspiciously but I'm not back in my truck more than a minute before they investigate what I've brought them. It must be terribly annoying to have to hop away from your meal every few minutes so a vehicle can drive through your dining room. I bring roadkill home and if I can't make a meal off it, put it on top of the outhouse for the three buffoons. They crack me up, a comedy routine, I'm learning to speak a little crow from watching their show. Language by osmosis. Successful repair and paint job in the small gallery. Tape residue is a pain in the ass. I used a damp foam sanding block yesterday, and it is paintable today but the texture is slightly different. No one will notice. Packing the cake show takes no time at all. D and I watch the Cirque performance, because the cast threatened us, and I still get home early, start a fire from the Wrack Show, heat cider for a toddy. It's a different world from a week ago, the leaves mostly gone, and it's somber, dampened. A prelude to winter. I can feel it in my bones when I go out to pee. "This is it, pretty baby..." and are you ready to play? Preparation for winter is such a large part of my life, strange really, but it doesn't seem strange to me, consider your latitude and do what you must. More a mandate than a prerequisite. I'm better prepared than I've been for several years. I scoff at your winter winds, your ice-storms, throw your best natural disaster at me and I will merely seek higher ground and hibernate. There are moments, in the early hours, where I defer to myself, I know I'm wrong, that isn't the issue, but I wonder what I'm doing. Why am I here, what am I doing. I don't have a clue. It's a short loop, I feed myself and write. I should be able to predict a pattern. But of course I can't. Because it hasn't happened yet. We'll talk about that later.
Tom

I'm pretty good, your looking
for a closer, I could do that,
throw straight strikes.
Read more...

This Fall

Most of the leaves are off there trees, the drifts are accumulating, the views are opening, I can see several other ridges now, the antics of the crows. Breezy evening and dead leaves rattle against the house. Rain forecast and I need to be at the museum tomorrow, so I park at the bottom and hike in. Puddles are disguised as hard surfaces covered with leaves, and I make several mistakes. Summer temps, today, 78 degrees, but with the trees stripped and the wind, you know it's fall. There's a turn-out, above the lake, on Mackletree, where the creek flows into ponded water. I often stop there, it's a lovely spot, and in the up-slope opposite it's easy to follow the succession of trees. Most oak forest are beech climax, things usually burn before then, but given a few hundred years without interference, any given oak forest would be a magnificent beech park. Beech trees are odd in that they hold there leaves, often through the winter, and I can't imagine what the advantage is in that. So that, in a typical winter, when everything else is bare, dead brown leaves still wave from the beech. The nuts are large enough that the succession must be at the whim of squirrels, or chipmunks, or something large enough to carry them. Times I feel like an idiot, every year, some particular things come up and I realize I don't know anything about them. Does the new leaf, in the spring, push the old leaf off? I won't speculate on that, but I will say that what happens in the Beech Climax sequence, is that the oaks canopy, the under-story dies out from lack of light, some critter buries some nuts; eventually an old oak falls, lightning or root-rot, and there are a couple of small beech saplings on deck, ready to go. I cut a very small sapling beech recently, 12 inches tall. If I read the rings correctly, it was 10 years old. Talk about waiting for a chance. Three or four of them will shoot up in a clearing, and they canopy quickly, shade out any competition; they're beautiful trees, I love them. So one of the reasons that I stop at that turn-out, is to look at the trees, and try and figure out what's going on. I don't research this, I just watch. An interesting bifurcation there, because I often do want to know, find the fact and file it, but sometimes I enjoy idle speculation. I've walked in the woods most of my life, and there are vague patterns there that I want to understand. But I want the understanding to come from experience, not from something I've read. I want too much, which is my want. An alpha beech emerges, shades out the others, establishes a realm; we've seen this before, if you follow history. I wouldn't want to profile here. We all know who we're talking about. He who needs no name. Or was that 'she', whatever. Read more...

Like Chickens

Two power-point presentations, two different rooms, one projector. A pain in the ass, but there are sufficient reasons, therefore I'll make it happen, as long as it doesn't interfere with my lunch. A new rule I just made up today. I'm not big on rules, generally, but I like to flirt with Lindsay at the pub. The leaf situation is reaching critical mass, I always forget this part, it doesn't last long, where the leaves are more than ankle deep, and you track them everywhere. Leaves in your socks, leaves in your pocket. The front deck is an installation, "Leaf Litter", that changes day by day. My truck was so buried this morning I came back in for the broom. The pot holes are a total amalgam. I could make a screen with a deckle and pull sheets of leaf paper. Tonight is the designated Trick-Or-Treat night in Scioto County and marks 30 years that I've never seen a kid in a costume at my door. I don't wear costumes, so I miss all those parties. I get a small bar of bitter-sweet chocolate at Kroger and eat one square. I'll make something for the staff with the rest of it. I don't do sweets. Key Lime Pie is my only dessert, I make maybe three or four a year, eat a slice and give the rest away. I bought four pounds of sugar last year, most of it I took in tea. I bought a scant five pounds of flour, I don't do any baking anymore, there were years when I bought fifty pounds of wheat berries and ground my own flour, almost daily, baking everything under the sun. Now I buy a loaf of whole grain bread every other week. We change, over time, for years I raised everything I ate, now I raise nothing but a few herbs. I wanted to slap someone, yes, this is what I do now. Emily, you know, up there on the second floor. We could probably live together, you up there, and me down here. I'm almost flexible, consider what you might say. Hey, all I was doing was driving home. Take Plato's main point, that the artist is dangerous, I'm not sure we still really see it that way. Emily goes a lot of different places, she's always one step ahead. I thought of several things that might happen, and none of them did. Blow it off and get on with your day.

Tom

Like crows, chickens
peck an order, look
where the blood runs. Read more...

Leaf Fall

The shear organic propensity. Usually there are some big winds that blow things into drifts, off to the side, but right now the leaves are six inches thick and cover everything to the point of invisibility. What driveway? In four-wheel low, a gear I used once in Colorado (in ten years), I slide slowly, but completely out of control, contained only by ruts that remind me where I should be. Exhilarating but a hell of the way to start the day. Scott has promised to grade my access this week, which probably means next week, in the mean time it's merely the first hurdle. I have a routine: drive out to the beginning of the downhill run, stop the truck, get out and walk the first 25 feet and gauge the relative footing. If I can't walk it then I don't drive it and call in some accumulated overtime. Mackletree is amazing. I know everything is mostly water, but the leaves are so thick that the road is disappeared. You know where it is, because of the leaves, but you can't see it, because of the leaves, the verge is indistinct. I want to be clear on this, the kitchen is my office, you leave dirty dishes in my sink and I will certainly wash them, a matter of course, but you can' expect me to be civil if you soil my carpet. My problem has always been too much attachment. That word again. I love the museum, and my place here, but I hate it when things are dirty. Odd, really, because I can live in a hell-hole, my home, my space, but the show must be clean. I actually prefer my space to be cluttered, I have a sense of where things are, and precision has always struck me as anal and too much bother. I call your attention to that last attempt at order, where the lights went out and you struggled for a candle. Fact remains, if you slip in your shoes, you probably can't drive it. Reconsider. If things are so constellated, then you merely read, which is a rule, I think. A theorem. I try to place things in order, devise a system, but what I'm actually confronted with is a wall, that I need to climb, that is unclimbable. I could have made a mistake, in what I that I was doing, but that seems unlikely, because I've considered every step. Newton said, and I trust my interpretation of this, five years of Latin, "tanaquam ex ungue leonem": as the lion is recognized by his print. You're revealed by what you do. Nothing is more important than who you are. I don't mean that in any profound way, more merely mundane. Yes, yes, Emily, or was that Molly, what is your name? Read more...

Storm Drain

Daft morning, the Roto Rooter guys were on time, early, to clean the clean-out on the interior roof drain, which comes down inside the building and elbows out into the alley about three feet below grade. There is a clean-out, cast iron, frozen in place, they eventually have to break the cap. Fine. They pull out a bunch of scale and small animal parts, come and get me, send me up the ladder with a flashlight, there's what they call and off-set and I'd call a break about three feet in, not good. They give an estimate of $1500, to dig up the pavement and make the repair. I'm off to the City Offices to talk to the town Engineer, Larry, who passes me along to the Sewer guy, Rusty, and we pop every manhole cover within the block, both ends of the alley. I'd not seen the underworld of Portsmouth before, bricked and nasty. There is no storm drain in the alley, but we have a roof drain that clearly goes out and connects with a storm drain, but it's not there. If Roto-Rooter had effected the repair, it wouldn't have made any difference, there's no place for the water to go. No wonder the basement floods. Records were lost in the '37 flood, whatever. You can almost reconstruct events if you look at the paving. Lovely brick pavers under two inches of asphalt, and down the middle is a strip of concrete maybe three feet wide, depth unknown. Having popped the manhole covers, we know that two of them, one at either end of the alley, and the concrete strip, are electrical, massive three-phase trunk lines. They destroyed the storm drain when they put in the underground electric. Progress. My proposed solution is to drill a hole in the side of the building, through double walled brick (there's a company that does this, there's a company that does anything), refit the drain with a 'tee' higher up, and daylight the water out onto the surface of the alley. This is what later buildings did, and it makes the most sense to me. Now the water hits a plug and pushes back against the basement wall outside the museum and percolates through. Not good at all. All I want to do, Drainage 101, is get the water downhill, I don't care if it blocks traffic, I don't care if a Barbie Doll drowns. Drainage, in these flood plains, is serious business. Glenn and I had talked about another movie, The Emily Project, and he sent some dialogue today that cracked me up. Talk about outside the box. A working title might be "Called Back", because we've always enjoyed that concept, of being called, again. The image of Tim Hardin smashing his guitar is priceless. I've known a lot of people, in a lot of different places, and that rift you do there, give me the camera, I can shoot as well as the next guy. We could well conspire together. Emily would need her room, and the view, out that dormer window. We'd have to build this, I see it in my mind's eye, and she needs to be perfectly comfortable there, understanding every nuance. There's a picture of Faulkner, it's iconic, he's stroking a horse's muzzle, there are holes in his pants. Does make you wonder about the relative value? He'd already won the Noble Prize.

Tom

I have to wander off soon, to the spaces between,
the unknown connection, that ties us together,
what they call static electricity,
and I call I shot in the arm.
Read more...

Modality Audible

A vagrant sound, an animal, sounded like a cat, but could have been anything. Enough to get me outside with a flashlight, it's a raccoon, horribly damaged, either a pack of dogs or an inept hunter. I go get a gun, put it away, best thing you can do, a situation like this; I don't like doing it but I don't have a problem pulling the trigger. Just before sunset, a shaft of sunlight broke free, a pie in the sky, everything it exposed became more than real, an emphasized reality, and I merely nodded. Nothing, really, you could say. Wow, but what does that express? I wonder. A Bach fugue chases its tail, everything that can be said about a certain subject. I don't know why it's suddenly clear to me, maybe just that seven worlds collide. String theory. Everything ends. We could walk in the dimming light. It's still beautiful, but the edges of the leaves have turned and there's a lot of brown. The angle of light and the colors now adumbrate winter, you can feel an edge to the wind, and the days are shorter. I'm ok, I think, but I don't have the confidence I've usually had facing this change in weather. Drag in the sheep-watering trough, heat water, scrub off a layer a skin and consider my recent mistakes. I'm not that good at living in the world, but I have a tough body; not strong particularly, but my bones are good and I heal quickly. After the bath I treat some surface injuries and chide myself for not being more careful. I want something good to eat, an omelet, with onions and mushrooms. I play to this part of myself, the part that wants something specific, and I have some dried morels that I reconstitute in chicken broth. I cook an entire onion until it almost disappears, add the mushrooms and the broth, cook off the broth, stir in three eggs. Not just any eggs, totally free-range, you might call them wild, chicken eggs, I had to put on a climbing harness and repel down a slope to get them. There was a opossum, edging closely, and I beat it off with my umbrella. Everyday life is a challenge. It's awkward, earning a living. Please tell me you care. Emily is above all that, beyond care, into the netherworld. The North Country Fair. Almost a circus. The hallowing winds. The borderline. The river won't hold you forever. Trust me. She's a girl with a face long gone. If I were just a carpenter. Carry it close to your chest, whatever it is, if I were a carpenter. Read more...

Emily

She draws at my heart-strings, she's everywhere in this world I experience, the air I breathe. Out the southeast window of the kitchen a couple of young red maples are lit by afternoon light. Nothing special, but they glow in a way that catches my attention. I'm so easily diverted, the classic mountain stream. The path of least resistance. You see something and you wonder what caused that. Rereading Emily's later letters, looking at her tombstone. Hour on, hour off, sawing wood, reading. Just enough light breeze and enough small birds in the understory, that there is no extraneous sound. At one point I wander off, thinking I saw a mushroom down the logging road. It was the underside of a poplar leaf, bleached almost white, an honest mistake. And extend the walk, looking closely at leaf form and color, marveling at this slice of the natural world. I spend an hour walking a hundred yards and back. I shouldn't be surprised when someone asks me If I'm alright. Crab cakes, picked up several cans of premium crab meat at Big Lots and I make a batch (these experimental batches are three cakes) with a little acorn flour and some instant mashed potatoes as binder. Fried in butter, these are a little heavy, but I like them, the last one I fried in bacon fat and served myself with a mild hot sauce. It was heavenly. I didn't lose the crab, and the crust was magical. I want a slight 'bite', I want some resistance. A flattened note, something. Read more...

Surreal

Deep blue cloudless day with a breeze and the leaves continue free falling. Impossibly bright gold surrounds what I laughingly refer to as my yard. Carhartt bibs, start a small fire, and I'm out the door. Eschewing intrusive noise on a day like this, I hand-saw wood, with breaks reading the history of Scioto County. An interesting hour working out the history of the word pone, which may or not be Indian. Postpone (bread later?) the usual Sunday bath until tomorrow, so I can just stay in overalls and work boots, tracking leaves in the house, a bit of mud in my tread. At the Goodwill I picked up a bag of sweatshirts for two dollars. These are disposable shirts, to be worn on walks through briars. I lost a favorite denim shirt last week, to the evil bull-vine (green briar), all of my denim shirts have a provenance, and this one had been bought at a thrift-store in Florida, eight years ago for three dollars; I had the collar turned (a group of older ladies have a sewing co-op, and they still know how to turn collars) for ten dollars, last year, so it was good-to-go for another five years before it became a painting shirt, and then disposable. All to be lost in a single incident, in a five minute period, on a day in October, when I got pissed and over-reacted to a bed of thorns. Downside of the disposable sweatshirt wardrobe is that sweatshirts are moisture magnets. Year-around I have wet clothes draped various places, absolutely can't put damp items into the laundry basket, so mid-winter, when the house is sealed up and I'm drying dirty items, there's a certain funk. I usually fry bacon, which gains me a couple of days before a trip to the laundromat. We all have our systems. The greatest good, for me, that approach to the sublime, almost always occurs when I'm on my knees, splitting kindling. Grain is critical here, and the force of the blow, that slap in the face if you figure incorrectly, or another band-aid on your thumb. I'm always fully in the moment, when I'm wielding a sharp implement, I know my skin is thin, hardly even a barrier, a mere acknowledgment, pretty sure I could do that in my sleep. Whatever is required, I don't do required. I'm a loose candle. There are always those. Read more...

Write Mail

Sometimes, now, I just keep a file open. A reporter's notebook or the sheet of paper I carry, folded into eights, bearing notes headed in every possible direction. There are two places to ford Upper Twin and we locals use them to clean our undercarriages. The first is beside a bridge and follows the old roadbed, a natural ford, on solid flat sandstone. The second, added recently, several miles further upstream, is not as elegant. They dozed a tow-path and hauled in some rock. It cuts a corner where the road turns sharply, nothing fancy, but serves the purpose. I drive back and forth through the first one, melting a week's mud. In the country we call this alignment. A thought occurs to me, something about crows, because there are crows everywhere on this little drive, and I stop to make a note. It's cool and I'm not dressed appropriately, but the hood's warm, so I sit there, amazed at how far a warm ass can take you, writing words on a folded sheet of paper. For the record, the words were: "How many times can three crows surprise you?" Rolling a smoke and of course a Park Ranger drives by, the first moving vehicle I've seen. It's bow season for deer, and there are trucks parked off the road, where hunters have staked claim, but the Ranger is moving, driving slowly, checking for violation. And of course he stops, recognizes me, and we chat (exactly the correct word, I love English, the nuance provided: we didn't really talk or have a conversation, we chatted) about the price of tobacco. I told him about the loophole in the new tax, how I now rolled cigarette tobacco that was packaged as pipe tobacco. There are always ways to cut corners. Between acorns and roadkill. At the second ford, I went through at speed, I knew I'd lose control for a split second, but trusted my ability to gain it again. Right there, where the State Road turns sharply, a Forest Service road goes straight into the heart of Appalachia, trailers, with everything they've ever owned piled outside, and there's a pick-up truck with three guys drinking Bud Light, waiting for me to make a commitment. I hit the ford at a high rate of speed, maybe 25 MPH, and the water exploded. The Good Old Boys applauded. We went our separate ways. The wild mustard is rampant. The one blue, other than the sky, is phlox. I recognize chickory by the stalk, it used to be blue. There is a way in which the change of seasons is just a change of color. Eventually everything becomes black and white. The dead of winter. I need a base line, and I find it in a stark black and white scene, deep winter, everything frozen, with Sam Bush playing a heart-breaking mandolin. My world, take it or leave it. Where nothing is what it seems. Read more...

Speaking Freely

When you're completely alone, it doesn't matter what you say or do. There is, of course, that problem, that you are a part of the world, so we develop different persona for where we might find ourselves. I watch myself closely on this front, and watch the way other people deal with it, it's a mixed bag. Some people surprise me, but not that many, and that's not just a product of years at the wheel, that element of surprise, it's something that actually occurs. I believe that, but I'm short on definitions. I really need to hook up the new printer, because I'm losing track of myself. I know I exist, at certain points of time, but as I gain definition I lose definition, and I wonder what that's all about. The more transparent I try to be, the more opaque I become. This is a language problem, I don't begrudge anyone anything. Whatever you have coming. I expect nothing, and that works for me. Your expectations would be different from mine. I assume we don't understand each other, maybe that gives me a foot up, an extra step. I'll take any advantage. I can't read certain things, parts of the old testament, the stupid parts, where I just roll my eyes, come on, we're adults here, some things are metaphor. Blustery day and the leaves are flying. Into the museum to touch base with D, order light bulbs, and to meet James and his fiancee. Cook's Tour. Stop back by Dave's place, best creek-bank mechanic in the county, but even he is defeated by my latched hood. The cable to the release has come loose and the primary latch (there are two) seems to be completely housed. It's impossible to get to. Dave says come back next Saturday and he'll stop at the auto parts store and read the manual. Haven't driven all the way up the creek in months but Dave lives at the outlet, near Rt.52, and I live 7.570 miles up the creek (my mailing address is the miles from the river, that's how they do it around here. Roads parallel to the Colorado/Utah border, in western Colorado, are often expressed as miles to the border. 41.35 Road. Here, everything changed, when the river ceased to be the main artery. Upper Twin Creek was running nicely, with the recent rains, at that lovely stage where all the fines are washed out, the water is wonderfully clear. Little waterfalls, over the steps of slate and sandstone. And the trees were lovely, madly shedding colored leaves. The verges are deep in leaf-drifts. The edges of the road are disappeared. Magic. There is a very real sense in which it is all theater: the posing, the role playing, the elaborate scenery, even the trained ducks at the lake. This whole Plato thing, reading for D's course, I'm struck with how dumb I was when I first read it. In the natural world, as I have lived for 40 years, the questions of reality fade into a chorus of frogs. There is no question in my mind, when I hold a tadpole, it is there. I can't speak to your table and chairs, but I know what I touch. And then it disappears. The past starts at the limit of my vision, when something has faded beyond my view, it's gone. It's the best I can do. I don't hide behind technique any more. I merely write. The past starts at the edge of the present, pat it on the ass and move on. Read more...

Fully Fall

At the top of the driveway, the young sassafras are a thing of great beauty, gold and yellow. 40 to 50% of the leaves gone on the ridge-top and I can now, for the first time since early April, see the other side of the hollow. Drive in with supplies for the weekend, but, as heavy rain is forecast, I took the truck back down to the bottom of the hill. Lovely, walking back up without a pack, flushed two grouse, that, as usual, startled me. A huge V of geese overhead, maybe 50, honking a running commentary on something. The women, staff, at the museum, were a riot today, I kept my head down, checked the calendar to see what phase the moon is in. Another event, something called Business After Hours, where business people gather for a few beers, a bite to eat, and chat amongst themselves. I duck out, as soon as everything is prepped, as this is not a crowd I would hang with. Too many suits. I know my comfort zone and I've stayed late twice in a week for functions, a record for me. The ladies liked the squash soup, it was good, I liked it both hot and cold, as I do when I make the same kind of soup with cherries. Made a mean chili, way too hot for almost anyone, a traditional chili, beans (pintos), ground elk, onions, garlic, tomatoes, a great deal of green and red chili powder, and I never had designed on eating it in a bowl. Scooped on tortilla chips with salsa and a thin slice of avocado was what I had in mind. Really, really good. I made some tortilla chips with corn and acorn flour, very little salt. I need just a small fire in the stove now, to chase the chill and damp. The house smalls good. An interesting aspect of work, in the current configuration, the smoke breaks. Sara usually comes down and finds me, we go out to the loading dock concrete sofa. Many things are decided there, and now Tammy, who is one of those 3 cigs a week people, comes out occasionally with us, and then today, Pegi came out too, waving a pencil between her fingers, as it were a cigarette; and the four of us were perched there, lifting our legs when cars would use the alley, talking museum business. Sara and I have declared the loading dock a No-Fly zone, where anything can be said, Tammy and Pegi catch on quickly, and we talk there, openly and honestly. It's a very cool aspect of working with other people, the chance to be open and honest. We always hold enough back to protect ourselves, I think that's the universal condition, we are monads but we operate in this enormous Venn mosaic, where everything overlaps. Thinking about dust today, the way it infiltrates. I now collect used Bounce sheets at the laundromat. I don't use them on/with clothes, I bought a box soon after I found out how useful they were for other things and used them once in the dryer with some jeans. I itched for two weeks. Fucking chemicals, man. Still, I use them for cleaning glass shelves at the museum, and I use them the clean my computer screen, and wipe my windows after I clean them, every few years. I think what they do is break the electro-static charge. I might be making that up. I ran a little experiment, to see if I wasn't the victim of yet another urban myth. Watched with the magnifying glass as dust I had stirred from the ash-box of the cookstove settled on several pieces of glass. I had prepared the surfaces and I had closed the house up tightly, so that any currents were fostered from subtle changes in temperature. The dust motes, which when viewed closely look like very successful, very light hair balls, a billion filaments, want to connect, want to amass, it's the nature of useless shit, it collects in the corner. But they bounced off the sheet that had been treated with Bounce. They positively clung to the glass that had been treated with any detergent, and they even liked the sheets of glass that had been wiped with an actual glass-cleaning product. Dust is insidious. When I watched closely, though, I noticed, there was an actual charge, when contact was made, the ball simply bounced away.

Couldn't Send last night. Thunder storms. Walked out this morning, and a fine thing it was, downhill, first light, everything cleaned by rain and prisms on every leaf-tip. A glorious sight. Spent most of the day working on the Historical Show with staff. Wondering if I'm becoming too assertive. We need to get this show together, so I can install it, consequently, I push things a bit. I thought they needed pushing. My role is mercurial. Sara would, I think, tell me if I was out-stepping my job description. 1926 catalog from Standard Supply (a large plumbing and heating supply company, wholesale) and I almost brought it home, to look at the pictures. One was labeled 'Battery Of Porcelain Urinal Stalls' and there were eight of them in a circle, around a shared cistern that flushed them. I want one. But the item that really caught my eye, was a thing I never knew existed, a sub-section, in the boiler division, "Isolator Garbage Consumers" (which phrase I had actually thought before, as it might relate to Kim, Kurt, and me) and there was a top of the line unit that was drop-dead perfect design/function. Once I got the concept. It was a large cast-iron closet, and you threw everything in there, household waste, and when it was full, it flamed-on and reduced your waste to ashes. How cool is that? The product description said: "Provides for the sanitary odorless accumulation and complete destruction, at the source of origin, of all garbage and waste material." That about covers it. Not to cut too fine a point, but what we do is create waste. There was a rain, hard enough, this afternoon, to knock leaves off trees. So it was raining leaves, really wet leaves; they lose the ability to shed water as they rot. I love the fall, you either hibernate or die. The decomposition has already begun. Mackletree was covered in leaves, to the point that you didn't know where the edges were, and my driveway, I'm pleased to report, was an absolute carpet of leaves. This is one of those days that defines (that last s might not be necessary) the year. When you might dance naked and do other things you wouldn't ordinarily do. I look up and see Emily's tombstone. I'm not sure it gets better than this. Read more...

Circus Lecture

Foremost authority in North America, we flew in on a Humanities grant, gave a nice power-point presentation and talk. Woman knows her circus. Wine and mixed nuts. With mixed nuts people tend to pick. I raised peanuts for years in Missip (the tops make great hay) and still love them dearly, so I am not usually a picker, just grab a handful, and shake them into my mouth. I do, however, love filberts and no one was taking them. Working at the Jefferson House, in Winchester, Virginia, there were lots of nut trees and bushes. Filberts are bushes (that can get large) that like their feet near water, and along the outflow of a small spring, someone had planted them on both sides. The one fall I was there I must have picked and roasted 30 pounds. In Missip they were wild along streams. I love them, I make a nut butter with them that is transcendent. Winter coming on, I've started thinking about oils and fats. That, of course, is one of the things that makes acorns such a good food for storage. A pemmican of acorn meal and jerky would be handy to have around, when you didn't want to cook. I might make some, I've read about pemmican forever, but I've never made any. You need two rocks, some acorn meal, some jerky, and maybe a drop or two of walnut oil to start the amalgamation. Sounds like something I'd do on a date. "Hey, you ever made pemmican before?" My younger daughter (I do love the comparative) calls and we laugh about a great many things. She may move here, to establish residency, so she could go to Ohio schools cheaply, and she is the only person I could live with, so it works for me; she understands my habits, she wants to write, I can't imagine a better place to be. I imagine, calling across, "I'm tensing a verb", and she replies, the very fact that she replies, is beyond the pale. "Did you come up with anything", I am not a role model, I don't want my girls using me as any kind of template. I'm a sorry model. I wear the same thing ever day. A creature of habit. I assume you'd have to change that look by the way you felt. But that wouldn't necessarily explain anything. What is is a mere diffraction of light. Look again. What did you think you saw. Read more...

Centrifugal, Centripetal

Centrifugal (I love the fugal in there) is force directed from the center toward the outside, centripetal force, also called afferent, brings it back toward the center. The modern circus, the American Traveling Circus, started as a horse show, when a horse trainer in England discovered that a ring of 42 feet worked best for tricks on horseback. Stopped at the lake on the way home because a guy was launching a small boat and needed a hand. Two fly-rods in the boat, so we talked fly-fishing for a bit, match the hatch, all that; he ties his own flies, and I gave him a couple of squirrel tails I had in the truck. Warm enough to not need a fire, but I start one anyway, to make the butter-nut squash soup for staff. I love this dish, and It's always interesting, the differences, how or whether the starches have fully converted. I'll be using leached acorn flour for thickening. A medium squash, peeled and chunked, simmered in chicken broth, with salt, pepper, allspice, and a little ground ginger, thicken, run it through the blender, add cream. I make similar soups with almost any vegetable, and a great many other things, varying the herbs and spices: shrimp, mushrooms, spinach, cherries, mustard greens are assertive, and I made a turnip version, last year, that was top notch but needs a name other than Turnip Soup, which doesn't fall so trippingly off the tongue. I love the entire turnip family, I do a caramelized rutabaga dish that once resulted in a marriage proposal. I turned her down, because I knew she just liked my cooking. That might have been the basis of a relationship in the past, but I require conversation and she was an air-head. She had a nice body and I did think twice. But, fuck, a relationship built on a side dish doesn't seem doable. I think about how my cooking, now, reflects the equipage. The wood cookstove allows all these options, cooking something for hours, leaching acorns, getting an oven very hot. My house is thirty-six feet wide, from the cookstove to my desk, but I never walk directly, or rarely, so I borrowed one of the measuring devices that you roll along and it tells you how many feet you've gone, from a city-worker guy that had one. I used the: "Hey, I work at the museum!" ploy, and it went perfectly. I like playing with new tools. A normal move, when I get up and roll a smoke and get a drink and feed the stove, is within a tenth of 42. I look like a serious dufus, rolling this thing around, but I appreciate the information. It seems to gibe with something. Yes, right, 42. Here's another cool thing, after I had cooked the squash in chicken broth, I needed to take the lid off, so I could let it cool, and I released several thousand BTUs that were pregnant with earthy smells. Almost as good as part of that. What actually happens. Cooking, I make some assumptions, rosemary goes well with lamb., maybe I make some substitutions, one thing for another, the deal is I always tell the truth. Factor that. Read more...

Left Field

From far out in left field, but not beyond the pale. Anything I think seems to fall within the realm. Even if I try to not make sense, sense emerges. Not that it's a game, but it seems to be. Something Wittgenstein said: "But if I hear a tune with understanding, doesn't something special go on in me --- which does not go on if I hear it without understanding? And what? --- No answer comes; or anything that occurs to me is insipid. I may indeed say "Now I understand it" and perhaps talk about it, play it, compare it with others etc. Signs of understanding may accompany hearing." This approaches the heart of things. When I listen to the Cello Suites I don't so much understand as I'm transported. Beam me up Scotty. Oak galls are bitter, but at their heart, there is a sweetness. A lushness, call it Romantic, or whatever. Harmonics play a large part in it. Listen to the Allman Brothers. "Sweet Melissa", I swoon. Two shots in Glenn's movie about the Wrack Show, that shot of Sara, and the boat carving a white line, what makes sense, really? A couple of chords, a progression of sorts. Work on firewood for a while, but feeling tired, coming down from the final rush of getting the show opened. Need my energy for the next show as we change out the upstairs gallery soon, photographs (all must be framed) and related materials, objects from earlier businesses in Portsmouth. History show. Reread parts of "Zettel", Wittgenstein stripped bare. "In a certain sense one cannot take too much in handling philosophical mistakes, they contain too much truth." Two nice boles of pine I'd picked up and dried all summer, I don't burn pine but I do use it for kindling, and I busted them in half to check the dryness. Both pieces have perfectly straight grain, what a treat splitting them will be. Need a froe, left mine in a tool box in Virginia. Burning Osage Orange is like burning hickory, hot enough to burn out your stove. I'll save the rest for deep winter. Solved the mystery of the floating wood. 50% of river wrack is poplar, then sycamore (a water tree), then oak; but there is also a lot of Osage and it didn't make any sense to me, because it is a very dense wood, about as dense as Live Oak, .95 specific gravity, 59 pounds per cubic foot, and it shouldn't be floating at all BUT it doesn't absorb water. Must have silica in there somewhere, because it actually repels water. Which, of course explains why it makes such good fence posts (in the words of Big Roy in Missip, "damned things will wear out two or three post holes"), absolutely refusing to rot. Quiet relaxing day until the woodpeckers arrive, I don't mind them, really; quite like watching them, so businesslike, so busy, and it wasn't all that quiet, with the breeze through drying leaves. It was relaxing, though, a nice walk down the logging road, a slow saunter, stopping to look at things. The Sassafras is lovely right now, yellow leaves and green branches, and the Red Maple is beautiful. A few fall mushrooms, and I collect a batch of chantarelles, a rare treat, right back to the house, I cook them slowly in butter (they get tough, is their only fault), just salt and pepper, serve them to myself on toast. With a second, smaller batch, I make an omelet. This is eating high on the hog. I had planned to make chili, but I can do that any time. I imagine an acorn/mushroom stew which I think would be very good: leach-slow-cook acorns, shelled and chopped roughly, two hours, changing the water less frequently, then toast slightly. Do not boil, the fats will go out with the baby. Simmer the chunks in chicken broth, slow cook the chantarelles, chopped roughly, in butter, add them, add some garlic, add an onion that you've caramelized in yet another pan. Served on toast, in a bowl, sprinkled with good cheese and minced scallion. I have to fix this as soon as possible, it sounds like something, and the idea of something perks my interest. Me and Molly, me and Emily, what was I thinking: now I've got this tombstone, staring me in the face, "called back" indeed. Read more...