Blog #18
It’s all your fault!
I only did it because of you! You
see, I was recently with my wife and daughter, Jennifer, in Ashville, NC. I have never been to Ashville before, and yet
I have seen it a dozen times. It’s
Berkeley, it’s St. Louis’ Central West End, it’s Greenwich Village and Boulder
and every other college town or ski resort.
It’s seedy and tacky; it’s edgy and artsy and chi-chi all at the same
time. Where ragged street jugglers,
magicians and string quartets compete for tourist dollars on the street corners. Where every restaurant is dog friendly,
gluten free and vegan. Where the
forgotten culture, the counter-culture, the homeless culture, the drug culture
and the artist culture merge somehow to become the avant-garde culture. Where every night has an art festival, a revival
and an exhibition. Where a store
charging $2,500 for a flower vase is next to a Himalayan gift shop that smells
of incense and yak dung. Where a
double-decker bus is turned into a chocolate restaurant. Where everybody
accepts everybody and loves everybody no matter what they are or believe. It’s loud and exciting and troubling and
expensive and fun.
We ate at a Spanish tapas place the first night. On the menu, among salads only a sheep could
love and a litany of other complicated and mysterious choices, was Galician-Prepared
Octopus. My first thought – no, my first
thought was “No way, Jose!” (it was a Spanish restaurant, after all). But my second thought was that Galicia was a
northern land-locked province of the Roman Empire in the interior of what is
now Ukraine, and, being land-locked, would have no use for an octopus recipe.
What? – I hear you cry. Galicia? Roman Empire? What is that wordy old
fool rambling about now? You should already
know that I read strange books and am a “diligent student of the impractical
and the largely useless”. That’s what
they said about Herodotus, and who remembers him? Actually, he was a Greek who wrote the first
history of the world around 380 BC. You’d think there wasn’t much history to write
about back then, but he was somehow prolific.
My third thought (stay on track now; we had a first
thought, then a second thought and now here’s the third) was to check this out
on Google. I hate to take out my phone
at a dinner table. I think it’s rude
when my friends do it, but this was Galician-Prepared Octopus and I felt I
deserved an exemption. And lo, there is
a province of Spain also named Galicia which indeed borders on an
octopus-filled ocean. Even so, I still
was not about to eat the slimy little creature.
But then I thought (this would be my fourth thought for those of
you who remember second grade as the best three years of your life) – I
thought, “I need a fun and interesting experience to write about in my next
blog, and eating some slimy, undercooked and likely-poisonous sea serpent from
a province of Spain I never knew existed would be just the thing. And I did it.
I took a bite. I told you it was
all your fault. And you know what? It was delicious. No, it was spectacular and I took another
bite! Octopus! Who’d have thought it? And it was all your fault.
In Asheville, the most common sights were homeless
people and tattoos! Everybody has tattoos – all over them. Well, I thought (that’s five), if I can eat
an octopus, I can get a tattoo. I’m old
and I don’t understand it but it’s the thing.
So why not? My wife and I took
the plunge and got matching tattoos.
Mine says,
I Love Carol. So
does hers.
You know, I take these blogs very seriously, and
sometimes I get a little depressed wondering if anybody actually reads
them. The feeling doesn’t last long,
however, because down deep I know I have a built-in audience of faithful
readers who monitor everything I write – Google, the NSA and Edward Snowden.
Every tweet, post, blog or text that you write is
electronically monitored and tracked by these sinister forces who know where
you are, what time you go to bed, where you shop, who you call and what you
read. I find it somehow comforting:
Each
blog that I write with such care
The
NSA plucks from the air
So
when I write a letter
It
makes me feel better.
At
least I know somebody’s there.
Hi, Edward.
Oh, and speaking of sinister people reading my blogs,
did you read last week’s where I asked you to pick from four proposed titles
for my book about Seniors? Here were the
four choices: The World According to AARP, Rheumatism at the Top, To Kill an Early
Bird, Cataract on a Hot Tin Roof
I have tallied the responses and the winner is:
(trumpets, drum roll, Vanna White) The World According to AARP. But wait, that was only the first
Semifinal Round. This is exciting, isn’t
it? It’s like Let’s Make a Deal. I’ll give a dollar to anyone with a Galician
octopus in her purse. Ok the second Semifinal
Round is made up of these four Senior book titles: send your pick to mfox1746@gmail.com
A
Clockwork Prune, A Tale of Two Colonoscopies, Atlas Limped, Into Thin Hair.
In St. Louis, we have two seasons – Winter and my
wife’s birthday. Starting in late June
and ending in September, the birthday feting is continuous. What are you doing tomorrow, Dear? Oh, I’m getting taken out for my birthday – for the 10th time. That woman gets taken out more than the
trash.
And speaking of Carol, she got a call today from some
marketing company that wanted to pay her $70 to participate in a 2-hour focus
group on radio preferences. She agreed,
but when they found out her age, they booted her. They don’t care what radio stations old
people listen to. Seniors probably just
listen to NPR and Golden Oldies. And
anyway, who cares about old people in general?
They clog up the highways by driving slowly. They waste our country’s medical resources by
taking too long to die. They pester
their children about the simplest technological task. Who needs these silly old people anyway? Unless you’re a four-year-old or six or eight
or ten, and you want a really cool bedtime story about dinosaurs and princesses
and poopy old men who fall all over themselves and make you giggle and who
never stop loving you no matter what.
It’s pretty much bedtime now, so goodnight Zachary and
Zoey and Alyssa. Goodnight Tyler and
Charley and Austin. Goodnight Parker and
Lucy. Sleep well, my darlings. And to all my loyal readers, don’t get all
jealous on me. I’ve told you plenty of stories
already, and I’m pretty sure some of them have put you to sleep. So goodnight, Gracie, and stay well.
See you next week.
Don’t forget to enter your
book title pick!
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