T-Shirt Friday, October, 2009: It’s Friday Somewhere On The Globe

I find Nursemyra’s custom of T-Shirt Friday entirely charming and  I hate to think I almost missed it, but it has been the kind of week that turns your brain into a tangle of fried relays. I know Friday is over at Nursemyra’s digs but I’ve still got a few hours to go on the [...]

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Spiritual Development

Brillo-Head, I mean Dino, approached me while I was hanging upside down on the Smith Machine again.
“You probably don’t know this,” he said as I dismounted and retrieved my visor (I always wear it in the gym to keep my face from scaring people when I max out) “but the people who are in contact [...]

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Autumn Landscape With Cranes

It has been raining almost continuously for the past couple of weeks, occasionally saturating some junction box or other involved with my Internet connection, and battering down entire trees full of leaves. From my desk I can see the cranes moving against the treetops.
No, not nice cranes from a Hokusai painting or wildlife photo, alas.
In [...]

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The Best Cat In The World, II: or, Urlicht

Some time ago I wrote about the Best Cat In The World.
We said goodbye last night. Even when you know it’s going to happen, it’s always a knife edge between too late and too soon, because most often you assume the honor and godawful responsibility of deciding when to do something. So I write to [...]

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Grey Riesling

A respectable lifetime ago, when I was at college in a historically peculiar little place in medium-upstate New York, I blundered — one of those friend-of-a-friend things — into a fraught situation.  Joe — close but no cigar, and  a tidily anonymous moniker — had decided to stay up all night, playing board-and-marker war games [...]

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Fifty Bucks

My Albino Ex, a quirky sort, had one relationship that was more sacred than any other: his bond with his childhood pillow, Sleepasaurus, or Saurus for short. The pillow  had gone to crumbled foam by the turn of the century, but the pillowcase — there were four identical ones — showed a green stegosaurus, or [...]

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Cat-Like Typing Detected

I have been listening to Baroque opera, among other things, on a laptop that doubles as an entertainment center. Thanks to the scholarly Zeus, I’ve been enjoying Lully — this afternoon, Cadmus and Hermione. (A period staging of a Baroque opera, I am learning, is a guarantee of at least one terrific monster puppet.)
Unfortunately my [...]

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A Simple Tubal Ligation Would Have Prevented This Delay

She is never in line in front of you, where the worst you’d put up with would be the fussy-tweety mommy talk and the high-pitched piercing voices of her kids; she’d be gone before you were checked out. No, she’s always just emerged from some line between you and the door, and has managed to [...]

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Wedding Gifts, Or, The Persistence Of Memory

When I got married, it was done rather evasively, because no one I am related to is anyone that anyone would choose to be related to, and we had, instead of a reception, a picnic in the nearest park with a picnic pavilion, reserved at $25 for the evening, no alcoholic beverages or amplified music [...]

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Sondheim, For No Particular Reason

Yes, the music is Leonard Bernstein’s, but I had forgotten that Sondheim wrote the lyrics. This is my flat-out favorite number from West Side Story.

What amuses me is how well-dressed and relatively clean a hoodlum could be in 1961, even factoring for a stage production.
What doesn’t really amuse me is… well… [...]

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