Real simplemindedness

From Real Simple's advice on at-home vacations:

"Make staying hydrated a beautiful thing.  Take a cue from Rancho La Puerta, in Tecate, Mexico: Fill your prettiest pitchers with ice water and slices of lemon, orange, or cucumber.  Place them (each with a glass) at various strategic points around the house and in a shady spot outside.  Then, as you go about your day, stop often to take a long, cool, flavorful pull."

Let's see how that plays out:

Click

The part of a relationship -- with a person, a city, a job, whatever -- that no one admits to longing for is the beginning of the end: the moment when the whole contraption shifts & re-forms itself into something that is mildly annoying, at best, & certainly no longer important.  Listen carefully & you can hear the pieces slide into their new places, & the clicking gets faster & more satisfying, like the end of a puzzle.

Of course some relationships never come to this.  I have never stopped loving any dog, for example, or a few human beings, or certain buildings, or the smell of kerosene.  The click comes with the bad ones, the ones that were a mistake to start with & have become parasitic.

All I was promised & more

Last night, a co-worker gave me three dried bhut jolokia (ghost) peppers, claimed to be the hottest in the world.

I cooked a karela (bitter melon) & tore the tip off one pepper (they are rather leathery) & added it to the pan.   The piece was about the size of my little fingernail; the pepper is hottest up toward the stem, so this should have been (relatively) mild.

That was an hour ago.  I ate the karela strips & the piece of pepper, too.  Delicious.  I've had to put the portable air conditioner on, of course, & if I turn the lights out the combination of internal glow & the hideous grin on my face should make for a sort of jack o' lantern effect.

One little matter, though: note the initials of the bhut jolokia.  Don't.  Not for hours, possibly days.  A kiss on the cheek might be safe after a few hours, but I wouldn't chance it.

Crossplay

On the top of the bookshelves in this room is a volume entitled "Jews in the Japanese Mind"; when I caught sight of it just now, however, I read it as "Jesus as a Japanese Maid."

That should boost church attendance nicely.

And then there's this

Today's Lio strip, which looks like a good idea:

That synching feeling

In the space of an hour, my fellow chilehead at work has given me a packet of ghost peppers (said to be the hottest on earth) & another co-worker has brought me a box of chipotle tortilla chips.  Mood greatly improved in anticipation.

Tree of death

Nothing like a beautiful but somewhat confusing meditation on one's favorite Issues -- death, families, what a dinosaur Cain & Abel would look like -- on a Sunday night on top of way too little sleep to bring on the black dog.  (Unfair, b/c I like dogs, but if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me.)  Pounding a green papaya salad to mix it helps; so do chiles in large enough amounts to get the endorphins flowing.  ("Step away from the ledge."  "No."  "Sabzi mirch?  Scotch bonnets?"  "Oh.  OK then.")

But no cure yet for waking up bright-eyed & bushy-tailed some four hours after falling asleep.  No book is boring enough.  Presently all of one's sorrows, fears, past screw-ups & their likely successors come calling, or the (slightly senile) poodle gets up & starts to roam the living room, or someone has forgotten his CPAP hookup & begins snoring loudly enough to knock pictures off the walls. 

Night workers have sleep fantasies the way day shift people have (so I'm told) sex fantasies.  In Penthouse Sleep Forum, the corner of the library, desert island or hotel room hasn't got another occupant, & size really doesn't matter, though distance & decibels do. 

Tick, tick, tick

Last week, the engineer got up at 4 a.m. to whiz & then wandered in, stark naked, as I sat staring at the computer, trying to bore myself to sleep.  "What is that on your leg?" I squawked -- & then took a closer look & saw what looked like tiny blisters coming up on several large red patches.

"Oh, that's been there for a couple of days, & on my back too.  I guess it'll go away."

Engineer is quite capable of believing that an invading army, if ignored long enough, will go away (granted, that might be true).  I said, "Does it itch?"

"Well, no, it sort of hurts, actually."

OH NO.

Confidentially ...

I have no idea why people confide in me.  Granted, I live in a city where everyone boasts, especially of their faults & sins, but even here I'm the lucky soul who gets to hear the Real Ghastly Truth That No One Else Knows.  Just ducky. 

Exactly what makes anyone think I am a worthy recipient of these sad secrets (I am short & can't run away fast enough, perhaps), I don't know, or I'd change it.  There's remarkably little variety, & unlike my friends in the 1980s who had sex lives of spectacular & hilarious complexity, no one these days comes up with amusing confessions. And if I've even halfway paid attention, I've figured it out beforehand (& might prefer not to have my suspicions confirmed).

In NY, the natives & many of the more recent arrivals do take great pride in their flaws.  I was raised to offer sympathy when someone moaned on about being an asshole, for example, or better yet to deny it ("be fair to yourself, what else could you have done?"), & even after all these years the kindly denial machine kicks in.  Not safe here:  tell New Yorkers that they are not assholes & they will set out to prove to you beyond a doubt that they are. 

The same great blessing follows here as back home, however: hear The Truth once from someone & get radio silence for weeks, months or even always.  Peaceful, yes, but rather depressing.  I'm not sure whether it's shame, embarrassment, or (most likely) the joyful lightness of having dropped a load onto someone else.

Some varieties of car wax supposedly protect the finish against bird shit.  To hell with Chicken Soup for the Soul, I need Turtle Wax for the Psyche.