CAN YOU DIE OF EATING PANCAKES
After my hard week’s work I decided to make myself a pancake. It was a difficult commitment because I do like my granola. I had to go on a 70-minute drive & stiff walk on a breezy beach to brood about it. In the end I decided to put granola into the pancake. It was a win-win situation. Happily I set about my task. I remembered a pancake in Olympia Washington once which came with fruit. I cut up a serendipitous half-apple I found in the fridge & threw it in. I was frying this pancake with butter so you can imagine the effect on the apple & how delicious it all smelled. I had to go out of the house (it was cold) & come back in just to truly appreciate the aroma. Ever notice that the only time you really get to smell your house’s smell is when you come in from outside? I used to think a certain smell was peculiar to Chinese houses until I started coming into my own house after cooking rice. The pancake, when done, was stupendous. It was actually more of a collection of pancakes. It was a pancake in the sense that Providence is a city. Sort of a cluster of pancakelets, each with the integrity & rights of a pancake, of course, especially the right to collect taxes. And no doubt there was one quintessential pancake in there which was the definitive pancake which gave the pancake gestalt to the lot of them. Anyhoo (never said that before) it was very high & crumbly. Very complex in its parts. It looked like a lethal weapon—or the results of one. I put lemon on it & maple syrup & set to. I’m still eating it. I’m going to be eating it a very long time. If I die, consider this my 5 lb accidental suicide note.
After my hard week’s work I decided to make myself a pancake. It was a difficult commitment because I do like my granola. I had to go on a 70-minute drive & stiff walk on a breezy beach to brood about it. In the end I decided to put granola into the pancake. It was a win-win situation. Happily I set about my task. I remembered a pancake in Olympia Washington once which came with fruit. I cut up a serendipitous half-apple I found in the fridge & threw it in. I was frying this pancake with butter so you can imagine the effect on the apple & how delicious it all smelled. I had to go out of the house (it was cold) & come back in just to truly appreciate the aroma. Ever notice that the only time you really get to smell your house’s smell is when you come in from outside? I used to think a certain smell was peculiar to Chinese houses until I started coming into my own house after cooking rice. The pancake, when done, was stupendous. It was actually more of a collection of pancakes. It was a pancake in the sense that Providence is a city. Sort of a cluster of pancakelets, each with the integrity & rights of a pancake, of course, especially the right to collect taxes. And no doubt there was one quintessential pancake in there which was the definitive pancake which gave the pancake gestalt to the lot of them. Anyhoo (never said that before) it was very high & crumbly. Very complex in its parts. It looked like a lethal weapon—or the results of one. I put lemon on it & maple syrup & set to. I’m still eating it. I’m going to be eating it a very long time. If I die, consider this my 5 lb accidental suicide note.
—SOCKS
I’ve had an interesting week. I met a poet last night who bought a house, got a job & had 2 books come out—all this month. And the house & the job are on opposite coasts. And additionally one is quite south. Nothing like that happened to me. But I did start work again after a long break. So I had to dress up. Look professional. It helps to have a bit of an exoskeleton. Suit jackets are corsets that have migrated outwards. Actually the term suit jacket is pretty new to me. It is in the same category as dish soap, neither term being in use in Ireland, though jackets and dishwashing liquid are. I can definitely see the advantages of dish soap. But I digress. The exoskeleton can get pretty uncomfortable after a while. When the time came to go home on the first day I was glad to head for the bathroom with my sneakers & sweats. Off came the boots & the cutting-edge pants & the suit-jacket too. I found myself musing on my new brown knee highs (great quality socks created by Every Toe Covered for special people—YOU, as they say, Enjoy.them). My feet were totally stifled & overwrought from me being on them all day, wearing my various hats. I decided to whip off the socks & give my feet a breather. Then I thought: Pity to have to put them back on—Hey wait a minute—Why not switch socks! That could be refreshing in itself. Put the right foot sock on the left foot. Put the left foot sock on the right. Each sock being molded & configured to the peculiarities of the foot it had sheathed, pressed suffocatingly between boot and foot as it had been, for 8 or 10 hours, would strike the new foot with a bracing, coniferous, aquavivish, muscular slap—simply by putting the sock on the wrong foot, the foot would get a massage! Swopping the socks would be the impromptu equivalent of that infamous run along the sea-shore in Chariots of Fire—the foot would be basking just as beatifically as Nigel Havers' face in the sun & air except you wouldn’t be able to see it because it would be inside the wrong sock. But I couldn’t do it. There seemed something promiscuous about it. Something illicit. Sweat from one foot being pressed via sock into the other, innocent, unsuspecting foot & vice versa. So I put each foot back into its proper sock & padded in my Nike Walks right out of there, thinking l have to write a poem about this. So here it is:
2 comments:
too funny
Too funny
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