The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: morning

  • A Complete Thought

    Inching along now, word by word, not a complete thought in sight. Did have one once, a complete clause, gave me pause, didn’t last long, a mere utterance. Must move along, a kind of proposition neither true nor false. Paddled through the kelp around the point. Each wave a fragment of fancy, a figment of you know what. Nothing here, nothing there, may a touch of wit be with you.

    Cartooned, too, motionless, almost, like a cartoon, barely enough. Threads. And beads. Even dismissal doubtful. Traveling light, stuff in storage, if you can call a household holding an industrial trial. Like paddling, nautical, head above water. Jarred, not stirrage, as in shaken, not stirred. Vespers as what light there is fades. Etymology: the evening star. Vespertine. And after night, matutinal.

    Dawn and songbirds. Bees swarm the morning glory gold trumpets. Swallows and swifts dash the morning cup of black bitter coffee the paper cup. From vespers to bitters. While still cool. Morning lasts until noon. Why morning works best: allows for song to carry along no distortion from wind or the noise of other animals. Work and the sounds of work opening, the pulling on of gloves, the squeak of toolbox hasps, the last of the dew spots on the sidewalk and the rolling out of the blueprints on the makeshift table on the sawhorses.

    A wet sidewalk and street closeup with letters in the cement curb that read "Work Projects," and an "A," so part of "Works Projects Administration," from the Great Depression years.
    SE Belmont, 16 Jan 2016

  • The Great Text Awakening

    These days, there is no bugle call. I don’t have to set the alarm for 4 am across the room to ensure I get out of bed now and hat up for a drive north to Seattle rather than hit the snooze button evermore. And these days, days will pass without my getting a single legitimate call. When I do get a call, the ringtone plays a bit of Dvorak’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” and I’m inclined not to pick up but to dwell in the sound of the violin reminding me my mother’s tears no longer flow.

    These days, I’m not sure why I still bother to maintain a phone, one that no longer rings till the cows come home. The cows don’t leave home anymore. Indeed, like Hamlet, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space” were it not that I get text messages.

    These days, the text messages I get are usually automatic. For example, my phone provider will text my bill, usually at an absurdly early hour on a weekend morning, as if a dozen or more cows were restlessly mooing to be milked. Or there’s an urgent message from some pollster who can’t take another breath until he has my opinion on who should be the next President. Or the local pharmacy is alerting me that once again my doctor is in denial.

    Yet this morning, deep in some recurring dream reconstituting an old commute and the reasons whyfor, at not, it might be argued, an unreasonable hour for someone departing the docks for an adventure, but arguably still a bit early for someone who has no call to wake up let alone get out of bed for a walk along some deserted slipway, I received the following headline-worthy news item of personal note from an old friend who I might add has I think never before texted me any message whatsoever and who indeed calls less frequently than my poor mother used to:

    “We are on our way
    to Texas. I am
    enjoying the book
    you sent: Three
    Men in a Boat.
    Thanks.”

    8:20 AM

    I picked up the phone, read said message with interest, got out of bed, made some coffee, bringing a cup to Susan and taking mine out for a yard walkabout where I decided I really should cut at least the back grass today, came back in for a second cup, and sat down to put up this post, thinking, I hope he’s not texting while driving. I hesitate however to discourage text messages from, say, a reststop. I remember Kerouac’s general advice not to use the phone, because, he argued, people are never ready to talk, and he advised using poetry instead. And, indeed, “We are on our way” is a perfect poem written evermuch in the Kerouac style.