“extraneous, appendix-like, the temporal wadded napkin under the calendar year’s wobbly table leg”

Above: Delicious PEI mussels. Tonight for dinner we will be cooking two pounds of them and eating them with big-ass baguettes. The above photo is from last summer — sorry to be photographically disingenuous. Tonight’s mussels, obtained at the Farmer’s Market this afternoon, are still in the fridge, resting up for the big event.

Several days ago I read a 2009 Mark Bittman NYT blog post on the subject of PEI mussels which makes me almost expire with simultaneous laughter and eye-rolling:

I was told, just the other day, that Prince Edward Island mussels were “the best.” They’re not. They’re consistent, they’re the most widely available, they’re not bad, and they’re not outrageously priced. “The best” mussels are the ones you harvest yourself, from a nice dock or outcropping of rocks in a cold tidal inlet. The second best are the ones someone else harvests from a like place, then sells to you. The third best are covered with mud or seaweed or whatever, and are difficult to clean, but are also wild and tasty. After these, the farm-raised ones from P.E.I. are kind of bland.

I like Mark Bittman. I’ve learned a lot from Mark Bittman. I am absolutely a Mark Bittman fan and acolyte. I was a terrible, terrible cook until I bought his How to Cook Everything and started using it as my kitchen instruction manual and culinary desk reference. But everything about that post just irrationally puts me in mind of a bit by Anthony Bourdain from Medium Raw:

I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home — in an aluminum saucepot — and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face.

Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift: Charlie Citrine ponders cosmic boredom:

For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing.

And:

The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought.

And:

As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realization, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!

Update on our crumbling city: Above is the remaining half of the hideous empty brick building-husk on Main Street whose other half I got to watch being converted to rubble last summer. The demolition goons finished their work back in the fall, and since then the site has gone quiet. The building has been sitting for months as you see it here, with its several destroyed stories’ east-facing interiors left yawning open to the elements. (The crane visible over the top of the building is on a different construction site one block back.)

I’d been kind of looking forward to seeing how those open stories fared over the winter, whether the Alberta Clippers would scour them clean, whether they’d fill up with snowdrifts, whether Yetis would roost in them, etc., but of course by now we all know that winter in North America has been canceled this year, canceled and rerouted to Europe. Hamilton is due a few more weeks of mild refrigeration and dim winter sunshine and then the spring rains can get down to business at turning those exposed floors into hanging gardens of black mold. Just kidding — I’m sure by mid-spring the building will have been 100% renovated into a gorgeous new office terrarium clad in mirrored glass and leased out to an army of desks and neckties.