I Have A Broom For ThatI have been in this house for six months, more or less. I've tried hard to keep the basement in some semblance of order, fighting off the urge to send unclassified things down those stairs to lurk in corners (see Robin Wood's The Theory of Cat Gravity for more on this). I have work cut out for me now, though, in the basement: I have been gifted with saws.
They are Japanese style pull-saws, seven blades for wood and one for metal, with three handles to take them. The teeth have strange geometry and no set, the kerf thin. The blades work under the tension of the arm drawn back, so the metal flickers and dances backwards through the wood under tension, the kerf thinner yet. They sing.
The saws are the first steps on a road, now: I need to build a bench. I must gather other tools to do the things the saws cannot. I must practice keeping the blades true; I must practice dovetails. There is much to be done, and the basement will slowly turn into a place to shape wood, clean and well-lit, perhaps with music coming from corners. I am going to go as far as I can with hand tools. There is sawdust on the floor, tonight: this is a fine start.
And All The Tumults DoneAcquisitions have been made.
It seems to work somewhat like this; I have stumbled into (and hopefully help propagate) a network of people who have and uncanny knack for finding engines. These things take many forms, indeed: words, images, little pots of hot food on cool days. And music, too. Ah, music.
My brother, then, slides a CD across the table. It doesn't matter what he says about this particular, anymore, for I heave learned to listen, to heed, in every sense regardless. Because it is this: invariably, the songs he sends along creep up behind and take firm hold of things, and have that magical power of first flush: there is no help but to listen to then again and louder. Each time the turbines spin up faster. Each time, there is the very real possibility that the world itself, all of its water and rock and blood and bone, will tremble and shake, rippling raw again.
This is what the music industry is killing in spite of itself. I am pleased that, in this, it will always fail.
Depth of FieldThe house (my home) sits on a little ridge, a small sharp remnant of the forces of water that cut and shaped this land. The particular river that set to this particular land has long since moved on, smoothing away dirt and rock here and there on downward to lie today in the valley to the south. From my little ridge, I can look that way from the study out over the little spooned out valley to a sister ridge, some half of a mile away. The view is limited tonight by mist and fog.
The back porch looks down and to the west, over a little commercial corner with a busy gas station. The air is lit bright white by this place, throwing up a fountain of clean light that struggles against the murk. The intersection is busy with cars, head lights and tail lights contributing. Its cheerful down there, known: an island of the visible in all the darkness of the houses and the parkland.
To the south from the study, there is no such light, just a simple string of sodium lamps on poles climbing the hill to betray the rise of the road. When the cars come down, the headlights stab into free air, and when the cars go up, the tail lights fade into negligence. The street lamps themselves manage, but the ones in the distance are little more than smudges against the night.
It is difficult to be an astronomer here.
PlatesMy life is fairly unstructured these days, once I get home. There are few things that make a daily appearance (the crossword puzzle is one of these), and I get to fritter around the house most nights, twiddling with this and making improvements in that or buried in some thing or other. Sometimes, this has an impact on how dinner gets put together. Apart from the known problems of cooking for one, if I am not careful the niceties can slip a bit. To combat this, I always try to eat off of table ware, even for take away, or such lowly things as a sandwich.
I have mentioned peanut butter sandwiches before, I know - all of that sill applies to the one I ate tonight, elderberry jam and all the rest. I could have walked around with the thing in hand; it is what they were made for, an elegant development of the multitasking meal. I could have, in fine bachelor fashion, wolfed it down over the sink or some such thing, gulping milk from the carton. Instead, the sandwich went on a plate, and the milk into a glass, cold. It elevated this simple food into a meal, gently pulling on a shabby coat of civilization there on the kitchen table. It was a welcomed thing.
The fog has not lifted all day. All day, I have been living in a cloud.
Can't Get There From HereThere are elevators in the building where I work. Most of the time, they are the dutiful abstraction that the modern elevator has become: walk into this little room, press a button, ignore the shifting pulls, and then exit where you want to be. This is sufficiently commonplace that even the expectation of arrival has fallen into the realm of the granted, even when the elevators get cranky, and the buzzers go off because people hold the doors open for too long.
Sometimes the elevators get crankier than other times.
Consider: three people get on an elevator on one, and press the buttons for three other floors. The doors close, and all goes too quiet. No motion is felt, but after too long a moment, the indicator displays two. Three has been pressed, and the display says three, but the elevator slides slowly by, upward. The buzzer begins to ring, and the buttons do nothing. It is becoming clear that the elevator is a malfunctioning box climbing ever higher in a shaft, and beneath it, nothing but increasing potential energy.
I walk over bridges on the commute, bridges that I would otherwise take with the car. In the car, a bridge is that abstract thing, a logical extension of the roadway. There are other things to worry about, in cars. On foot, bridges become feats of engineering and faith, strange structures that leap from here to there and keep us up off the valley.
The elevator eventually let us out at the top. I've been taking the stairs. This doesn't stop the stairs from being just another engineering problem.
Keep The Kettle Going, PriamI've been reading The Histories before sleep these past nights, and something occurred to me. The style and content may be contributed to by a culture, time, and original language (to say nothing of the translation) all alien to me. It may also be this: when there is a scarcity of people writing stuff down, the things that get written about are those things that manage to capture the attentions of a few, and so what comes down to us is grossly filtered in part by supply and demand. Artisanal historians, if you will.
(I will cheerfully submit here that I am no Historian, trained or otherwise. It is entirely possible that not only are these thoughts entirely unoriginal, but that they are crap. Onward.)
I attended a fascinating course a few years back, offered by the History department of a local educational concern. The idea was to look at history through the words of texts written in the time of study. One nice thing about this is that voices bubble up that do not always represent the views and perspectives of those around them that went on to write the official accounts of What Happened. Part of the problem is finding these dissenting views - the folks in charge have traditionally been fairly bellicose about that sort of thing in the depths and shallows of my culture, but the small voices are there, giving us little windows into what life was like on the other side of the accepted, which was sometimes (often!) the majority population.
So. We are in the throes of our own little prosaic revolution, where broadcast is easy as picking up a keyboard, with the sometimes neglected assurance that one's words might be sticking around far longer than one may hope. We have words in our age, mountains of them (my thoughts on the veracity of such are on the About page, should you choose to believe them). The problem of Sturgeon's Revelation aside, I wonder what future historians will make of it.
The tea is ready.
Watch CapOne of the nifty things about this place is the sheer amount of talent abounding for the making of sausage. It is worth noting that the local instance of high-end food chain hasn't quite gotten it right yet, while the doldrum, monopolistic grocery concern can crank out a petty good sausage. There's no excuse for settling for that, though: the thing to do is find a local deli and walk down to the end where the little hand lettered sign sits, proclaiming sausage. If you're lucky, the sausage will be identified by the name of the person who put it together. It will glisten in the deli case.
I had some kale. I had some sausage; I fried it gently pierced in the bottom of a pot. Out came the sausage, a little water to release the fond, then onions. More time, more flame, more fond, more water. Then, a bit more water and chopped kale, eager to turn dark green from the wet heat. The sausage got sliced and sat merry on the kale. Good things filled the house.
While all of that was going on, a pot of polenta burbled gently on the next burner over. When all was ready, the polenta went into a bowl, topped with sausage and onion and kale. I put a hat of grated cheese on that, and grabbed a big spoon. There is no weather that can compete with this.
There was a bunch of of the sausage and kale left over from that; tonight I folded it into a quick pot of lentils. It is cold out there tonight, and the winter wraps fingers on the wavy panes. Between supper and this cup of tea, it knows it is not wanted here.
Radar Not AvailableAn element of this house: it sits close to one of the local highways. The road itself is cradled down in the valley, and while it can be a bit noisy, I never notice it when inside. It asserts itself on the back porch a bit, somewhat like having a public white noise generator for our little neighborhood. City living, I suppose; I would not trade it away for leaving this place. The odd thing is the affect of the weather.
The amount of ruckus that climbs the steep hill to my home is highly affected by the wind. Most days, the wind comes galloping up the valley from the river, carrying most of the evidence past. Sometimes though, the whips backwards over these hills, and the rumbles of cars and busses fill the yard and shake the herb patch. The water in the air does things, too: on sere days, the tumult of the parkway is hollow, distant. When the air is thick and wet, the sound puffs up and smears all over everything, making chats in the hammock difficult. If you like, the Steelers could be considered a weather phenomenon; after games when the valley is chocked with cars going nowhere, the road noise drops to nothing and the silence is kind (unless they lost, of course: then it is just silent).
When the sky is a puzzle with swirling motes of snow, a quiet blanket is thrown on all and the growls of the downshifts from the trucks are distant beasts. In the snow, it becomes a mystery up here.
The HillsI used to live at the base of a steep hill. We have no shortage of those, here in these parts. The road that came down it was straight as an arrow on the map, but in three-space suffered a bit from the drop. Any given winter, there are nights when the weather turns the roads foul and slick (slippy, to use the local vernacular) and occasionally a driver would find themselves bereft of traction as they came down. I have only seen that end very badly once, and even then I do not think anyone was seriously hurt. The problem, I think, is that the road was something of a thoroughfare, used by drivers who were not necessarily familiar with the area. While they were careful, it would sometimes turn out that they were not careful enough.
There are similar roads where I live now; I have a beautiful view of one from the study window. Tonight is a night of slippery roads, with fine mists of snow or rain descending. I am not too worried, though; this new place is a neighborhood, filled with excellent locals, and I do believe they will be sufficiently gentle with their cars and trucks. So far, so.
Go Colts!
Pasta Ai FunghiThere are a bunch of ways to make pasta with mushrooms. Most of them take a little effort; manage some carrots and onions into a fine dice, then finely chop some mushrooms, etc. I've done that, and the results are often extraordinary, but unless I can trick myself into that kind of effort on weeknights, I usually do something simpler. Here's one other way.
Put a pot full of water on to boil. Loosely chop up a bunch of mushrooms and put them in another largish pot with a little bit of oil and maybe an anchovy fillet. Let 'em fry while mincing a couple (or more) of cloves of garlic. When the water's boiling, throw the pasta in. Add the garlic to the mushrooms and turn the heat under that to low. When the pasta is done, drain, then dump it all into the mushroom pan and stir to coat. Dress with cheese. Eat, verily.
I walked home tonight in beautiful blue twilight, through winter woods made soft by falling snow.
Not bad, that.
Stone Souping MyselfMany nights after stomping homeward, the immediate difficulty is food. Depending on the day, dinner might be a hunk of good bread and soup from the freezer heated up in a saucepan. For the times when I didn't put together a pot of soup the previous weekend, I have a collection of (pretty good) cans of soup in the pantry. If I really have it together (only sometimes) I whomp up something from scratch. I trick myself into doing that, sometimes.
It has been a long day; the cans of soup are compelling. I take one down, and happen to spy a little bit of pancetta in the fridge. That's a possibility: that could go into the soup, pump it up a bit. I chop that up and toss it in the bottom of a saucepan. While that is sizzling and filling the kitchen with goodness, I note the onions in the cupboard, and consider that the cutting board and knife are already out. Some onions go into the pancetta fat and begin to sweeten. It would be easy at this point to dump in the canned soup and be done, but: well, there's already a pot going, and one part lentils and four parts liquid (one part stock, one part water, maybe) a bit of ground ajwain, and in a bit there is soup of my own, and the can can settle back into the pantry.
Squalls of snow are moving through, blurring the lines of the hills and lightening the sky. It is going to be cold tonight. I should see about fixing the fireplace.
There Are Leaks In The Roof Of My Palazzo di Memoria, You SeeWhen I was a child and we would visit my Grandmother, we would play in the alley behind the house. It is how we would always approach (no one ever parked on the street in front) and where the gravity of the house drew us. The front of the house was an adult place, calm and filled with precious things; the back of the house was a natural progression of kitchen, then back porch (with the bushels of apples in autumn, and the creaky glider), then stoop and garden (snapdragons). Finally, the alley. It was dust and sunlight and the promise of secrets if you were to follow it all the way to the end. I have ever found great comfort in alleys.
There are many where my home now is, and with wonderful names! We have a Sun Way and a Moon Way, a Grit Way and a Moose Way. There are the wondrous Ways of Theodolites and Expositions. In our neighborhood, Tesla has his Way.
Somewhere in all of this cartography is a Weak Way that I have been unable to find. I've seen a picture of the street sign; I know that in this day and age this is suspect evidence, but I would hope that it's there, somewhere, in all of these little streets. Regardless of that, its another good excuse to walk around a lot, and more of those is never bad.
The Hilliard Ensemble was in town this evening, and the performance was indeed a thing devoutly not to be missed. Should they come to your part of the world, they are worthy of a listen and a deep breath; they are wonderful.
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