strawberry cream cheese the way it was meant to be

1. Toast a bagel.

2. Spread it thickly with cream cheese (real cream cheese, now, none of that diluted spread stuff).

3. Pile on thin slices of fresh strawberries until the bagel is somewhat precarious but not an outright architectural failure.

4. Drip just a little bit of honey on top.

Oh my goodness.

Ode on a Golden Bundt Spice Cake With Lemon Glaze

So, today I meant to write a midterm essay for American Short Story, but instead I learned how to smoke a brisket and baked an exceptionally beautiful spice cake.

I don't think John Keats had thought about spice cakes when he wrote "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Spice cakes embody transient mortal beauty, more valuable simply because of its impermanence.

Really, Keats should've written an ode on a spice cake to explore this angle of the aesthetic experience. But no, spice cakes aren't romantic enough for him. He has to write about seasons and birdwatching and pottery, when there are beautiful spice cakes in the world unimmortalized by verse.

But wait -- if he immortalized a spice cake, he'd be missing the point of its fleeting beauty, violating the very ephemerality which sharpens its significance.

So. . . maybe Keats actually wrote a poem about spice cakes by not writing a poem about them. His conspicuous silence on the subject actually proves his reverence and appreciation for the evanescent beauty of spice cakes.

(This ramble is indebted to this poem. Also, forgive my ridiculousness; my blog looked lonely and so I posted on it.)