city hall, philadelphia
prettiest city picture I ever done took.
pay-per-view
More flagrant than ever before, the garden this spring has been one raucous and debauched carnival of lawless bacchanalian flower sex. Someone asked me how the yard was doing a couple of weeks ago, and the only adjective I could think of to describe it was pay-per-view.
That the bees are back doesn’t hurt: there are more wanton workers barnstorming the sepals, looting the pistils and bracing the stamens than I’ve seen in years. I blush yet at the thought of the countless bodies clumsily adjusting their undergarments, stumbling out of the garden dizzy with the perfume of sex, telltale pollen smeared on their collars.
Of course, that’s nature’s nature every spring. I’m just tuned in to it more acutely this year than any other in memory. I’ve been sublimating pretty hard in 2010, thanks to an especially lusty curiosity and cunning, and an abundance of free time, botanical variety, and midday mead. It all came to a climax today when I realized just how oh-so very badly I want to lay down with this one:
Can that be so bad? Can this particularly innocent instance of polymorphous perversion really have a price? Will Courtney be jealous?
Persnaps, but let this be her consolation: my botanical tryst is short-lived. Alas, this beauty is exceedingly ephemeral: try as I might, I can not preserve these petals. Vivid colors fade, perfect posture wilts, ardor will languish.
And yet!
For whiners like me, there’s always Autumn. The fruit borne this fall will be just another form of the same biological ecstasy, though more visceral and less hysterical, more nourishing and more sustaining, and far more enduring.
Thank you, pesto, for making winter worth living through.
jumping on the visual bandwagon
I’ve spent a lot of free time this week looking at page after page of a few new (to me) sites devoted solely to images (ffffound and dethjunkie and yimmys yayo) and while I’ve got my complaints (yawn, steve, when do you not?), I have been so inspired that I started to wonder late last night if I wasn’t meant to be a visual artist, that while I started out with an obsession with language I really have been much more visually oriented these last few years, and that maybe I oughtn’t start making pretty stuff that exists off the page.
I ought, but, I know in the light of day, not at the expense of language. So while I’ll return to the regularly scheduled programming next post, that doesn’t mean I can’t throw up a few pretty pitchers sans the chit-chat right hereandnow.
foxy fritillaria michailovskyi
Someone told me yesterday that they say that fritillaria michailovskyi smells foxy. I got what he meant. He wanted to make sure. You know, like sex.
First of all, major props to a working man for recognizing the flower, knowing its pain in the arse name, and for retaining this erotic bit of esoterica (or esoteric bit of erotica I suppose, depending on which team you happen to be batting for).
Secondly. As a euphemism for sexy, foxy is first rate. Sure, gents have been calling good-lookin’ ladies foxy for ages immemorial, but to have it connote not a look but a smell is to put a novel twist on the word that resonates with darker meaning when it’s used in relation to fox behavior. Think feral, think sweaty, think animal.
But. I clipped a few and stuck my nose deep up in them and… meh. They have a smell, but it’s not a musk or a funk. It smells like rot. I mean, I’m all for dirty girls, but pretty or not, this is beyond the pale. Turns out it’s a single compound to blame for the stank, a certain 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, which they say has a smoke-roast stink but I sez no way unless your smoke-roast has been sitting in the sun way too long.
by the by, everything worthwhile to learn about fritillarias can be learned here.
fish pocky baby yeah
I went in Lucky Market looking for rice cakes last day, and lo, what did I find in the freezer section, licking her lips at me beguilingly from between the squid and the whale? Perfect inscrutable temptation!
In my inexorable quest to be early-adopter to everything, I present for your viewing pleasure these gold-wrapped tubes of fish paste product. After years of striped socks, high-body cars, pink khakis on boys, and cetera with my mouth shut, I am screaming it from the mountaintops now, the perfect snack has been invented!!
Yes babies, lick those lips! A big thumbs-up to a friendly gold manga….”cigar”, ahem, of “cheese” snack fish paste product-y goodness.
As the rest of you crackers know already, half the fun of Asian groceries is the sheer novelty of the somehow-still-ostensibly-appetizing products. Ice that with the bubble-gum beauty of the (deceptively?) innocuous packaging and you have yourself an impulse buy!
Oh siren, how I have foundered on your fish paste product shoals, how I will never look at snacking the same now that I can peel happiness from a golden tube, a fat phallic red-striped counter-intuitive crayon of bottom-feeder and cheese and gluten and flavorings.
However! Sigh….. There’s always a condition with me. Before I can go on record as saying that this awesome snack is ready to be gulped up by the eager masses, I need to point out the design flaw: unwrapping is a pain. I would love nothing more than to squeeze my fish paste product from it’s tube straight into my gaping maw. But instead, I am meant to peel the tube away, like a near-infinite Escherian spiral of red baloney-casing. But too much fish paste product goodness is left stuck to the walls of the golden sheath. Somehow, whether by oil or by toil, I want squeezy or somehow else more easy, (pleasie).
