Well dry, camel dead.

So in the interest of dredging up a good reason to live keep posting, I'm going to do this thing where I go through my bookshelves and just throw up the first page of whatever I find there. I did it for the far right sidebar this morning (it's now below), and then I thought, Hey! Wouldn't it be fun to have some actual writing on this blog! With a link to the book! Not that I've earned a cent on my Amazon Associates account for my assiduous linkage; no, I'm not doing this to earn points.

I'm doing this because I don't have a goddamn thing to say right now.

Et voilà!

1

Years ago, a child in a tree with a small caliber rifle bushwacked a piano through the open summer windows of a neighbor's living room. The child's name was Nicholas Payne.

Dragged from the tree by the piano's owner, his rifle smashed upon a rock and flung, he was held by the neck in the living room and obliged to view the piano point blank, to dig into its interior and see the cut strings, the splintered holes that let slender shafts of light ignite small circles of dark inside the piano.

"You have spoiled my piano."

The child would remember the great wing of the lid over his head, the darkness, the cut wires curling upon themselves, the smell of spice and the sudden idea that the piano had been sailed full of spice from the Indies free of the bullet holes that would have sent it to the bottom, resonant with uncut strings, its mahogany lid slicing the wind and sheltering a moist and fragrant cargo of spice.

What an idea.

Thomas McGuane, the opening page of The Bushwhacked Piano, 1971.