Happy Monday. Our countertop coffeemaker snuffs it this afternoon in mid-brew. The latest in our household’s series of live-fast-die-young appliances. Cuisinart, Krups, KitchenAid, we kill ’em all. This one almost makes it to eight months. It produces its final cup, then starts ticking madly, emitting sheets of evil-smelling burnt-plastic smoke from its base and hot-plate, scorching a caramel-brown veneer onto the coffee pitcher’s glass bottom, and then powering itself off forever. Was it something I said?

Dear pen pals. I and this cup of coffee wish to express our egrets, our profoundest ibises, our most heartfelt cranes and herons, that we haven’t written you in a while, and that what little we have written lately has been such weak tea, so quotationy, so tersely photographic, so sphinxlike in the detail department, so bone-dry and dispassionate and chalked thick with boredom-dust since sometime before the snows let up. The cup of coffee points out that, here nearly at the year’s midpoint, freshly post-solstice, I have posted fifty-one times on erasing.org in 2011 so far. That, opines the cup, is some truly woebegone shit. If god forbid I were a Gawker Media blogger I’d be required to post that many times daily before my noontime lunch-pellet, lest I be cast out into the street and trampled into pageview-paste by berzerk Dentonian ad-weasels on the hunt for ambrosial clicky-cash. The cup of coffee is now just an empty cup; its former occupant is sloshing around somewhere down behind this here bellybutton, its shade-grown caffeine hell-bent for the nearest adenosine receptors while a god damn Iguazu Falls of gland-washed epinephrine thunders down around them. I feel embarrassed to be counting posts and lamenting some stupid uptick in blog silence, the who-cares arias just write themselves by sheer reflex and then perform themselves to ferocious self-encores; and anyway lest we forget blogs are dead, unbelievably dead, shockingly dead, they’ve been dead for years, were dead in the very eggshell, and are now deader than ever, uncountable levels below the deadest of all previous known deadnesses, their mangled remains exquisitely profaned, their ashes eaten and excreted without surcease, their blackened and salted graves smugly macarena’d upon by the grand mal avenging angels of social media triumphant. It is ever thus. We and our pronouns miss you nonetheless, pen pals; we miss this nighttime skywriting, these one-way wall-taps, this unlooked-for pouring-out of letters and their pet punctuations; and I speak for myself and the wearily empty coffee cup and its inky-black ex-contents when I say I wish we spoke more, I wish we said more, I feel ever more egretfully (most bitternly, most storkly) the wading waning of connection between me and you and memory and English and weather and all the figures of fascination that creep across our pages and screens and all the passing hours those figures hasten or slow. Would we could improve.

Summer.

A few weeks ago I make a cameo appearance (via a quoted email) on Ed Park’s blog, contributing a celebrity item to Ed’s ouroboros collection: Anthony Bourdain’s ouroboros tattoo, aka the Ourobourdain.

At the time I kind of had Bourdain on the brain, as I’d just finished reading Kitchen Confidential. An entertaining book, some parts of which may even qualify as nonfiction. Three details from it have stayed with me:

1. His recommendation to cook with shallots.
2. His warning to avoid ordering fish at restaurants on Sundays.
3. His appealing simile “Luis screamed like a burning wolverine”.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: “S. seldom does wrong, but what he does he usually does at the wrong time.”

Douglas Coupland, from “A Dictionary of the Near Future”: “ANTIFLUKE — A situation in the universe in which rigid rules of action exist to prevent coincidences from happening. Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of antifluke.”