Yes, my life is dull. Why do you ask?

[rejectomorph]

Tiny Tim is fascinated by the water coming from the hose. When I water the back yard, he watches the stream wherever it lands. He always crouches to watch, the way cats do when they are stalking prey. He hates the water itself, and if any splashes on him he runs away, but he always comes back to watch again. He apparently doesn't quite know what to make of this stuff that is so bright and noisy.

He will often glance at me briefly before returning his attention to the stream of water. He knows I'm interacting with it somehow, but I don't think he gets the nature of the connection. Perhaps he imagines that it is something that I'm trying to catch, rather than something I'm actually controlling. Whatever his puzzlement, at least he enjoys watching the watering, and it distracts him from untying my shoelaces, which is something he now does almost every time I go outside.

Kitties are very entertaining creatures, and can do a lot to enliven a dull day. Other than watering, I didn't do much of anything today, and even the watering would have been dull without Timmy to watch.

Bastille Day was three days ago.




Sunday Verse

The Day Lady Died

by Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday 
three days after Bastille day, yes 
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine 
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner 
and I don’t know the people who will feed me 

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy 
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   
in Ghana are doing these days 
                        I go on to the bank 
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres 
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine 
after practically going to sleep with quandariness 

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE 
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton 
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it 

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of 
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT 
while she whispered a song along the keyboard 
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Bonus music link: Lady Day, Fine and Mellow, 1957.

Comments

[edbook.livejournal.com]

dull? a psychiatrist once told me that my life was too exciting and he didn't think he could handle that much excitement... he said he would rather have an easy dull life. I told him that it must be hell being him.

Peace

[rejectomorph]

Being a psychiatrist would be enough to drive anyone crazy.