Author: johnbrandall

John Randall is a writer living in Missouri. His interests include camping, running, walking, cutting and burning wood, messing around with magnets, foraging, and listening to podcasts, many of them about baseball.

Cabin Sessions

~ johnbrandall

I think about our conversation.  Our conversations.  They're like a river.  One river, different river, it doesn't matter.  What we say—it's important to say it.  I'd like to remember everything but once you say something it's in the river, the river takes it on down the stream, we can't look at the river to remember whether we said something.  Did we say it, didn't we?  If it's important enough we can say it again, and it can go into the river again, and it's not wasteful, it's not pollution if we mean what we say when we say it...



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Farm Draft

~ johnbrandall

Every car and truck that could've passed us has done so by now.  Oh wait, here's a couple more.  I will need to make a stop for gas; the tank is about a third full.  I'll stop in Vienna or maybe at that gas station along the jog at 133 and 42.  Two choppers appear, now three.  Low.  Military.  Black and grey.  A fourth.  The Cards and Nats are knotted at two after six innings.  Where are those choppers going?

Bob's Gasoline Alley.  Old filling station signs and alpacas.  Vacuum Museum, exit 195.  This semi I'm tailing is going a little slow but sitting content in its draft takes all of the decision work out of driving, a relief and a condition necessary to the drafting of this travelogue.


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Dateline Farm, Tape Measure, Missouri

~ johnbrandall

Indeed, the coffee maker was in the lazy susan.  The apple cider vinegar was also still here, all that mother settling like ore to the bottom of the bottle.  Days earlier I had bought some black pepper style pea snap snacks for my wife, who shunned them hard.  I brought them down and will stash them for some(one's) future use.

I've found over these last several years of my life that my favorite hobby concerns this Farm.  I have developed a fascination with the place.  I love bringing things down and stashing them here.  Then when I return a quarter of a year later—is it still here?  Do I even remember having stashed it?  I get a kick out of that moment, "Oh yeah, I did bring down a tube of marine caulk, awesome!"


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Black Holes and Second Lives

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

You look down at yourself from above, then you awake.  You realize you have flies buzzing about you.  Not a ton, but more than you would expect and somebody tells you,

"They'll go away after a while."

The flies are there because you have been dead.  But you have come back and your second existence has started.  You always go back to an existence that you have already had.  That's why you want to have good existences. 



Full dialogue here...

Vegas 2018 —or— AM40

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I.  Neck Willow.  

I'm an untapped resource.  I'm a gathering storm.

"Place the six and the eight for $12 each."  My total investment: $24.  If either number is rolled before the next seven, I win $14.  If a seven is rolled first, I lose both bets.  If I hit a couple of my numbers, I deploy some of those profits as bets on the five and the nine.  Then I have five, six, eight and nine covered.  A seven still means I lose all of my chips on the table.



Full travelogue here...

Memory Foam

~ johnbrandall ~ 1 Comment

It is broken.  Does it require of me that I buy a new spacer kit?  What if I counter-offer with a brand new ball assembly?

The right answer ran between the left guard and the left tackle, to the house.

I am from Illinois but I live in Missouri.  This does not make me anxious.  I do not spend an hour a day imagining the explanations I will offer as justification when someone asks me, "What are you doing here?"  Or says, in the pejorative, "Go back to your Land of Lincoln..."


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Observations, Recent and Uncatalogued

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1

I was struck by the rightness of a Morandi still life, leading me to believe (again) I could paint something similar, or should try in any case.  Are my old oils still any good?  Am I better with either color or depth?

2

"There's a dead branch out there," she said, pointing out the window.

"You dissembler," he said, raising a knee and tapping it with the opposite hand.  Then raising the other knee, tapping it with the other hand.  "These are my new calisthenics," he said.


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The Only Good Way to Get a Really Good Suntan is to Start with a Really Bad Burn

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And tomorrow I will circumautolate another part of the country, virgin to me, assuming I make it onto the plane.  We fly to AriZona to visit River's parents.  They say they have enough water but I am afraid they will try to tap into her, claiming genetic rights of appropriation.  Gila, Salt, Colorado, her.  I imagine large red rock formations, poisonous creatures of sand, water-hoarding cacti, shimmers of heat appearing to rise in the distance off of the road we are traveling.  Lizards, near-tropical birds, political animals, billboards, a pool, a cadre of golf courses.  I need only the stars, a red light and enough sobriety to make a little sense of a timeless sky.  I will not pack any of my meths but I shall be able to get plenty of them there, for paper scratch.


Full travelogue here...

Farm March 2017—Outhouse Edition.

~ johnbrandall ~ 1 Comment

I.      Wood for which the flames to lick...

Farmhouse fajitas, nachos, Helm at the helm, old time music, fiddles, a nearly full moon, clean cool air.  Chucking my banana peel toward the brushline, cabbage shards.  My nose is cold and runny.  Hat on, hoody, vest, thermal, two pair sox, crox.  Hot dog on the stove in foil this morning, baked potato on and then in the stove last night.  Splitting wood, getting wood, arranging wood, burning wood.  Excursion to Iberia via Brays Church Road, church there at 42, Mount Gilead, cemetery too.  Pastures, cows, farm dogs just chillin not chasin.  I cut up a fallen ash that wasn't nearly as dead as I thought, somehow still going at a forty-five degree angle and living on and through the v-trunk of another tree, maybe the second hickory species here, without shaggy bark and difficult to split—pignut?  The four horses are still here, two white, one black, one...Appaloosa?  I thought that word and then Helm said that word so it must be so.  A sparse, low fog rolled in.  I spoke of Misty at Chincoteague, we talked about wild horses...


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