Tues., Oct. 26, 1999
The 299th day of the year....
The third day of the 43rd week....Two days past the full moon, meaning no full moon again for this year's Halloween.
Once again, nature refuses to accomodate the demands of our myths and pop
culture....Sunrise was at 7:58...
Sunset will be at 6:38...
Less than 11 hours of daylight today....
Next Sunday, after we change the clocks, sunset will come around 5:30....
Time once again to soak up as much light as I can before heading off into my
office to hibernate.Noon, and it's 55 degrees under mostly cloudy skies...
Hazy clouds which let the sunlight flicker through as if it were a candle behind
frosted glass....Geese wander lazily in the grass and then sit beneath the green apple tree within
83 paces of my room....Payne Stewart reminds me that it's possible to be alive in Florida at 9 am and dead
in South Dakota by 2....
Death of another sort last night as I sat on the couch reading "Light in August"...
page 438.... "Without a word Grimm turned and ran across the yard and into the
house where the old disgraced minister lived alone, and the three men followed,
rushing into the hall, pausing, bringing with them into its stale and cloistral
dimness - "That was the word entering my eyes - "dimness" - when I heard the dull thud of
automotive metal at 8:35 last night. No braking, no skidding, just thud from behind
me and to my left. The sound, I imagined, of one car broadsiding another right in
the midsection.No. No, I was wrong. It was the sound of a van hitting a big antlered deer.
Maybe 200 yards to my east....We live on a state route.
It is the start of deer mating season here in Ohio.
The time when deer start acting frisky and think nothing of darting across roads in
pursuit of wanton copulatory activity....Saturday night, a 26-year-old man drove his motorcycle into a deer
a few miles to my west. Neither survived....As far as I know, only the deer died last night.
That was enough.More than enough.
Had Faulkner written "gloom" instead of dimness, would the deer have survived?
Had I been reading the newspaper instead, would it not been hit at all?
Faulkner taught me two new words last night. Neither are worth the life of a deer,
and even together they fail to equal the life of a gnat, but we have no choice but to
take what we can as it comes.Vide: See. Used to direct a reader's attention.
Suttee: 1. The now illegal act or practice by a Hindu widow of cremating herself on
her husband's funeral pyre to fulfill her true role as wife. 2. A widow who commits
such an act.Not that he told me these definitions. I had to look them up, then stretch them a
bit to fit his somewhat unconventional use of them.Reading is not a spectator sport....
I don't think I learned any new words by watching "Ally McBeal" but then Faulkner
didn't provide me with any hot sex scenes set in a car wash, either. On the other
hand, I didn't get the feeling from Faulkner that he was using cheap tricks to
sucker me into reading his book just because various companies had paid him
huge amounts of money to lure my eyes to the big, splashy ads they'd pasted
on each of his pages....
I learned a few other things yesterday, too....
I learned that I really like Laurie Anderson's "The Ugly One With The Jewels" CD.
I learned that federal law says you can't donate blood for a year after getting a
tattoo.I learned that Mexico consists of 31 states.
I learned that there's at least one man in the world whose first name just happens
to be "Woodring"....
I need to go make a leaf chime. It's just like a wind chime, only you use fall leaves
instead of glass or metal for the danglers. I want to gather one of every different
kind of leaf I can find and hang them together on my back awning so I can enjoy
their autumnal rustling all year long....By next fall I want to have a rather more complicated system in place. I want to
bury a net of wires in a broad circle around a tree. The wires will be connected to
a random tone generator and my stereo. Whenever a leaf falls and disrupts the
electromagnetic field around the wires, a tone will sound. Whenever a squirrel
goes romping by, a virtual symphony will erupt.Mmmmmmm, think I'll spend the afternoon safely inside, imagining the sounds of
my future....
(©1999 by the fingers of dan birtcher while he was lost in the beautiful music
playing in his head)
