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When We Lose The Son
So I'm over early to Dumaine not so much to keep the punk ass street bitches from stealing my Sunday paper (I should get it transferred to Rocheblave I guess) but because I feel drawn to the electronic media which exists over here but not yet for awhile at Rocheblave.
There's something to say about all this New Orleans rain but...must I really? I tend to vere so much. And haven't the local headlines this last week said it all: "Rain, Rain, Go Away," and "Enough Already"?
Its like this the myriad images, to outline: It was cloudy in Austin once for sixteen days straight, or was that days straight over one hundred degrees? I think the former, and I was depressed, which I am not now, but chemically (like I know about chemicals?) there is a sense of remembering, triggered by this sunlight deprivation. How you like the bombast so far?
Then there was Oregon, outside of Eugene, across a wooden bridge over a bubbling brook into a treeless land lagoon surrounded by trees where I was heading for cigarettes. It was a mom and pop shop and they were loading their belongings into a moving van. The man said he never realized it could rain so much. They were getting the hell out. Relocating to Gulf Shores, Alabama. I couldn't imagine what the hell he was talking about. I was from Texas, happy, in love locally, and miles away from the acceptance of my eventual failure. I wished the man well.
Then Seattle, well, what are you gonna say? That's were they invented "sunlite deprivation." Of course, other parts of the globe lay greater claim but let's not confuse the issue with too many facts. That's where I started learning about the only kind of failure that matters. Was I depressed, sunlight deprived, chemically unbalanced? Who cares? I strapped all the good and bad tightly to my being, hunkered down on my mobile island, and left out of there, with damaged love, and lover, and some hope.
When we lose the sun the water runs cold. No, goddammit, not poetry, I'm talking about solar heat.
In the woods of Bastrop, outside of Austin, where I was being, for brief periods, a low elevation mountain man, in a literal shack, built by me with some advice, a chainsaw, hammer, nails, and lumber, and where one day (probably while I was failing in Seattle), a friend of mine and lover of another, a former prostitute who had come to the woods to cleanse, died of a heroin overdose. Before that, over the year or so I knew her she did on occasion shine with such lightness that as I think about it now my feelings are not so much of sorrow, but admiration.
Those sparsely populated woods were not comprised of nudists per se but it was understood that public nudity, on your own land, and at the community pond, was ok. "Public" being four or five of us spread over a hundred acres. So it was with an unparalleled sense of freedom that I would in the winter standing naked in those woods with a trigger operated hand sprinkler locked to the "on" position, and attached to the limb of a cedar tree, enjoy a shower. Winter in Texas one must understand is often a sixty degree day, and my water supply was run from a neighbor's pump, overground for several hundred feet, with black plastic pipe. The water in the pipe on a sunny day was understandably quite hot, and lasted more than long enough for my shower. These cleansings rank highly.
Likewise, on Rocheblave, my unfinished renovation project, where I live almost full time now, my bathing is reliant on solar heat until the water heater is installed and the gas is hooked up The gas meter is the last thing that will happen. I have to be pretty much inspectable/respectable for that to occur. I had the plumbers run the copper water pipes through the attic instead of under the well off the ground house because copper is precious metal to the roaming denizens of the night (read--crackheads) and the property is on direct route to the recycling plant a few blocks away at St. Peter and Rocheblave. You don't need much hot water for a summer shower but a little is nice and these last few weeks of sunny weather have aided me in my pursuit of greater comfort. The showers have been nice. Especially after five years of claw foot tub baths at Dumaine, which is not always elegant.
That's all I wanted to say: that my showers this week--what with the incessant rain and clouds and no hints that a sun even exists--have been cold. Which reminds me of the campground at Palenque...