Monday, November 30, 2009

silly poems are my middle name

The floating yellow apparitions
in the black
Are windows.

Not windows on the darkness in
my soul,
but windows on North Shore houses.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

If there were an All-Madden team for name-dropping gourmands, I tell ya, you'd be on it

Isn't Thanksgiving really about overeating, after all?

As a red-blooded American, I was worried, as anyone would be, that I wouldn't be able to overeat to my heart's content in Canada.

I was wrong. There was more than enough food, and I ate more than enough of it. And it was great. It always is. Am I supposed to apologize for eating too much? It was delicious. I'm sorry that there are people who don't have enough to eat. I would like to help them. But at Thanksgiving, you stuff yourself. It's what's done. I can't turn the tide back from the shore, and I can't help but eat too much at Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving. Feel free to stuff yourself. And give some thanks.

Thanks.

take 'er easy

First blog post from Canadian soil

First USA Thanksgiving spent on Canadian soil

Canadian soil never tasted so good, etc. etc.

Went to the supermarket today here and saw a can of Habitant 'Soupe aux Pois'

I must explore squash. There are great possibilities in squash

I won't leave without sampling poutine, which is not spelled phonetically

Saturday, November 21, 2009

ramblings again?

* There is the mundane, there is the banal, and then there is the conversation on the T with an acquaintance from some previous phase of your life that you used to know and haven't talked to since. And then, in the next circle of hell below that is secondhand listening to one of these conversations that someone else is loudly carrying on.

* We should totally hang out some time!

* Have you considered, while eating, whether a juicy steak is worth the future high blood pressure and heart disease, and the attendant increase in healthcare costs overwhelming an already dangerously strained American healthcare system?

* Don't you just love looking for things to get angry about and rage at with righteous ire? Things like reality television. And righteously angry conservative television commentators who bemoan the rise of reality television.

* I never turn down the chance to have my back to a wall. It's just safer that way.

* A sausage is only a sausage, unless it's andouille. That stuff is spicy!

* The Journal of Economic Entomology: real or fake? That depends on how you feel about apiaries.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

spackle

There are only two rackets in this town: the Canadian whiskey racket, the integrated information management business, and the illegal fur trade. I chose the latter, and I've been kicking myself ever since.

Amoto quaeramus seria ludo

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

It Just Is

I like seeing things for what they are, but also not trying to see in them what's not there. I read David Foster Wallace and find that there is rich humor throughout. Do I ask why? I do not. I would like to advance the notion, perhaps forgotten, that enlightened people can enjoy art, music, literature, food, or anything else, without knowing the minutiae of its underpinnings.

The chicken is free range from southern Alberta, raised on handpicked rye and winter wheat as well as organic tulip bulbs. It's marinated in a Sonoma Valley white made with 100% sustainable Chardonnay grapes pollinated by ladybugs, along with some basil I raised from seed and ginger from Sichuan province in China. Of course, I don't need to mention that, really, a civilized person wouldn't use anything but Sichuan ginger. Would anyone like some more pesticide-free fetal asparagus?

Thank you, I really didn't need to know that. If something tastes good, maybe that's all there is to it. That's why we say it tastes good, rather than saying, oh, it's made out of fresh local ingredients derived from sustainable farming techniques and I know every stinking detail down to the chicken was born on a freaking Wednesday. If you saw an attractive person, you wouldn't start guessing about which side of her family the Roman nose came from, or whether the steely gray eyes are a recessive trait. No, you would say, that is a suitably attractive person for me to mate with, or something less creepy-sounding along those lines. We seem to have an unhealthy obsession with analyzing things, so that we can't see the forest for the trees.

Just let it be.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Post-structuralism in roasted potatoes

Christopher Ricks told me:

The biggest difference between poetry
and prose is that the line endings

matter

in poetry.