Zero degrees this morning, after three or four days of warm March-like sloppiness. Why do my weather reports always ask to be written as sentence fragments? In real life weather is full of verbs. In real life pianos are full of dust and bathroom sinks are always decorated with hair, no matter how finicky the sink cleaner tries to be.

Our house is cold and the poodle is curled into a tight ball. She looks like the kind of fat caterpillar I always want to poke with a stick, which is odd since she is not fat. I am thinking about the fact that I need to practice the fiddle tune "Red-Haired Boy" before band rehearsal this afternoon. Also I am thinking about this second-rate coffee I am drinking, and about Tom's homemade chicken ravioli, which we had for dinner last night and which was not second-rate by any means. Also I am thinking about Eliot's The Waste Land, which I keep wanting to spell as Wasteland, a spelling that makes it look more like Portland or Ireland or Disneyland and less like Mysterious Land of Legend. This leads me to an interesting thought: if Disneyland were spelled Disney Land, would it be more like Mysterious Land of Legend and less like Foodland?

I can never decide if these kinds of frivolous distractions are useful or stupid. At my reading on Thursday night, my friend Dave said something along the lines of "I like your poems because they are funny and dark at the same time." His actual words were more nuanced than what I just wrote, but still: what he was implying was the old issue of I Can't Stop Wondering Why So Many Strange Bits of Memorabilia Turn Up Again in My Life As Bookmarks. In other words, "Look What Thoughts Will Do," which is my favorite Lefty Frizzell title of all time.

If my house were warmer, I might have more to say about this.