SCRIBS AND SCRATCHES

Since receiving the set of five new books a couple of weeks ago, there’s been a great gray blur in my brain---I liken it to that hazy fingerprint thing they put on the TV screen to obscure the faces of the innocent.  Nothing to talk about, nothing to relate.   We’ve had some wonderful times together, some lovely gatherings for meals and little parties; there’s been a little “work toward” some houseguests who have had to cancel (babies due to arrive in a few days!!) and a tiny bit of muchmuch MUCH- needed Fall house-straightening for the closing-in to come. 

 

But no words come, so I just ramble amongst little snips from my journals, of bits and pieces I jotted down when the ideas and phrases came to me in a “Hey---I can use that someday,” but which seem to fit into no rhyme nor reasonable prose.   They’re just snips and snaps which don’t relate, but seemed like a good idea when they came to me. 

 

Perhaps sometime in future I’ll have reason to use them; probably not. 

 

Wine in a box:  Cardbordeaux---say it fast enough and it sounds as if it would be in the same set of furniture as Cabernet

 

 

Marquetry: A vegetable stand under a tent.

 

 

Prostitality:   Parties for the sole purpose of getting guests to buy stuff

 

. . .as many lives as Dent-slain Agragag.

 

I’m prone to acrobatic sentences.

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I could never be a critic of anything, though I can think of wildly witty and scathing and apropos reviews of books, television shows, movies, people’s behavior and fashion and words, usually five minutes or the day after the proper time (if there COULD be a proper time to take it upon myself to offer an unsolicited opinion).     I chuckle over the dishpan at an unsaid bon mot or barb, telling and true, and I’m glad for the missed moment of opportunity which saved my manners once again.  But writing down and putting out there such reviews and criticisms as I read and hear, with no holds barred, no bridge unburnt, no prisoners taken---I’ll never have heart nor mind for such verbal vivisection.

    

 

 

OH, and beaten biscuits---I've made them. Once. Just as an experiment on a lazy Saturday morning. They're like a cross amongst a Ritz cracker and a dog biscuit and a Communion Wafer---the really hard, tough kind found in Baptist churches, which, if they weren't tiny enough to get back there and crunch between your back teeth, would do some serious dental damage. Or hang out like a mint until they melt sometime between the grape juice and "Just As I Am."

 

 

 

But just sitting down “to write something,” without having an idea before the start, feels like the typing equivalent of Ustinov’s Poirot in “Evil Under the Sun,”  strutting hobble-footed across the beach stones, puffed out and parading in that hideously magnificent bathing costume, wetting toes, oar-stroking with his windmilling arms and emerging, wet-to-the-knees with his invigorating pretense to exercise which had impressed no one save himself.

 

That’s what it feels like.

Moire non I hope, when the new season of COPS demands its blur back.