goodbye readers

Well, everyone, this is the last post.  Thanks for reading.  Jono

goodbye from Jono Tosch on Vimeo.
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SAYONARA!

Wed Aug 28 2013

Yesterday the company who provided the portable toilet to the house under construction across the street from Caroline’s house came to empty it.  A truck with a giant white tank on its bed pulled into the driveway, and shortly the entire neighborhood smelled like shit.  I pulled my shirt up over my nose and finished my business on the internet.  Then I went inside to tell Caroline about the smell, but the smell had already entered the apartment. 

My friend Andy has been living in Germany for the last ten years.  He calls me about twice a month.  This spring he called me and told me about the “dirt menu” some chef in Japan created.  The menu is a $120 tasting menu, and each item on the menu contains “dirt”—i.e. specialty compost made under very controlled conditions.  I don’t know too much more about the menu.  My phone is ringing off the hook—an expression that no longer makes sense—and I need my breakfast. 

hangovers

The other night I got drunk.  Zoe had come home from Brooklyn—she’d been away all summer and we’d missed her—so me and Caroline and Zoe picked up a pizza and a bottle of wine and took them back to their apartment to celebrate her return.  I disappeared between ten and eleven PM to say goodbye to Emily who moved to Brooklyn the following morning.  When I returned, Caroline and Zoe had not moved from their seats at the table.  I assumed that they had continued to drink wine, but they had not.  I alternated between wine and beer and said a number of harmless but inane things, much to their amusement.   The next morning, I woke up to a terrible hangover. 

In five years I have made five hundred posts here, and I would be willing to bet that at least ten of those posts were written under the influence of the anxiety ridden euphoria bad hangovers can provide.  Similarly, I know that at least a few posts were written whilst totally drunk.  There is always the temptation to hit “publish” or, when writing e-mails, “send,” when you are drunk, but I am here to tell you that you should not do that.  E-mails especially do not disappear into memory the way inane conversations can.  If you say something dumb to your friends when you are drunk, they can only rely upon their memories, but when you write a drunken e-mail, a permanent record of your stupidity is created.  If I ever deleted a post early on a Saturday morning, it is because I was feeling shameful and wanted to retract it.  I have retracted many posts for many reasons over the years. 

This should come as no surprise to my loyal readers, many of whom would probably readily admit to having done the same—or even better, readily admit to reading a post written on a hangover whilst having a hangover themselves.  Such was my station in life for a period while creating this blog, suitable for poets I suppose.  If you want to know why I chose to show a picture of a compost tumbler on this second-to-last or third-to-last post, it is because compost symbolizes death and renewal—death to that which has come before and renewal for that which has yet to come.  I must now make my dinner: stir fried green beans and brown rice, a recipe I learned from my Chinese boss in Bloomington, Indiana, many millions of years ago. 

tile saw

Someone is running a tile saw next door.  Never mind.  It’s not a tile saw.  It’s just some anonymous whirring noise, and now it’s done.  It’s Friday morning, the twenty-third of August, 2013—i.e. approximately one week before the conclusion of this blog.  I am on Caroline’s side porch.  There is a slight breeze.  I am in my pajamas.  We shall swim today. 

The saw noise has returned.  It is a tile saw.  I went onto the front porch and found Caroline reading Al Jazeera because she could not access the New York Times.  The house across the street is having its kitchen remodled.  A team of roofers was there yesterday, replacing some slates on the roof.  One roofer attempted to emasculate the other roofer by telling him that his saw was “short.”  He responded that he had been using his short saw for twenty-five years. 

I can now hear the distinct sound of a garbage truck.  There is a gas station about one hundred yards from here.  I am guessing that the garbage truck is emptying the dumpster there.  Sometimes I fetch Caroline chocolate bars from that gas station.  Two houses and a bunch of trees stand between me it.  I don’t have much else to report this morning, except this: last night I dreamed that Caroline was ordering hundreds of dollars worth of pizza and several salads.  I was concerned about the number of toppings.  It was going to be expensive.  For one salad, the “Delmarva salad,” she ordered two separate dressings.  That concerned me, too.  I am going to miss writing this blog.           

loose tomato video

Yesterday afternoon I ate some pan con tomate on my front porch.  A bee landed on the tomato and began to eat.  I observed the bee for several minutes and then took the sandwich for a trip around the house and garden. 

bread and tomato from Jono Tosch on Vimeo.
  

To make pan con tomate, toast some nice bread and then rub raw garlic onto the toasted bread.  Drizzle the bread with olive oil and then put some slices of fresh tomato onto the bread.  Sprinkle with salt and enjoy.  

a real book made of paper

I am sitting comfortably on a wire chair with my feet up, on  this beautiful morning, the fifteenth of August.  It's surprisingly cool, the morning, not the chair.  A few puffy clouds are in the sky.  I am not sure what I will do with the remainder of my life.  Will I get married?  Will I have children?  Will I have a home in the woods?  From where I am sitting on this porch, I can see a portable toilet.  It's so blue.  I has a white roof.  It is parked in front of a one-car garage.  It has a little black chimney.  There is a tall, old oak tree behind it, but I cannot tell you which specie of oak it is.  Is it a pin oak?  A white oak?  I don’t know my oaks.  I don’t know my pines either.  Donald Rumsfeld once said that there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.  I wonder what the unknown unknowns of my life are.  It’s possible that I will become enthralled by a hat this afternoon.  It’s possible that this will be another ordinary day, one that I will not remember.

Jacob wrote to me the other day and told me that he wished he could have a collection of my essays, in book form, to have and to hold, a real book made of paper.  I would love that.  I have dreamed about that for a long time.  But will that book happen?  Is there a publisher out there who would want to publish a collection of lyrical essays about botany and the life of the self?  I have no idea.  I hardly know how I will spend the remainder of the morning.  This is only a note to say hello to the world.  Hello world whose trees I cannot identify on this surprisingly cool morning.  Hello portable toilet.  Hello vacuum cleaner sounds arising from the hospital.  My next objective is to make some toast and spread a bunch of peanut butter onto it.  Beyond that peanut butter toast, I have no idea.  I hope I do become enthralled by a hat, and I hope the hat is huge.     

sunflowers

I am not sure how I feel about sunflowers.  Normally, I am against them.  When I see sunflowers as cut flowers in restaurants and bars, I want to puke.  They are such obvious flowers, so common.  You can find them in any supermarket.  They are too popular for their beauty.  They are easy to grow and once cut they last for a long time.  I grew an enormous one as a child.  There is a picture of me standing under an enormous bloom that is bigger than my head.  Their enormity is probably part of their popularity.  They are freaks of the flower world.  People probably pant around enormous sunflowers.  People probably become drippily romantic around them.  It’s popular to ooh and ahh over their symmetries.  The radial pattern of their centers has been forcibly aligned with progressive political parties and multi-national oil companies.  There is a battle over what they mean.  They hold so much sway over our imaginations, far too much if you ask me.  And yet I planted an abundance of them this year.  I cut them and give them to Caroline.  She likes them, and I like giving them to her.  They look good in her apartment, much better than the terribly uniform sunflowers for sale at Stop n Shop.

But I did not plant them for cut flowers.  I planted them because I thought they would attract gold finches to my garden, as I've seen them do in Ed's garden for years.  One gold finch did come to my garden about a week ago, but it did not stop to eat sunflower seeds.  It perched for a moment on another, sunflower-like flower in my garden.  Then it flew away, just like me.  I probably finished up whatever hurried business I was doing at home and straightaway drove across town to Caroline’s house, quite possibly with a bouquet of flowers and some cut herbs.  If one hundred gold finches were to come to feed on my sunflower seeds, I would probably not be around to see them, so frequently am I gone.  But I don’t mind how gone I’ve been.  When we trade one pleasure for another, how can we complain?  It’s like the Frank O’Hara poem that says, “the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won/and in a sense we’re all winning/we’re alive.”  Sometimes I say that I would rather not be alive, but I understand what the poet means.  Being alive is a kind of victory over death.  Have you heard?  Death can overtake you at any moment.   Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, or, as it were, a bunch of sunflowers.  

I am home now and waiting on a friend.  I am on my porch.  After a day of rain and heavy clouds, the sun has finally come out.  My sunflowers are between me and the street, possibly atrocious symbols of something possibly profound, possibly only vegetable matter screens. My upstairs neighbor is on the driveway,  pacing, smoking, reading a book.  The air smells like vanilla.  A moped just went by, putt putt puttering, dumbly like a fart.  It’s a completely ordinary August afternoon by all accounts.  Oilchanges will be over in two weeks.