I was hoping the title slug would make you flash on Tuesdays With Morie. Or perhaps Tuesdays With Morays.
Or again, less terrifyingly, Still Life with Woodpecker -- which could be a painting or a flip-top pack of cigarettes.
Or an appetizer. "Would you like a little more more Still Life to go with your Woodpecker, Sir?"
Clearly then, I'm thinking of restaurants. Like last night. There I was in some local Chinese place slurping up Lo Mein, my hair far from perfect, when in walks some over-the-hill-hippy Boulder babe, and she sits down right in front of me. Well, with her back to me. I never did see her face. She then proceeds to do two things simultaneously: repeatedly suck snot down her throat and make multiple lunch dates on her cell phone. I was thinking, oh great, if she has a cold and I get it, I'm going to have to track her down and... well, never mind. This is a blog, after all, and I am trying to practice ... what was it again? ... oh right, civility.
But I was overreacting, as usual. In the course of her many lunch-date-setting calls she mentioned (more than once) that her allergies were kicking up, who knew why, and that that's why she kept having to suck snot down her snorkel. SNURK! Well OK, allergies I can handle, as long as they're someone else's. The rest of it was only mildly disgusting, and the Lo Mein was delicious. Plus, I was reading the opening bars of Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk, the guy who wrote Fight Club. I won't try to tell you what Survivor is about (I barely know, myself), but I was choking laughing at the return of the goldfish leitmotif at the end of the first chapter. At the beginning of that chapter, our hero mentions that his goldfish, which sits in a bowl atop his refrigerator, seems agitated. So he tosses in a Valium. OK.
Then, at the end (as I already said, right?), he starts talking about how his parents had given him his first goldfish when he was just a little kid, to teach him the value of even a single life, no matter how small. Then he says he's on his like 654th goldfish.
AHHHHHHH!!! OH NO MAKE IT STOP! I've fallen out of my chair and am clawing at my throat, laughing so hard I can't breathe. Oh no! Oh shit! I hate it when they do that.
I guess I should have mentioned, as it may be relevant, that what this guy does for fun is put suicide prevention hot-line stickers in phone booths, with his telephone number on them and a message that help is just a dime away, etc. Then when people call, he tells them to kill themselves. Nice touch. So in that context the goldfish thing was, well, you know.
Then today, after battling the medical bureaucracy for nearly one whole hour, I decided I could use to relax with a nice refreshing double iced espresso. So finally I'm all settled in at a sidewalk table outside the Starbucks at 28th and Pearl, and I start another book by Palahniuk (having gotten the general hang of the other one). Lullaby is about how to make a killing in haunted real estate, with side excursions on crossword puzzles, police scanners and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I know what that sounds like, but it's really funny.
However, it's getting too cold to hang out on the street like this, so I pack up and head into the harrowing terror that is rush hour in Boulder, Colorado. I flip on NPR to catch "the news" (right) and some guy is talking about a hot debate as to whether horses should be considered livestock. The real question, he's saying, is whether or not we should eat horses. I've been wondering quite a lot about what the real question is, and I have to say I was surprised to learn that this was it.
However, before I could fully parse the semantic pathways that were opening up before me -- even as the lanes of traffic were shutting down -- some chick comes on and says that horses have always been a part of the American way of life. "We rode into battle on them," she says. "We used them to deliver the mail..."
You know that Beatles song where they go "...found my way upstairs and had a smoke and somebody spoke and I went into a dream"
and then they go AHHHH-AH-AH-AH, AH-AH-AH, AH-AH AHHHHHHHHHH.... Like that? Well, that's what happened to me. Except for the smoke part. Or the stairs, as I was, if you will recall, driving at the time.
And I thought to myself, the view through the windshield going as fuzzy as a Penthouse centerfold, well that's right! While I'd never given it much thought before now, who ever heard of the cavalry arriving just in the nick of time on cows? Or some hapless postman pushing through rain and sleet and dark of night on cowback?
When you think about it, there are a lot of things to think about.
Finally I arrived back home where I was, as usual, fondly greeted by my cat. This reminded me to shoot off a note to Selene, following up on something I'd written to her last night.
...forget what I said about Kitty-Kitty being a KGB mole during WWII. She finally came clean. Evidently, she is a Nazi war criminal, escaped to Buenos Aires on a Vatican ratline in November, 1945. How she got from there to Colorado is beyond me, though she has dropped dark hints about having been the personal housecat of Pablo Escobar at the mountain fastness of the Medellín cartel in the mid-'70s. However, she said the whole Colombian dope scene was "just too crazy" back then, so she moved on.
And we think we know those we love.
So that was my day. How about you?