Sundry Items

Nice note from Linda commenting on the musicality of a particular passage last night. I was aware of it too. It's different, writing late at night or early in the morning, when I often do listen to music, usually the blues or The Dead. Writing then becomes more of a jazz riff. I'd started that post late the night before, when the dog woke me up yet again. Interesting conversation with Anthony at lunch today. A ceramic artist in D's next show and D had told him to ask me about the potential mess his part of the show might make. I looked at him with raised eyebrow and said that after 7 years of Janitor College there was no mess he was capable of making that I wasn't capable of cleaning up. We sparred back and forth, he mentioned certain acids, and I mentioned broken bones and the effect of sugar in the gas tank of his prized Jetta. Just so we understood each other. Fucking artists, man, they get an MFA and they view it as a license to kill. In this heat, and this afternoon it was hard to breathe, I look toward grazing cold foods. Bought one of those long seedless cucumbers and a bunch of radishes, make a plate with them, sliced; cheese (a double cheddar), and crackers. They didn't carry the Bleu Cheese dipping sauce with the wings on Friday Night, hard to circulate with a dipping sauce, so I brought it all home, a dozen or more containers: for the next week or two I'll be eating raw things dipped in increasingly pungent sauce. Found a couple of packages of frog-legs, in the varietal frozen food case, and decide to do some Buffalo Frog Legs. Only got two packages, I wonder who else would be buying them, a brace per package, so I only have four. Will have to be one of those meals where we wonder did it really happen, because I will certainly be alone and probably drinking. I go through two or three coasters a night in this kind weather. I can use one coaster for the entire winter, but when the weather takes this shift, I'm steady stealing coasters from the pub. If I start thinking about a particular verb, or dealing with an awkward comma, I destroy coasters as a matter of course. They cling to bottom of the glass, then I walk on them; sometimes I sling them like Frisbees against annoying insects. I killed a large roach, just the other night, with a soggy Landshark coaster, and I think Jimmy would have been proud. Me and my monkey. You probably noticed me, playing on the street corner, turning a crank, while the primate danced? This is how I pay off my college loans. You got a quarter mister? The geese were gathered at the lake, they're going somewhere, the far north, where they'll turn barnacles into babies. Magic, of sorts. I went down to the banks of the Ohio, a few spare minutes before the next storm front, and found a sycamore branch that looked exactly like the missing arm from a Greek marble piece. A good day.