Thursday, July 22, 2010

Horrible slug death

Just last night, the okra corn hot pepper thing cooked and cooling, I sat on the back bench under the crab-apple tree, surveying our one-rod manse, thinking, Gee, there haven't been any slugs this year.

That was obviously a big psychokinetic booboo.  Because this morning, sitting out with coffee at the edge of the patio and admiring that same bench and tree in reverse view, I lolled my head to the right and there on the wall of Joann's place, not 12 inched from my schnoz, was a big friggin' slug-daddy, a real man-sized slug, a full grown index finger of slug, a slug that if it got into your nostril or throat would undoubtedly suffocate you, you would die horribly between asphyxiation and uncontrollable gut wrenching gag reflex.  Do I make myself clear?

Skank!

I quick footed into the kitchen and came out with a handful of salt (it happened to be Kosher salt) and poured that on the beast, which immediately started exuding heroic quantities of snot and writhed in what a human could only sanely interpret as pain.  Intense, deadass pain.  But it wouldn't drop.  I got another handful.  It dropped.  A little while later it was dead.  I felt ambivalent about that and what I had done, but went back to coffee and Jim Harrison. 

Time got later, I needed to ready myself for work.  I started to stand, put down my bare right foot from where it was resting on an old stool... and missed by two inches another friggin' slug.  A smaller one, practically lithe, the size of a young child's pinkie.  I imagined that eeeuuuwwww feeling I would have had if I'd stepped on it barefoot, smooshing it, and I had an involuntary sphincter tightening reaction.  I went inside.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Gravity, strange torque

Anyone who has spent an overnight at our place knows that we have a sheet metal shower stall in our one full bathroom that seems to have been lifted from a Korean War era Quonset hut.  It's great virtue - the reason why it's still there (other than inertia and money) is that it is the ultimate in anti-low-flow plumbing: big honkin' streams of shower water, which I adore.  (Allow me to digress, and say why we love our friend Ms. Higgins: because when we embarrassedly say how we've been meaning for 14 years to rip out the old bathroom, she says, Why!?  Why would you want to change anything about it!?)

Anywho, this is about the latch on the stall, nicely illustrated over there on the left.  See the top screw?  Every couple of days I notice it's loosening, and I screw it back in with my thumb.  (Right thumb.  Always the right thumb.)  What's that all about?  How's it loosening?  Why?  What's the strange gravity and torque? 

The only thing I can come up with is that the torrential waterflow creates a coriolis effect so strong that it wrenches the screw loose. 

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

The lesser calico

This morning I gave up sleeping at 4:30 and went out back to read (Jim Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked).  As the sky brightened one of the two calico cats that live in the gap between our place and Lula & Vincent's, the less athletic one - they are strikingly different this way - came walking in from the back of the garden heading for the gap.  For years there has been a thin space between where our fence meets our kitchen, and this cat would slip through it on her way to the gap.  Last weekend, though, I repaired that part of the fence.  Now this cat slinks onto the patio (we don't like each other), leaps to our kitchen window sill, then up to the top of the fence, then backtracks 5 feet to where there's a clear spot to drop down, then walks to the gap on Lula's side of our fence.    Her more able sister just leaps to the top of the repaired fence and then straight down into the narrow space behind.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Tuli Kupferberg

Lost in the morass of Yankee death - Steinbrenner (eh) and Bob Sheppard (no!), was the death of the uber Fug, Tuli Kupferberg.

Kids, renew your vows to be a little more free. 

The No Smoking Orchestra is totally smoking in every language

Bummer is that if you want to catch their next show you'll have to go to Latvia , but trust me it will be totally worth the trip.  The No Smoking Orchestra is pretty mind blowing.  The pics on their site of last night's show in NY don't do justice to the rocking intensity of the thing.  But I do see me and Lota in one or two of them.

The Captain: Isabel and tales of passion

Our friend, The Captain, wants you to watch Isabel Allende telling tales of passion.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Michelangelo Merisi's occasional verse and jail time

A few years ago I was writing a bunch of occasional verse and really enjoying it.  So I was tickled reading Francine Prose's description of the verse Caravaggio and a handful of his fellows were accused of writing (and jailed for) about their hated rival, Baglione following the unveiling of one of Baglione's paintings of the Resurrection. 
The verses predict that Baglione's utter lack of talent would soon reduce him to the point at which he could no longer afford the cloth for breeches to cover his naked behind.  They suggest that he bring his drawings to the grocer, or use them for toilet paper, or give them to the wife of Baglione's friend Tommaso Salini (a hugely unpopular and notoriously nasty painter), who could put them in her vagina so as to prevent Salini from having sex with her.  The poems refer repeatedly to the sore subject of the gold chain: Baglioni is undeserving and unfit to wear it; an iron chain around his ankles would be more appropriate.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Bagel me, Dr. Memory

From Mark Strausman to wine making buddy Savino to you:  the chef teaches us to make bagels at home.  Real bagels.  Get your malt on.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Welcome back

Jah, we back.  But before we was back and we was away we went again to ol' Fore Street where we said to our waitlady hey, we never been back what you didn't put a card on our table what said welcome back!  But she twicky!  When dessert come, look what she did!!

(Took two home cooked dinners, a leftovers lunch, and a bananas breakfast to get the poops back to normal.  And no bottles of wine.  I knew you were concerned about that.)

Monday, July 5, 2010

Normal

Am reading Don DeLillo's Point Omega, sitting in a car in the visitor's parking lot at the Maine State Prison (long story, short version) and I read:
"They were as normal as people could be and still be normal, she said. A little more normal, they might be dangerous."
Roger, that.
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Thomaston Cafe, Thomaston, ME

This place has become one of our very favorite. Last time we were here was April of 2009. This time around we had the chilled blueberry and banana soup, Lota had the haddock sandwich and I had the halibut Caesar. Hail, Thomaston. (Last time we finished with the coconut cream pie, but having had all we had this time before noon, pie just couldn't make itself happen.)
File under "great food happens wherever someone wants to make it."
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Sunday, July 4, 2010

Andreas Laszlo Konrath: My Generation

Andreas Laszlo Konrath.  A grouping o prints named My Generation, which we say at the Susan Maasch Fine Art in Portland, ME. on the fabulous First Friday of this month.  Another artist who lives in Brooklyn whose work we first saw in Portland.  Odd.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Lisa Dahl: Trickle Down

Portland, Maine. First Friday. Congress Street.  Lisa Dahl
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