Flocked Around.

Barry Hannah's "Water Liars," from Airships, opens with the line, "When I am run down and flocked around by the world..." Well. That's how I am today, too. Completely flocked. The drought rolls on, and I guess the good news this week is that the percentage increases in the various severity levels of the drought were smaller this week than last. The drought's still worse this week, but nowhere near as much worse as it was last week, or the week before.

I was in Tennessee. I saw Tennessee. It rained in Tennessee.

The semester draws to a close and I find new ways to disappoint the kids. The dogwalks aren't long or frequent enough. A kind of physical tiredness is settling in, and on top of all of it, I can't shake the feeling that I'm lonely.

Mostly I am just tired, tired. This, too, will pass. Tonight our little college lines up luminaries all over the place. A good percentage of them are plastic. White plastic imitations of white paper bags. We have fake luminaries.

I keep feeling like not only am I not ready for what's next, but that I am not ready in general. That story ends with "We were both crucified by the truth." I love that story. I love most of that book. I am a dragon. America the beautiful, like you will never know.

Other Illumination.

I'm still pretty hyped up about the twilight thing. I like the notion of a few guys sitting around at dusk, holding their hands out in front of their faces, arguing about how dark it is or isn't. This, then, compliments of the U.S. Navy:

"In the morning before the beginning of civil twilight and in the evening after the end of civil twilight, artificial illumination is normally required to carry on ordinary outdoor activities. Complete darkness, however, ends sometime prior to the beginning of morning civil twilight and begins sometime after the end of evening civil twilight."

And this:

"At the beginning or end of nautical twilight, under good atmospheric conditions and in the absence of other illumination, general outlines of ground objects may be distinguishable, but detailed outdoor operations are not possible, and the horizon is indistinct."

I have, all day long today, had some difficulty performing any kind of detailed operations, indoor or outdoor. I raked for maybe twenty minutes. Pulled some of the leaves out of some of the pansy beds. My brother called to report that it's a boy. I'm happy for them, genuinely so, happy they're having a kid and want to have a kid. But I don't know how to be happy about it being one sex or the other, and this feels like a distinct deficiency on my part.

Let's go to the forecast: It's somewhere between cool and cold. It's supposed to stay that way. Some little ripple may or may not be coming through tomorrow, and we may get a little moisture out of that. Keep it tuned right here, then, folks, for the latest updates.

Fleece Hat.

Colder again. Just like that. Watchcap weather. I have this fleece hat this year — this year's hat — that I'm much fond of. It's the yarn monkey hand puppet I can't go to Kroger without. When I was a kid, I had a yarn monkey puppet, named Monkey, who went everywhere with me. Actually, he wasn't named Monkey. He was named Maa The Monkey. My brothers had these squeaky toys, intended originally for dogs, I think. There was a pelican and a purple gorilla. The pelican was named Pelican. The purple gorilla, of course, was named Piver the Moon.

The days are getting so short that I keep missing the evenings. Seems like it just comes on dark and that's it. Christmas lights are going up in the neighborhood. The cold front came through, and on the dogwalk I could see the Pleiades no problem, even in the wash of streetlights.

The dog's limping on her front paw again. It didn't rain enough to quite matter. Thanksgiving was a train wreck. It's basically dark by 5:45. Civil twilight has something to do with the ability to clearly distinguish terrestrial objects. Also the horizon is clearly defined. I miss my brothers. I am not ready for Christmas. I am having trouble finding the horizon. I am having trouble distinguishing terrestrial objects. I am wearing my watch cap indoors.

Much Warmer.

Well, it is. Midnight. Windy. In the sixties. Weather all screwed up. Marchlike. Just thought I'd say so.

Denser Fog.

Dense Fog Advisory. The name of a band if I've ever heard one. We're not so much gray as a kind of filthy white this morning, the sounds of the garbage trucks muted and half-hearted up against the fog and the now-wet leaves everywhere.

The Japanese Magnolia dropped every leaf it had while we were gone.

The weather pattern isn't right yet, but it's closer. There's more rain in the forecast for the end of the week. I don't want to use a word like hope. I have a friend who has a rain barrel system, though, and if we get today and tonight what they say we might get, he'll be in good shape for whatever winter stock he's got in the ground.

Data: The dog is still asleep. Phil's maples are empty. The stubborn apple trees in the back are purpling. The pansy beds are covered over in leaves. I have purchased two new hats. La Vieja's heater kicks on, kicks off. I've got 25 crocus bulbs that still need planting. For today, I'd rather live the kind of life where all I had on front of me was another pot of coffee.

Drizzle, Fog.

Home again, home again. Out of a gray Nashville dressed up right for the occasion, down and off the plateau (only the lasts of the oak leaves left), into sunshine and back over the mountains on 70 through Hot Springs, where we ate a kind of desperately needed charmed lunch — outdoors in November in the NC mountains — at the Paddler's Pub, then south and east through Asheville and back onto the Piedmont (we've still got the dregs of the maples in places) and a welcome mix of fog and rain and that cold still winter wet that makes me feel so much more at home, in every sense of that word.

Coming through the mountains the clouds were piling up on the sides of the slopes, skittering across, breaking up and coming back together. Long lines of geese in Tennessee. Hawks. Vultures. Crows flying with and against traffic. Weather coming in.

And everyone's back home now and through their own doors, bolts thrown behind them and deep breaths and scotch and coffee and dog walks and books on the shelves where you put them, where you intend for them to be. My pronouns have gone to hell here, but so be it. I know what this home thing looks like, what it's supposed to be, what's needed, what's gained. I know it better than anyone, or at least as well. But how, then, to reconcile this up against a non-negotiable demand I've got lodged in my skull that my family come back to Nashville or Atlanta once or twice a year and box all that up and drop back into the roles that we're supposed to remember, say the words we're supposed to know back to front?

And let's say one has a kid. Expand one's family: My mother's new favorite hopeful euphemism of choice. Let's say one has two, or three. One raises these spawn the best one knows how: don't shake the baby, don't pour scalding water on the baby, don't instill some set of disastrous complexes (social anxiety, nervousness, inadequacy, general shittiness) in the kid. Tell the kid her Science Fair project is good enough, for god's sake, even when it's not. Baking soda and vinegar. Gravity. Beans in a cup in the dark. These things can be tested, proven. Mainly. But let's say one does this, raises a family, gets it all somehow to hold together without death or pestilence or famine. Get them to where they can dress and feed themselves, get them finally out of the house.

What if they don't come back? Or: What if, when they come back, they're all completely damaged anyway?

Sweet potatoes. Onions in cream sauce. Turkey. And on Saturday night, as always, the roast beast. Whiskey. Wine. Coffee.

All that maybe and probably for the last time. That way, anyway. That's what's got me half-miserable right now.

But: Drizzle. Fog. I remember this. The drought's not broken, isn't going to be any time soon. But I think I remember this weather. Something about this, goddammit, looks familiar.

Snow Flurries.

And I only mention it because I sometimes worry we could go all winter in Greensboro without seeing any. It used to snow. Seven or eight years ago we got more than eight inches twice in two weeks. Haven't seen anything like that since. Here on the plateau it's 35 and flurrying. Back in 27408 the .19 inches of rain was all we got out of a system that dumped 2 inches on Atlanta. They needed it more than we did, though, so.

Celebrated Thanksgiving by slowly but surely cracking the fragile detente we'd glued onto the side of our lives. Our positions, newly staked out: Some of us simply do not much like others of us. With that firmly established, then, let's hold hands and sing songs and make construction-paper turkeys and celebrate the New World.

I think I know what happened in those early colonies like Jamestown where the people just plain dropped off the face of the earth. They had at least one too many dinners together. And, just like that, I'm now I'm an anthropologist. Anybody needing any additional expertise should please take a number and wait patiently. I will get to you as soon as I can.

Thanksgiving Day.

Nine hours yesterday across the mountains and up onto the Cumberland Plateau and Nashville, TN for Thanksgiving with the family for what's probably the last time— new babies and aging patriarchs will probably get you every time, no? Last night, a real and honest thunderstorm. Close-striking lightning, the dog at full alarm, and then a free-fall down out of the seventies overnight and this morning we're gray, fog, and 43. Here's hoping that front and that rain make it fully through to Greensboro. PTI only shows two tenths so far.

Part of me hates that drive— the eighteen-wheelers banging by, the families all packed into their minivans headed through Hickory and Newport and Sevierville, the way when we hit the power plant steaming away west of Knoxville we've still got two hours to go, still haven't even made it to Cookeville. Part of me's the kid again, though, headed back to the house on Foxhall they don't own any more, the island in the center of that cul-de-sac with the Bradford pears as touchdown markers, the street Adam whatever-his-name-was' mom taught me to ride a bicycle on, the creek and woods down the back of that neighborhood. All of it's too easy and too homespun. But part of me might be too easy and too homespun.

I'm caught squarely between hating whatever all this has become and is becoming, and loving what I thought it used to be so fiercely that I might be able to wink it back into being. Like if I just squeezed hard enough, this shit would somehow snap back into focus. Like I'm sitting in the optometrist's chair, and that grassy hill with the goddamn red barn floating a half-inch off the ground is there, and everybody wants to know is it clearer like this, or like this? This, or this?

Is there no more scientific way for those people to go about their business? If I knew what was wrong with my eyes, I'd fix them myself. The orthopedic surgeon doesn't ask you if you like your broken wrist set better this way, or this way. That whole thing at the eye doctor has always bothered me. It's an outrage. It all is.