Old and Cold

INT.  RAMSHACKLE STUDIO APARTMENT IN SOUTH TROY - LATE AFTERNOON 

The Artist is 85 years old.  It's cold in his room.  He's wearing two jackets and the only thing that's keeping him warm is tearing his paintings into strips and burning them in the wood stove.  All the wood he had, including the stretchers for the paintings, is gone -- already burned.  He'd get more, but walking is difficult.  He weighs 450 pounds.  He's warmed a can of dog food on top of the stove and is in the process of scooping it onto two plates.

THE DOG

I can't believe you're eating that shit.  I can barely stomach it.

THE ARTIST

It's not so bad once you put some salt on it.  Oh look!  A worm! 

Wow.  That's a grim image.  It came to me this morning as I ate my corned beef hash (Hormel) with two fried eggs on top.  Because it's not that big a leap from corned beef hash to dog food.  I guessing the only difference is the presence of salt and monosodium glutamate.

And the hash was great.  Way better than the cream of mushroom soup I had a week ago.  I don't think I've had real corned beef hash in ten years.  Maybe significantly longer.  The Ilium Cafe in downtown Troy serves something they call corned beef hash, but as is often the case in high-end restaurants, they over-think the hash and lose the truth of the thing.

Back to the cream of mush:  A friend of mine told me that if I'm going to go the food nostalgia route then I have to go all the way.  Meaning that I cook some chicken thighs in the C of M and serve it over rice.  Or better, egg noodles.  My mother was an egg noodles girl, while Dad skewed towards rice.  But I'm not sure I'm that motivated.

Furthermore, while we're sharing, I didn't actually get to bed at 9:20 last night.  Closer to midnight.  I spent the interval sitting on the sofa reading The Goldfinch, which I finally just bought for myself as an early Christmas present.

Note to readers:  It's entirely possible that I've been referring to both this painting and the identically named novel by Donna Tartt as the Bullfinch, since that's how I subconsciously typed it when I googled the image.  If I did, I apologize.  I'm disinclined to go back and change.

Once it's down, it's down.
Exactly.