the tomato slicer clocks out heads home takes a nap/awakens mid-afternoon and it still being too hot to walk outside/takes a look at movie listings on amazon prime
he sees a jack reacher title/and clicks on it to find to his dismay that it is not the new guy/but a miscast tom cruise instead/but it has some good improbable action/but is plagued by commercials/so he exits playing about 45 minutes in
clicks on the “continue playing” button for the good the bad and the ugly/which he’d watched a chunk of in its greasepainted glory a week ago/with clint eastwood and lee van cleef and eli wallach as the arch archetypes
the tomato slicer noted with astonishment that this spaghetti western miraculously left a taste of spaghetti in his mouth
making him hungry so he took a convenience store burrito from the fridge and reviewed the microwave instructions and followed them
and as the burrito was cooling saw in the amazon prime listings thunderbolt and lightfoot/with clint eastwood and a really young jeff bridges and george kennedy
the delighted tomato slicer fired it up/he’d missed this film in the 70s but always wanted to see it
and it tasted like sawdust but in a good way/and smelt of the linseed oil the tomato slicer used/when he was briefly an oil painter in the mid 70s
oddly though no trace of turpentine was in the scent
there is no accounting for taste, i suppose the tomato slicer mused as he fired up bad boys clint and jeff again
and as he ate and watched/he couldn’t help misting up/thinking about what time had done for and to eastwood and bridges
plus poor george kennedy had died ten days after his 91st birthday more than eight years ago
but the movie being nice and raw and weird soon banished such mawkish thoughts
yet the tomato slicer having finished the burrito/now daydreams of amidnight snack of a tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwich on extra-sour san francisco sourdough bread
an older frank sinatra sang lyrics from “the way you look tonight”/and they used it for a commercial/with stills of frank singing and smiling/and who knows what the commercial was advertising/but i trust it showed to frank/that he still had it/and was valued
a really old tony bennett/brought tears to lady gaga’s eyes/simply by recognizing her when she came out to sing with him/and they sang timelessly together/though tony was addled with dementia
glen campbell and alice cooper were golfing together/and glen told alice a joke early in the round/and then told him the same joke later in the round/and yet again before the round was over/but glen kept on performing on stage/and bathing in the applause/and he was still really good/and muscle memory kept his guitar playing astonishing
and i identify with and cheer for those old guys/and learn from them/that spending the last of your life making music/even when much of you is gone/is a glorious testament to “the show must go on”
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i was an art major in college/and jokingly told my friends and family/that i was getting an early jump on my retirement
turns out not to be a joke
i will be seventy-one before the end of august
and i blissfully spend hours and hours making things on the potter’s wheel
i turn lumps into cylinders and cylinders into chess pieces and goblets and vases and birds
and I watch with increasing detachment as another part of my mind slowly erodes
for instance I did a search on “glenn campbell”/because i’d forgotten that “glen” has only one n in it
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but back to “the way you look tonight”
it is a distant echo of the lines “And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes” from “She Walks in Beauty” by george gordon, lord byron
“aspect” loosely translating as “the way she looks”
fun fact: “specchio” is old italian for “looking-glass”
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i don’t give a care about leaving a good-looking corpse
but i care fervidly about leaving some good-looking and well-made clay art
so I raise the “power turquoise” cup i made, and i raise it to you, whoever and wherever you are,
“They sell us the President the same way/They sell us our clothes and our cars/They sell us everything from Youth to Religion/The same time they sell us our wars.” Jackson Browne, “Lives in the Balance,” mid-1980s
well, my mr. coffee died quietly two days ago/the on switch simply wouldn’t light up nor activate when pressed/so i being unhandy and incapable of repair slash resurrection called the time of death/and have emptied the reservoir and will give it an improper nonburial
and now I have a new coffeemaker/and have read the instructions/learning thereby that the manufacturers of this charming device/define five ounces as “one cup of coffee”/so i will get about two decent-sized cups per pot/which is ok
and I have just now followed the instructions/of first washing the pot with warm soapy water and rinsing/and next running a brew cycle without coffee/so as to clean its innards
and when i ran it/i learned that the new machine sounds like it dies an agonizing death by copd/as it yields the last fraction of an ounce of superheated water
its agony and final death-rattle sigh/worthy of shakespeare/who famously said
“Cowards die many times before their deaths;/The valiant never taste of death but once.”
may my new fellow-coward coffee machine/die a thousand histrionic deaths/before it really and truly and once and for all and irreparably/dies
One with Clay, Image and Text 