The circumambient air was redolent with doughnuts

Since the romance of my working life is no doubt of great interest to my reader(s), I will let you in on this secret: it is more challenging to define "waterfall" (for an audience that may include both middle schoolers and adult English learners and without using the words "water" or "fall") when you are experiencing brain fog than when you are not.

And now it's later and I've been laboring on "doughnut," which has made me hungry for circles of fried dough and also brought me to this extraordinary historical information about how the Civil War, doughnuts, and the state of Maine converged:


The ladies of Augusta, Me [Maine], distributed over fifty bushels of doughnuts to the Third Volunteer regiment of Maine, previous to their departure for the seat of war in 1861. A procession of ladies, headed by music, passed between double lines of troops, who presented arms, and were afterwards drawn up in hollow square to receive the welcome dough-nation. 

Never before was seen such an aggregate of doughnuts since the war began. The circumambient air was redolent with doughnuts. Every breeze sighed doughnuts – everybody talked doughnuts. The display of doughnuts beggared description. There was the molasses doughnut and the sugar doughnut – the long doughnut and the square doughnut – the rectangle doughnut and the triangular doughnut – the single twisted doughnut and the double twisted doughnut – the “light riz” doughnut and third kneaded doughnut – the straight solid doughnut and the circular doughnut, with a hole in the center. There were doughnuts of all imaginary kinds, qualities, shapes, and dimensions. It was emphatically a feast of doughnuts, if not a flow of the soul.

All I want in this world is a doughnut banjo picnic.

Too strange to speak

I have been sporadically checking in with the Iditarod this past week and a half, mainly because I am a huge fan of Blair Braverman and her dogs. We had a blustery, bitterly cold several days, and while crunching through the snow with my non-working dogs, I imagined racing across a quiet stretch of wilderness on a sled pulled by dogs gone nearly silent as they run. I don't literally wish I were racing the Iditarod, especially after learning how hard mushing is on the fingers, but it's the best kind of fantasy in March in Maine.

Blair's Twitter is one of the only reasons I still open Twitter. I think she and Nicole Cliff and the kid who pets dogs should be in charge of Twitter 100 percent. If you need a little extra faith in humanity right about now, please go read this thread prompted by Nicole's question "What is the kindest thing a stranger has done or said to you?"

In other news, on a wet and icy city walk with the dogs this morning, I shuffled my feet carefully and thought about how many hours of my childhood I might have wasted spent desperately trying to have telekinesis.

Oh of late I wake with this wedged deeply, intractably, in my head, rather than the dreams that should be lingering there.


My horoscope this week (go find yours!)

"You’re usually so comfortable living inside language, so good at translating your shimmering ideas into words that can be shared. This week, though, you might encounter moments that language fails you. Your emotions might feel inexpressible, too dense, too complicated, too strange to speak. It’s okay. This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong — not with the feelings, and not with your words. It just means that language was never meant to do everything. Some experiences are meant to be solitary. Some emotions aren’t asking to be spoken yet, only felt."

Rabbit rabbit!

Soul Train was too pure for this world

I seriously didn't spend enough of my childhood telervision hours watching Soul Train. 

 

I mean, Love Train dance contest.

 

I want to fly like an eagle

Ooh, I like the new retro design, Facebook! Nicely done!

Hey I keep imagining writing about how we've now officially lived in Maine for 20 years and forgetting to do it. Which means we've lived here approximately 20 years and a week. We moved to Maine in February and instantly fell ill with the flu, all four of us. I remember it was vacation week — we planned to have that week to settle in before Zoë started school, but we stayed sick well into the following week. I picture us lying on mattresses on the floor and kids vomiting into the popcorn bowl* when I think of that time. We had a dog! Poor Happy, I don't even remember how we accommodated her needs for those first weeks. I guess we had a fenced yard full of dog poop.

Twenty years. Time is weird, and it keeps on slippin slippin slippin into the future,** doesn't it?

Also, this makes both our refrigerator and stove approximately 20 years old.






*Popcorn bowl = vomit bowl, sorry if you've eaten popcorn at my house.

**You're welcome, that's today's earworm especially for my favorite Academy Award winner!

Try a little Gemütlichkeit

One of those days when it literally takes hours to try to explain, to a hypothetical human aged somewhere between 12 and 112, what a windmill is.*

This is a hotel in the Netherlands: "Ancient times are brought alive in these original corn mills. Unique in its kind!"

I was on a roll with my dream journal and got stalllled for a few days. I did recall some funny details this morning (a trip to New Orleans with a bossy, fictional college friend of Charlotte McDonald's named Katherine, a special necklace with deep significance that I didn't comprehend because I was only pretending I could hear the whispers of the "customs officer" who gave it to me). At the end, just before I woke up, we were watching a scene in a movie in which Anne Hathaway and Anna Kendrick were performing a beautiful a capella version of "Who Let the Dogs Out."







*I still get paid $8 for that blurb. Under normal, brain-fully-functioning circumstances, it works out to a perfectly fairly acceptable hourly rate. 

There's a vaper on the road / his brain is squirming like a toad

As I attempt to divert things to this blog that I otherwise might have Twittered or BookFaced, I have to announce that I just sang a song of my own invention to two dogs and a cat, inspired by a human I saw walking past my house. Just a little tune I like to call Vaping in the Snow, to the tune of this: