"That's some get!"

I walked outside to milk the cow and fetch the eggs.  It was a cool pleasant, quiet morning.

At the barn, I look up at the ridge beam, and durned if that spider had spelled me a message in its web:

"That's some get."

"Yar" I mutters to myself, pushing my old bones one to stoop down at the cow and leaning awkwardly to take hold of the utters.  "Natalie Portman" I said, looking towards the pen outside the cow stall, and there was Arnold the Pig, but nowhere in sight was that crazy philosopher spider that left the message during the night.

I was thinking long ago of how I charmed her and all her high society friends by reciting Elton John, but I thought, so much water under the bridge, so much having happened, and separately in our lives, that it would take more than Madness Across the Water or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road stuff to get over in her eyes again.

I went to sleep that night watching The Saint and Branded, with a plastic cup of fridge-cool tea beginning to warm between the arm of the chair and my thigh.

That next morning, a new web was up between the wall and the ridge beam:

"Let's see your Step Two, there, Huxley."

"Who the heck?" I said aloud bemused.  I fetched the milk pail and was getting a hold of the stool when a laugh erupted deep down in me.  "Oh!" I thought, "I'm Huxley!"  That dang spider got cute with me, then disappeared so I wouldn't see him.  There was only old Arnold, just absorbing his surroundings: the cool mud and the disappearing morning mist.

 

After the milking, I got on a ladder so I could reach the ridge beam, and gingerly, while balancing my weight, or at least trying to keep myself steady, I got out my pocket knife and carved into the old oak heartwood:

"Don't judge me."

 

I had sousemeat and eggs later, watched some AWA wrestlling then some Good Book program.  I was having like, a need for comfort, and even after all that ground-up organ meat and by-products and all that other filth, I was still hungry.  I wanted cookies and milk, or something like that, something heavy on the stomach.  There was something deep down, or should I see, high-up, like above the neck, in the think meats: kind of an emptiness, like existence itself was not enough for me, that I had to cross the valley towards the horizon, just to see something or something, and what I had no idea.

The next morning I was surprised as heck at what I found in the pens. 

There was my rotary tool with a grinding wheel attached.  I was bemused, wondering who had been in my stuff, got at my tool room.

But the most upsetting thing was etched on the ridge beam, where I had carved my message the morning prior:

"Donkey fudge."

The lowly philosopher spider, part-monk, mendicant, had mastered a subtle social skill of manipulating a given material to the point of making it kind of a pale satire of what it had been before.  Everyone did this, even the street artists that were so fond of painting their own names on the walls of other people's buildings, as if all the buildings were communal property, to be shared.

Just somewhere to go inside and pee if the notion should take you.