Tomas Tranströmer, “The Scattered Congregation”:

Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way
to the Address. Who’s got the Address?
Don’t know. But that’s where we’re going.

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.

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.

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:

A twenty-four-hour wind storm hits us on Friday evening. I am peeling and de-veining white shrimp and listening to music and it gradually dawns that the weather noise outside has grown noticeable over the recordings. Great muscular gusts swell up every several seconds and whoosh and hammer against the windows with unfamiliar violence. The window frames creak, rattle, groan, and every so often emit an alarming and unlocatable tenor sax–like squeal as the wind finds its way into some kind of structural sweet spot. I hear short firecracker bursts of raindrops patter at high speed against the panes in the bedroom and the living room. I see dim silhouettes of five-story trees thrashing in the dark. Laura gets home from work after having walked in the weather and asserts shruggingly that it’s not so bad out there. The internet tells me of local wind-related mayhem, downed power lines, rising Great Lake levels, spazzed-out airport wind socks reporting numbers in excess of highway speed limits, tree limbs falling into roads and electric restaurant signs biting the dust. We spend a few hours cooking and dining and watching movies and the wind noise persists the whole time. It does not abate. It is still roaring to itself and the vacant streets in a Pacinoesque fury well after midnight. Neither of us is entirely awake as we listen to this late-night weather bludgeoning the building. In the dark I suggest to Laura that the wind storm’s sounds are soothing, like a pounding ocean surf, the windows’ creaks making the house seem like a ship at sea. Laura points out that waves crashing on a shore or against a ship’s hull have a regular, mesmerizing rhythm, whereas the wind’s gusts are erratic and so the lulling effect never really kicks in. Somehow we do sleep. In the morning the wind is still up. The gusts whistle and thwack, the panes shudder, and the trees flail with abandon as we eat breakfast, drink coffee, read. Banks of immense clouds sail overhead at a disorienting and scale-obliterating clip, making the sunlight in the house flash on and off like a bad basement light for much of the midmorning and afternoon. By sunset the wind has slowly eased back down to its usual mutterings and silences. Sometime before that we take a break from wasting our weekend over weather appreciation and pulpy books to slice open and eat a few non-local fruits whose insides’ color schemes and textures are surprising.

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.

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.

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.