SO MUCH FOR THAT or (THE YEAR OF BEST INTENTIONS)

220. SO MUCH FOR THAT or (THE YEAR OF BEST INTENTIONS):

OK then I'm not sure where any of that came from but looking at the paper on the wall I'm thinking pure chance - an old barn pattern with little chickens and a rooster and a weathervane and a red barn and barnyard repeated ad infinitum in some older format of what once somehow was bleakly called 'early American' and which style graced many a 1960's kitchen and kitchenette (two more words gone by the wayside) and which is now probably all gone (yet here still holding the connections to food - pig-out country dining in a most happy fashion) and a calendar on the wall proclaims the 'year of best intentions' but it's inconsequential for sure since it's for a tire company so I cannot make out any connection there - except for tires on vehicles which take people to endless eateries along the highway but...OH NO!!...not that again! - and the Michelin Man was a fat tire pig and they're round and filled up and roly-poly too but who knew that back in the old days anyway when starch and food and all that could very well get you through the bleakest of the cold winter months when you most needed some fat to work off to make the needed body heat to survive the frost and work of the lesser-food season which came upon you - and I never knew a fat farmer an obese dairyman and I never saw one who couldn't work off a meal baling hay or throwing a few milk cans around and year after year of best intentions shall make Jack a thin boy 'see saw Marjory Daw Jack shall have a NEW master and he shall make but a penny a day because he can't work any faster' I thought I'd heard that not so long ago and if that too was early American then call me late for supper (yum yum I can't wait to eat again and 'the smell of pig meat warmed my heart' said Anthony Victor Lavalle 'the pleasures of food were stolen from me in the interest of being svelte/but now it's over I'm done with that/I'm letting out my belt') and opposite to that actually I'm thinking of that skinny dark guy Franz Kafka brooding on and on about starvation and lack in his story 'The Hunger Artist' the premise of which goes something like this - some strange solitary and reflective type guy a dark character a loner a brooder goes into a zoo over to the panther's cage and watches the panther as it paces back and forth in its beauty and form devouring flesh and feed as it is thrown to him and the admiring eyes of all those who have paid to see it are gaping and gawking at the live beauty of what they see and what they're witnessing and this guy too is fascinated and still and fixated by the sight but in his mind he wishes to do the opposite and somehow convinces a zoo guard to give him a cage and he goes in and has people pay admission to watch him STARVE waste away simply wither from no food and this is his wish his ideal the prime goal of his life and he gets thinner and thinner and withers to nothing and the crowd - whatever there was - dwindles too and fewer and fewer people until none at all visit him in his cage to watch and he eventually withers and dies emaciated and skeletal in front of NO ONE in particular - a sad sideshow to a sideshow an abandoned forgotten cage tucked away in a corner and eventually covered with a tarp beneath which our hero - lone stark thin and silent - dies a lonely slow death - as was his wish : his very own 'Year of Best Intentions'.