The sketch I did sometime back about how to build
such a structure, of boards, iron bracing and fieldstones.

September 2004 Cabin Diary
     
  1. 27 September 2004 -- A life apart

27 September 2004 -- A life apart

There is some sort of an "existential" sense of need, to propel the old tale of the Cabin and the Hollow along through time, as though I'd be accused of "giving up" if I just drove out the gate without telling anyone and threw away 8 seasons of observation and reflection.  The proper man would take all of this text and amalgamate it, I suppose, but what would the point of that be, anyway?  No one really wants to hear this kind of stuff, from someone too timid to be properly edited and published.  "Oh, but there is the single vocation, back in reality," I remind myself, "the one I somehow hate just because of its being a real job."  Well, that's why they call it work. 

What can I say of the woods tonight?  Well, it has been getting cold, with the first frost fairly close at this elevation.  Leaves have begun to fall, and the harder months are ahead.  It would appear to be night-time again, and I've decided I'd light more than just the cook-fire, in recognition of the passage of the Equinox.  The cold is, of course, a comfort, for it causes a man to snuggle in against himself and conserve the heat he'd otherwise be rejecting, in the summer months.  Just think of all of the cellular respiration we must conduct, day in and day out.  Summer is but a taunt, for the warm-blooded being, who is better represented in something that showcases a true survivor.  The fellow from down on Route 735 will be bringing up some cordwood for the woodshed, in his beat-up F-350.  This stuff is from the previous load; it had been accumulating cobwebs that now add their own bio-mass.

I should just chuck all of this over a precipice, where no one would be likely to hear it crash.  It is dissipation for no cause, while the valiant struggle in that shopworn business setting only piles on the accolades and the income.  It is all a mis-match, to keep a project like this limping along.  It was something that had relevance once, to one internal frame of mind that is now lost, even to me.  I've often spoken of my confinement's shell, and how I can never find classification among the "normal" as a result.  But gosh darn it, all of their life still looks vibrant and powerful.  I am just at a loss to author any of it myself.  I am an onlooker only, and have no write privileges.  In UNIX terms, I guess we're just talking about r - -.  Some directories, it is true, are r - x, but those are the hard ones to find.

It is basically quiet up here tonight, and crisply cold.  That much I know for myself.  I am not so configured as to have proper entry into the more fanciful realms, and the managers of my passage probably don't want that, anyway.  They only trust their own; the ones who know the rules of the species.  I suppose I express the characteristics of a real human being, but come on now, do you really think that this is how a proper human behaves?  When the game gets cooking among them, the cooperators in my enterprise, professionally related as they are, really pretend to follow along with my quirks.  Still, it is an alien fellowship, and I don't want to intrude.  I should just stop trying to be one of them; their training will still leave that small gap that everyone notices.  Blessed is he whose asymptote draws near, but he will be as far from that final completeness as the mass in high relativistic motion is from c.  They are light.  It is pretty awesome, when you think of it.

Who knows, who knows, but then, that is of course not the question.

"Bo"

Ahead to November 2004