Need I mention that I was at work from half past eight this morning until half past ten at night, dealing with the sorts of questions that 300 square centimeters of bleached woodpulp smeared with petroleum products could answer? I hope I don't become one of those terrible people who talks about her/his job in her/his journal. Horrifying! Horrifying, it is to me, that I no longer have the kind of job about which I can talk with the specificity and impunity that brings out the funny in my prose -- and yet being there, doing it, debilitates so many of my breathing hours. Close readers of la merlette are hanging on for the final, gripping installment of a Coffee Place Soap Opera -- this is food service's great contribution to literature. The best stories come from the enforced, anonymous intimacy of making and delivering food to a person.
Tech support is not where novels and poems come from. Tech support will make my didactic muscles overdeveloped, and, the gods looking on in disgust, my syntactic engines will lose power; they will be reduced to a tiny whirring factory just behind my left eyeball which juxtaposes simple subject to simple predicate, leaving them there, the wood-glue still seeping from the unsightly join.
I'm not griping about my job, mind you. I love it, so far, even though it's persistent and unrewarding -- a clingy boyfriend who gives bad head. And yet . . . O, don't mention Love! More to the point, do mention the paycheck.
I'm very cross at M*ss*ch*s*tts for causing all the wine shops to close before I got out of work tonight. Since I really needed to buy a tidy, cold little bottle of something white and Loire-y tonight. Instead, I came home and ate spaghettini al pesto.
See? The pleasures of the gut are still totally engaging. Marilyn Hacker reminds us that Graves tells us the perennial themes of poetry are Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, but to that must be added chilled apricot soup over finely-shredded cr�pes, saut�ed snow peas, mushroom biryani, with a few slices of fresh Roncal to finish.