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”
.
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
.
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”
.
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
You walk by someone who is a fair fit for what you read about someone you might like
You hear the voice of that someone and you like it
You like what the voice says
You find a way to share space and time with that someone, possibly in a group setting
You start daydreaming about what might happen
You present a better version of yourself in hopes the someone notices
You start accumulating nice moments involving your someone
You seem to notice a mutual attraction
You definitely notice a mutual attraction, unless your mind is playing tricks
Your heart leaps when one or the other of you throws caution to the winds and the two of you arrange to be together
.
(Like the visible light spectrum, Love Spectrum #9 is but a sliver of the full spectral range. The creation of Love Spectrum #10 is left as an exercise, or an overture, for the reader.)
(The author hopes a certain someone is reading this.)
my adult-life home town was named after a mythic bird who was periodically conflagationally consumed and then was reborn from ash
but a spreading fungus is a more apt comparator
aerial maps over time show urban development filling topographical nooks and cartological crannies
and photos over time of camelback mountain taken from east of 40th street and south of camelback road show expensive houses climbing the mountain like lurch-stepped hikers
.
climate change has amped the furnace roar of this Infernal paradise
and entrickled the cascade of Verde salt and Colorado rivers
and new residents migrating from California to escape wildfires are just as thirsty as the rest of us
One with Clay, Image and Text 