equinox nox. who's there?

fall! that's who!

remember when i said that i disliked summer? well, it's gone. over. on to another unsuspecting hemisphere with you! we are finally free of your toasty grips. i know i'm a little late on this posting, but i was busy playing sports and cooking savory things and wearing socks--all of which are things one does in fall--and i didn't get to celebrate its arrival until now. but now it's time: hello autumn! i am so glad you smote the behemoth of summer. i lay a wreath of cranberries and small mice at your leafy doorstep!

now that it's september, it will soon be october, which makes me wonder if this ever happened to you: if you are old enough to remember the days when we trick-or-treated with pillowcases because we were allowed to leave the 1 block radius of our homes and therefore needed more than a glossy 4-color printed glad bag with a ghost on it to haul in our candy, you might have had this happen to you. if not, then i will feel pretty bad.

what happened to me was, i went out trick-or-treating with the requisite gigantic pillowcase. we got so much candy, our bags were practically dragging on the ground, so we went home, spilled out all the candy and went out for the second leg. we went to another neighborhood, even farther away, and miraculously, we weren't worried that someone was going to gag us with our own pillowcase, steal our candy and then bury us in the orange grove. so on we forged, with nary a grown-up or a glow light stick to guide us. pixie sticks, tootsie pops, little boxes of sunmaid raisins which we weren't allowed to eat (incidentally, my sister always thought that the lady on the sunmaid raisin box was the one who sang the song "downtown" even though i'm pretty sure that it was petula clark and i'm not sure there is much of a resemblance, but it's such a nice thought), sweet tarts, you name it, we had it in our pillowcases. and remember the smell of all of that candy when you stuck your head inside the pillowcase?? it was as if you had died of a sugar coma and gone to heaven--or if you had died of an attack on a suburban street and gone to the orange grove.

anyway, we finally got home, ate whatever we could, fell asleep with clown makeup on and didn't worry about our skin, and woke up the next morning. only the next morning, something terrible had happened: my whole bag of candy had seized up! i mean, the whole pillowcase was just completely stuck in a weird position and all the candy was stuck too! it was as if someone dipped the whole bag and its contents into liquid cement. or water. but it had all solidified. it was pretty bad. i remember that i had to throw it all away, because who knows, someone could have given me a lik-m-aid laced with rubber cement which had then leached out into the whole bag. better be safe, best to just throw away ABOUT A YEAR'S WORTH OF CANDY, and that delightful smelling pillowcase too.

it was pretty sad. anyway, i really like halloween. it's my favorite holiday, even though about 9 years ago i had heard that there were roaming bands of teenagers with shotguns who would kill you as soon as you opened up your door with that big bowl of candy in your hand. that same year, i managed to give out candy until about ten o'clock when i got sort of nervous when i heard people coming up the walk, since most kids should already be home, eating their non-seized-up candy. so i looked out the little peephole in the door and i watched as a kid in a hooded sweatshirt grabbed my beautiful carved pumpkin. he ran away and the next day i found my pumpkin smashed right next to my house. i know kids do that, but i still thought it was pretty terrible. but you know, despite all of that, i STILL like halloween. this year we're going to get some really great candy and we'll have a lot of it for the kids who visit our neighborhood and shun the local shopping malls.

time to make soup, reminisce, smell the air, buy squash, forgive mean people and harvest. happy fall. r.i.p. summer.

you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares

birds of a feather clip together

when i was a young banana, i had two things i really loved. one was a tiny fully-functioning printing press and the other was a parakeet i got at k-mart. the printing press was incredible. it had little rubber letters that one could place in a tray, all tight and rubbery against each other, and then that spring-loaded tray would go in the main press. there was an inky cloth i think that went with it, but then with a metal crank arm, the paper would roll over the letters and out came a perfectly printed note. they had little pictures you could print too. one was of an old-time announcer standing at a microphone. so i did all kinds of announcements: my birthday, the birthdays of the beatles (even though they had long broken up) and i announced the arrival of bud, my blue parakeet.

though in my family, i had grown up with dogs and a horde of hamster, we never had a bird. that was until i got the idea. we went to k-mart, and i got the cage, the little sand-paper coated perch covers, a cuttlefish bone and the bird. that was it. all you needed to walk out of there with a live bird was a mom with a checkbook. it seemed too easy. i was crazy about that bird. he used to scritch his little feet on the bottom paper which also had that sandpaper coating and it would jump around and flit and play with the hanging toys in the cage. i would spend hours watching him hull seeds with his beak. my sister was reading a 7-part serial novel in that same timeframe i think, but i loved watching the bird's beak work. he seemed to take a liking to me, always jumping right onto my finger when i presented it in his cage. i thought he might want to fly around one day, so i took him out of the cage and he flapped wildly all over my room until he hit a wall. he fell down and after a second, righted himself and flapped around again, hitting another wall. then i put him back in the cage.

a little while later, a friend of a neighbor said i ought to clip bud's wings, so he could fly. well, it was a lot like pickled pigs' feet or barbecued ribs, because when i heard that he was going to clip the bird's wings, i didn't really understand that he was actually going to CLIP THE BIRD'S WINGS.

i watched as this guy held bud in his hand, fanned out one wing, and then just cut the whole lower half of the wing off. it was sickening. then he did the other side, and handed the bird back to me. half of the wings were strewn there on the floor like tiny fountain pens. i didn't know what to say, and i put bud back in the cage. later on, i took him out and he couldn't even get up midway in the air in my room before falling back to my bed. the whole thing was hideous. i didn't know if the guy had done it right or what--he did say something about a blood feather--but the whole thing made me feel really bad. and what happened later was that i started to have nightmares about bud's cage. i wasn't the best at cleaning his cage, and the seeds and hulls all over the carpet might have attracted a little pest or two, but i don't think it was that bad. but in my dreams, all kinds of worms and maggots and flying insects invaded poor bud's cage. they were all over my dresser and the whole thing was awful.

you know, i don't even know what happened to bud. i am sure that my mother will read this and she'll tell me what happened to him, but i am thinking that i don't want to know. we had little funerals for all of our hamsters and even our beloved dogs. oh and also we had a gravestone for tubby the turtle and some goldfish. i think that bud is out there too. i must have blocked the whole thing out. anyway, i made up some pretty neat stationery on my printing press with all the news about bud while he was with me. that bird had the best publicist in the city. i think i will look on ebay for one of those old printing presses. it was so neat. but bud was one-of-a-kind. he was a beautiful bird.

shake off slumber, and beware!

when i was a youngster, i hyperventilated a lot, but that's not what this is about. i did have to breathe into a paper bag quite frequently though. what i didn't know then was that i was experiencing full-blown panic attacks. however, it was edwardian england, and in the absence of pharmaceuticals, the lunch bag trick worked fine. it wasn't really edwardian england, it was yosemite or something. but generally, at least once on each family vacation, i had to lay on the loden bedspread at the motel, breathing the fibery air of the brown paper bag. who knows what set it off? the plaster-specked basin in the motel bathroom, the threat of wildlife, i don't really even know now. i think the fear was simply amorphous. one thing i do know though is that i had a real distaste for spending the night at other kids' houses. i once went to a slumber party (to write the term now sounds so delicate, like some erstwhile ritual) but i hated it. it was generally ok until the mom went to bed. sometimes she'd come down every few hours, screaming her head off and threatening to call all the parents, but sometimes all the kids would just be left to their own ugly devices. boy, sometimes those kids were mean. i usually was so tired, i just fell asleep while everyone else stayed up talking and scheming. but woe to the kid who can't stay awake. and i don't just mean the stupid tricks everyone plays on the sleeper - like putting a sleeping hand in a bowl of warm water to induce bed-wetting, (or sleeping bag-wetting) or the other favorites: drawing in lipstick all over the sleeper, or dragging the sleeper, like a sack of onions, into another room and locking the exit door - i am not talking about those kinds of things. that's childs' play. i am talking about the gulag tactics of psychological torture employed by the cubs of my youth:

i once brought my stuffed animal to a party, because i couldn't sleep without it. but my stuffed animal wasn't just your garden variety stuffed animal. i had made mine. from an old tube sock. you can imagine how well that went over. i had never even finished it--it was the creature of a child with an imagination, monochrome, featureless--which endeared it even more to me. but to everyone else, it was a joke. they said it looked like a tooth. so, with my tooth clutched to my chest, i fell asleep. and that was the end of that. until the next morning, when the ringleader said, "you were so funny last night! you were talking in your sleep!" i felt sure i hadn't. and then after i denied it, she said, "yes you did! you said: 'unh. unh. genevieve. fresh strawberries.'" and she said the unh unh like a grunting sound. everyone started to laugh and laugh. i was pretty sure that i hadn't grunted and said genevieve fresh strawberries, but i was known in my family for falling asleep sitting up and talking in my sleep and walking all over the place, so i really couldn't be sure. but those words? no, i'm sure i hadn't. and this party was the first of the schoolyear and a at a new school where i was a little behind in the social development. and by that, i mean that i did not take a solzenheitzen approach to my own personal slumber parties. for the rest of my life, i carried on the terror they infused in my heart. with roommates, on sporting tournament weekends with teammates, dating, you name it, i have always lived with the fear that i will wake up only to find out, not simply that i've uttered some embarrassing thing in my sleep, but that someone who has overheard will make fun of me for it--that someone will be cruel. i live with the dread of waking with a start from a nap on a train, only to scream out, "DORSAL!" or some such thing. slumber party, indeed. slumber is some kind of tranquil ideal to which we aspire. something one has as a baby. not only that, i ended up keeping my very special handmade creature i'd brought to the slumber party all through college and beyond, only to lose it after an earthquake. that's another long story, and had i words enough and time, i would tell it, but for now, i will just remember my dear companion, as one who stood by me while those other children did not.

hoof blitzer

have you ever driven on the freeway and come upon a big ramshackly truck with a painted sign for a meat company? well, i have. a long time ago i remember seeing one with a dancing pig, holding a hatchet or something. it was kind of a simple drawing, with little lines showing the dancing motions, and the pig was wearing an apron, and dancing. with a machete. or hatchet. it doesn't matter which. and, you know, that pig was smiling. there's another meat company that drives around with a drawing of a cow's face, a pig's face and a chicken, all standing there together, and they have a crude little saying boasting how their meat is the greatest, but they say it in such a way that you are either offended, or you wonder if they didn't realize they were saying something kind of crass. but of course they are. so not only do they have this thing that says a crass statement, but they are further insulting the animals by having them ride along the freeway, dead inside the truck, with their smiling likenesses on the outside of the truck.

once when i was in france a very long time ago, i went into a store that was a sort of general foodstore. it wasn't a butcher's store, because i wouldn't have ever gone near that to begin with. although, when i was with someone once in vancouver or was it montreal? well, we were walking around and if one of us spied a store up ahead to the left with a row of dead ducks hanging down by their feet or something along the awning of the store, we would say as quickly as possible: "LOOK TO YOUR RIGHT!" thereby saving our friend the terrible sight. then i think once i said, "LOOK TO THE LEFT!" and the person looked to the right and saw a big dried pig head or something. it was awful. i felt bad, because she turned her head so quickly to avoid the sight and there she was, face to face with that head. boy was that awful. i also once had a friend who had a post office box near a store called 'proud bird' and they had all kinds of headless chickens, all splayed out, with their legs and wings spread, revealing all of their deepest feelings, right on a big bench-like display in the window. no modesty, nothing. proud bird. it was awful. it was one of the most denigrating things i had ever seen. it's one thing to eat a bird, or an animal. if you follow tinyengine,--what am i saying? everyone, but EVERYONE follows tinyengine--so by now you know that i am no longer a vegetarian after nearly 30 years and i eat turkeys and chickens and fish. and i even now prepare them. i buy raw bird breast and unwrap it and wash it and even though i am terrified that some salmonella has splashed up onto the side of my toaster where it will breed and leach into my toast, i still cook the stuff. but i don't jump around and poke fun at the raw stuff as it's sitting there on the butcher paper. i don't spread it out and prop up my old coloring books of pictures of smiling animals on the farm, while the dead bird is sitting there, all suffocating and pressed up against the cellophane of the little styrofoam package from the store. so why the heck are there smiling animals on those trucks? and also on the big signs at barbecue places, there's always a kind of weird, plump, fetching pig, with a--dare i say it--slightly come-hither look on its face, striding across the sign with a big spatula in its front hoof? it usually has a plump and rounded hindquarter and a high-heel kind of hoof. it's awful. i'm not kidding. look next time you go by a place like that.

anyway, i started to tell you a story about that big open freezer section in that store in france a long time ago. they sold lapin which is rabbit for those of you who didn't get my french egg joke a few days ago. but anyway, they sold lapin. to eat. bunny. to eat. comprehending that, at the time, was a stretch for me too. but anyway, they did sell it. and before i go any further, i want to say that i am probably the biggest francophile you would ever meat. i mean meet. i accidentally just typed that. can you believe it? that's live broadcasting, folks. gotta keep going. i tell you this so you know that i love the french. i love france. when i malign their rabbit-eating, it is just a culinary opinion, not a cultural one. but they had a sign for the lapin at however many francs per pound and then above it, they had torn a picture from a magazine of a girl in a frilly dress holding a little white and grey easter bunny in her lap. underneath it they told you how much per pound you'd pay for the frozen bunny.

i mean, don't you think it's mean to make the rabbit cute? or to make the pig dance, or to have the cow wink at you as you go by on the highway? not that it should be a menacing pig or an ugly cow, because that would only vilify the animals and it might be worse, because then it would seem like they had been depicted as bad creatures that should be killed and eaten. but maybe they could have a picture of a plate of meat or something. the plate of ribs could be up, dancing on little tap shoes. or else, the animals' mouths could just be straight lines, relaxed: not smiling, not sad or mean. it's just something to think about if you open a meat store or a bbq restaurant.

i have a tunafish salad sandwich in my refrigerator. it's now 12:36 and i'll probably have it in a few minutes. i bought it yesterday for my spouse of all sposi, but he forgot it today, so i am going to eat it instead. i saw salmon spawning (and dying) recently and i haven't had a piece of salmon since. i haven't recently run into a tunafish, so i'm just going to eat it and apologize and try not to picture it with a little net in its fin, smiling.

squid pro quo

now that you know a little about my spouse, i would like to tell you a tiny story. first, i'll say that i have some dear friends. they are quite stellar. about as stellar as two people could be. they are so neat that if either of them were one ounce neater, or more interesting, you wouldn't be able to know them anymore because you would die of inadequacy in your regular life. for instance: at 8am (i'm making up these times. i don't think they are even up that early. and i know that i am not up that early). ok, i'll begin again: at 8am, they are tidying up their yurt. at 8am, i am cooking oat bran in the microwave and waiting for my dog to finish eating so i can give her a shot of insulin. at 12noon, they are admiring a deer that has come to rest in their own personal dell. at 12noon, i am hurriedly wresting the wrapper from my chocolate power bar so i can eat it and run out to the chevron station before the rush. at 3pm they are translating tibetan scrolls and composing poems (in addition to the one with the words 'mink water' in it) while contemplating baby names. at 3pm i am collecting all the bags of poop that i have thrown over my back wall after walking my dog so i can place them in the proper receptacle. ok, you get the idea. this is really just an exercise in self-effacing humor. i'm actually pretty neat, once you get to know me, but the point is that these people are lovely and wonderful. and they met online. ok, ok, i know, you've all seen the commercials for e-harmony. well, what i'm saying is that they didn't meet on e-harmony, but they did meet online before it was cool and i wanted to be just like them, so i started looking in the privacy of my own office. i mean, home.

well, if you've ever created a profile for online dating, you will know that it is excruciating and worse than writing an oral report on 'young goodman brown,' or wearing pantyhose and telling someone directly why you think you'd be good for a job. it's pretty bad. forget about what i said before, it's worse than bending your fingernail backwards or finding a dead bird outside of your front door. and next you have to put up a stupid picture of yourself and then die a thousand deaths as you hit UPLOAD. it's pretty mortifying. and it's mortifying because you don't know that in approximately 2 years and 3 months from that moment you will be marrying the most incredible creature you could not have made up in a hundred thousand lifetimes. so, you pick a picture, because you have heard that everyone ignores a photoless profile, and then you sit back and wait for the responses to roll in. well, that's provided you don't upload a picture of a gigantic dead squid on a stainless steel examining table, which is what i did. i was kind of embarrassed to put a photo of myself, and it seemed ghastly to put up a baby or childhood picture, which, incredibly, some people do without the tiniest shudder in even the most remote piece of their brain. so i pulled a picture of a recently discovered giant squid, and put it up with the following disclaimer: "i really do not look like a gigantic squid, but i'll be happy to email you a photo." do i have to tell you that my technique did not reap me very many replies? i kept checking my email and nobody had written. and my profile was interesting too. i had really taken a lot of care in filling it out.

i finally decided that it didn't matter. why not put up a photo? everyone is up there--everyone allows himself or herself a little vulnerability. it's important to be honest in the pursuit, or else, what good could come from it? so, i found a nice looking photo--it was sort of natural, nice lighting, a slight smile, kind of a 3/4 view--really good, and i posted it. but it was a photo of someone i had never met. it was just a nice photo of someone in kind of a chunky wooly sweater and those neat rubber gardening clogs. i came across the photo while reading an article about people in a community volunteering to plant trees or something, and i put the picture up there in my profile. i got a bunch of replies, but i wasn't terribly interested in any of the people, and then i started to feel bad because i don't own a pair of those gardening clogs. i wrote each person who had written to me a nice note, and they all wrote back saying they thought it was nice that i wrote back and good luck. everyone was really nice. i wondered about the person in my photo--all those people who were planting trees seemed interesting--like they were all friends and they had gone out to plant trees together, all of them with the kind of hair that dries nicely on its own, even in a lot of humidity. then i took the photo down, after someone said that they thought what i did was the worst thing they had ever heard in their life. i later replaced it with a photo of myself that was about one centimeter by one centimeter in size. it was just big enough to tell what color hair i had, and that i was sort of near a pool or something. and with that, i met the person of my dreams. well, that and my award-winning profile i wrote which i mentioned before. i also got a letter from someone who kept a dead crow in the bedroom and a lot of people without photos on their profiles. i wrote back to everyone and said thank you, but i had met someone else. and that is the story of online dating. good-night.

mortar in the court

when my darling spouse and i were courting, things were different. it was 1890, and times were simpler. it wasn't really 1890. if you read this blog, you know by know that i'm not even over 40. there. well, back to our early days: we would take the train on our visits to one another and we would stroll by the seaside and drink old-fashioned sodas and eat fake chicken in a bowl. on our first date, there wasn't even a tiny kiss anywhere in sight. it was the picture perfect victorian date, though it lasted 8 hours. which was actually half a person's life in victorian days. i think people were about 2 feet 7 inches tall then and they lived to be 13 and a half. can you imagine what they would think now? they would think that every one is tall. and old. anyway, speaking of tall and old, that's sort of the courtship picture i am painting here: tall and old. mr. tall and mrs. old. we are both the same age, but this is an attempt at being funny. it's victorian humor. here's a victorian joke: A chicken comes into a breakfast restaurant and says to the host: 'bitte gives you to me nevertheless an egg cup, a small spoon and something salt, the remainder can I then besorgen!' that's not really a victorian joke, and by now you know that i am not a joke teller. but even my brother-in-law couldn't make that funny. even if he were a german-american, which he is not. he is tall though.

anyway, i was in france in the early days of my and my beloved's courtship and i bought a pair of candlesticks, the style of which i understood to be a rat de cave, whose purpose was to illuminate the wine cellar. this particular design had a little rat tail-ish piece that serves as a sort of long hook so a wine cellar visitor could hang the thing on the edge of the cask or barrel of ageing wine while you check on things. they are neat candleholders and they also have a sort of spiraling design, so that you put the candle in and as it burns down, you can rotate the base up the spiral, so there is more candle sticking out of the top. i'm sure you are bored to tears at this point, but i'm getting to the crux of the matter with the candle here--thrilling, i know.

i recently read something about this candlestick that is confusing to me. i was under the impression that this was a wine cellar candle, but i saw a photo of this kind of candlestick and they called it a "courting candle." apparently, one (or one's father, actually) would put a candle in, and then rotate the base up or down, depending upon how much he liked the particular suitor. see, if he had the candle sitting down very low, the candle would burn out quickly, and the young man would go home, quite unsatisfied. but if the father put the candle up very high, there would be plenty of time for the date. but then i was thinking: what father would put that candle up high? do you know of one? i don't? you know what though? who cares. that's what. forget about the candle for now. i am going to tell you right now what really matters and that is that i bought this particular pair of shoes YEARS ago. years. and they are the most comfortable shoes in the world. they are not birkenstocks so just don't picture that right now or it will ruin your experience of the next section. but they are kind of weird. they look like the kind of shoe you would wear if you went to a foreign country because you wanted to help. that's the kind of shoe they are. or they look like the kind of shoe you would wear if you made wheatcakes in your kitchen on an old iron stove while simultaneously giving birth. that kind of shoe. and it's kind of husk-colored or mortar-colored. but this pair of shoes is SO COMFORTABLE. well, i have occasionally worn this shoe out to dinner, where nobody would really see, or to the grocery store to buy a light bulb or something, but i haven't really tried to wear them anywhere else. on one trip to the store late at night, the person i really love (the aforementioned darling spouse) said the shoe was attractive. (i am not using pronouns, that is why that sounds weird, ok?) so it was at that exact point, in the biscuit aisle, that i wondered if we might end up making wheatcakes while simultaneously giving birth to a baby. i think that might have been the turning point. maybe that was the day i really knew it was going to last: when the clay shoe was given the approval. here was the person who could understand and validate the shoe. well, you know what? today i was looking through a super high fashion magazine and there was a person WEARING THE SHOE! there was some kind of outfit that was like wall street meets dirndl and some kind of yellowy duckling hair and there is that shoe. now, i am not one to follow trends, but i think i'll wear the shoe tomorrow. and maybe i'll get an extra little kiss from my darling one who understands.

the not-so-dirty dozen (a clean joke for clean times)

here is a joke for you:

why doesn't a frenchman eat an omelet for breakfast?

because un oeuf is enough.


oh boy, that's so funny.
well, you know what's especially funny? it's that this joke is purely a joke for the oral tradition. see? it's a pun! it doesn't work if you see it written. and it definitely doesn't work if you don't know how to pronounce the french.

i guess i could say this:

why doesn't a frenchman eat an omelet for breakfast?

because enough is enough!

see? it doesn't work that way.

but the good thing is that now, with both versions, you can still enjoy the joke if you didn't get it the first time you saw it written there, and you don't have to feel embarrassed. you could just laugh along with everyone else. only you'd laugh about 4 seconds later. when i was a kid, i used to watch tv and i would laugh when i heard the people laughing on tv. or if i heard my family laughing. i had no idea what the jokes meant. later on in life, i found out that now they have a guy named a laugh man. he has a piece of equipment with all kinds of laughs. sighs and groans and all-out laughs. he mixes all of the laughter in with the laughter that is recorded when the show is filmed. it makes all the laughter work smoothly over the edits. i think that might be one of the weirdest jobs i have ever heard.

but i digress.

i am notorious for being a very bad joke-teller. i am a joke-ruiner. it's a well-known fact around these parts. i try to capitalize on that fact by just mangling jokes even more. you know, for the fun of it. you should try it some time.

unfortunately, i don't have enough time at the moment to discuss this further with you. i have to drive across town, braving terrible traffic, to get to my opera class. the trouble is i haven't practiced un oeuf.

s'more s'nouts

when i was a young chockchippy, i loved marshmallows. i loved toasted marshmallows and i loved the smell of them burning as we cooked them over the firepit. we used a kind of fondue skewer that had a wooden handle and a metal fork sticking out of it. it was long and skinny and ended up with a little two-tined thing that looked like a snake's tongue, but two of them, and barbed. it reminded me of a pitchfork too, but a snakey pitchfork, or neptune's scepter. what is that called? a trident. well, this was like a du-dent. anyway, i do remember one time toasting the marshmallow and then when it was perfectly charred, as i loved a marshmallow to be, i blew on it for a while, to cool it off and pulled the charred skin off of the skewer. of course, the remaining orb-y globule of molten corn syrup had to cool off too, otherwise, layers of your mouth would slither down your gullet along with the marshmallow core. anyway, finally, when it was cooled, i pulled it off of the skewer, WITH MY LIPS ON THE FORK, which was still approximately 487 degrees. i had 2 blistered barbecued strips on my lips for days.

well, marshmallows were popular for a while in our household. and then finally my sister became a vegetarian for reasons i won't discuss here. i don't actually know. there are so many legends, i'm not sure anyone knows which holds true. and then 3 years later, i joined her in vegetarianism. i will tell you that i had always wanted to do what my sister did, but what pushed me over the edge was when i was eating some love's spareribs with my dad, an experience that might have been, at the age of 7, my favorite thing on earth. we sat at the kitchen table and ate rib after rib, with the the crispy singey parts and tons of barbecue sauce. it was heaven. anyway, i said, "it's funny that they call them ribs, you know? like RIBS," and i patted my own ribs, showing him. and my dad said, "they ARE ribs." and i remember throwing a rib down in disgust and screaming, "whose ribs are they?!" he told me they were a cow's ribs and suddenly it all made sense. my sister was right, as usual. how could anyone have let me sit there at the table and suck on a rib? i would innocently rip that (delicious) barbecued flesh off the bone! it seemed barbaric! i was not alone though, our next door neighbors used to play in the front yard, gnawing on something called "pickelpigsfeet," which, you guessed it, turned out to be PICKLED PIGS' FEET. they didn't know what it was they were eating. sure, 'ribs' sounds like 'ribs' and "pickelpigsfeet" sounds just like "pickled pigs' feet," but when you're a kid, it's just a thing, and it's salty and it tastes good, so even if some barbecue sauce-slathered reptilian brain in your child head was screaming out: THIS IS A FOOT! your barbecue sauce-slathered denial would have just swept right in to take care of the matter.

well, what happened after the rib débacle, was that i wrote a note to my mom and taped it on the oven. it said, simply, "i am a vegetarian." and that was that. well, for 29 years, anyway. oh now i am giving away my age, but i will tell you all about my current meat consumption, or rather fish & poultry consumption later. but for now i will continue on about marshmallows.

back in the salad days of marshmallow roasting, before we knew what we were doing, we ate a lot of marshmallows. what i have failed to tell you at this point, if you don't know already, is that marshmallows are made with gelatin. beef gelatin. that means that when you have a s'more, it's graham cracker, then chocolate, then pig snout cartilage, melting all together. we didn't care as kids. come to think of it, i might not care right now if handed a melty one, done just right. but anyway, we ate marshmallows and one day, i cut one with a scissors and stuck the two pieces onto a sort of goldish-brassy trim panel that separated our sliding glass door from our kitchen window. i smooshed the two halves onto the metal and incredibly, my parents didn't make me take them off. they ended up staying there for a long time. i think they yellowed a little, but weeks later, they were still soft. then, months later, or years, maybe. (yes, years) someone drew little faces on them. then at some point, someone colored them in with a green felt tip pen, but you could still see the faces. at this point, they were pretty yellowy too. but they were STILL soft, if you poked them with your finger.

eventually, my parents renovated the house. it was a big overhaul, the kind that happen post-natural disaster. they pushed out the wall of the house and put in a big gourmet kitchen. they updated the whole thing, but they kept the weird brassy gold panel with the marshmallows on it. nobody can say they weren't sentimental. the marshmallows are still there today. i think they have now been up there for 32 years. and they are still soft. yes, i said 32 years. i think it is such an incredible fact that i am telling it to you, even though it reveals my age bracket. it's that fascinating to me, and i hope to you as well. when i go over there, i usually smoosh them a little with my finger just to make sure they are still soft. and they are. they dent in when you push on them. they have shrunken a little bit in the last 3 decades, but they are pretty much the same green-faced marshmallows they ever were.

now, in a nutshell, i will tell you that against all odds, i started eating chicken and fish 2 years ago, following a weird decline in my health. i had never imagined i would ever eat meat again, in my entire life. and the idea of it was so incredibly disgusting and ethically horrible, but i was quite ill and anemic and couldn't get enough protein. so i started eating the stuff. i did not go near red meat or pork though. i still haven't. but one day i found marshmallows made with fish gelatin. FISH GELATIN, instead of beef gelatin. that meant i could have a marshmallow. i mean, the first marshmallow i would have in 30 years! it was good. better than good. it was so incredibly wonderful that i ate practically the whole bag. tonight i had 2 of them in a cup of cocoa. i hadn't tried that yet. it was so good i nearly cried, except when they got syrupy and goopy in my cocoa, i kind of freaked out because i was thinking that weird fish particles were melted into my cocoa. but i finished it all anyway. it was very great. well, so that is the story of marshmallows and gelatin and beef and meat and ribs and my dad and the kitchen table and my sister and my mom who put up with 2 insane kids with weird dietary restrictions and these fantastic kosher marshmallows.

i know. this isn't very funny. I KNOW THAT. it was just something i remembered tonight as i had my cocoa. gee willikers, can't i just have a little memory?

woof blitzer

i have been too busy to blog. T.B.T.B. no excuse, i know, but i just must say that at least 2 times a day, i think: "that's what i'll write!" and then, the next day, i forget what it was that i was going to write. anyway, i have had 2 very strange dreams in the last 2 nights. i won't go into the details, because i think there's only one person i know who really ever seems to patiently listen to me tell my dreams. but i will tell you that one of them featured a red dog, i guess an irish setter, who was all wet, and seemed all the way a normal setter, except its face had a bill. like a long, extended duck bill. then, last night, i had a dream where a dog was a boy, or a boy was a dog. he was a bad seed. he was standing on his back legs, and was very much a boy, but he had a soft coat all over his body and he had his head turned to the side, as if someone ran over a dog in a cartoon, the way the dog would look on the cement: flat, with its face turned to one side. this dog/boy kept bullying me the whole time. with its little whiskery chin and saying things and growling. and then i realized that this dog/boy meant business, that his attitude was just foreshadowing some explosion to come. lots of people were there, in a weird half-framed house that i apparently lived in. my mom was there and some of her friends were there. i can tell you exactly what it means, but i won't. i think the story is better than the meaning. so that was my dog/boy/duck dreaming series of the last 2 days. i am off in a half-hour to pick up my actual dog from her appointment. she had a haircut and a bath today at an upscale dog lounge. well, for her it's upscale, because she usually eats poop in the backyard and walks around barefoot all the time, so i think that this place, with its bakery display of dog cookies is probably the ritz-carlton as far as she's concerned. and she's not one of those little chippy dogs that everyone is toting around these days. she's a great, normal dog-shaped dog of nearly 50 pounds. she doesn't have a duckbill, and she doesn't bully me. well, not in the sense of her being MEAN. she does sort of coerce me into giving her all manner of chewies and grapes and stuff, but she's never mean. she's never touched me with a tooth or anything. she is, in fact, the greatest dog that has ever lived, if you ask me. and that is not her photo. i would never exploit her like that. in fact, that dog in the photo has folded felt feet.