Saturday, October 31, 2009

Happy Haloween


"So Autumn’s not the end, not the last rung
Of any ladder in the yearly climb

"When that is deathly old which once was young,
Since time’s no ladder but a constant wheel


"Like an old paddled mill that dips and churns
The mill-race, and upon the summit turns

"Unceasingly to heel
Over, and scoop fresh water out of time."

Poem: 
Vita Sackville-West
, 
The Garden, Autumn
Pictures: Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan, October 2009

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Vacation


And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.

- Edward Thomas Sowing

It rained last night! I'm off for 2 weeks.

Saturday, October 03, 2009

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

After all, tomorrow is another day. Margaret Mitchel

I think that was the name of the column in Cosmo. You’d meet Dick and Jane who would each frame the issue from the standpoint of themselves as the longsuffering victims. Then the Wise (i.e. Real) Doctor would preach at them until they were Saved and whatnot.

Tech Support Guy and I went to the grocery store yesterday. We each came home with our favorite staples replaced, and each made our own favorite sandwich for dinner.

TSG speaks:
I ate a baloney sandwich on Styrofoam day-old, generic, wonder-bread slathered with the butteroid material in the half-gallon vat of generic you-won’t-believe-its-just-lard, and topped with several peeled slabs of generic processed cheese log of orange rubbery heavy-weight jello-cheese product. I plated that with ruffled cheesy potato chips in a relatively somber international orange, that we both agree is god’s most perfect food. My meal was accompanied by an amusing little pink wine from a box. Note also, that I decant my beverage into a foggy plastic glass stained with your farmer bros coffee and/or your cola and artificial sugar flavored phosphoric acid. A plastic tub of plastic chocolate pudding and carcinogens topped off my meal.

Weeping Sore speaks:
I had a sandwich composed of artisan cheese bread, gourmet mustard, Swiss cheese and pastrami and topped with a couple of fresh organic romaine lettuce leaves. My sandwich too, was also accompanied by god’s most perfect food ruffled cheese chips. I sipped a martini made with vanilla vodka and organic Italian blood orange soda, mixed 1:1.

Wise Counselor
No. This marriage cannot be saved…. Well, let’s see if we can’t make something good about this crap sandwich of a marriage. The gulf in the culinary tastes of TSG and WS might at first seem irreconcilable, but…

Ok. Let’s suppose no evidence remains about how the spatter stains of that luminol-fluoresced wall got there. Let’s say forensic analysis of samples taken do not match either TCG or WS, or their latch-key child’s blood.

Didn’t T, (can I call you Tech?) use coarse kosher salt, and didn’t W use homeopathic doses of the same coarse kosher salt? Yes? Yes! Didn’t you both design, build, and consume a sandwich composed of bread, filler, lubricant/sauce? That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!

And, at the end of the day, it isn’t about the more sophisticated chemical compounds Mother Nature wouldn’t know from a chicken in an orange jumpsuit. It’s not about the preservatives, pesticides or other carcinogenic trace materials consumed. The one unshakable foundation of your marriage must be the potato chips.

Think about this. How many kinds of potato chips are there in this universe? There must be hundreds. And yet, you both agree that the foundation of your diverse sandwich tastes is the potato chip that meets the following criteria:
1) ruffled to permit maximum transfer of your topping of choice (T: canned onion dip. W: homemade Holy Christ roasted tomato ketchup).
2) Seasoned/coated with a fine grit dust of orange powder of various tones ranging from Headache International Orange Neon to clay-colored turmeric yellow.
3) Composition of Seasonal Dust is preferably cheesoid, but honey mesquite barbeque is acceptable to W whose more sophisticated palate enjoys a savory adventure from time to time.

Which, if I’m not mistaken is the secret to a perfect marriage that will transcend any difference in sandwich composition. That, and plus lies. Can’t have a lasting love without a generous pinch of denial in these tough times.

Voiceover in a voice of Kent Brokman:
TSG and WS lived happily ever after, at least according to the settlement decree approved by the courts and published by TMZ. And who the hell are you to raise your redundantly Supercilious eyebrows?

Did I mention I’m hormonal? Forgot what a mood swing felt like. It’s a bumpier ride than I remember, but something is twitching inside my brain, and I’m holding on so far. There may be something to this bio-identical hormone replacement therapy. But then again, Big Brother would say that’s anecdotal, invalid, femino-centric discourse. To which I’d reply – Dude, stop blathering. Take a placebo and chill.

My blood tests surprised Doc who said my testosterone is “off the charts”. T is out picking up my estriol and som’pin else that is not horse piss bottled by Big Pharma that causes breast cancer (oops their bad). So no wonder I want to bite the heads off chickens. You may ask yourself - how did I get here? Me, I ask myself, why not make another martini? But the doc told me to cut back on the testosterone. He promised that way I won’t grow a mustache, or attend a monster truck show in the arena wearing a Jack Daniels baseball cap backwards. Or at least, not yet.