Saturday, January 22, 2005 OUR ENTHUSIASMS Onomatopoeia. Boogaloo. Bats. Brass tacks. Shakespeare. The distribution of scarce resources. The methane rains and howling winds of Titan. Our enthusiasms, here at Mango Pudding Blues, frequently press up uncomfortably against the meager allotment of time we’ve been given on the planet. Photography and painting and graphic design and music and cooking and writing and now, now that we’re settling in, fucking interior design. Where are the pictures of Paris? Where is the cycle of sonnets? What happened to our promise to learn a latin-tinged piece on the piano? When are we getting our now-antique Vivitar 283 flash repaired? What about digital photography? When are we gettin’ that new computer? And what about our endless yearning for an artificial extended family of scientists and poets and financiers and fire-breathing jugglers? And we are furious that we are seemingly unable to schedule a visit to New York to see The Gates. * * * Friday, January 21, 2005 RADIANT COLD And so winter, real winter, has finally bitten deep into the bones of the city. Each night we hunker down, afraid in our atavistic souls that the end is here. You will never convince our reptile brain that the end, when it comes, won’t look exactly like this frozen dark wasteland. And we sit at the dining room table early in the morning, feeling the stony cold waves radiating up from the newspaper that we chipped off of the icy stoop. * * * Monday, January 17, 2005 AW, JEEZE A small brass statue of the buddha. A minor recurring flood in the basement. A new blower motor for the furnace. A long dark moment of doubt. A new red bedroom that is a roadmap to a beautiful future. Modigliani in Toronto. A pomegranate slurped over the sink. We at Mango Pudding Blues are still here. We’ve been eating a lot of steak, drinking a lot of red wine and doing some uncomfortable suffering. What have you all been doing? * * *