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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Butternut chronicle: Nov. 13, 1998

This entry is part 12 of 14 in the series The Butternut Chronicle

For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. The butternut tree that then dominated the view has since fallen over, and I have yet to reconcile myself to its loss – or to the imminent loss of its species, currently being wiped out throughout its range by a disease of unknown origin and poorly understood epidemiology.

3:20 p.m. Fifty-four degrees. A male white-breasted nuthatch inches along the edge of the porch roof, probing under the lip of shingles with his workmanlike bill.

There are four things you need to know about white-breasted nuthatches (Sitta carolinensis): 1) they are basically solitary; 2) their strongest allegiance as a non-migratory, highly territorial species is to place; 3) nuthatch space is defined and delimited by the presence of trees, with which they have a unique and intimate relationship; and 4) they spend must of their waking hours upside-down, finding thereby all the small gleanings overlooked by everyone else.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Guestblogging at the V.B.

Elck started it, Velveteen Rabbi picked it up – soon everyone was doing it; me too. By the time I joined in they added another rule to make it more interesting: not just One Sentence, but No Commas. I do need to acknowledge the influence of the new kid on the block with his post about different sized thoughts. And I must say that trying to shrink a whole thought into a single sentence does feel like downsizing. “Here’s your sentence, little thought. Now do your time.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Raising hell

I guess I must’ve had some kinda angel on my shoulder back in them days, like that one time when I was sitting out on the porch in that dump I used to live in there on College Avenue working my way through a case of Koch’s, and as I finished them pounder bottles I’d give ’em a good toss so they’d go splat in the middle of the street, which was also Route 26, you know, just for the sound of it I guess, like cymbals at a parade except for having no echo, and to watch them zillion little pieces of glass go skittering and skattering up and down the street. ‘Course the cars all had to slow down as time went on, crunching their way slowly through like they was grinding over a bunch of little bones or something, like them bones you got in your ear maybe, or a bunch of mice. But the thing is I wasn’t out to do no harm, I was just feeling so good, you know, and it was really more like, “Hey! I love everybody,” because you gotta understand it was like the first real warm day in March, real nice afternoon, and you know how that goes. Things get crazy on them kinda days in a college town, you know, I’m sure there was parties breakin’ out all over and the kids up in Beaver Canyon was probly bein’ assholes as usual, throwing keggers out on every balcony, pissing on people down below, getting naked, even screwing out there – that’s how they started that riot that one time, and Penn State ended up expelling the girl that was involved even though it wasn’t on Penn State property – yeah, just her, not her boyfriend nor none of them assholes who came running down from the frats up on the hill and did most of the damage, tearing down lampposts, flipping cars – so all I’m saying is, I guess the cops was otherwise occupied that afternoon. But I didn’t even think about that, I had drunk more’n half that case of pounders when the phone rang and it was my old girlfriend Kate on the line asking me if I could meet her at the Brewery in like fifteen minutes, just to catch up and have a few drinks, you know, so I said “Sure” and got my wallet and started right on over and I was only about one block away when here come a whole gang of cop cars with their lights flashing. “Some poor son of a bitch is about to get fucked,” I said to myself, and then forgot all about it until hours later when I got home and my one roommate Drew, he says, “You know the cops was here right after you left,” and I says “What about?” and he says “What the hell do you think? Someone called in about all the glass in the street, and whoever it was said they seen it coming from our porch, but the only one home was Darren and of course he was all fucked up on pills or whatever and he said he didn’t know nothing about it, but they made him get out there with a broom while they stopped traffic in both directions for about ten minutes, though they never did try and cite him for anything,” and at the thought of that sorry-ass little punk with his falling-down mohawk out there in the middle of College Avenue trying to sweep up a ton of glass with our worn down broom with a busted-off handle, I couldn’t help it, I cracked up. I mean, I was just like, “Well fuck me runnin’!” Darren and me had a good laugh about it after we got sober.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The butternut chronicle: Nov. 11, 1998

This entry is part 11 of 14 in the series The Butternut Chronicle

For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. The butternut tree that then dominated the view has since fallen over, and I have yet to reconcile myself to its loss – or to the imminent loss of its species, currently being wiped out throughout its range by a disease of unknown origin and poorly understood epidemiology.

I’m a day late on this one, but that’s O.K. because I didn’t include an entry for November 12. I was starting to run out of steam at this point.

Rain, forty-four degrees. It’s Veterans Day, a holiday of no special significance for my family but a somber time nonetheless. I’m out on the porch at 5:40 a.m. with my coffee. When I sneeze, all of a sudden, there’s the sound of two or three dozen hooves running up the hillside through the woods in the drizzly darkness.

“Rain before seven, clear by eleven” actually comes true, for once. I’m out again at a quarter till twelve. I hear the happy croaks of ravens soaring high over Sapsucker Ridge.

A bluejay is making a nuisance of himself in the lilac bush, trying for some reason to chase out all the other birds – juncos and chickadees. He flaps awkwardly through the maze of branches, screaming, no match for the smaller birds who simply turn the tables and start dive-bombing him. He beats a hasty retreat.

1:40 p.m. A series of harsh, throat-clearing noises from the top of the ridge, reminiscent of that strange sound nighthawks make when they dive, only not as loud. Then a few minutes later the resident redtail drops in, landing on the branch of an oak tree some fifty feet up from the edge of the woods. This really sets off all the squirrels. Annoying as their alarm calls are, I always enjoy listening to the way they spread like signal fires from tree to tree, squirrel to squirrel. After half a minute or so the hawk takes off and heads down-hollow, skimming just under the canopy. The chatter of startled squirrels follows him like a wake.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

First draft, best draft

The above dictum would hold true only for gravity-fed systems. With forced carbonation, the first draft is of course mostly foam.

*

THE FUTURE ABBESS PICKS SPILLED LENTILS OFF THE COUNTERTOP

This love
is no excuse for clumsiness. I must
start paying better attention. Or is it
simply distraction I’ve been craving?

No, No. Come here, damn you! I want
to make a plain stew with onions,
a porridge with garlic – what Esau
bought so dearly, starved & sweaty,
hot from the hunt. These small red
lentils slip so nimbly from between
forefinger & thumb! Good thing
they don’t roll, too. I picture bracelets,
a little choker with five decades of red.
One tells a rosary, yes? Would drilled
lentils listen better, fall in line?
A wheel of fortune for levelers: no
matter where I stop counting – whether
I stop – the same mellifluous prayer,
half a pair of wings. Easy does it,
sister. Don’t hold your breath. But

why not just lick my finger, forget
the clumsy thumb? Ah, I can pick up
two, three, four at once! I point.
They stick.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Terrorism and silence

The Guardian newspaper on Monday had a must-read commentary by Madeleine Bunting on the silencing of all independent voices in preparation for the assault on Fallujah.

Assaults on cities serve symbolic purposes: they are set showpieces to demonstrate resolve and inculcate fear. To that end, large numbers of casualties are required: they are not an accidental byproduct but the aim. That was the thinking behind 9/11, and Falluja risks becoming a horrible mirror-image of that atrocity.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

From the sublime to the ridiculous in three easy steps

Seek and ye shall find, the saying goes. But whether found and sought are one, who knows? Yesterday, between the covers peeking, in three different books I found (though hardly seeking) lines as sweet to me as an unplanned tryst with a lost love I never knew I’d missed.

So far from linear, this ocean we think of as time! The waves are never the same, though they often rhyme. Things unsought reward unconscious seeking. All creation dwells at last beyond critiquing.

Here are the three, in order as I found them:

Everything has its mouth to manifestation; and this is the language of nature, whence everything speaks out of its property, and continually manifests, declares, and sets forth itself for what it is good or profitable; for each thing manifests its mother, which thus gives the essence and the will to form.

– Jacob Boehme, De Signatura Rerum (translator unknown)

That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant. But even they must concede the fact, indeed the inevitability, of the judiciously spaced, but nonetheless certain, interruptions in the flow of their high art to interject the word of their sponsor, the divinity that controls remotely but diligently the transactions of the marketplace that is their world.

– Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savanna

When the bear thinks,
It does not think of us.

– Paul Zimmer, “Lessons From the History of Bears”

*

Odd, I thought, that the day selected to go up to State College would be the same day on which I made the trip six years ago, according to the Butternut Chronicle. (The fact that the days of the week match up is spooky enough – possible because this was a leap year, giving us an extra day.)

At the coffee shop where I went for lunch (my own packed sandwich, plus their coffee), all the tables were taken, so I sat at a counter two stools down from a young woman typing away on her laptop. I had grabbed a copy of Jon Stewart’s America: The Book from a stack in the new books display to read while I ate. I took off my knit hat with some misgiving, conscious of the fact that my hair would stick out in all directions. But from the moment I cracked the cover of America I began giggling and chortling uncontrollably. Not having TV, I’d never come in contact with this guy’s brand of humor before. Damn, he’s good!

After a while, I noticed that the woman I was sharing the counter with kept glancing in my direction. Soon, I noticed she opened a new window on her screen, and I recognized the tell-tale Blogger “dashboard.” (I have very good peripheral vision.) She typed a few lines, looked my way, typed a few more lines.

What could she be blogging about, I wonder? “OMG, I believe I have just spotted the famous local gadfly and blogger Dave Bonta! He’s even better looking in person than in that photo on his webpage!!!” Or, more likely: “Boy, this place sure fills up with weirdoes over lunch. It’s bad enough that there are a couple of demented-sounding locals talking loudly at one of the tables. But you wouldn’t believe the guy who just sat down next to me. He has just about the worst case of hat-head I’ve ever seen, he’s wearing some kind of dirty old flannel shirt, jeans that look like they could stand up by themselves, and I can’t even begin to describe what he’s wearing on his feet. And he’s sitting there giggling to himself! His pack is on the stool between us. It is definitely large enough to hide a knife. I’m going to publish this now so there will be some record of my last moments on earth…”

On the other hand, maybe she just had a crick in her neck.

*

My big accomplishment of the day was to spend 84 cents on a new pocket notebook. I like to think of it as a low-tech laptop. Reading Jon Stewart followed immediately by Paul Zimmer – a consummate wordsmith – did strange things to my mental equilibrium. As I stood outside the library waiting for my ride, I compiled

A Short List of Silly Words for Strange and Ridiculous People

Omphaloskeptic. Someone who isn’t convinced of the value of belly-baring fashions in women’s apparel.

Pedantophile. Someone who admires the writing of George Will.

Iraqnophobic. Someone who doesn’t fear the consequences of invading Iraq.

Unbornicator. A politician who uses abortion as a wedge issue, screwing over the electorate.

Fear Mongrel. The offspring of a terrorist and a coward.

Factotempolecat. A skunk surrounded by status-conscious yes-men. George W. Bush.

Cucaranchero. Karl Rove.

Loremipsumizer. A blogger.

Bloglodyte. A Blogspot blogger.