Here is a picture of Laura brandishing a multi-leopard coffee mug. There is a full-body leopard on the outside of the mug and a disembodied leopard head inside the mug. The mug belongs to a coffeeshop in downtown Guelph, where I took the picture in April of this year. The inside leopard head is there, of course, to produce the effect of the leopard rising predatorily out of your coffee as you drink, like a mud-slicked Martin Sheen emerging from the steaming jungle river at the end of Apocalypse Now, which rising leopard fixes you with a lordly stare and enhances your coffee-drinking experience. This feature is available to right-handed people only. Left-handers who drink from this mug will miss out on the inside leopard, as the leopard will be 100% submerged when the mug is tilted into the mouth, or, when the mug is at rest, the leopard will be facing away, unseen by Lefty’s oblivious eyes. Laura is right-handed, but in the picture she is holding the mug in her left hand to demonstrate its leopard technology to the camera, etc.

It is Laura’s birthday today, 29 July. Her birthday is easy to remember because it is exactly two weeks after our anniversary, which is 15 July, the month’s midpoint, July’s ides. The anniversary is easy to remember because it is exactly two weeks after Canada Day, 1 July, though I am still working on committing that weirdo holiday to memory. This latest anniversary, two weeks ago, is our fifth. I like Laura. She and I are the same height. She has this sort of razor-sharp smile that you feel like could open up corrugated sheet metal. She has an earth-scorching command of spoken profanity to which my cap stays permanently doffed. Best of all, she has a university login that allows our household free access to the online OED — so much English, too much English! Also she reads like a house on fire, and writes like a house on fire on ice (shaken, strained, served in a tumbler with a scratch of pop, optionally garnished with leopard zest).

Classic: Stephen Colbert, on last night’s Colbert Report (US link, Canada link), reading off America’s Bucket List:

And we should finally just do it with Canada. The tension’s been building for years! I’m talking crazy, last-night-on-Earth, grabbing-borders, slapping-Rockies, half-in-French, no-eye-contact, eating-poutine-out-of-each-other’s-Great-Lakes nasty-nass!

Sweet mother of Cupertino. Above is the new Mac mini. Looks pretty much the same as the exquisitely redesigned Mac mini that Apple released in the summer of 2010, but this new-new mini 1) has jettisoned that hilarious moldering antiquity that was the CD/DVD drive, 2) runs the newly-minted leonine OS X 10.7, and 3) unholy gobsmacking miracle of transdenominational miracles, is finally the same price here in Canada as it is in the States.

My circa-2008 Mac mini — at which I am typing right now, a computer that to my ongoing astonishment is still working fine, spookily reliable, a pleasant example of the Last Year’s Model (plus two) ethic — cannot wait to be replaced by this object. This disappearing thing.

So the new-new mini is slimmer, sleeker, quieter, cooler, whiter, greener, blanker, and bleaker. More minimalist, more miniature, less there. A vanishing ice cap. An eroded stone. Something or other melting, thawing, resolving into a dew, etc., etc. Like all of Apple’s hardware, each newer model fills less space, is less solid, approaching insubstantiality, fading from view — like clouds, like air, like poor Steve Jobs’s body, like us poor users’ minds. I appreciate that when Jobs was explaining iCloud, he said they’re demoting the Mac to just be a device … I know the feeling.

Theodore Roethke, from his notebooks: I’m beginning to think like a novelist. Is that death?

Above: Laura and Lightbox, in Toronto. On this visit, a few weekends ago:

1. We are at the Lightbox to catch a matinee of T. Malick’s The Tree of Life (aka The Big Lubezki), in which we see B. Pitt being a bad dad whose chin never un-juts, S. Penn staggering through antiseptic skyscrapers and salty dream-deserts, the newborn universe sobbing out endless nebulae of cosmic chemical tears beneath the screaming melodies of Z. Preisner’s “Lacrimosa”, and a dinosaur stepping on another dinosaur’s face.
2. We go to Mjölk and stare in reverential silence at their inventory of moon-man housewares, diaphanous furniture, minimalist hand-diddled tree bark, and soothing fragments of metal. (I am sort of forbidden from buying anything there because last time we went there we bought some intimidatingly featureless wine glasses and very soon thereafter I broke one of them. It’s what I do. I break wine glasses. This one was in my hand when it interfaced with our granite countertop and shattered into wabi-sabi smithereens. Possible suicide.)
3. We have dinner at a restaurant for wannabe beer snobs, where we consume a parade of craft brews concocted in countries that do not appear on maps, along with beer-baked bread and a bowl of beer-murdered mussels evidently too small to wrench themselves off the cultivation ropes. Laura eats cider-cured rainbow trout that has been converted to greyscale and then exploded all over a plate of drunken lettuce. I eat applewood-smoked suckling pig from Guelph, presented on the plate as a sprawling mound of dark, greasy, shredded baby mammal-meat atop a foundation of meat-colored root vegetables, accompanied by a clutch of oversauced mushrooms also resembling meat. Oh that poor piglet! Poor tiny, tender, delicious Guelph piglet.
4. We encounter a street-Shakespeare troupe performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Dundee Place Courtyard for a smallish crowd. It’s maybe ten actors playing multiple roles, allowing for maximum ham. This is minutes after we leave the restaurant, still woozy from our substantial intake of fancy-pants beers and annihilated fauna. We stand and watch the play for a while, and I must confess that I join some of the other spectators in being guilty of the obnoxious Shakespeare Snicker: laughing slightly too hard at a play’s laugh-lines to show that you know the text and supposedly understand it, even though the lines aren’t that funny. Several fine scenes later we donate some cash to the troupe hat and then leave in search of a Starbucks washroom, bowing out after Bottom’s translation into rude-mechanical ass-face.

As a person of partly Russian extraction, I was interested to read this bit in Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking a few days ago, while en route to the bottom of a bottle of wine:

Some say the Russian Revolution of 1917 happened because the Czar had banned alcohol three years before as a wartime measure, or at least that was why it was so bloody. Certainly the Russian attitude to drink is different from ours in the West, probably always has been. Centuries ago, travellers recorded that a typical Russian meal was one where everybody got speechlessly drunk, all classes, all ages, both sexes, seven days a week, that people were always falling down dead in public through over-use, that “drinke is their whole desire,” as an English diplomat wrote of his visit in 1568.

A while ago, in search of after-work food and drinks, we try stopping in at a local-ish pub called The Dickens. Named in honor of Charles Dickens, as the place takes pains to point out. Their signs feature the author’s portrait, the menus haul in convivial quotations from his books, and a number of their dishes carry his name: Dickens Fries, Dickens Salad, Dickens Burger, Dickens Mac & Cheese. Not exactly Dickensian fare — no boiled beef, no joint of mutton, no plum pudding — but then again their house fish-and-chips might’ve been a subtle homage to Oliver Twist, as it does kind of taste like workhouse gruel. Also, grotesque book-nerd snickerings erupt from our table when the check arrives and we see that the establishment name at the top is printed as: DICKEN’S PUB. Ouch! Oh, goroo!

“Ah yes. Named for the famous writer Charles Dicken.” — “Author of A Tale of One City.” — “The Pickwick Paper.” — “My Mutual Friend.” — “Great Expectation.” — “Um … Bleak Room?”

(Somehow reminds me of a bookish drink not available from their bar: a double Dickel.)

It is the time of the summer here at the Hotel Fantod when the sun sets from left to right. The high-rise down the block is a horizon rotated counterclockwise ninety degrees. As of this writing this sunset hits around 7:30pm. The high-rise’s shadow bends gradually across our building and the failing light goes very weird and wavering for a space of about ten minutes once the sun touches the high-rise’s vertical, then dims down to low and indirect once the sun slips 100% behind it. During the few hours preceding, our place is a straight-up solarium, great tides of direct sunshine blazing in through the west-facing windows, the floors and furniture incandescent with upward-reflected light, making the ceilings glow crazily, spindly elongated shadows reaching across the walls and down the hallway, the kitchen lit like a stage.

Above: My long-lost Meshuggah Nothing bookmark. I’ve been looking for this thing for years. I finally find it the other day in a 1959 paperback anthology of Jonathan Swift that I obviously haven’t opened since shortly after I lifted it from my parents’ garage in 2006. Meshuggah being, of course, the world’s favorite Swedish math-metal band. The bookmark is not really a bookmark. It is an old CD promo insert for the band’s 2002 album Nothing. But it has been one of my most prized unintentional bookmarks. I admire the typography of it, the way it erases almost half of every letter in MESHUGGAH and NOTHING, reducing familiar letters to very nearly alien glyphs, yet still managing to make itself understood. But the main reason I like it is simply its sublime slogan: You’ll get NOTHING and like it.

Daniel Pinkwater, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror:

The Honorable Lama Lumpo Smythe-Finkel, the bookseller Howling Frog, and another man, who kept the collar of his coat turned up, and the brim of his hat turned down, sat at a booth at the far end of the Deadly Nightshade Diner — We Never Close. The men spoke in hushed tones and consumed plates of french fries and catsup.

If one had been sitting in the booth next to the one occupied by the three men (which no one was) one might have heard a whispered word or two. If one had been situated inside the napkin dispenser on the table (which no one could have been) one might have heard the Honorable Lama Lumpo Smythe-Finkel speak these words:

“In all my two years as a mystic lama and meditator, nothing this amazing has ever happened to me. It is as though I had been singled out, chosen from among all mankind to receive this vital information.”

If one were a spoon on the table (which no one could possibly be), or if a spoon were a sensate thing with ears and a mind (which spoons are not), one might have heard the bookseller, Howling Frog, say:

“If the lama’s information, which is of the nature of a mystical revelation, is true, the situation is one of great seriousness and danger. We thought it best to consult with you at once.”

If one were the coat collar of the stranger with the slouch hat (which would be utterly ridiculous) one might, with great difficulty, have heard him say in the lowest possible whisper:

“Yes, yes, you acted correctly. I only hope it is not too late.”

“Do you think it is possible that it is too late?” asks the bookseller in a voice so low that even the spoon can hardly hear him.

“What are you going to do?” asks the lama in an urgent whisper.

“You know my methods,” says the stranger, more to his coat collar than to his companions. “I prefer not to reveal anything until I have more facts at my disposal.”

“But you will help in this matter…?” says the lama.

“I would be a swine not to,” says the stranger.

Above: Lights in the sky, this past Friday night, captured in poor focus, sans viewfinder. Below: Beckett, Molloy.

Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition. That night was not like the other night, if it had been I would have known. For when I try and think of that night, on the canal-bank, I find nothing, no night properly speaking, nothing but Molloy in the ditch, and perfect silence, and behind my closed lids the little night and its little lights, faint at first, then flaming and extinguished, now ravening, now fed, as fire by filth and martyrs.

Oh yeah! Happy North America Weekend! Canada Day Friday! Fourth Of July Monday! A pseudo-four-day pseudo-chillout for us US/Canada pseudo-mutts. A good hot outdoorsy weekend to drink and barbecue and reflect on the fluidity and arbitrariness of international borders, and of the very idea of nations. I can’t claim to possess any real patriotic love of country, for either the one of my birth or the one of my residence. But, if pressed, maybe I could summon up some homelandish pride in my continent. It is an excellent continent. Definitely in my top seven. Has many evocative landscapes, cuisines, and climates. Looks nice on a map.