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

and a big glass of cold cold milk

and another movie