“Why is everyone so grumpy all of a sudden?”

Everyone, meaning everyone at work, is just a little tired, a little grumpy, a little ‘off’ today. Or, maybe, I’m just projecting my own grumpiness onto everyone else:  it’s definitely a Thursday that should be a Friday.

It rained this morning, sheets and sheets of rain -  it rained so hard that lines of water appeared to bounce off of every hard surface, including the roof of the building across the street from my place. The city is in the process of tearing down the building, which has been empty and devoid of business tenants for months and months on end. The city, in it’s great wisdom, tried to do a ‘deal’ with a developer in order to develop some utter monstrosity that would, supposedly, generate much tax revenue. In the sharp downturn of the economy, the city got caught out when the developer backed out. The city now owns the building. Well, no matter. It’s only the tax-payer’s money, after all. Why should the city worry? (I am being flippant, even sarcastic, dear reader).

My mother watches the building from our front window, and says that each day a group of men collect on the flat-topped roof and work at pulling off huge square slabs of some sticky, black material. She says while two or three will work hard, the others will just stand around and watch, not doing much of anything but taking breaks for something to drink. I don’t think she’s too impressed by the latter group. At any rate, the thing has to come down soon, because the city has an upcoming deadline beyond which they will fine (who, themselves?)  if it doesn’t get it done. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

City, or local, government around here is interesting. Or, maddening, as the case may be……

“Well the weather has suddenly turned wintry here”

Suzanne Vega, on her blog, about a show in France played last October.

(The thing I like best about the post is the picture that accompanies it, of a snowy-wet road viewed through the window of a car or bus, or something ‘on the road’ like that……)

“In the Cathedrals of New York and Rome there is a feeling that you should just go Home and spend the lifetime finding out just where that is”

In the shadows
of tall buildings
of fallen angels
on the ceilings
Oily feathers
and bronzen concrete
faded colors
pieces left incomplete
The light moves slowly
past the electric fence
across the borders
between continents

In the Cathedrals
of New York and Rome
there is a feeling
that you should just go Home
and spend the lifetime
finding out just where that is….

From Cathedrals, by Joan Osborne (this link takes you to a youtube video of the song.)

“That Old Metropolitan Dialectic”

Wonderful photo-essay at Mick Hartley.

“She seems very sweet……please don’t crush her”

“Pogo” on this post about Susan Boyle at Althouse.  He also posted the following poem in the comments:

Poets and Scientists Find Boxelder Bugs Useful for Both Metaphor and Experiment
Crush a boxelder bug.
After the little snap
a tiny liquid drop
the color of honey comes
out on your thumb.
The boxelder bug does not
hear this sound.
The red racing stripes on
his black back, like decorated
running shoes, finally don’t
run anywhere, anymore.
You, on the other hand, had done
what your life prepared you for:
kill something useless and innocent,
and try to find some beauty in it.
Bill Holm

“I love her writing, or at least, I did years ago when I first discovered it.”

I love her writing, or at least, I did years ago when I first discovered it.  There is a devastating short story, the name of which escapes me, about an upper class Indian woman who loves this man that completely uses her up, she follows him, he’s kind of a loser, but her fascination is too strong.  She captures the mental, well, space for lack of a better word, of someone who is in that kind of relationship with such cutting truth, it’s hard to read.  I don’t give a darn about politics when it comes to writing.  I only want to be transported.

A comment of mine at ultrabrown, on a post about Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s East into Upper East.

Listening to WXRT…..

….where Andrew Bird, Pictures and Sound, Raconteurs, Spinto Band, and Rafael Saadiq are on my Recently Heard: Title-Artist list, and now, I am listening to X Levitation Cult’s Habit Forming.

I love the new music channel at WXRT.

I tell you, I love My Boys……

The third season opener starts with a mustache-growing contest. It’s just an excuse for dropping one-liners, which is the best part of the show, naturally.

Jim Gaffigan, who plays the character ‘Andy’ on My Boys, has one of the best lines about the contest: “so, if you win, you still lose.”

Daniel Hannan: “Prime Minister, you cannot carry on for ever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.”

I loved this speech.

(And this posted on Daniel Hannan’s blog is lovely:

Yesterday, under my wife’s direction, we plucked nettles and wild garlic for the kitchen, the children splashing in a brook while their mothers combed the bank like Palaeolithic gatherers.)

It’s so nice to talk to friends, isn’t it?

I spoke to my lovely friend Ilaria today. I called her in Italy and we had a nice long talk. She laughed and called me ” lazy, lazy, lazy,” which is absolutely true. Underneath the supposed workaholic stuff, I am quite lazy. Some of us are just comfortable with contradiction.

After our warm meandering talk, which made me happy, I went to the gym where I ran around on a treadmill and stared out of plate glass windows splashed with silvery rain drops. While running, I see two birds fly over a group of buildings across the street from the gym, and I note the weathered brown brick and a kind of gray stone-ish facade displayed on the front of the buildings.

Odd that a busy gym should feel so cozy, but it did.

*Oh, I had a long talk with my niece, too, she’s very talkative these days, she loves to talk, it’s as if she’s just discovered talking about her day and is completely enthralled. I love it, of course, she tells me about taking skating lessons and going outside to make a snowman because, while it rained here in Chicago, it snowed in St. Paul.