Niente Note:
De Minimis
30 January 2019

¶ Every once in a while, it must be acknowledged that There Is Nothing To Report. It wouldn’t be true to say that nothing happened today — something is always happening — but it is very much the case that nothing was achieved. No little stories came to a conclusion. One might say that lots of little stories began, or at least a few, but whether they’ll prove to be interesting stories won’t be clear for a while. Working on the writing project, for example, I turned for the first time in decades to a spiral-bound notebook, and I filled the first page with my illegible scrawl. (As soon as I’m done here, I have to type out the handwritten notes, while I still have an idea of what they were meant to say.) It was part of developing a method for working on the writing project that breaks with years of relying exclusively on the computer. The writing project has revealed a certain incompatibility with screens and keyboards and a need for paper and pencils. It must not be imagined that I am going to draft a lengthy document in longhand. But the method that I am developing will make use of old technologies as well as new. 

Aren’t you dying to know more? 

We did order another pizza from Vinnie’s, the place around the corner that I mentioned last week. This time, I figured out how to ask for mushrooms along with pepperoni, and ordering was once again extremely simple. The pizza arrived right in the middle of the infusion, but we were not too discombobulated because yesterday’s infusion was also interrupted by a delivery — by the delivery, as it happened, of this week’s medical supplies (including the antibiotic syringes, which keep in the refrigerator).

I wish I could figure out how to make my homemade pizzas taste like Vinnie’s, or at least make them share that basic pizzeria flavor that I happen to like. I understand that the whole point of homemade pizza is to avoid that flavor, which is why I’ve given up on homemade for the time being. Kathleen tells me that I’m crazy, that my pizzas taste great, but the fact remains that I don’t like them.

After the pizza, we watched “Deceived by Flight,” the Inspector Morse episode involving cricket and cocaine. Although I’ve seen it more often than most, and know every twist and turn, it’s always good to see Jane Hooker. And the pile-up of comeuppance at the end is not unsatisfying.

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