SHANE: “I though we were going further.”
RICK: “We are. 18 miles out.”
SHANE: “So why’d we stop?”
RICK: “I wanted to talk.”
ME: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”
Jesus, these people have more feelings to express than Slutty Talkhouse.
Goal: To examine moment when change was possible, but declined.
What to do: 1. Think of a time when you (or a character) made a negative decision: chose not to do something, go somewhere, not to act in a certain way.
2. Write it down precisely: where were you (or your character), what were you wearing, what did you say and do?
Alice LaPlante, I have gone with you on this journey to the Land of the Written Word for three chapters, but here in Chapter Four -where the hero of the story should begin to see the dark storm clouds of approaching conflict on the not-to-distant horizon- I find my conflict is with you. Here is sit in black socks that have been on my feet so long the bottoms are hard and shiny like Grandpa’s slippers, and a yellow jock strap, thankfully clean since no one likes rotten crotch, cursing you and your E.D.-the-moment-after-I-finish-sewing-this-poppet husband to spin off your axes and languish like the timeline in which I unhesitatingly replied “YES!” to your existential writing assignment as detailed above. For in the end, Dear Lady of the Book, my defiant “No!” flies at you like sneeze spray torpedoed from the puggish nose of Andrea Bocelli; I will not accept your invitation to change!
The salty bouquet of Fritos wafts across my laptop, heralding my dog’s arrival. One can almost sense the drool. Sudden and somewhat moist weight on my thigh draws my attention, and I see he is resting his alligator-sized head on my lap as if to say, “Give ‘er hell, Dad!” Oh, dear Hogan, it is given.
HE: “I saw your Mom last night and she was all, ‘Uh..uh… uh! Oh, yeah! More!’”
ME: “Weird, I saw your Mom last night eclipsing the moon because she’s a hideous troll.”
HE: “… That doesn’t make sense.”
ME: “Neither does your Mom. She doesn’t make change for nickles, either.”
HE (becoming a sensitive, hot-house flower): “OK, you’d better stop.”
ME: “That’s what I told your Mom cuz I didn’t want any of her diseases.”
HE: “I’m serious. This isn’t funny.”
ME: “That’s what I told your Mom when we aborted you.”
HE: “I’m 5′ tall; you’re 6’1″. Who cares if you’re 11 inches taller? come on! It’ll be fun!”
ME (thinking): “I hope we have sex tonight because there will be no second date.”
SHE: “Oh that Adele is just wonderful. Her voice! Ohhh, she sings just like a black.”
ME: “What. the actual. fuck?”
What I like most about this post is the I called the image above “Madge’s vadge”.
ME: I taught some co-workers “fuckery” today. They all loved it and said they were going to start using it.
BRO: How had they never hear “fuckery” before? How old are they?
ME: Our age. They’re sorta like Liz. You know, she’s on the Internet all the time IMing and playing games, but has no idea about Internet culture or how it works. It’s like going to the Apollo because they have your favorite beer on tap.
If anyone doubts that the religious, social and political climate in the United States has taken a turn towards the theocratic, you’re either not paying attention or you’re an idiot. Four Republcian presidential candidates were told by God to run for the highest governmental office in the land (hysterically enough to make one doubt the power or existence of an Omnipotent Divinity, all but one have vanished from the scene and he’s a few altos short of a choir (see below for his most recent vileness), and the remaining all have pledged their utmost to undo marriage equality, abortion, and porn. Catholic Churches, who take money from the public, are preaching that the government is engaging in religious oppression, when they are actually asking the Church to follow the law or stop sucking on the taxpayers’ teat. Some would rather cut services than have their beliefs sullied, which is respectable on one level, but on another, I know that priests eat lobster and shrimp (and I don’t mean just young boys’ toes), so cherry-picking which crass and irrelevant parts of the Bible are best to inflict on the 21st century is just hypocrisy at its most blatant.
None of that, however, approaches the eisegetical theocracy which Bishop Eddie Long envisions himself leading. Long is “Bishop” of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Georgia, a megachurch that seats 10,000 God-botherers every Sunday (most interestingly, their “About Us” page reads like a financial statement and not an disclosure of their Christ-like works (I refuse to link to it)). He has also recently become famous for what many male religious authority figures famous for: boy-fucking. Yet for reasons I cannot fathom, bishop Long has not only been forgiven by his flock, but in a ceremony that both terrifies and nauseates, was also declared “King” by Rabbi Ralph Messer, who called Long “humble” (the almost-real hair tapestry on his head notwithstanding, one assumes) and also referred to the Torah mantle as a “foreskin”. If you have 15 minutes to kill, hate life, and think LSD is “meh”, watch and be prepared to have your mind blown:
If this looks only like a particularly vulgar piece of theatre to you, which it is, you’re missing the significance of being wrapped in the Torah and given the belt which binds the scroll: Eddie Long was just declared the Messiah. But what good has he done? What good to the world is he? And the answer is the same: “Nothing.” He has, however, stepped up the game of Race to Fundamentalism to a new and horrifying level. Presidential candidates (indeed, some Presidents, too) can only talk to God, but Long now is God. He has taken to himself the mantle and responsibility of Savior, and with a congregation of 250,000 to back that claim up (I assume the other 240,000 who were unable to get tickets to this performance are of fervor equal to those who were in attendance for this charlatan’s apotheosis), so where does that leave the other players on the board? Will Michelle Bachmann have to get Long on speed dial if she intends to keep her Christian cred? Will Long’s reign be a benign one or will his followers take to the streets to declare the return of Christ and cull away “non-believers”? Does lispy Tim Tebow have to pay Long royalties on every righteous touchdown? I see nothing good coming of this. But of late, I feel the same about any brand of theology: they will be the ruin of us all. Better to let something like The Second Coming happen -God dies and we’re left to our own devices and our own fates without anyone to shift blame towards- and forget about It on all levels. Whatever It might be, if It is, I cannot believe these people are Its Voice. I refuse to believe it. Is this the best It can muster as a representative? I hate these people. I hate them as they claim to speak for It. I hate them in Its Name. The idea of hating anyone makes me feel like I’ve failed as a human being, but these people push me past all endurance. Their crass, inhumane religion of sociopathy actually brings me to tears. I hear them and think, “Things would be so much better if we eradicated ourselves from the face of the planet!” They make me hate humanity.
And for that, they can go to Hell.
Then I think, “What if they do speak for It? What if their words are indeed an accurate expression of the Infinite’s Will and All?”
Well, then I will go to Hell. Willingly.
I haven’t been keeping up with my food documentation since a problematic… “thing” claimed an inordinate proportion of my psychic real estate. I am here today with a new recipe to try out and share with you, corporations and banks be damned.
This past Christmas I meant but didn’t get to making a pumpkin roll. Among all the other sweets and treats around the house, yet another pastry would have been gilding the lily and added even more holiday weight to my middle parts. But yesterday, I started craving waffles, and pumpkin waffles came to me for no reason I can account for. Unbidden, as it were. Then I began to think of a cream cheese filling and how wonderful that would be on a pumpkin waffle. And here we are.
Looking around for recipes, I found several (one at a blog dedicated solely to pumpkin waffles, sparsely populate, but there nonetheless), and settled on this one.
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup canned pumpkin
2 cups milk
4 eggs, separated
1/4 cup butter, melted
The technique isn’t shocking: wet, dry, mix; stiff egg whites, fold. Even my nephew can do it (he got special dispensation form my brother to suspend homework duties to help me out in the kitchen).
The cream cheese topping, I think, is what makes the dish though my brother who passed on it says the waffles were perfectly fine sans. I upped the butter and reduced the sugar from a traditional filling for pumpkin roll thusly:
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
8 tablespoons butter, softened
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon Vanilla
Whipped.
Of course, there has to be meat. Two kinds.
I have a waffle iron that I got from my Mom when I was… probably 16. It’s the same kind my Grandma made waffles for me on (accompanied by Smith’s hot dogs). It got pulled off the shelf tonight as it is about every other month. It is the item to which I attach more sentimentality than anything else I own. Someday, there may be a very awkward conversation between my future ex-husband and myself about which means more to me: his ring or my waffle iron. Someday.
However, for now nothing was left but to plate and eat.
And it was goooooooooooooooooooooooooood! D told me, “I’m going to open a restaurant and the menu will have all the things you taught me to cook on them, and will say, ‘Recipes from my Uncle Sean!’” Awwwh!
My BFF and I used to have Saturday night Dinner & a Movie events about twice a month. For a while there, we we delving into film noir, partially because of our love for Bette Davis’ Dark Victory, but it was the Alamo Drafthouse‘s Mildred Pierce Pie Social that got us all a’dither for the bad gals and hapless dupes of the genre.
“Double Indemnity” was a classic less than five minutes after popping it into the DVD player. Beyond seeing Fed MacMurray, who is best known for his roles as the bland-but-caring Dad in “My Three Sons” and the eponymous role in The Absent-Minded Professor, doing his best up-hill acting as a guarded-but-horny insurance salesman and calling chicks “Baby”, meaty historical tidbits like his voice-over narration of an in-person call to a client in the Hollywood Hills saying that a house up there, “[p]robably set someone back $30,000″ make the film a priceless and gobsmacking watch.
Double Indemnity is also up to its black and white tuchas in paraprosdokians, sentences that end in unexpected and therefore funny ways. In a scene between MacMurray’s best friend and an insurance investigator, they quip:
Barton: Have you made up your mind?
Jackson: Mr. Keyes, I’m a Medford man – Medford, Oregon. Up in Medford, we take our time making up our minds.
Barton: Well, we’re not in Medford now, we’re in a hurry.
It’s difficult to watch a movie as brilliant as this one and not come away with a few good paraprosdokians of one’s own. After watching the climatic scene:
I commented, “Love means not getting off the second shot.” Yes, I am that witty. It’s why I get paid the mediocre bucks.
More paraprosdokians can be found here. I’ll bet you recognize several.
You know me; I like to shop locally and keep small businesses afloat rather than keep CEOs in vacation homes and andriod mistresses. I only ask that businesses be worthy of my support.
Monday was the last day for one of my staff members, Alex. Alex is a really good kid and a dedicated worker who with some more job and life experiences would be a benefit to any organization he worked for. I’d have liked to see him stay on for a while longer, but there was never a chance working in a group home could compete with his dream of going to the police academy coming true. When a staff member leaves, or if I owe someone for a favor, I go to International Bakery and get some sweetie to pass along -and let me say how fantastic the sweets at IB are; Magnolia Bakery isn’t worthy enough to flour IB’s cutting boards- because I find such treats always put the recipient more in debt to me than I was to them. Or they just, you know, think I was a good supervisor. Which I try to be. However, I was running late on my errands and didn’t have time to cross town to get to IB, and then remembered a bakery next to my favorite Chinese restaurant (Golden Wok, if you’re ever in Erie) and made my way there.
How a place with a name as adorable as Tasty Bakes could be run by such a shrew is going to take some cogitation on my part to answer.
As I approached the door, I saw the neon OPEN sign was not lit, but there were people inside. I hesitated for a moment, checked the hours posted on the door, and based on the information listed there, decided I could go in. The bell jangled and four people squished around a pub table that wouldn’t have seated one comfortably did nothing except keep talking. This was obviously a staff meeting. A woman with a squat forest green chef’s hat, a calculator and notepad positioned in front of her I could tell she was in charge because her energy felt like reins directing the room. She was also the only one not pressed against a wall or refrigerator. I can understand the idea of wanting a place for people to sit down and enjoy a scone (if they had scones, but I’ll get to that), but given the space restrictions, it would have either been an intimate scone or a lonely one.
There were no brownies. No blondies. No cupcakes. No fabulous fruit tarts. In fact, the whole display case was rather impoverished of selection – a few cookies, slices of cakes, and some sad cream puffs, like a housing development that boasted only a model and wide swaths of mud between one or two finished homes. Ultimately, nothing I wanted and not enough of any one product to present to Alex and the guys at the house and the rest of the staff. I reminded myself I was short on time and this was my only choice. I settled on the cream puffs, of which there were three.
In the time it took me to absorb all this information, no one had acknowledge my presence, whether to say, “Someone will be right with you!” or “I’m sorry, we’re closed right now.” The meeting continued apace and I floundered for an exit line. Stay and hope there would be a break or walk out an feel like an asshole? The feeling-like-an-asshole thing should not have been something I took upon myself since I was not behaving outside of acceptable social norms. In fact, I was being subjected to a mysterious, anti-customer silence which still boggles.
After two minutes of unwelcoming neglect, a man came form the back of the store and asked me if there was anything he could get me. I asked him if he had anymore cream puffs. He thought for a moments, then said, “Let me ask.” and walked over to interrupt the meeting. “Excuse me. Are there more cream puffs beside the ones on display?”
Without even looking at her employee, Ms. Chef’s Hat tersely replied, “Isn’t there a refrigerator you could be checking?”
And I left. I went to International Bakery, where I wanted to go in the first place, and accepted that I would be late. I knew, however, that the cupcakes I was buying would mitigate any possible complaints. Perhaps it’s endemic to Erie, where I hear most small business owners are either tertiary syphillis-levels of unreasonable or just straight up sociopaths, but I never encountered it in Austin (if indeed any business in Austin can be classified as “small”). How do businesses run as such survive? Things like this make me think I could run a business and do well at it. I just need to figure what that business would be: sandwich cart? Noodle bowl truck? Whatever it is, come support me! I swear I’ll at least make eye contact with you!
The offending profiterole
