Oatmeal for Breakfast...

I eat oatmeal for breakfast. Made in the DFAC with brown sugar and raisins. I eat it alone in my office. I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.

Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you. That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with. Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion. 

Nevertheless, this morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge, as he called it with Dylan Thomas.

Thomas said I was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone. He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as wholesome as Thomas claims, still, you can learn something from it.

Yesterday morning, for instance, Dylan told me about writing Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge.

He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet. He didn't offer the full story of writing Do Not Go Gentle as I had hoped.

But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field started on it for him, and the line, "Their frail deeds might have danced a green bay" came to him while eating oatmeal alone.