Late Spring Eternal

One thing to remember if you're seduced by warmer temps to cut the legs off a pair of pants, is save the legs. The next thing to wear out on a pair of pants, after the knee, is the butt, and when it happens you'll be happy that you saved some matching material for a patch. I was, because I did. I am.

I'm obsessed with this donut shop that's just off the bike path in Johnston. I would definitely categorize it as New Wave Donut because they have like, a donut covered in Fruity Pebbles, a donut that ties in with a recent television show, a crème brûlée donut. But the prices are blessedly regular, not like other new wave donut stores I could name. And when you get a filled donut they pipe the filling in right before they hand it over, so everything's nice and airy. The regular glazed is beautiful and light, but the crème brûlée is the star I think-- the filling is a little eggy and pretty light on the sugar, and the hard glaze on top is enough to crunch but not like Sugar Daddy thick. As for the coffee, I love it, but it's like, perfectly average. A snob would balk at the absense of floral notes or whatever but true afficianados recognize the ideal coffee to pair with a donut. I'm not complaining but they use powdered cream? The donuts get fresh cream and the coffee gets powder? Again, I'm not complaining, but that's interesting, don't you find?

They close at 3 and close up even earlier if it's either very busy or very slow. Good luck. More than once I've biked there and they're closed, and I have to take my business to Latte Love Johnston (nb: Mary Lou's is under construction). I take it to go of course and sit somewhere along or just off the bike path, where pleasant vistas reward any traveler willing to traipse a little. Just a 10 minute ride / 30 minute walk from Olneyville. Probably going to go on Tuesday, the day of this post. If you're reading this on Tuesday I might be biting into a crème brûlée right.... now.

After a months-long travail, there are kittens in my house. We had talked about getting kittens, then we found some kittens on an adoption site, and then (no one's fault) the process was longer than any of us could've anticipated, and anyway now they're here, asleep on the cool of the kitchen floor.

One of them has the sniffles at the moment, and purring seems to jar the snots loose-- she's sitting there, and then you pet her for a little bit, and then she blasts thick green snots on your person. Similar feeling to rubbing your stocking feet on a carpet to build up an electric shock, but it's a sudden and productive sneeze. It's not ideal but neither is it without charm.

The other one is a real little nipper, she loves to put her teeth on you. This is jarring when one is, for instance, asleep, and many a morning lately I've yowlped in shock at 6am with this needle-sharp menace hovering o'er. But she doesn't really press down-- the fangs never puncture the flesh. It's like she wants you to know that biting you is a possibility. If you can possibly ignore it she moves into an immediate serenity and curls up right next to your pillow. The arm unbitten and the kitten fast asleep.

I admit, this was baffling to me at first-- like why not really bite? And how can you pivot so suddenly from threatening to placid? Then I realized that I have friends like that, and I've been that friend to others, the one that leads off with a sharp transgression like "what's up shithead" and if you can just roll with that for a second without getting your hackles up then everything turns lovely. That need to know that if things get ugly for a sec, our love will endure. I can sympathize. And empathize, even. And then of course there's just that feeling of "Look at this guy, asleep. I shall bite him a tiny amount.". Lord knows I've been on both sides of the tooth there.

Links / Misc

• After the last post on here about Nancy and the loan office [link], I went looking for more examples of exhaustive riffing, where a person or group of people tries to squeeze every drop of potential out of a scenario. I found a few and then a few people wrote in:
  • Cyrano deBergerac, this one part: [8m, youtube]. Jose Ferrer eats this up. See also Roxanne (1987).
  • Goldberg variations by JS Bach: [Glenn Gould 1955 version, 39m, YouTube], also [Glenn Gould 1981 version, 51m, YouTube]. See also 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993)
  • 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, by Eliot Weinberger
  • 36 Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai [wikipedia]
  • 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens [poetry foundation]
  • Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

  If you can think of other good ones let me know, I love this kind of thing.

• There's no practical reason as to why I do this, but years ago I started taking a screengrab every time I look up a word in the dictionary. And so just because the data's there, I made a little file that's every word I've looked up. It's a weird document, I feel like all the words are aligned somehow on a very peculiar axis. I keep the file in the library of course. It's right here: [library]

Archives of previous posts is here, in the coat room: [coatroom]

To sign up to get these posts in your email for free, click here: [substack]

To write me a nice message, use the contacts page: [link]

To leave a little donation to help in the maintance of this castle, OR to simply hear the sound of a large bell, which is good luck, visit the temple area: [link]

As always, if you're bugging out or need a respite from endlessly scrolling the feed, you are welcome to hang out in the castle as long as you want. :)

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