April 11, 2015

Read on Thursday as part of the Celebration of the Arts to a room including but two people who were not themselves reading. Had to discuss Long Day’s Journey into Night directly afterwards, and the one experience did not blend well into the other.
   
To Waynesville last night (the intervening woods abloom with redbud and cherry) to see The Actor and the Assassin at HART. I was intensely interested in the play, and Adam’s stage presence was– though his lines were not yet rock solid– remarkable. First, he looked so like John Wilkes Booth it was creepy. Second, there was no Adam at all in him; it was all character, all Booth. I watched the unfolding of this perfect identity with fascination. He is truly an outstanding young actor.

Trailed by a cop most of the way back to Asheville, him tailgating so I assumed he was reading my license plate.  It came to nothing, so perhaps we were just traveling down the same road in the same direction. You can’t see on the Internet every day a new video of a cop murdering an innocent not to be disturbed when there’s even a distant chance that your own time has come. One incident in North Charleston finally got a cop booked for murder, though, watching, you understood that he had every expectation of getting away with it, as he surely would have had someone not been filming, as thousands of his brothers have in the past. Cop culture must be dismantled. It’s the only way to solve this problem.
   
All the mornings and afternoons of light I have filled with gardening, no matter what else I had to do. Raided Reems Creek and Jesse Israel, at the latter buying a nectarine. I asked the very blond woman helping me whether I should prefer an apricot or a nectarine, and she said that both provide an opportunity for disappointment. Planting the nectarine I discovered one of this house’s secrets– a certain way down you hit something odd and hard and black. If you scrape the black, liquid comes off on the edge of your spade, and if you smell the liquid you realize it’s fuel oil. They used to heat with oil, and the tank was never removed, and it is broken or disintegrated or something, and a hardened film of it lies a few feet below ground. It seems to be fairly localized. I filled the hole up and dug somewhere else.

Finishing my chores, I saw beside the shed my opossum lying dead. He was stiff, but not too smelly, and the maggots had not started in, so he may have died since last night. Of what? There was no mark on him, except that one of his eyes was sky blue. I though about burying him, but he was too big– bigger than any cat I’ve buried– so I put him in a trash bag and into the bin fo pickup Tuesday morning.  He must have weighed thirty pounds. I felt bad. I though we would be neighbors for a while. I’m sorry I couldn’t do better by him than a bag and a trash bin.
   
Still pulsing blue light outside.