Loose Knots

Apologies to regular readers. I haven't been on here much.

I started training bjj again regularly, but was sidelined last week with a persistent sinus infection. It has finally loosened its grasp on me, and I took a brief hike this morning in the local state park. It was an easy trail, but one of the most beautiful nature trails I've seen. It runs smack against various streams. There are plenty of bridges and beaver dams and sudden, unexpected, open fields. I wore my knee brace and brought walking poles with me, and my knee hardly seems to have been affected.

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I finished Charles Portis's True Grit. An old Boston Globe review called it a perfect novel, and I agree. It is precise, warm, witty, and violent. There are enough slight digressions to make it feel human, while the pacing is brisk. Portis really knows how to work the language, how to make the words themselves a source of pleasure. He knows equally well how to give characters nuance and color.

Here's the breathless first paragraph:

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avente her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Forth Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carred in his trouser band."

This isn't music, so much. But the tension between the sounds of the words is masterful. A reading out loud will help reveal how dense the language is, given its simplicity.

I found myself laughing a lot while reading it. I tried to find some passages to read out loud to Jess so that she might understand, but all that I could find, when read out loud, sounded gruesome.

As Portis might put it, it is that kind of book.

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My main goals now are to get back in shape and to get my teaching license so that I can start teaching high school English this fall. I am embracing the focus.

Additionally, homelife has been particularly good to me these past few weeks. I am a lucky man.

A walk around the house today reminded me of why we were drawn here. With a little heat and sunlight, the surrounding woods seem to hum. Already, this seems less the drab and dying place of an overlong winter, but a place of color and energy.

At the local state park, I stood alone in a vast field, with a bridge crossed stream on my right side on the mountains on my left. I lay down in the grass and let my sunstarved skin rest in the heat for a few minutes. I didn't feel, as I have recently, like a knot of sore joints. I felt ambitious, and eager to get back to the work of reading and writing.

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For lunch, I made another various on Mark Bittman's anti-ramen soup, this time adding seaweed. Yesterday, I made it with carrots, celery, galanga paste, lemongrass, and fish sauce, along with the ingredients given in the recipe. It is a quick, easy, tasty lunch, and lends itself to leftovers or, in my case, veggies gone nearly bad.