Middlemarch

A fiction writing teacher told me  I should read it. A friend told me I’d begin to understand it if I got past the first few pages. This has to be the twentieth time I’ve started it. I’m actually reading the motherfucker now.

Is it age? Do you have to exhaust the more interesting possibilities in your life before you can habituate yourself to the sentence that curdles the anxious spirit like Xenophon’s ten thousand awaiting their turn to hump a cow; an echo of the delicate tinkling in a pan which might stand in the mind of ruddy men as a facsimile for the stray decades between the apex of sexual  faculty and the grey tomb? Well this is not what Coozledad assayed when he took the chunky volume up and gave himself  up to it,  a myopic virgin to a tree.

God help me. Gonna finish . This time.

Awful. Just awful.

Christ, the weather’s been fucking horrible. I had to cut back on my drinking so I could be certain it was the fucking monsoon making me miserable. No , it was the constant thud of rain this week, following last week’s rain. Mud just makes mud of plans so you have to be especially disciplined and plan beyond the mud, ignoring the projects it’s already destroyed. But I’m not chipper: I’m Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold without the rugged good looks or the money.

Rugged, though. That’s me. I should take up bathing again any day now.

There is cuteness, which I will share. These pictures do not convey the monstrous head of this young animal, which I have lately mistaken for a disembodied cow head floating above the pasture.

Screw this weather.

I done cleaned the damn house. The weather can clear up now.

Can’t it?

the angles pop bands work

I never thought about Liz as Eliza Doolittle until this evening.

Purley

We got another calf yesterday. When we first got up, Claude’s water had broken, and you could see the feet. After about half an hour of  Claude standing up, lying down, bouncing slightly with contractions, standing up, lying down, my wife said we ought to intervene. She’d watched a Youtube on assisting a difficult calving.

She started trying to pull the calf first, but no luck. The calf was stuck at the head. I tried for awhile until my arms gave out, and then we decided it was rope time. I got the rope, which was also attached to a block and tackle.  Fortunately we didn’t need the block and tackle:  Tammie looped the rope around the feet and pulled on the head while I pulled on the rope. Once the head was out we helped lower the calf out. You could feel the umbilical cord tearing.

After the calf stood up we went back to the house for breakfast, and we watched the youtube, just to review. At one point the guy asks the vet ” Is the cow in pain?”

The vet gives the peremptory answer about endorphins while the cow bellows in agony ” Gah! aggghh. Help! fffft.” My answer would have made note of the empirical evidence.

“Dude,  even ignoring the vulva, look at the shape of that asshole, and tell me: What the fuck do you think?”

Test firing

I’ve been looking for a small stove to heat an attic room for a few years. One interesting find was a little shipboard stove designed for heating a 6′x10 ‘ area, and a teakettle to boot. Cost: $800.00. Mama wouldn’t have it, and to be honest,  it struck me as slightly obscene.

I’d acquired an old disc drum from a tractor trailer a few years back, that was, in my mind, destined to become a forge for blacksmithing. The internets told me it would only be a vale of tears, so I repurposed the drum. We have mountains of metal garbage here, so I had plenty of 1/4 steel plate to make the the top and bottom. The challenge, as my friends at the welder’s gas supply store told me, would be getting the cast drum to fuse with the weldable steel. Well, I was lucky this time, and was able to fit the thing together without the  nagging intrusion of science.

The next hurdle was to make sure smoke didn’t pour out of its top access door. So far, so good.

My wife is absolutely mystified at why I am so pleased with myself.

I ‘m a total dork for crap like this. Before too long I’ll be crafting body armor from old Schlitz cans.

Children

Suckers! Go get me another fucking carrot!

Yesterday, Jane began to go lame. We figured she’d developed foot rot from all the rain. She was shivering and favoring all her feet. About mid-day she went down, baring her teeth in the death face and groaning. She ground her teeth a little and showed me that her joints were cracking.

Tammie phoned the vet to set up an emergency appointment while I assumed the worst (colic) and started feeding Jane cored apples filled with corn oil and mineral supplement. I started searching the web and the closest symptom match I could find was “stifle injury”, which is the human equivalent of being kneecapped with a ten gauge shotgun.

I visited her during the night to talk to her and give her treats , which she did not refuse. In the early light I went out to the field to find her standing up. She was searching my pockets and asking me where’s the m’fucking apples.

By broad daylight she was cantering around the field, looking for barrels to leap. When the vet showed up, he said he’d seen four cases of the same thing this week. He thought there was an outside chance it might be upper motor neuron syndrome.

I think the equines have conspired with him to net twice his usual  monthly allowance of gas money.

I used to think mules were a better investment of time and money than children. They learn quicker, and they can drive your drunk ass to town or away from town way before a human child could cop a license. But last night, looking at that prostrate bulk in the moonlight, all I could think was, some shithead has got to do a lot of digging.

Tiles, etc.

We’ve been having another weeklong rain, so I’ve been working on some of those incomplete indoor projects. These are fake Delft tiles I’ve been working on for a fireplace surround. Only eighty or ninety left to go!

These are pretty crude. The equivalent of fingerpainting, really, but I’m hoping the finished piece will have a little seventeenth century Dutch feel.

I’m also working on a bunch of maritime copies to hang on the dining room walls, since the room already looks like the interior of a creaky boat, or an old sailor’s home.

Each of these will require another drunken bout of painting or two to complete.

This one, on the other hand, will probably take another couple of years. It’s a copy of a Chinese School picture of the Port of Hong Kong. It’s huge. I don’t know why I start these things.

Here’s an original that’ll take another couple of months to finish:

This photo doesn’t register the colors right. I’ll retake it in the sun, if it ever comes back out.

And finally, with a mud demonsrtation, here’s a formerely white mule:

The idea of gunplay

The only Dylan song I can groove to.  Maybe because I identify it with Slim Pickens.

The voice of God

We heard the Johnny Rivers version of this in the grocery store yesterday, and I told my wife there was a much better, earlier one. I just couldn’t remember who recorded it first.