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.

Robert Burton: Is not homespun cloth as great a preservative against cold
as a coat of Tartar lamb’s-wool, dyed in grain, or a gown of giants’ beards?

Beer for a snowy evening. In a great big bottle.

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes … When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,” he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,” because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.

Lorrie Moore, from her novel Anagrams (via Vintage & Anchor):

Basically, I realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity. It’s when you don’t know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don’t even have a philosophy about all the things you don’t know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

The wood drinks up the oil, amplifying the grain colors very beautifully. In many places the oiled grain takes on an affecting pearlescent luster, which I did not expect but am glad to see. This first coat takes several hours to dry. I return to working at the computer as the drying oil’s fragrance fills up the house, sickening the houseplants and ironing out my cortical gyri and sulci. A couple days later I re-sand lightly with 400 grit, then apply another oil coat. I may be building up an immunity to the oil fumes, or else succumbing to them. The oil-soaked cloth I’ve used must be disposed of in an oil-soaked-cloth-type disposal place and I promise not to disregard this part. I still need to re-sand again and may add more coats this week. I am obviously not good at this but the idea here is for the countertops to look a notch above OK-to-passable while being able to withstand grievous kitchen abuse. They can always be re-oiled and are supposed to be, periodically. Just kidding about the grievous kitchen abuse. The worst these countertops need to withstand is being covered with clutter, being splashed with bad beverages, being leaned on in moments of vacuous contemplation, and being bumped into in the dark.

So today has been the day of the web’s big SOPA/PIPA blackout protest. I do not black out erasing.org. The extent of my participation is a lunch-break impulse to post the above picture of Ellsworth Kelly’s 2010 relief “Black Curve Diagonal” on erasing.tumblr.com. An egregious co-opting and misuse of art on my part, but to me somehow it looks correct for the occasion. And now I am cross-posting it here. Forgive me, Ellsworth Kelly, wherever you are.

For long periods I live in isolation, isolated both in mind and in body … Subject to every vagary of my own nature and of the universe — whatever it is — I can get through life only with the help of a precise daily routine. I am able to exist only by dint of standing up to myself — in fact, of consistently opposing myself. When I am writing I read nothing, and when I am reading I write nothing. For long periods I read and write nothing, finding both equally repugnant.

And:

There are long periods when I detest both reading and writing, and then I fall prey to inactivity, which means brooding obsessively on my extremely personal plight, both as an object of curiosity and as a confirmation of everything I am today, of what I have become over the years in circumstances which are as routine as they are unnatural, artificial, and indeed perverse.

Ogden Nash: Besides pollution and erosion / We now must face a goose explosion.

Yesterday I dig out the industrial glue and reconstruct the exploded goose from last weekend. No problem. The cracks are an aesthetic improvement. Am feeling better about 2012 already.

As shown in the first photo above, after I reduce the number of pieces from twenty-six down to two, and am all set to close up the bird for good, I inscribe a message to future goose-breakers (most likely me) inside the tail, along with the dates of breakage and repair. How often does one get a chance to write on a sealed object’s inside surface? To hide a quote-unquote Easter egg inside a bird? At the time this seems clever, but now I kind of wish I hadn’t done it — I feel like from now on whenever I see the goose around the house I’m always just going to think of the concealed message inside it. I can see this eventually bothering me. It’s possible I’ll have to re-break the bird so I can blacken the writing out.

Also: Somehow I’m reminded of that old, bad Groucho Marx joke (though it involves the wrong animal): Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Department of Bad Starts: Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve I accidentally drop a full champagne flute on the floor. And on New Year’s Day I accidentally knock a vintagey folk-art ceramic goose off a table onto the floor. Both items fight the concrete and lose. Better them than me. Fragments of shallow symbolism fly all over the place and have to be carefully swept and vacuumed up. The goose ends up in twenty-six grabbable pieces and can probably be glued back together. Maybe if I leave a few pieces missing I can drink champagne out of it.

Hello and good morning, two-thousand-and-twelve.
We have bottles to empty and books to unshelve.

Goodbye and good riddance, December the last.
The best Christmas present: you’re now in the past.

How joyful to see January the one’th.
Though I figure this year will fly by in a month.