Arose before anybody else — came down and went out to look at Mamma Earth and her green clothes — Breakfasted — Read aloud from Madame Recamier’s memoirs for the ladies — Kept this up for an hour, got as hoarse as a fog horn. Think the ladies got jealous of Madame Recamier — It’s so hot — I put everything off — Hot weather is the mother of procrastination — my energy is at ebb tide — I’m getting Caloricly stupid — Tried to read some of the involved sentences in Miss Cleveland’s book, mind stumbled on a ponderous perioration and fell in between two paragraphs and lay unconscious for ten minutes — Smoked a cigar under the alias of Reina Victoria think it must have been seasoned in a sewer — Mrs Clark told me a story about Louise’s mother singing in a company a song called I have no home, I have no home, somebody halloed out that he would provide her with a good home if she would stop — I understood Mrs Clark to say that this gentleman was a bookkeeper in a smallpox hospital — Mrs G has placed fly paper all over the house. These cunning engines of insectiverous destruction are doing a big business — One of the first things I do when I reach heaven is to ascertain what flies are made for — this done I’ll be ready for business, perhaps I am too sanguine and may bring up at the other terminal and one of my punishments will be a general ukase from Satan to keep mum when Edison tries to get any entomological information — Satan is the scarecrow in the religious cornfield — Towards sundown went with the ladies on yacht — Talked about love, cupid, Apollo, Adonis, ideal persons. One of the ladies said she had never come across her ideal — I suggested she wait until the second Advent — Damon steered the galleon, Damon’s heart is so big it inclines him to embonpoint — On shore it was hot enough to test safes but on the water twas cool as a cucumber in an arctic cache — Mrs G has promised for three consecutive days to have some clams a la Taft, she has perspired her memory all away — Been hunting around for some ant nests, so I can have a good watch of them laying on the grass — Don’t seem to be any around — don’t think an ant could make a decent living in a land where a yankee has to emigrate from to survive — For the first time in my life I have bought a pair of premeditatedly tight shoes — These shoes are small and look nice. My No 2 mind (acquired mind) has succeeded in convincing my No 1 mind (primal mind or heart) that it is pure vanity, conceit and folly to suffer bodily pains that ones person may have graces the outcome of secret agony — Read the funny column in The Traveler and went to bed.
(Thomas Edison’s diary, 20 July 1885)
Verbatim Poetry 