KCPA

This for That

What will I have for breakfast?
I wish I had some plums
like the ones in Williams’s poem.
He apologized to his wife
for eating them
but what he did not
do was apologize to those
who would read his poem
and also not be able to eat them.
That is why I like his poem
when I am not hungry.
Right now I do not like him
or his poem. This is just
to say that.

-Ron Padgett

From Daily Postings by Christopher David Ryan (three first names!)

Remember those eggs!

My brother remembers them.

Worst eggs I’ve ever had - oh they were slimy, white, distinctly egg-tasting, but not in the good way, in the way you might imagine eggs tasted if you had never had one and just smelled a chicken coop.

The white bit of the scrambled eggs was like rubber - gooey, runny, glue-like - and any other unattractive adjective used to describe a food that you wouldn’t want to eat, that, five years or more after you last ate it, stirs the memory of that scrambled egg gag reflex.

Sorry, Mom, that I stopped eating your scrambled eggs.

1. Dishwasher

2. Garage

3. Painting

4. Shopping for furniture

5. Loft

6. Space

7. Fireplace

8. Basement for kitty boxes

9. Clean

10. Clean and well-lit basement

11. Well-lit closet without a door frame I will hit my head on

12. Mine

From the website that gave me a heart attack at work today and made me yearn for London more than I have in months. NEON TUBE! THE PURE BRILLIANCE IS SO OBVIOUS WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY DO THIS BEFORE? Somebody, get me the number of a custom neon sign shop. I’ll commission it and put it on my wall and then worship by the buzzing of the electric sexiness that is the tube mapped out in neon.

Noted (November 3, 2008): My married friends had the best Halloween costumes this year.

Balancing objects on my hips - whether it be laundry basket (especially laundry basket), cat, or boxes of marketing material - makes me feel the most feminine I will possibly ever feel in my life. I have good hips.

Also:

The show we’ve been working on for months is finally coming soon. I’m abundantly excited and I’m learning a lot about artists, working with the gallery, and prepping for installation (something I knew absolutely nothing about.) I have learned so much in the past year and a half that it’s astounding to sit here and realize that I just wrote that statement and that it is entirely true.

This is the scoop:

MINIMAL/MANIMAL, The 4th Volunteer Biennale at The Soap Factory. Opening November 15, from 7-11 pm.

In all my eagerness to promote this thing, it’s unfortunately easy for me to forget that I have a few pieces I said I’d have ready for the show. One down, two to go.

October 28 was the day when all the leaves on the tree outside my house fell. My car was buried in the still-green leaves in the morning, like the morning after a heavy snowfall. But with leaves. I cleared them away with my hand, not with a window scraper.

I wanted to find these pictures of this mole in rigor mortis for some very specific reason the other day and I didn’t quite make the journey to Andy’s flickr page (I still don’t know how to navigate that website effectively). Now I have forgotten why I wanted so badly to have a picture of this mole posted. Did I relate to the bloated dead mole? Did I want to write a poem about him and his pointy red nose (so pointy, so unbelievable?) Or what about those paws - look at how wide they are! Can he do anything with them? His fingers are so fat! Was I going to write something about those paws that might as well have oven mitts on them?

When we found this mole while walking a trail in Frontenac, we were unsure if it was a mole or a vole. Moles, I thought, were bigger. In Wind and the Willows I pictured Mole the size of Badger. I didn’t know much about voles so I thought it was probably a vole. It’s not a vole. Voles are just big mice.

Okay, I know those big paws are for burrowing, but they look ridiculous!

(From Andy, but I did all the work with my marshmallow roasting stick.)