I hate to post pics like this...

...because I know how you chicks get when you see my logging gear.

But I've successfully tuned my own chainsaw...

   

and I figured you might want to bask in my masculinity with me. 

_______

Too, I've been on this  IPA kick...

...couldn't tell you why.

Might be an age thing.

And reading the hell out of some Barbara Kingsolver, as well.

The bitter and the sweet.

'A Song I Sing Often and Quietly to Myself', or, 'Lament of an Old White Slave'.

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Damn my nigger hands
done built a wall round the Promised Land,
I ain't never gonna climb try hard as I can,
Damn my nigger hands
 

                                                  

                      

                              

After Sitting for a While Sunday Morning

At times, when the words wouldn’t come, he would search images of the great authors, as if, in those dark mannerisms and confident smiles he might find some common thread, a shared squint or folding of the hands, that, with practice, he could master and thus join their ranks.

           

On the Need for Constants

It was as if the house were melting, the leafless trees, the sky. Everything dripped and trickled. He stood in his pajamas on the back patio with the filter of coffee grounds in his right hand, listening. After weeks in teen and single-digit temperatures, the thaw was a moment to be savored. The thirty-four degrees felt like summer, like T-shirt weather. 

     He chucked the spent grounds out, into the long planter that ran the patio’s edge. In a month, the bare earth there he knew would be green with spears of day lily and tulip. The concerns of winter would be forgotten, long stored away, like his old jacket, in some slip of a closet beneath a narrow well of stairs. The chores will have changed, his clothes, his worries.

     He turned back to the house.  

     'As long as there’s coffee,' he said, raising the emptied filter in part toast, part request, to whatever force had brought him thus far without grave incident, 'We’re good to go.'   

The Lost Art of Venting

James picked at the splintered wood of the cabinet Steven had beaten to pieces in a fit. He smiled slightly, as if it gave him some small pleasure, knowing now that this normally quiet and patient man had a breaking point. That he was not all together... above. 

     “Did it make you feel any better?” James asked.

         

     Steven expected James was fishing for admission of regrets, an apology of some sort, shame. Because that’s what the World wanted, Wasn't it? When you lost your cool and busted something to pieces—Regrets? Apologies?

       

     Thing was, Steven didn't regret a thing. Not this time. Not the mess, not the questions, not the inconvenience. It was kill or be killed. The cabinet or him. He saw that. Now. Life is not a tangible bully. It pushes and pushes until you break and strike out blindly in self defense. Hit something. Anything. 

     “You know what,” Steven said, “It did feel good. Very good.”