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.