AGH!!

Falstaff, Henry IV Part I, fooling no one: An I have not forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I am a peppercorn, a brewer’s horse. The inside of a church! Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me.

Recently I went back and compiled all those iambic pentameter tweets into what I’m calling an accidental long poem: “Good Morning Winter, Walking Down the Street”.

If you don’t want to read that whole thing, here is the abridged version:

G.M.W.W.D.T.S.

• Jan

  Good morning winter, walking down the street.
  Returning home my face is frozen off.
• Feb

  I’m looking Blu-ray, feeling VHS.
• Mar

  Sadistic cryptic crosswords fill the hours.
• Apr

  Tonight for dinner: Cuckoo-clock confit,
  filet of Roomba grilled on planks of Nerf,
  and blog pilaf with spicy fuck-you slaw.
• May

  We read till late, then sleep in signatures.
• Jun

  At night machines emerge to clean our streets.
  They chug & rumble by with sweepers down,
  like Sisyphuses driving Sherman tanks.
• Jul

  This summer has been edited for length.
• Aug

  The choppy lake’s profuse with creepy fish.
  Our cozy lodge is loud with crabby tots.
• Sep

  Our furniture persists in roaming free.
  The bookshelves wander in & out of rooms,
  the desks & tables pace the floors till dawn.
• Oct

  My English hath evaporated, bad.
• Nov

  We undepressed ourselves on local draughts,
  and chowders made from creatures of the deep,
  and hearty plates of Indie Rock Poisson.
• Dec

  My vodka tonic’s singing Auld Lang Syne.

Saturday afternoon: Pints of esoteric suds to distract us from our mobile devices and pads of paper.

Friday night: Vaguely splenetic early-spring snow-broth.

Dear Henrietta, since you were kind enough to ask why I no longer write, I shall do my best to answer you. In the old days, my thoughts like tiny sparks would flare up in the almost dark of consciousness and I would transcribe them, and page after page shone with a light that I called my own. I would sit at my desk amazed by what had just happened. And even as I watched the lights fade and my thoughts become small, meaningless memorials in the afterglow of so much promise, I was still amazed. And when they disappeared, as they inevitably did, I was ready to begin again, ready to sit in the dark for hours and wait for even a single spark, though I knew it would shed almost no light at all. What I had not realized then, but now know only too well, is that sparks carry within them the wish to be relieved of the burden of brightness. And that is why I no longer write, and why the dark is my freedom and my happiness.

It can’t be that great if their branding commits the graphic design sin of stretching
and compressing a single typeface rather than using extended and condensed widths.

Above: Bad Wolf antidote. Photographed today at downtown Hamilton’s Jackson Square shopping mall during a Saturday visit to the Farmer’s Market.

Simon has alerted me to the likelihood that that Bad Wolf graffiti I photographed outside Jackson Square last weekend may be a tribute to Doctor Who, in which the phrase Bad Wolf has had a recurring significance, even to the point of appearing in graffiti form on the show. I confess I have never watched Doctor Who, so the reference rocketed at spectacular altitude over my head if indeed that’s what it is. I’d just thought the graffiti tag was a run-of-the-mill instance of weird and gnomic street art, and posted the photo as an obscurely amusing follow-up to posts involving pigs and weather that threatens to blow our house down.

But the Doctor Who explanation seems plausible to me. I’ve seen three of these Bad Wolf tags in the same general area of downtown Hamilton, all of them apparently done very recently. Did this spraycan artist only just discover the first Doctor Who series? The show’s Bad Wolf bullshit is like seven years old if I’m reading Wikipedia right. I myself am disinclined to get into Doctor Who for a petty reason: the Tenth Doctor‘s leading role in an howlingly unbearable butchering of Hamlet. Give me a break, I was brainwashed at an impressionable age by a Bardolatrous English department. Also I apologize for employing the adverb howlingly in a passage with wolf content.

Above: Neon windowpig, front and back, Memphis Fire Barbeque Company, Winona, Ontario.
Below: Wendy Cope, “Traditional Prize County Pigs”, on the Dorset Gold Tip, an extinct breed: