7/03/2006
Sick of This, Part One
It should have been a peaceful, perhaps even restful weekend. On Friday night, I spoke, somewhat productively, with my roommate, had a few beers, read a couple of Damon Runyon short stories and went to bed early.
Before seven Saturday morning, I tightened bicycle brake cables in anticipation of a ride to the 'burbs later to meet with Mojo Collins about a proposed slide guitar festival and then to have dinner with a friend and his ex-wife, who I introduced more than 20 years ago and who seem to be enjoying a reunion since I put them back in touch with one another a few months back.
After visiting with them, I was to go to a big Fourth of July party hosted by friends from work, and I'd even been offered a car ride to that event, a real plus since one can't see bike tire-puncturing nails and glass in gutters in the dark and because I do hate to drink responsibly.
The plan began to unravel when I got out of the shower at about 2:45, preparatory to leaving home at 3:15 to stop by a bank to make a deposit and by the grocery store for wine or flowers or something to take to Larry's house, where I was due at 5:30, as a dinner guest gift and then get to Mojo's house, near Larry's by four. As soon as
I turned the water off, I heard knocking on the front door. Hoping it was UPS bringing me those yopo seeds I'd ordered mid-month and looking forward to the hallucinogenic snuff one makes from them, I tugged on some shorts and went to the door.
It was Annie, offering to show me the new highway bypass around Loonville that had just opened that morning in return for half a tank of gas. She promised to get me to Mojo's house by four and we left my house at 3:10. Well, I've seen highways bordered by swamps before and got no aesthetic joy out of the road, but it was nice to see Annie positive and excited about something harmless and, since she'd worked for the highway department before yanking a cigarette out of a co-worker's mouth while driving a departmental vehicle (which was supposed to be nonsmoking space, being government property, but an official board of inquiry later decided would have been a shitload safer with a little cigarette smoke going out the open window than
with Annie careening all over an interstate highway while assaulting one of her colleagues), I could understand how the beauties of new pavement might not be so subtle to her.
Looking at my watch, I told her that we didn't have time to stop at the county line produce stand that marked the end of our tour, so she pulled into the produce stand parking lot and began asking me, "Don't you want a watermelon to take to Larry's?," and then, when I declined, asking me if I wanted tomatoes, then peaches, then every
other goddamn sonofabitching fruit and vegetable under the palm-thatched awning before us.
I kept saying,"No," and reiterating that we didn't have time to shop there, but since I'd been dumb enough to have handed her $25 cash back at my house for the requested gasoline, she got out of the car, went into the stand and immediately found a gay, male couple from her church to hug and annoy before starting her leisurely, melon thumping bullshit. I stood in the sun and smoked a cigarette.
You see, these fuckers on mental disability have no concept of time. They don't have to work, they've got all the time in the world to fuck around, sleep late, have to have their coffee shop coffee before they can do absolutely nothing in the morning and so on and so forth.
A few weeks ago, I watched "Dirty Filthy Love" with Annie, and her take on the film, which would be a "Sleepless in Seattle" quality chick flick if the protagonist wasn't an obsessive compulsive paranoid with Tourette's Syndrome, was that the people around this irritating, mentally ill, screwed-up mess should have just listened to him.
Yes, Dirty Filthy Love" is probably a good test of sanity, guys. Watch it with a woman you're getting to know -- If she thinks people with lives and loves and responsibilities should listen over and over again to some crazy fucker tell the story of how his wife
left him because he wanted to leave Istanbul and return home early from their vacation because he'd accidentally broken an aftershave bottle on the bathroom floor and might have gotten a microsliver of glass in his foot, then she's fucking crazy, herself, and you should either start running, keep running and don't stop to shit or be the constant victim of crazy women that I am. It's your choice. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Of course, her estimated half-pound of peaches weighed in at just less than four pounds (yeah, anybody could make that mistake), and so there was an ugly confrontation with the bewildered new arrival from Honduras at the checkout station, and we got back in her car fifteen miles from Mojo's house at 3:50.
Originally, we were to stop at my bank so that I could make a deposit, but that had to be abandoned, and I hate being late, especially to a meeting at which other participants have to think I have my shit together enough to, oh, let's say, be able to goddamn tell fucking time, and I explained all this to Annie, which made her do 70 in a 45 zone until I agreed that I'd rather be late than die in a loud car crash/ball of fire/disaster film epic, and she let me out at Mojo's at 4:10.
He was great company, positive, full of ideas (starting with moving our meeting to the cafe tables outside the Trendies-A-Plenty bookstore coffee shop, where I could smoke) and in all ways the right man to start planning this festival with. At 5:20, he gave me a ride the three blocks to Larry's house. Everything was clicking along, back on track. I yucked it up with a contented, domesticated Larry and delightful, bright Cindy and put down more beers than were really necessary to stave off dehydration. Larry generally followed directions given by Cindy, visiting him from her base in Confederate City, with the results one might expect from "generally following
directions" in a kitchen. There are some of foods I don't care for fresh, but am quite fond of frozen or canned or otherwise processed by others.
Asparagus, spinach and mangoes are on that list. I can't get the fibrous threads out of asparagus and don't give a damn about the satisfying crunch. Fresh spinach tastes like dirt no matter what,
and mangoes ... well, if they'd grow on trees pre-peeled, in chilled, glass jars of heavy syrup, then I'd have some serious mango mania, but they don't. They grow on trees or bushes or wherever the hell they grow before reaching grocery store bins in the form of sorry-ass substitutes for unripe apples with acrid, bark-thick peels.
"Oh well," must have thought Larry, at least if I make them into tricky shish kabobs, alternating slices of mango with the barklike peel still in place with unpeeled shrimp, everyone will be concentrating so much on wrestling the chitinous, clinging shells off
of hot, greasy shrimp without destroying the meat while fighting back tears of pain from having to handle piping hot shrimp fresh from the grill with one's bare fingers in the first fucking place that they won't even notice these cocksuckin', underdone mangoes. If you let them spend a little, but oh no, not enough time on the grill, mangoes develop the flavor of a boot heel that's trod on unripe apples, yet still retain their feisty, fibrous, annoying raw character.
And, of course, they caramelize just enough to make the neighboring, searing hot shrimp exoskeletons flanking them on the kabob skewers stick to your hands when you try to take them off the goddamn shrimp in order to make your meal become actual food. Oh well, my life has taught me that not all dinners lead to actually having a meal, so what the fuck. They were smoking cigarettes during the meal, anyway,
and that's an appetite suppressant for me. I smoke cigarettes; I do not eat them. Cigarette smoke in a kitchen will ruin chopped lettuce or onions for me. The company was good, and they gave me a ride to the party at about 8:30, which was great, and the party was a grand time. I stayed late and drank epically.
Before seven Saturday morning, I tightened bicycle brake cables in anticipation of a ride to the 'burbs later to meet with Mojo Collins about a proposed slide guitar festival and then to have dinner with a friend and his ex-wife, who I introduced more than 20 years ago and who seem to be enjoying a reunion since I put them back in touch with one another a few months back.
After visiting with them, I was to go to a big Fourth of July party hosted by friends from work, and I'd even been offered a car ride to that event, a real plus since one can't see bike tire-puncturing nails and glass in gutters in the dark and because I do hate to drink responsibly.
The plan began to unravel when I got out of the shower at about 2:45, preparatory to leaving home at 3:15 to stop by a bank to make a deposit and by the grocery store for wine or flowers or something to take to Larry's house, where I was due at 5:30, as a dinner guest gift and then get to Mojo's house, near Larry's by four. As soon as
I turned the water off, I heard knocking on the front door. Hoping it was UPS bringing me those yopo seeds I'd ordered mid-month and looking forward to the hallucinogenic snuff one makes from them, I tugged on some shorts and went to the door.
It was Annie, offering to show me the new highway bypass around Loonville that had just opened that morning in return for half a tank of gas. She promised to get me to Mojo's house by four and we left my house at 3:10. Well, I've seen highways bordered by swamps before and got no aesthetic joy out of the road, but it was nice to see Annie positive and excited about something harmless and, since she'd worked for the highway department before yanking a cigarette out of a co-worker's mouth while driving a departmental vehicle (which was supposed to be nonsmoking space, being government property, but an official board of inquiry later decided would have been a shitload safer with a little cigarette smoke going out the open window than
with Annie careening all over an interstate highway while assaulting one of her colleagues), I could understand how the beauties of new pavement might not be so subtle to her.
Looking at my watch, I told her that we didn't have time to stop at the county line produce stand that marked the end of our tour, so she pulled into the produce stand parking lot and began asking me, "Don't you want a watermelon to take to Larry's?," and then, when I declined, asking me if I wanted tomatoes, then peaches, then every
other goddamn sonofabitching fruit and vegetable under the palm-thatched awning before us.
I kept saying,"No," and reiterating that we didn't have time to shop there, but since I'd been dumb enough to have handed her $25 cash back at my house for the requested gasoline, she got out of the car, went into the stand and immediately found a gay, male couple from her church to hug and annoy before starting her leisurely, melon thumping bullshit. I stood in the sun and smoked a cigarette.
You see, these fuckers on mental disability have no concept of time. They don't have to work, they've got all the time in the world to fuck around, sleep late, have to have their coffee shop coffee before they can do absolutely nothing in the morning and so on and so forth.
A few weeks ago, I watched "Dirty Filthy Love" with Annie, and her take on the film, which would be a "Sleepless in Seattle" quality chick flick if the protagonist wasn't an obsessive compulsive paranoid with Tourette's Syndrome, was that the people around this irritating, mentally ill, screwed-up mess should have just listened to him.
Yes, Dirty Filthy Love" is probably a good test of sanity, guys. Watch it with a woman you're getting to know -- If she thinks people with lives and loves and responsibilities should listen over and over again to some crazy fucker tell the story of how his wife
left him because he wanted to leave Istanbul and return home early from their vacation because he'd accidentally broken an aftershave bottle on the bathroom floor and might have gotten a microsliver of glass in his foot, then she's fucking crazy, herself, and you should either start running, keep running and don't stop to shit or be the constant victim of crazy women that I am. It's your choice. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Of course, her estimated half-pound of peaches weighed in at just less than four pounds (yeah, anybody could make that mistake), and so there was an ugly confrontation with the bewildered new arrival from Honduras at the checkout station, and we got back in her car fifteen miles from Mojo's house at 3:50.
Originally, we were to stop at my bank so that I could make a deposit, but that had to be abandoned, and I hate being late, especially to a meeting at which other participants have to think I have my shit together enough to, oh, let's say, be able to goddamn tell fucking time, and I explained all this to Annie, which made her do 70 in a 45 zone until I agreed that I'd rather be late than die in a loud car crash/ball of fire/disaster film epic, and she let me out at Mojo's at 4:10.
He was great company, positive, full of ideas (starting with moving our meeting to the cafe tables outside the Trendies-A-Plenty bookstore coffee shop, where I could smoke) and in all ways the right man to start planning this festival with. At 5:20, he gave me a ride the three blocks to Larry's house. Everything was clicking along, back on track. I yucked it up with a contented, domesticated Larry and delightful, bright Cindy and put down more beers than were really necessary to stave off dehydration. Larry generally followed directions given by Cindy, visiting him from her base in Confederate City, with the results one might expect from "generally following
directions" in a kitchen. There are some of foods I don't care for fresh, but am quite fond of frozen or canned or otherwise processed by others.
Asparagus, spinach and mangoes are on that list. I can't get the fibrous threads out of asparagus and don't give a damn about the satisfying crunch. Fresh spinach tastes like dirt no matter what,
and mangoes ... well, if they'd grow on trees pre-peeled, in chilled, glass jars of heavy syrup, then I'd have some serious mango mania, but they don't. They grow on trees or bushes or wherever the hell they grow before reaching grocery store bins in the form of sorry-ass substitutes for unripe apples with acrid, bark-thick peels.
"Oh well," must have thought Larry, at least if I make them into tricky shish kabobs, alternating slices of mango with the barklike peel still in place with unpeeled shrimp, everyone will be concentrating so much on wrestling the chitinous, clinging shells off
of hot, greasy shrimp without destroying the meat while fighting back tears of pain from having to handle piping hot shrimp fresh from the grill with one's bare fingers in the first fucking place that they won't even notice these cocksuckin', underdone mangoes. If you let them spend a little, but oh no, not enough time on the grill, mangoes develop the flavor of a boot heel that's trod on unripe apples, yet still retain their feisty, fibrous, annoying raw character.
And, of course, they caramelize just enough to make the neighboring, searing hot shrimp exoskeletons flanking them on the kabob skewers stick to your hands when you try to take them off the goddamn shrimp in order to make your meal become actual food. Oh well, my life has taught me that not all dinners lead to actually having a meal, so what the fuck. They were smoking cigarettes during the meal, anyway,
and that's an appetite suppressant for me. I smoke cigarettes; I do not eat them. Cigarette smoke in a kitchen will ruin chopped lettuce or onions for me. The company was good, and they gave me a ride to the party at about 8:30, which was great, and the party was a grand time. I stayed late and drank epically.
