Animal Trickology

I have a pair of clown loaches acquired when the tank was overrun with snails from store-bought waterplants.  A clown loach is a Snail Destructo machine and will scoop the edible part out with the barbs surrounding its mouth, leaving an empty shell behind.  You may have seen them, they are black and yellow striped with red fins and you can also find them on ice in the Asian fish market in much larger, edible sizes. The nature of a clown loach is to play fishy games with each other, chase, bobble, chase, scoot under the other and the game that fools the tank owner, Play Dead.

These fish play dead so convincingly; they lay on their sides on the bottom, unmoving.  Fins up, like a cartoon fish kicking the bucket.  Today one let itself be sucked to the grate of the filter and became stuck there, debris-like and stiff. It was alarming, but I steeled my nerves and waited for the nonchalant thing to remember that fish swim, and therefore continue regular fish life.  This is the Clown loach pledge, that it is not a successful day unless a dose of rigor mortis to unnerve the human has occurred.  If I myself flopped onto the floor in front of the tank feigning expiration, they would not care a dillywag, it's not their nature to be emotionally involved with other species.  The cats would come investigate, however, find that I am still warm, and curl up on top till they thought of dinner.

I can't imagine living without animals in the house, even the Look I'm Dead fish now trailing each other top to bottom in the tank.  There is a nippy angelfish, two cory cats, and the plecostomus who has grown larger than a smallmouth bass with double the temper.  He hates when the tank gets vacuumed, and tries to wham the plastic end of the hose right outta the ballpark.  I let him win, it's good for his psyche.  Other times he will allow rubs on his sides or nose, but mostly he looks at the world through an antediluvian lens, maybe hoping that the annoying loaches would stay permanently dead, not fake dead.  None of my fish like each other, similar to most of the cats who care less for the next cat than a punch in the nose.

None of them sleep together, wash each other or share me very well.  It is a melody of neurotica, and I am the bandleader.  Everyone has their little spot, whatever territories there are have strong boundaries designated right down to the time of day.  I originally got the fish tank so the cats would have something to watch, the tuna channel, but they grew bored very fast.  Who wants to watch fish that aren't moving because they think they are dead?  I could have pasted a picture of a sardine to the wall for the same effect at a better price of upkeep.

The days are warmer than usual for late November, the Christmas lights hang sodden in the rain over wet brown lawns.  I hope the jerk downstairs loses interest in hearing himself, the man has a microphone attached to some sort of electronic abomination which broadcasts his angry f-ing game no way this f-ing game f! at 2 AM.  I wish he'd play dead.  As a person who owns many cats, I am careful about complaining about what to who in this place and so far I manage to get back to sleep.  I can only hope his vocabulary expands beyond single syllables.

It has been nighttime for a while, the sun sets low towards the southeast these beginning winter days, and dark covers all those activities you wouldn't think about doing twice at 8 in the summer.  Time to hit the hay, let the dreams come and wash free the questions of why.  Cats curl or roll paws up, fish settle under the submerged knotted branches, plants close leaves, I lock doors and shut windows.  Sleep, dream, wish, create, do.  With love.

Rust Belt Bookstore

Walk in the door at Rust Belt, and you step into a teetering world of books stacked, shelved, tucked, loaded, and piled high as a cocker spaniel.  The atmosphere is dark and arty, the books are papery and plenty; there is lots to look at and search for.  Wear comfortable clothes, you'll be bending sideways to read titles filling the half-lit walls, in the murkier corners of the castle bulwarks.  Books here climb into your lap or perch on a shoulder, waiting for adoption or at least a nod of recognition.  It is a sort of separate world you enter when visiting.

I found two to come home with me, but even then I was in no hurry to leave and poked at the titles from all over the city, discarded editions favored by people with ideas.  It is a nice little bookstore in the heart of Allentown, with a knowledgeable proprietress, errant lamps for illumination, and artistic commentary that lets you know that this is not the mall.  You will be happily amazed at the number and depth of books, certainly rival to any shiny bookshop that fronts popular text.

A book can be a bandage for disillusion, a place to lose yourself until you look up from the page and remember.  Books took me far and away from the whirligig mechanisms of feckless edicts broadcast night, day, and twice on Sunday.  They still do, they still are the heavy, warm pages of paper and board with stories put forward by authors who want to share what they know with you and me.

No electronic device will ever replace the affectionate relationship we tactile humans have with genuine books.  Picture an image of a child taking an electronic notebook to bed, then compare it with that child taking a real book to read under covers.  I dunno, maybe it's a sentimental idea; I just wonder about the day that the electricity goes off, from say a blizzard, a hurricane, or like that outage which took out the Eastern seaboard grid in 2003, due to aging equipment.

I shall read tonight, after this entry and dishes done.  A soup is on the stove for a light supper, the rest of the cookies were baked, and animals fed.  Tomorrow is to be a busy day, but there will be an arrest of the clock's hands when I open the page to read thoughts of echoes, from people in another age.  Hear, and attend, and listen O Best Beloved.  Good night.

Et Alors, Babelfish

There is a reissue of Buster Keaton's silent feature, The General, that has been redone by a notable French company with an orchestral score composed by Joe Hisaishi.  It was cleaned frame by frame, eliminating the years of damage often overlooked by earlier outfits simply because the technology was not available.  In addition, the popular Hisaishi, who did the work for the Japanese animation, Spirited Away, has created a piece sure to dramatize and burnish Keaton's remarkable achievement in a distinct, complimentary glow.  The edition I now own plays "Teddy Bear's Picnic" during the scene in which Keaton climbs nimbly onto the cowcatcher of the moving train, in order to knock a loose rail off the track by hoisting another and smashing it down in a quick physics lesson of force and fulcrum.  Teddy Bear's Picnic, for heaven's sake.

Well, go to Amazon online, the seller of anything you think you might need.  The dvd is not available in the US, but Amazon UK or Amazon FR carry it, as well as some independent sellers using the Amazon storefront.  Whee!  I sign up and push buttons until a message appears, saying that there is a problem with my address in that neither entity wishes to ship this far out.  Now, I have ordered seashells from small dealers in China and gotten them safely within the month, (You lucky fine, come back, buy more), so what is the problem especially when it is as big a pickle jar as Amazon?  Is this not a global economy?  Mildly frustrated, I rise to the challenge.

The French title is Le Mecano de la General and I find a tidy website that lists a Collector's Edition as well as the usual.  The problem is, I don't speak a lick of French other than food names from cookbooks or Canadian road signs.  How do I convert to Euros, will they send it out over the ocean, do I know anybody in France?  What I do is go to Altavista's Babelfish, a translator of communication from one language to the next, and concoct a short message in simple American, push it through a French strainer, copy and paste it into their email link.  If anything, I learn that I know less about the language than I thought, for consonants get tacked onto the word in front sometimes, or words get mooshed together, letters get unpronounced.  I imagine somewhere in France a media store le clerk is wondering what on earth does this woman think she's going to get?  But, a missive came back this evening.

"He IS USELESS D' Y TO ANSWER, Did you consult our Fair with the questions? The answer s' there surely finds. Consult it while clicking on the following bond.  You know our service "Clara"?"  Well, yes.  Clara is a friendly looking virtual girl, who is available 24 hours a day to answer website questions.  In French.  I may go bother her tomorrow, after I arm myself with prepared phrases from Babelfish since getting this particular dvd has become a Quest, a mosquito bite intensifying the want, lurking just out of reach when all that is needed are the right words that will get a Gallic hand to slip it into a slim cardboard box and toss it in the mail.  My god, we get cheese from France, how can a movie be more problematic?  In addition, my dvd player is region-free, so I can run movies from Tibet if there were any.  

It is now 2 o'clock Saturday morning in France.  Deep in the French dark, a dvd is sitting next to a display of chocolat and stationnaire d'une manière amusante for All Occasions.  This dvd feels a slight pull from the West, a psychic kinesis creating a portal to American terra firma, a hypnotic whisper in a now sleeping employee's ear that sharing genius is important, necessary, and merciful.  Dream of me, Le Mecano de la General, as I dream of trains and bridges, of clarity defined by stringed instruments, of dedicated film preservationists.

Night is here as well as there, we are six hours before whatever is going on in the dark of France, a time traveling force of nature.  We could fly into the next day, and if the speed of light were achievable, into  years past simply as nonparticipating observers.  Travel ahead of the beam that left yesterday to a point in space it has not yet arrived at and fine-tune your telescopes to see it rehappen; get far enough out and theoretically, you could see dinosaurs, Vikings, or who ate the last piece of cake you were saving in the fridge.  A silent film presented by the cosmos, a memory of vision held in light from centuries ago.  I wish you success in your small victories.  Le sommeil profondément, dorment coffre-fort.  Alors.

And How Was Your Day?

After arriving in the parking lot at 7:45 this drizzly morning, I made sure the fan and heater knobs were turned off all the way in the car before getting out, remembering the one car owned by my son whose battery would drain if the heater was left in any position except off.   I do not want this to happen to me, and because cockeyed things do drop from the sky, it's all around better to be safe than sorry.  As I opened the door to the car to disembark, I noticed that the radio stayed on.  Now, with this model car, the radio does stay on until you open the door unless things are frozen up and then sometimes you have to manually turn it off, but only in the most Arctic of weathers.  Ah, just a fritz, especially since yesterday I put in the semi-annual brake fluid, a twice a year ritual that occurs when a sharp temperature change occurs, which did yesterday.  No big deal, and I flick the radio off with a finger.

Go into work, blah blah blah, sit down, leave him alone, synonyms, how is it that your pencil has broken again, line up, dismiss, come back in, correct papers and geez, everyone else has gone, I should too.  3:15 in the afternoon.  Where the hell are my keys?  Neither purse nor pocket confess, so with hope they are probably in the car.  I get the emergency-backup keys out of my purse, go out to the lot and there is a car that looks like mine, but I know it isn't mine because it is running.  Ah, someone with a car starter has their engine going but in this parking lot this neighborhood, not always the best of ideas.  I turn to go to my own car, and it isn't there.  What?  What the hell, someone stole my car goddamit.  I must have really left the keys in there and someone helped themselves to the opportunity.

The parking lot cameras record me scooting around a few cars further down, looking for a car that looks like the car that is running but isn't.  Many cars look like mine, and one or two are often at this lot.  Wow, the day before a holiday when you think of giving thanks, some jerk stole my car.  I need to call the police.

But wait, I know me, this is why I made a set of extra keys for when I lock myself out of things.  I should take a closer look at that car and see if the driver's side door is a different color, before running in to building security.  Well slap my biscuits, it was.  Imagine my surprise when the dawn cracked over the old cerebellum, and ran down in drips of stunned.  It was my car, running.  I left the unholy keys in the ignition that morning, on, and it hummed away merrily for 7 1/2 hours of loitering.  The mileage was really good, for there was a quarter of a tank left, plenty to drive to the gas station in a half-baked state of unbelief.

Because the sun was lower in the sky, the license plate was obscured.  Because I am still amazed that I have a car that looks this new if you don't look at the driver's side black door or the dent, it didn't register as my car immediately.  Besides, my car shouldn't be running.  What the hell.  After self-flagellation, there was a flood of relief that the thing didn't overheat, start on fire, explode, or, get stolen.

In years past, the people who work where I work had a close relationship with the security guards of the attached building, and everyone knew everyone else and their kids.  How did no one notice that there was a car idling for seven and one half hours in a public lot?  Apparently, Al Qaida could move in and set up a meth lab by those standards.

But that is a mild adventure with a happy ending.  What floors me is my lack of recognition of things, the doubt that arises as to what is really mine; I can look straight at something I have owned for forty years, and if it is put into a different context, the brain opens the floodgates of doubt and are you sure this is yours?  Objects become alien, unrecognized, uncertain.  Photographs and people, no problem; but a unsentient thing loses whatever familiarity and conviction that existed in surety just minutes before.  I have had this problem since being a somewhat jumpy child.  I think this has to do with all the yelling my father did, this self-doubt as to if things were the way I perceived them to be.

The car was the model, color, and left in the area of the lot where I park, but it didn't register as mine simply because of the one differential of it running.  Couldn't be, couldn't be going for all day without someone noticing, but then I remember the radio staying on.  Oh.  If I hadn't turned the defroster fan off, that would have signaled that the engine was still engaged and chugging.  Well, tell you what, I'm over it and ready for the next adventure.  Forty dollars more worth of gas over it.

Sleep well, have your rituals and emergency-backup plans in place as a method of keeping some sort of order, of buying safety in packets of self-preservation.  I keep a flashlight near the bed, an extra toothbrush at work, and sundry keys are hidden around parts of this city in case of getting further locked out.  Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus hang in the south of the sky, points of light wheeling through centuries before engines or humans were ever thought of.  Neptune's winds are the fastest in the solar system, estimated at 2,000 miles per hour, determined by watching how quickly cloud formations change in the planet's blue atmosphere.  Clouds come and go, nothing ever stays the same, some things faster than those Neptunian breezes.  Circle the sun, attend the moon.  Sleep, drowsy child.

Damn Toof

I am a cuckoo clock, all that would be necessary is a small wooden bird to inhabit the again crevice, the gap, the cavern of my missing front tooth.  Nuisance is all that can be said; small potatoes in the real world, so many people have no teeth at all, but talking to colleagues is torture at the day job.  They try to avert their eyes from the tiny snaggle of dental stump; due to the root canal besides, there is a bright pink cement something frozen at the remaining point which punctuates the grey, daid tooth.  It looks like hell.  The irritated gum is gruesomely pulled back, and I am a cartoon thufferin' thuccotash, while trying not to hit people with spit as I talk.  Whee.  This does nothing for my looks, unless you go into negative numbers.

The cap felt funny yesterday morning as toothbrush bristles poked around with unfamiliar sensations.  No. No, no, no.  Not again. By nightfall, it was wiggling to and fro like a seesaw in a playground full of kids.  Not wanting to swallow it in the night while sleeping, I helped it the rest of the way and put it in a small plastic bag, tossing it into the purse.  I may try the Recapit again, even though that didn't work the last time.  I should get a box of Chiclets and stick one in there, a door of coated peppermint gum to swing open on the way to the glottis.

What other solutions are there when the dental office is closed on Mondays? I could draw a picture of a tooth and tape it in from the back, duct tape will stick to anything.  On this mockup will be space for advertising, a cheerful proverb, or a "Try Again Later" saying like that of a Magic Eight Ball.  When people, especially children, start mewling about needs and desires, my grin will transmit that exact thought.  Try Again Later.  Not Likely.  Outlook Dismal.  Get Busy.

Ah well, back to the dentist tomorrow, with hope.  This is Thanksgiving week, and relatives will be met Thursday by a full set of choppers so they can see I am doing fine and have most of my marbles.  Cousin  Susie with a missing front tooth will underscore their suspicions that the last immigration of invasive genetics from Europe to the New World are taking over and sprouting branches with monkeys, they were just sort of hidden until now.

Nighttime has come in and sat down in a thump as it does during the end of year.  You look up and all of a sudden it's dark, for heaven's sake, you were just peeling carrots or reading and whomp, hit over the head with midnight at four thirty.  Well it slows you down, which is good.  Jammies go on earlier, cups put away in the cupboard sooner, you're not running around the yard or down the street, maybe a board game is a good idea.  Make something, fold something, tell a story something.  Reach down into memory for a fable of learning or fun and think about when.  Sleep well, take some words with you, spin them as you fall.  Good night.

Mushroom Life

You just have to squirt the thing with spring water two or three times a day, the bulk of the work has been completed by the vendor.  I am referring to the block of popcorn-like cellulose that now resides on a kitchen counter within a vinyl tub impregnated with shiitake mushroom spawn, in existence for the past two weeks.  Growing things to eat is in my genetic code, probably received from my grandfather who grew stuff from pits, bulbs, twigs, spurs, and seeds.  His backyard was inhabited by fruit trees and an arbor for grapes; his basement, a sodden hole under the house with wooden steps, held trays of pine seedlings started from cones.  He loved to show what he could do with nothing.  Me, too, which is why plain pencil and paper are two of my solaces in life.

It was a surprise to see this immense, white, rice-cakey cube about as big as an ambitious loaf of bread within the plastic bag, Lentinus edodes tagged on the outside.  Put it in the fridge for three to five days, said the booklet, then soak in spring water for two hours; drain and wait.  A plastic bag roofed over held in humidity, which needed to be kept at 85%.  Two days later, small brown nodes pushed out and hurrah, I was a mother!  They expanded rather slowly, I thought, for a mushroom, yet grew to edible size in five days.  Fungi that grow on wood go at a more leisurely speed than soil-based fruiting bodies, which can appear and disappear in a day.  My first harvest went to soup, blended with some store bought Agarics for a meal both delightful and faintly proud, considering my success.

The block is now going into a brief dormant stage, but can be revived for 3 to 4 more flushes of mushrooms, and this will be the tricky part if I can get the thing going again.  Really, it is cheaper to go buy fresh shiitake at the grocery, but not half as much fun.  The cats are absolutely not interested, so the mushroomery is safe, unlike many of the houseplants arranged by cat menu desirability.  The ones they don't eat are barriers to the pots containing the ones doomed to fangmarks and missing leaves, punctuated by a short barrel cactus at the front, my security guard against hooligans.

Mushroom research shows that they are exceptionally good for the immune system, and so I try to include them at least once a week in meals.  We didn't eat many growing up, but the mystique was promoted by the Polish-Russian side of the family, who would go and gather Suillus luteus, the Slippery Jacks found under larch trees.  They have a wonderful, woodsy-pine scent about them, unlike any mushroom found at the store.  Peel the slimey caps, string them and hang near the stove to dry.  What else was there?  I went to mycology courses to find out, and now have about ten different species that I feel safe enough about to eat, plus a pantheon of names for the ones you can't.

Please don't mess with wild mushrooms, even to pick up to look at, unless you are scrupulous about washing hands and keeping track of whatever the thing touched, some are that deadly and grow in your yard. Anything pure white with a cap and stem is most likely to kill you in spite of its beautiful nature and flavor; the Death Angel, Amanitas verna and virosa, bisporigera, and phalloides.  

The grocery today was burgeoning with food, shouting prices out of advertising placards as if they were doing you a favor letting you shop these unbelievable savings.  Doing the math, you end up spending more for these alleged deals than if you purchased elsewhere.  Buy one get one bacon, for example, how on earth did bacon ever get up to $6.99 a package to begin with, so are you really saving anything here when the store up the road is saner in offering bacon straightforward at $3.00 a package?  The cost of food is soaring, no wonder people look to raise their own chickens, grow their own vegetables, or order mushroom kits from Oregon.

Sleep inside a story of your heartfelt longings tonight.  Goodnight.

November Ennui

 I cry for the dead, the missing, the lost, and those with illnesses so unbearable I wonder how the person does not end up screaming in horror at walls or in a car with the windows rolled up.  How do we do it, this getting through life?  There has been so much loss these later years, I have witnessed two close friends be eaten alive by bits, and now another and now another.  They fall like pins in a terminal game, mowed down not by time but through erosion of flesh and sense.

Have you lived to old age?  There is no formula or mercy of the divine that allows life as we would like it to be; a slicing shadow cast by some astral gnomon, following a 360° circle of the sundial in a garden of fruit and flowering excess.  It is one day at a time and there is no dispensation; you get the suffering and tragedy with the tiniest bits of happy.  Are you happy all the time, for half a day, for two hours, for five minutes solid?  I would like to meet you.  

So sour, so focused on the negative, but lord god it is overwhelmingly common when compared to what joy rarely pops in.  I can tell you the dates when I was happy in the past year.  There was a period of three weeks that I don’t understand which occurred in the spring.  I was unscared, capable, and energetic.  I was happy on October 9, the day I started taking a beta blocker for high blood pressure: it was unreal to me, the calm, the warmth, the embraceable universe that lasted through to the next day before dissipating as my system regulated itself back into panic attack mode.  Another chemical breakthrough happened the day I first took a half dose of Budeprion, an offshoot of the antidepressant Wellbutrin; it was different than the beta blocker, not so warm fuzzy happy but humorous, playful, involved, speedy, you’re my new friend happy.  That disappeared and is gone, even as the dose was put at what is considered full.  I’m told it doesn’t do anything for panic, and to increase the beta blocker creates risks and very real nightmares, the ones where you are frightened to fall asleep because of the vivid, bloody scenes of walking over slippery mashed faces in mud furrows during war.  That was Paxil.  Yes, I am becoming a medicine cabinet.

Antidepressants are still not mentioned in company, polite or coarse, as if it is more a battleground of will than a chemical imbalance.  Cheer up, get over yourself.  People are more comfortable if you are a drunk.  Would you condemn a diabetic for not producing enough insulin?  Really, this is no different, we depressives drive, go through grocery lines and can button up our shirts neatly if not wistfully.  I had weaned myself off of Prozac two years ago, partially because it wasn’t doing anything but putting weight on me, plus the inner shame of needing a crutch even if it was a prescribed medicine that wasn’t a bottle of whiskey.  I imagine it was why so many family members became alcoholics.

I don’t need an antidepressant for a few months to get me through a period of blah, I need one everyday for the rest of my life, unless knocked unconscious by a passing two by four, and I am ashamed of it.  But in my view, disclosure is strength and you would be stunned to know who takes one in secret morning ritual anyway.   But what if my job finds out?  An angry individual seeking methods of sabotage?  Or the people who sort of like me but may be uneasy to know that I take a tablet that fine tunes dopamine, making me able to stand and breathe and walk out the door?  Gossip has no intent but self-promotion, and there are a few who would love to have this information to pull a Did You Know card out of their pocket.   Get over it, I tell myself, there will always be people who prefer plums to peaches, and more than a few insecure jerks abound.  I don’t mean you.  Smiley face emoticon inserted here.

You see, this goes back to the beginning of this page, the loss of friends and loved ones that I could trust with my life.  I’ve never had that many friends with periods of none to one; making friends has always been fraught with flashes of what do I say next, oh jesus I shouldn’t have said that, good lord panic freeze get me out of here lockjaw.  I write better than I speak, it comes way easier.

But I have been crying, too much.  The news delivered regarding my brother’s health issues two weeks ago broke something inside of me, and so now I have been spilling tears overmuch concerning aging, loved cats; my fricking crown that came off, the fact that I read the Sunday paper in fifteen minutes and it’s over, (I look forward to Prince Valiant in the funny papers), and that I haven’t made any art in months, years, waiting waiting for some inner permission and look, I’m almost sixty.  I could have been a somebody if only if only I wasn’t such a jerk myself.  Life. Is. Hell.

I am the Assistant, if you need help, I am there and will stay to the end.  I will bathe you, lift you to change tubes and pads, administer meds, and wipe you up.  Can I not assist me?  I am good at keeping going, putting one foot in front of the other even if it is robotic or unsure; but it accomplishes nothing great, no deeds, no insights, nothing but a love of the possibility of life, of the hope that there is happiness ahead, that I will someday have another October 9th.

Tears are falling now, for the music playing through the laptop is poignant, a piano rendition of Never Neverland by a gifted Vince Guaraldi who composed the scores for the Charlie Brown cartoons.  He’s dead, a heart attack in his forties, gone.  I have a place where dreams are born and time is never planned.  Cripes.  Wah.

Now this piece has been totally self-indulgent and I realize that, but this is My Journal and didn’t you know you were part of my self-therapy of working things out?  I have to stop crying at dust motes and cake crumbs (no, there isn’t any cake but I wish), and so writing gets it out there for reflection and honesty.  I have hand written journals from twenty, thirty years ago that I revisit for verification of blurry memory or just to read.  No letters of merit, but there sometimes is wonder at the amazing beauty of this world, physical, emotional, or innocent.

Early dark, Kai is at the open window breathing in night air of the cool, damp grass and fallen leaves.   A Sunday, there is a pot of soup on the stove made with We Have to Get Rid of Them Today Mushrooms from the grocery and chicken, enough for a week of meals.   Sleep will come to cleanse with tides and fathoms, waves and currents.  Restore, recharge, replenish.  Good night.

Toof

My "F"'s are thick, and there is now a hatchway for fresh air to enter and escape.  This has happened because the problem child of my upper incisors let go of the expensive crown last night, during night-night tooth brushing. There is now a gap punctuated by a dark grey fang-stump left from the root canal/capping that startles people when I open my mouth to speak.  It's appearance is that of a gruesome extrovert, the guy on the street crumpled against a brick wall at 4 a.m., the one with the personality of an auditor from the 1963 Internal Revenue Service rolled into one dental hooligan.

There is good in this event, as the pain that I thought might be continued infection has disappeared, as well as the cadaverous flavor exuded by whatever got caught inside the little bastard.  Putrescine: we all have it.  Yet however now painless, this open gateway to Tonsil City needed closure; after research online, I found the product touted as the miracle cement for temporary relief and not scaring children.  Recapit, printed out in slanty lettering emphasizing the speed with which remedy would occur.  Yay.  I love stuff that can be fixed myself.

Ate lunch, cleaned the fang, and noodled some of the glue gunk into the top of the cap, the inside of which is some sort of soft metal, and tried to insert the porcelain devil back into place but guess what.  My liberated gum line had advanced, relaxed, ordered a pina colada and resisted being put back into place like grandpa at the Legionnaire's Post hot lunch, thus preventing the errant crown from settling in nicely.  Oh ho no, this thing will go back in, sez I sez I.  Wiggling and pressing, I got it reasonably located with just a little too much overhang, but now, by using continued pressure from clamping down in the ferocious bite of determination, the thing seems to have migrated into domesticity.  Takes an hour for the cement to solidify, then, as the package says, You Can Eat.

I want this to work until I can call the dentist for an allegedly permanent conviction of this villain tooth, so all food will be pulverized, broken into tiny bits to be shoveled delicately into the left side of the cavern.  This artificial mastication eliminates any fancy display, for all the pureed food looks alike, and is deviated only by color, like cat food.  Guess what's red, guess what's brown, guess what this greeny stuff once was.  Meow.  Really, all the fancy crisscross squirts of designer sauce goes to hell when it comes down to the basic mechanics of eating.  Arugula?  Roquette?  Ten dollar a pound Belgian endive?  Put it through the processor and you have undefinable green smoosh sans the foofoo advertisement.  But hey, didn't I can applesauce this past fall? What a smart kid I am, preparing for the toothless days that were ahead.

This pain in the behind situation is small potatoes compared to the larger outlook of life.  I have a butternut squash in the oven, am roasting a knucklebone for making soup, and have a Shiitake mushroom kit to open and rev into production.  Little cat Min is having the problems of old age with hypoglycemia, which creates convulsions in her tiny frame: they are coming closer together after a half-year hiatus, and I know what that means.  Either a slow decline with palliative care, or an end brought quicker when they are too many too often.  She just had supper and so is well for the night.  It's when she forgets to eat that her blood sugar dips into dangerous low levels.  Oh Min, my last stray cat who found a home with us.

Tonight, I will sing a song of tenderness to my newly cemented tooth.  It is cockeyed, but not terribly so, and certainly passes into acceptable company unlike its inner, monstrous Mr. Hyde pointy barb.  Tonight is the evening of the time change backwards, and so tomorrow we luxuriate under covers for one unplanned extra hour that happens in the middle of the night, while our eyes are closed.  Time.  Pushed into 24 neat packets, orderly as a row of white teeth so that we can count birthdays and appointments.  What does it mean, this substratum?  Why 24 and how did an hour become 60?  Days grind, years fly.  Sleep well, tooth, sleep peacefully little cat, hover over us, winged seraphim,  and make us remember where we come from and why we do the things that we do.  Sleep well in innocence, you are.