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.

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.

A few weeks ago I injure my right foot, and then injure it further by not properly treating it. Several days ago I break a crystal wine glass and spill red wine all over myself and the kitchen floor. This weekend, in tribute to both mishaps: Drinking wine from a wine tumbler with a concrete footprint. (Will probably drop it on my toe.)

Whoops.

Things broken beyond repair in our household in February (so far):

• One glass coffeemaker pitcher (cracked against something ceramic in dish drainer)
• One tempered glass cutting board (dropped onto kitchen floor)
• One drinking glass (knocked onto kitchen floor by large wooden cutting board that tipped over after being stood up on its edge, unwisely)
• One large wooden cutting board (hurled angrily to floor seconds after the aforementioned glass, also unwisely)
• Six mouse spinal columns (annihilated by mousetrap technology)
• One blind, crippled, long-dying, pitifully prehistoric circa-2004 PowerBook G4 (cause of death hardware hash-up or system software seppuku)