Category Archives: prose

Lofty living with my cat

Flatiron Building

When my cat is on my bed there is nothing left for her to attain. In her feline world, it is the pinnacle of places in which to rest and roam.

My bed is like New York City, where there is nowhere left to go. Meaning, anywhere else is a step down. So you just park yourself and enjoy the view — in this case, a skyline of book piles — some of them hefty tomes resting vertically like architectural showpieces.

My book on contemporary collage art can be the Flatiron Building, while certain stacks of literary paperbacks — built with the biggest on the bottom to the smallest on the top — evoke skyscrapers of note: Central Park Tower.; the Woolworth Building; 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Continue reading “Lofty living with my cat”

Morning Meanderings

A cow’s moo and the muffled grunt of Frankenstein’s monster (Karloff). Compare & contrast.

**

I am in my cocoon right now, complete with classical music (Chopin’s Mazurkas) coffee and Wayne Koestenbaum’s Pink Trance Notebooks, dudes. In a bubble I might instead be listening to Bach or Brahms and per chance reading Bukowski?

**

Thought in the back of my mind is … 2019 is just crazy tawk.

Next in line

Standing on line at the restaurant, suddenly I am next. It makes me feel like Friday after clocking out at work, where everything’s about to happen. And the waiter or waitress will at some point carry over my tray of food, and everything will be situated just so. There will be a rosebud in the vase on my table and I will snap a photo.

Seamstress

My great-grandmother’s woven basket—a trove the size of a bread loaf—brimming with spare buttons. The wood door to her sewing room ajar. Her threaded Singer perched like a hummingbird amid patterned fabric and spools.

The flour on her wood cutting board and maple rolling pin in the kitchen. The smell of confection, like gingerbread and breakfast muffins.

Her Sunday stroll to the corner store with her button-front smock, and her slow return to her apartment on the third-floor.

Mr. Mustachio

Mr. Mustachio is basically a walking / talking, bristly & dark-haired mustache who is debuting a cable TV show.

A round beverage coaster who wears a sombrero on occasion, his show will be titled, Drinks Are On Me. He will discuss cocktails and other mixed libations during segments, which will be filmed on a kitchen table.

He also will share stories about the times he’s had at the 24/7 dive bar in Las Vegas where he used to work, until a customer slipped him into his pocket and brought him home, where he is now, unfortunately, used primarily for coffee, tea and sometimes domestic beer when friends are over.

Overall, the show is a way for Mr. Mustachio to relive the days (and nights) that he loved so much while working at the bar.

Knowledge

Overview
You can see as I stir it looks like chocolate pudding before cooling and setting.
You can hear it sounds like water when you’re alone in a quiet tub (high-caliber audio via parabolic reflector).
What it looks like is this after it’s baked: (closeup of sedimentary rock, the color of clay pot).
As for texture, think of a hunk of banana-walnut bread.

Findings
It was something I enjoyed eating so much that I constructed this hut using this material.
And now I am sitting here in lotus position, passing it on like a sort-of Siddhartha.

Notes on grackles

Grackles engrossed in nonstop quibbles like tweens in a schoolyard. Their predatory clamber across tree bark, clawing like cats on carpet. Grackles and the way that they crow and cackle! Torpedoing from bush to rock to tree to fountain, dumpster-diving, whizzing past your head like P-140 bombers. Fluttering low like bats in Victorian homes, perched on hilltops and awash in fog and sickly lamplight, their nefarious flight charged with purpose, bulging from their green button eyes.

Bowie

I am reminded of Bowie today as I walk about in mismatched spa socks. Wear clashing articles of clothing to work day should be a thing. At my job they have different themes for dressing down: They had one recently with go as your personal hero day. Which would be perfectly appropriate for me: my two different species worn with my blue genus.