It is Saturday night in Canada and it is negative nearly-ten outside in the Hammer and Ms Joldersma and I are at home and toasting cheerily to the totally timely demise of February two thousand goddamn nine. A terrible, tedious, stress-laden, brain-fraying, soul-steamrolling freezing-ass-cold compact misery-bomb of a month that neither of us wants to see or even be in the same room with ever again. Farewell, fucker. Thank Christ for Time’s Unflagging Forward Stride. Dear March: Be brief.

DFW, “Church Not Made With Hands”: The screen breathes mint.

Above, from Fight Club: “RUN, FORREST, RUN!” Who’d’ve thought that back in 1999 David Fincher and Brad Pitt were already telegraphing their Gumpian intentions? Those clever fellas. (How’s that working out for you, being clever? Keep it up then!)

High Fidelity: “I don’t wanna hear old Sad Bastard music, Barry — I just want something I can ignore.”

This afternoon a Toronto location scout knocks on my door. He’s vetting Hamilton buildings for a Canadian indie film winningly entitled The Love Child of Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono. Evidently a crime/heist comedy set within an art-scene milieu. The scout (who says he’s recently worked a number of productions shot in Hamilton, a few on our street even) tells me the film is set in like the New York art world, and basically that he’s looking for interior spaces with interesting windows. We do have big brilliant seven-and-a-half-foot-tall windows in two rooms, but I’m doubtful the apartment could pass for an arty Gothamite loft-type thing or whatever, even if the art department brings some serious set-dressing Movie Magic. The dude takes a few photos and says he’ll let me know. Uh-huh. Not holding my breath for a call back.

Hello and good morning. My recent replacement DJ headphones (I am not a DJ) are a mere month old and are still kind of brutally viselike. They make music and movies sound sublime and weepworthy but their Japanese non-fall-off technology bear-huggishly squeezes and compresses my poor skull with violence. After I wear them for an hour, my accent changes. Two hours and my personality switches Myers-Briggs types. Three or more hours and I begin observing eight-foot amphibirodents in three-piece sack suits doing their god-damnedest to sell me cut-rate Austrobelgian automobiles by bullhorn-rapping through their transverse navels. As I type the phones have been feeding me spooky creak-laden ambientish solo-piano miniatures by Goldmund and Gonzales (which sounds like a law firm but are two separate musicians, names not their own), sauced with an underlayer of subtle subtle rustling magnetic static and the occasional ambulance-dispatch transmission blip, no voices, blips only, at the very threshold of audibility, as they say. Earlier today I listen a few times to Neko Case’s forthcoming Middle Cyclone record, temporarily streaming on npr.org as part of Anti’s tender loving label promotion hustle. The new record is about forty minutes of fine music and then a thirty-minute track of crickets chirping. The cricket track would go very nicely with the Goldmund Gonzales & Sons and the simmered blip-reduction that the phones are piledriving into my brainpan. However I have my doubts the cricket track will make a strong candidate for Laura’s and my next ecstatic, embarrassing, meticulously-edited caterwauling-in-the-car video.

Margaret Atwood, “Women’s Novels”:

3. Men favor heroes who are tough and hard: tough with men, hard with women. Sometimes the hero goes soft on a woman but this is always a mistake. Women do not favor heroines who are tough and hard. Instead they have to be tough and soft. This leads to linguistic difficulties. Last time we looked, monosyllables were male, still dominant but sinking fast, wrapped in the octopoid arms of labial polysyllables, whispering to them with arachnoid grace: darling, darling.

Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”:

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Am in the late throes of a peculiar Friday-p.m. psychosis, wherein I’ve been struck with the compulsion to listen to and howl along with this one song, on ceaseless repeat, for no rational reason, a mind-manglingly cheesy ’70s classic-rock song by a mind-manglingly cheesy group whose other songs I vehemently loathe, a song whose title (perhaps uniquely) possesses five punctuation marks but only three actual words, a song just under four minutes long whose final minute-thirty (i.e. nearly the song’s entire second half) consists of the lead singer and a cataclysm of overdubbed vocals singing nothing but one-hundred-fifty-four instances of the word “na”. Save me.

Canada yesterday: OMG OMG OMG !!!!!!!! [shrieks, sobs, hyperventilates, faints]

Oh, Barack … I bet you say that to all the countries.

Note regarding the headline under “The Thrill”: A Beavertail is a deep-fried pastry.

Theodore Roethke, “The Pure Fury”:

Stupor of knowledge lacking inwardness —
What book, O learned man, will set me right?
Once I read nothing through a fearful night,
For every meaning had grown meaningless.
Morning, I saw the world with second sight,
As if all things had died, and rose again.
I touched the stones, and they had my own skin.

February Goddamn. As Nina Simone might not have sung. Why did I work by the windows today? Outside here it is the sort of Dostoevskianly dark grey drizzly spirit-crushing hair-above-freezing worse-than-winter weather that back on the ranch would be called a three-wrist-slitter. Note: This ranch is figurative. Second note: Word around the [also figurative] campfire is that such annual doldrummy meteorological moodinesses may be temporarily cured by food and spirits. If true I am halfway there.

I buy a large, strange, ghastly gnarled driftwoodish tree root thing at a local quote-unquote “Floral Atelier” we wander into on Saturday. It is lurking on the floor when we walk in and I keep walking around back to it. I have to have it. I don’t know why. Laura does not outwardly object to owning it. Looks like a hideously overhormoned ginseng root, arachnoid, tentacular, disconcertingly anatomical, a clawlike clutch of down-snaking bronchial tubes, an antler rack torn off a elk with problems, two and a half feet tall, two and a half feet wide at its barkless fingers’ widest reach, Caucasian in color, Cthulhuan in shape. There is probably a real name somewhere for what it is. I carry it the several blocks back to the car while passing drivers stare. I mime it as a hand emerging from my jacket sleeve and ask Laura Should I have this looked at? to two whole seconds of hilarity. Its bottommost limbs are sawed off flat to make it stand relatively level. The initial idea is to install this monstrosity in the corner wall alcove but it won’t fit. It looks wrong on our floors, wrong on our tables. It seems to want to be up high. It now sprouts grandly out of the top of the ancient junk-store Canadian Railroad Co. wooden dynamite crate labeled HIGH EXPLOSIVE DANGEROUS that sits atop the blue bookcases. The root’s digits stop a foot shy of the ten-foot ceiling. Lording over the room. Drawing the eye up. I will be sick of it soon.

Pablo Neruda: Before loving you, love, nothing was mine: I hesitated through streets and things: nothing mattered or had a name: the world was of the air that I awaited.