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The East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in the last dusk of the first decade of the new millennium.

For reasons now obscured by the gauziness of time, I wind up at a Feast of Seven Fishes each December 24th. (Always, I might add, seated next to the look-alike sister of a film star on whom I’ve had a decades-long crush. And no, don’t ask–it’s a murky Dante / Beatrice / Gemma sort of thing; darkly twisted psychology crossed with One-Degree-Of-Someone-More-Talented-Than-Kevin-Bacon.)

Anyway, this is the day I annually make my Social-Obligation Apple Pie–which is also increasingly known as Dub-Mix Apple Pie because over the years I’ve reduced the ingredients to six, and lately I’ve even decreased their amounts. While I’m certain that the final destination of this recipe is unavoidably a baked apple skewered on a cinnamon stick and sprinkled with brown sugar, I’m fighting the temptation because my yearly dining companion seems to like current iteration of the pie–and when she smiles, she looks exactly like her sister . . .

You know what I love? The powder-finshed, matte-black Incase slider that lovingly (and minimally) surrounds my iPhone 4. You know what I hate? Pulling off the bottom of that case to dock the phone. You know what I hate even more? Charging it on its back, straight from USB cable.

And so I went searching, because surely I wasn’t alone in my docking need. And, lo, I wasn’t. Except that this Other Guy seemed to be an engineer–an engineer with access to machine shops and power lathes. In short, this Other Guy was in a position to actually do something about the proper docking of an iPhone inside an Incase slider. (Did I mention it’s powder-finished, matte-black and Seriously Minimal? Did I also indicate my more-than-slightly perverse love for it?) 

It’s a week later, and here it sits on my desk–a dock carved out of a single piece of aircraft-grade aluminum, with–wait for it–an anodized black finish. (Steady on, there–steady–be still, my design-fetishist’s heart.) A dock that literally has been machine-tooled to fit my powder-finished, matte- . . . well, you know. And, best of all, when the phone is off, the goddamned thing looks like it’s waiting to be discovered on the Moon in a Kubrick film–which is indisputably good.

And now, because I knew you were going to ask (how could you not?), here’s a short video of the dock’s first phase of manufacture:

Fig tart with caramelized onions, rosemary and Stilton (drizzled with honey). Long day; suddenly much better evening.

I’m thinking of pairing it with a Pinot Noir and Maddow. . .

Zero History, William Gibson’s new novel, has been released today. I’m a littler over a hundred pages into it, and WG is making the prose sing in a way equal to Pattern Recognition, my favorite of his novels to date.

Really? you say cautiously, looking askance at me, ready to be dismissive of any fanboy worship you detect. Except there isn’t any because none is needed. In terms of prose style, Gibson has mashed Banville into Ballard to often wondrous effect:

‘Nuff said . . .

For me, verse is infrequent punctuation to the constant flow of prose. Infrequent and also unexpected, because while I arduously search for the next elusive sentence no matter how long it may take, the poems thus far have always found me and arrive nearly whole when they do.

And though I dutifully capture and refine them, I’ve never been sure of their exact relationship to any of my long-form writing. But thinking about it, that’s not quite true. It’s less about uncertainty over the poems and more about the fact I try not to dwell on them. Maybe because I see them as momentary and  inexplicable impulses–like a split-second homoerotic thought or an instant of darkness while standing slightly too close to  the edge of something dangerously tall. It’s better not to think about these things too much; best not to follow their respective logics to whatever destinations they may lead.

And so all I can do while remaining honest is to shrug and and introduce the latest from what  is clearly my bicameral self–mostly produced by one part of me to the slight astonishment (and occasional annoyance) of the prose-centric other chamber: An aftershock from the East Coast quake woke me in the middle of the night last week–in much the same way that bad dreams regularly do. And instantly the entangled gist of “Aftershocks” was there, forcing me to polish it when I should have been bashing-out exposition. Natural disaster, meet neurosis; aftershock, this is anxiety.

But now it’s done, and true to my word, I’ll be more than happy to stop thinking about it. After all, no one needs dangerous thoughts at the edge of dangerous places . . .

Aftershocks