Above: Butter, sugar, and flour. With some other stuff.

J. Fogerty, “Rhubarb Pie”:

Rhubarb pie!
Rhubarb pie!
It might rain tomorrow!
Better get some before I die!

I forgot to mention here that back in June I bake a rhubarb pie. Made from scratch on a sun-flooded Sunday afternoon. I am not sure what possessed me. Earlier in the month, one of Laura’s co-workers had offered us some fresh rhubarb from her family’s garden. We’d love some, thank you, I told the co-worker. What are you going to do with it, Laura asked me. Bake a pie, I replied. I had never baked a pie in my life, but it seemed like the correct answer. The rhubarb arrived the following week. Recipe-wise, I adhered to the Gospel of Mark. The bake went down on Sunday the twenty-sixth and the resulting pie was sort of shockingly delicious. Maybe not perfect in the presentation department, but for a first-timer, a damn fine pie.

I must confess to one serious cheat: There wasn’t enough rhubarb for the filling, so to top up the volume I threw in some thawed frozen strawberries — yes, frozen, very embarrassing — and thus it was really a strawberry-rhubarb pie. To me, though, it was all rhubarb in spirit.

Photo taken from my window, zoomed in substantially, cropped with reluctance.

Above: Rubble. A long reach excavator with a big fat chomping robot claw has been slowly demolishing parts of this derelict eight-story brick building across the street from us. Here on the west face of the Hotel Fantod we get to observe this spectacle up close. Lean out the window a bit and one may watch, hear, and savor the bouquets of the resultant dust clouds as the claw meticulously eats each section of the building one floor at a time, releasing great thundering showers of crumbled brick and concrete blocks and rusty-looking girders and roughly several hundred million billion petrified rat corpses all over the debris-strewn ground below.

I guess I disapprove of the demolition — I’m told, persuasively, that it would’ve been better for the city had the building been converted into lofts (as was done with the Hotel Fantod) — but I’m not exactly shedding tears over the loss of the building, a former federal-government hellhole where tax-department drones of yesteryear slaved away at their lead-and-asbestos desks. I’ve only ever known the building as an old, ugly, long-abandoned embarrassment taking up space in the downtown core. It is an eyesore. A reptilian local developer with a comic-book-villain name is knocking it down to build some sort of new and even worse eyesore. And of course the long process of knocking-down and building-back-up will enliven the downtown area with plenty of interim eyesoreness to tide us over. The sort of thing Ogden Nash refers to in “Paradise for Sale” as: This manic, fulminating ruction / Of demolition and construction.

East Coast earthquake today, or so I hear. Apparently it even hits here in Hamilton a little bit. Laura and I are out of the house and driving various highways at the time and so we do not feel it. We have no idea. We only find out after getting home hours later and finding our Twitters and Tumblrs and bloggy-blog feeds hip-deep in exuberant quake-text. A shallow sense of event-envy kicks in immediately. Minutes of skimming ensue. Also, I search Twitter for “graboids” and find a nonzero number of search results — impressive!

Side note: To my dumb Anglophone ears, other languages’ words for earthquake somehow sound cooler, tougher, more ominous. German: ERDBEBEN! Norwegian: JORDSKJELV! Dutch: AARDBEVING! Spanish: TERREMOTO!

Beckett, Molloy, the narrator on visiting his elderly bedridden mother:

In any case I didn’t come to listen to her. I got into communication with her by knocking on her skull. One knock meant yes, two no, three I don’t know, four money, five goodbye.

Mark Strand, last stanzas of “The New Poetry Handbook”:

18       If a man lets his poems go naked,

he shall fear death.

19       If a man fears death,

he shall be saved by his poems.

20       If a man does not fear death,

he may or may not be saved by his poems.

21       If a man finishes a poem,

he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion
and be kissed by white paper.

Yoshida Kenkō, from Essays in Idleness, fourteenth-century Japan:

When they were leveling the ground to build the Kameyama palace, they came on a mound where a huge number of large snakes were coiled together. They decided that these snakes were the gods of the place and reported this to His Majesty. He asked, “What should be done about it?” People all said, “These snakes have occupied the place since ancient times. It would be wrong to root them up recklessly.” But the prime minister said, “What curse would creatures dwelling on imperial property place on the site of a new palace? Supernatural beings are without malice; they surely will not wreak any punishment. We should get rid of all the snakes.” The workmen destroyed the mound and released the snakes into the Ōi River. No curse whatsoever resulted.

1. For a stretch of time between cocktail hour and magic hour on Friday the twelfth our stupid kitchen is a riot of ingredients.
2. I am relaxing by chopping various choppable Farmer’s Market purchases.
3. This week was not a good week and to salute the week’s demise I am throwing down Wild-Turkeys-and-Cokes at an athletic rate, and I am correspondingly being very careful with the big kitchen knife — no sudden moves.
4. I am dividing a big fat Ontario hothouse tomato into small dainty bricks of ur-salsa.
5. I am knifing half a cortex of a U.S. iceberg lettuce head into pale green shoelaces.
6. I am carving a quarter of an English cucumber into diaphanous slices as thin as contact lenses.
7. I am hedgehogging a mango, which sounds like a dirty euphemism but is just the cute vernacular name for a method of mango-cutting.
8. This mango hails from Mexico. It’s the only truly Mexican thing in this supposedly Mexican meal I’m making.
9. When cutting mangoes I invariably remember this time in a coffeeshop in college when I saw a paper sign listing flavors of fruity tea, on which sign someone had penciled around the word mango the refrain from Soul Coughing’s “Super Bon Bon” — Move aside and let the mango through, let the man go through.
10. Bourbon-and-Coke refills materialize in my hands at regular intervals, one for me, one for Laura.
11. With each refill the kitchen knife moves at increasingly cautious velocities.
12. I am chopping rings of pineapple into fragments and placing them in a bowl with the exploded mango, adding a little lime juice and cilantro and a pinch of cumin and a half-pinch of sugar and then Saran-wrapping the bowl and sending it to the fridge to think about what it’s done.
13. Also in the fridge, a few raw chicken cutlets slumber in a wrapped bowl, where they have been getting lovingly worked on by seasonings and citric acid since three o’clock.
14. Rinsed white rice readies itself for the hot pot.
15. Spiced haricots noirs simmer in a covered saucepan.
16. Time passes and additional tasks ensue, some mid-prep cleanup, some stirring, some tasting, some cocktail-replenishing, some staring into the horizontal sunset, which here in August now happens around eight.
17. Vintage analog funk tracks from the internet have been chugging from the stereo for a few hours, followed by wailing, macabre, ghostly indie-rock cabaret.
18. Downtown Friday-evening traffic rackets roar through the open windows, trying to drown out our dreadful music selections.
19. My few remaining motor skills are put toward exercising a Tai-Chi-like slowness as I move around the kitchen, as by now I’ve had so many Wild Turkeys that I’m hiccuping feathers.
20. Everywhere I turn I’m faced with deadly kitchen stuff — all of it sharp, heavy, and/or hot.
21. The fridge starts giving up the previously chopped choppables at rest in their chilled serving bowls.
22. Shredded cheese and sour cream and guacamole and jalapeños and mole sauce spring out of hiding on cue.
23. Manta-ray-sized flour tortillas drift down from the heavens and alight on a pair of plates.
24. The chicken cutlets are on deck, unfridged for several minutes before cooking.
25. The electric countertop grill does its adorable impression of a real grill.
26. The big kitchen knife emerges from the knife block for one last job, plunging at a very safe and leisurely speed through piping hot poultry, hacking the bastards to puzzle pieces after the poor birds’ loud, sizzling, mercifully quick second death by flameless grill is over and done.

I take back what I said about that wolfish grinning grin. And the staring mug-leopards, for that matter. It was just that fucking red-shirt guy in the background that was bothering me, of course, his own self. That behind-the-back photo-bomber. That expendable Star Trek grunt. The things I said about wolf-grins and leopard-stares were just thrown in as syllabic interlardings. It was the bad red shirt all along. The bad red background shirt and its terrible bad background redness. It was my fault for taking the photo and not shooting around the shirt. That accursed shirt. I felt I was stuck with the shirt in this otherwise fine photo because I am disinclined to change photos after I take them. No photo-cropping, no Photoshopping. But I have caved and allowed a tweak or two. All the photo needed was the merest soupçon of light-fingered Photoshop massage and the offending shirt barely even registers anymore.

Side note: The word wolfish is no insult in this house. Particularly with regard to grins. In fact wolves and their many winning characteristics hold a great fascination for me, as do persons who occasionally are wolves. I am a lycanthrophile. I am Team Jacob all the way. I saw Taylor Lautner drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s. His pecs were perfect.

Related: I ate Icelandic Wolf Fish at a Bonefish Grill in Lexington, Kentucky during last year’s Yanksgiving road trip. I can definitely recommend it.

Ignore this paragraph, this paragraph isn’t here, I just kind of have to get that wolfish grinning grin and those infernal staring mug-leopards and especially that retina-destroying red-shirted mostly-headless Guelphite perched on his bar-chair in the background (with his bright blue jeans and his spinal slouch and his jabbing left elbow and his bokeh-blurred edges and his god damn photo-stealing fire-engine-red bro-shirt from hell) bumped down off the top of the page.