Plug

This is a little belated, but my poem "The Last Fetish" appeared on the Best American Poetry blog on Sunday with an introduction by Bruce Covey. A heads up to interested parties, and many thanks to Bruce.

Garlic Roulette

The older I get, the more weirdly I behave in malls. Right now I'm operating at the stage on the mall-sanity continuum that involves wandering the aisles stunned, sweeping my gaze like a searchlight and generally wearing the expression of someone who has never before heard of or seen a shopping mall.

I don't know what code-red mall intolerance looks like, but I imagine it includes shirt ripping and other symptoms of classic Victorian-era feminine hysterics.

One thing that bred a sense of alienation during my visit a few days ago was the obvious comfort and ease of the other shoppers. People were strolling back and forth, laughing, swinging shopping bags and eating Dippin' Dots. Cell phones abounded.

Nobody else seems to think it's profoundly weird to spend one's free time buying expensive crummy objects. It's an enigma to me, but if regular mall goers experience half the contentment I feel in the produce section, then I'm glad they go. At the end of the day, a bag of nectarines or strappy shoes from Charlotte Russe- whatever gets you off.

So why was I at a mall in the first place, sticking out like a sore thumb? I was looking for an oil cruet, which I didn't find, probably due to bad navigating.

I found one a day or two later, totally by accident at Longs Drug Store. That place is just a cavern of surprises. I felt like Harry Potter lowering the small glass stoppered bottle from the top shelf, blowing on its surface and releasing a plume of dust from 1985. I promptly purchased it and took it home to start my very own botulism colony.

NOTE: don't ever keep garlic cloves submerged in olive oil at room temperature. Botulism loves that anaerobic shit. I did not know this. I threw my cruet in the garbage after the cloves started quietly bubbling. It's not sad because it only cost me three dollars, and I didn't get botulism. I won one round of garlic roulette.

Bloodthirsty Butterflies

Accidentally delicious meals are some of the best. You know what it's like to fruitlessly spelunk in the refrigerator in search of anything that seems edible? It's the same syndrome as having cable. But the outcome of there being "nothing to eat" can be surprisingly perfect. It's just like the adage goes, necessity is the mother of salad:

3 cups baby spinach
2 small gold potatoes, cubed and boiled
1 pear on death row
Measly walnut runts at the bottom of the jar
Refrigerator found object: 1/2 cucumber
1/2 avocado

Topped with:
olive oil
vinegars: balsamic and seasoned rice
cracked pepper
chili flakes
dried garlic bits
glowing sense of resourcefulness

Before lunch, I walked three miles up the coast with Scott wearing my bad sneakers that make my gait look like a collapsable wooden donkey's. We both tend to neglect the picturesque bayside in favor of peering into people's yards and windows. Mission Beach is teeming with intriguing dwellings. As we passed a little cottage whose yard was yo-yo-ing with butterflies, Scott was like "isn't it weird that butterflies eat other insects?" I died. I guess he forgot that when we visited the butterfly house at the Natural History Museum in New York, there were no crates of doomed prey emptied at the wingtips of a bloodthirsty swarm. I love him. Jet setting man.

Gestalt Snack

It's hot today; that happens in San Diego, too. But it happens indoors, to the afflicted who don't have air conditioners.

The cat and I have sunk into the cushion of my papasan, and this blog is our modest SOS. I kicked my feet onto the kitchen stool and the whole chair slid back, isolating our two overheating bodies inside a structure akin to a life raft, or a cupcake tin. Please help! I don't want to die in faux-sateen pants!

Earlier today when I was still mobile, I walked up the beach to the grocery store and bought maybe forty pounds of food. I have no idea how much food I bought. But I felt like Atlas carrying it home. Some lady with a clipboard from Greenpeace spied my reusable bags, car-lessness and overall suffering and was like, "you OBVIOUSLY care about the environment, would you like to..."

"Not today, sorry."

I always say that. What a cop-out.

When I finally made it home, after inspecting my battered shoulders for enviro-sac shaped patterns of broken blood vessels, I made the best snack in the history of snacking. A snack so powerful, so inspiring, so bafflingly simplistic, I'm calling it Gestalt Snack.

Gestalt:
Psychology. (NEWLY: Snack.)
1. a configuration, pattern, or organized field having specific properties that cannot be derived from the summation of its component parts; a unified whole.
2. an instance or example of such a unified whole

The only ingredients in Gestalt Snack are a couple slabs of good crusty toast, a ripe tomato, and a small bowl containing olive oil, fresh ground black pepper, sea salt and dried garlic. Fresh garlic would be fine, but I like the crunch of the dried stuff. I think you're supposed to rehydrate it before use, but then it's just regular garlic. This is crunchy garlic. It goes to eleven.

The magic in this recipe happens when the toast comes out of the oven, and you give it a good body rub with wedges of tomato. The seeds and pulp soak into the top layer of the toast and then it is so exquisite mopped in the olive oil mixture that decency forbids me from describing it in further detail. Just have some. If I ever make it out of this chair, you better believe I'm making another batch.

"My Cat Can Eat A Whole Watermelon"

A healthy suspicion of all foods that outweigh me.

Green Smoothie

Today I arranged my breakfast on the cutting board to snap a photo before tossing it into the Blendtec. I drink a variation on this theme every morning, which is why I have such huge muscles. Other fruits like pineapples, stawberries, mangos and nectarines do good things for the resulting mixture. Sometimes I throw a carrot in there if I'm feeling crazy. This pile exceeds the FDA's recommended daily allowance of fruits and vegetables. It's like cheating.

Meatless Monday

Imagine if the whole American population agreed to eat a vegetarian diet for one day out of the week, not counting Friday. If I hadn't had to retake statistics class in college just to scrape by with a passing grade, I might be better equipped to talk about exactly how much one meatless day could reduce the environmental impact of the meat industry in our country. There are probably also some impressive numbers on the public health benefits, which I will not quote here.

This was my revolutionary idea, which I know now has already been dreamed up and promoted. At least my reinvention of the wheel wasn't something obvious this time, like "wheel". In fact I only discovered Meatless Monday because I was looking for a good vegetarian chili recipe. Which I found, if you care. Cumin is key.

The Meatless Monday site is sort of cute, and they get points for utilizing America's talent for bold, appetizing food photography. I don't think it's cool enough to snag the general population, though. The front page features some guy in a Batman suit, with a treacherously un-edited crotch and a blurb about the "Superhero Diet" that closes with this actual sentence: "While you're eating your vegetables and fighting the forces of evil, remember that every man is a superhero to those who love him".

Barf! Remember this Danish ad I posted a few weeks ago? It's hip. It's saucy. Vegetables need a carefully executed PR campaign to rescue them from lameness. Like Segways.

Of course, *I* don't think vegetables are lame. But then, I also want to ride on a Segway, even after looking at this cool kid:



In any case Meatless Monday, thank you for trying.

"...What would Batman be without his deductive powers? Just a lonely, frustrated millionaire in a cape. You, on the other hand, can stay sharp by getting enough niacin." -MeatlessMonday.com