We went inland for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch's birthday this year, arriving shortly before sunset at Lexington's Paint Mine. We had been intrigued by the name on a map of local trails; it turned out to be a naturally exposed deposit of ochre just inside the lip of a wood which under snow-crusts looked very little different from any other outcropping among the pines and the stark birches, its rustier tinge perhaps an illusion of the scratchy, horizon-steeped light ashlyme once memorably described as a seventies sun. Behind us the sky was solid blue as sea-ice with the white chip of a waxing moon over the industrial green and barn-red pylons of the high-tension lines that sang all the way down the ravine where we crunched over frozen grasses and the ice-scars of older footprints, the sunset scalloping the wires above our heads. It looked empty and waiting, a ghost story for Christmas. There was a boardwalk in the wood, the grey leaf-bubbled pane of a stream frozen beneath it. There were dry stone walls and trunks as bare as if they had been felled lying in frost-tangled geometries.
( I don't care about history. )
We drove home in an after-sunset the color of sloe gin; for dinner we collected massaman curry and khao soi salmon from Love at First Bite and watched Allan Arkush's Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979), which is distinguishable as a predecessor to Get Crazy (1983) just by the subtitles that misspell themselves off the sides of the screen and the giant mouse that conscientiously brings its own ear protection to the Ramones concert. My present to Rob this year was a cocktail strainer, which was less in the way of bartending paraphernalia than I had hoped to furnish him with, but Berman's this afternoon had been rather thoroughly locusted by the holidays; we left mostly with vermouth and bitters and soft drinks and later in the night he made me a Bronx Revised out of Eddie Muller's Noir Bar (2023), which we revised further into something that could be enjoyed without ice cubes. He has started calling his botanical gin and elderflower tonic the Garden Path. I had some kind of allergic-asthmatic attack all night and have not slept since some distressing hour of yesterday, but my poem "Hagstone" has been accepted by Not One of Us; it was written to a prompt from Ashlyme and incorporates something of the M. R. James tradition of old things generally being a bad idea. Next year, maybe the sea.
spatch's birthday this year, arriving shortly before sunset at Lexington's Paint Mine. We had been intrigued by the name on a map of local trails; it turned out to be a naturally exposed deposit of ochre just inside the lip of a wood which under snow-crusts looked very little different from any other outcropping among the pines and the stark birches, its rustier tinge perhaps an illusion of the scratchy, horizon-steeped light ashlyme once memorably described as a seventies sun. Behind us the sky was solid blue as sea-ice with the white chip of a waxing moon over the industrial green and barn-red pylons of the high-tension lines that sang all the way down the ravine where we crunched over frozen grasses and the ice-scars of older footprints, the sunset scalloping the wires above our heads. It looked empty and waiting, a ghost story for Christmas. There was a boardwalk in the wood, the grey leaf-bubbled pane of a stream frozen beneath it. There were dry stone walls and trunks as bare as if they had been felled lying in frost-tangled geometries.( I don't care about history. )
We drove home in an after-sunset the color of sloe gin; for dinner we collected massaman curry and khao soi salmon from Love at First Bite and watched Allan Arkush's Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979), which is distinguishable as a predecessor to Get Crazy (1983) just by the subtitles that misspell themselves off the sides of the screen and the giant mouse that conscientiously brings its own ear protection to the Ramones concert. My present to Rob this year was a cocktail strainer, which was less in the way of bartending paraphernalia than I had hoped to furnish him with, but Berman's this afternoon had been rather thoroughly locusted by the holidays; we left mostly with vermouth and bitters and soft drinks and later in the night he made me a Bronx Revised out of Eddie Muller's Noir Bar (2023), which we revised further into something that could be enjoyed without ice cubes. He has started calling his botanical gin and elderflower tonic the Garden Path. I had some kind of allergic-asthmatic attack all night and have not slept since some distressing hour of yesterday, but my poem "Hagstone" has been accepted by Not One of Us; it was written to a prompt from Ashlyme and incorporates something of the M. R. James tradition of old things generally being a bad idea. Next year, maybe the sea.
