1. The total success of my sweet carrot pie. Anything tastes good when it’s dosed with ginger/nutmeg/cinnamon/honey, puréed, mixed with cream, and baked in a gingersnap crust.
2. Nate FS walked in and proceeded to pull out of his bike bag a Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph, one hundred and sixty-nine silver dollars, a current 1958 calendar (well, 1996 Gent’s mag nudie cal), eight vials of paregoric, a plastic sack of exotic seeds, a packet of grapevine leaves in a special humidor, a jar of feta, sections of wire coathanger to be used as shish kebab skewers, a boy scout shirt, two cinnamon sticks, a bottlecap from Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic, a change of Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear from a foraging at Bloomingdale’s, an extra pair of corduroy pants, a 1920’s baseball cap, a Hohner F harmonica, six venison loin chops, and an arbitrary number of recently severed and salted rabbits’ feet, or reasonable facsimiles of all of the above, plus a Tyrannosaurus Rex hat-and-booties costume.
I plan to tie the empty paregoric vials (i.e., Tanqueray No. 10 nips, which look like something you’d find in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude) on a string like Xmas lights and hang them on the wall.
3. Finding out in the middle of the evening that David Foster Wallace had hung himself, and sitting down immediately in the bedroom to call Ryan and tap into, it turned out, an impromptu phone tree/shivah. I said, “HOLY SHIT. Ryan. Oh my God.” He said, “Yeah. I’m here at the Abbey with Steve. We’ve already heard from Matt and Joe.”
I plan to trek up to Enfield (i.e., Chestnut Hill above Cleveland Circle) sometime this week to leave something appropriate somewhere. Email if you want in.
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Added, 1:11 p.m.:
While I understand intellectually that many artists struggle after a brilliant achievement because past performance is no guarantee of future results, and nearly everyone will always feel insecure and scared about their ability to produce anything good ever again, my gut immediate reaction was the same as Ryan’s friend Jami’s:
How can you achieve so much and still not be satisfied?
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xx
djd
p.s. anodyne
Merriam-Webster:
(adj.)
1 : serving to alleviate pain [this is also its noun sense]
2 : not likely to offend or arouse tensions : innocuous
p.p.s. Now what will I do with the domain name untitledunfinishedunreleased.com?
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