We walked on fossils

Several mornings recently it has snowed, but it's finally sticking in the thin trees of the back yard, the tangle of pokeberries at the front, the gravel- and moss-roofed tumuli of the neighbors' garages.



I have no particular feelings about the lyrics video for Anna B Savage's "Lighthouse" (2024), but the line we shone in sea-spray near Heaney's place made me think that "Agnes (feat. Anna Mieke)" (2024) should be considered as another of the innumerable radiations of his bog body poems, which it is appropriate should have such a fertile afterlife. I am off, once again, to the dentist.

Mom, I tore a big hole in the convertible

Actually the hour, five minutes, and seventeen seconds I spent on the phone with my health insurance were the product of a heroic customer service representative trying to reinstate us on our plan without further hassle since we had been abruptly and incorrectly kicked off it yesterday, occasioning an outcry of profanity and tsuris. That she was not able to manage it without escalating our case seems no fault of hers but the system's, especially since she stayed overtime to see if she could resolve what should have been a non-issue. If I knew where she lived, I'd send a fruit basket. Instead I have a case number and instructions to dig in my claws if anyone tries to deny us coverage.

I was calling so late in the day because the afternoon was entirely consumed by a dental procedure, where the great news is that I got to keep the tooth. spatch drove like a champion through the thickening snow which skirled photogenically between the buildings of the Financial District and Chinatown and turned I-93 into a parking lot. I had one of those weird stress reactions of falling asleep as if stunned afterward. By the time we were on our way home with restorative cider donuts from the Boston Public Market and assorted foodstuffs from Mamaleh's, we were in exactly the right mood to encounter the revival-tent DTs of Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats' "S.O.B." (2015), whose video was demonstrably directed by people who love The Blues Brothers (1980), and the Mothers of Invention's "You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here" (1966), which sounded at first as though something distressing had happened to the Incredible String Band, respectively courtesy of WERS and WZBC. College radio for the weird.

My four shots of prilocaine wore off shortly after I got onto the phone call, so I am now carefully eating some chopped liver with a slice of cheesecake for dessert on the theory that neither of them requires very much chewing, also they're both delicious. I kind of plan to do nothing for the remaining hours of fall.