Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Random memory as a blogging placeholder

I've been thinking that I really should blog about an important and troubling topic. But it was not quite important or troubling enough to actually make me put skin to key.

So in the meantime, I offer you this random memory from about twenty years ago which struck me this morning as I crossed at a pedestrian crossing (pedestrian!? It was dull as dish-water!):

As a teenager I was watching a war movie one night, one of those harrowing Russian front affairs full of the futility and brutality of armed conflict, an anti-war classic (but not so classic that I can actually remember what it was called). By the end, I was practically sobbing, my chest heaving, my eyes thick with pain. My God! I thought to my young self. My God! (Because I was and am a repetitious creature, a repetitious creature) What a sophisticated and emotionally deep person I am! So visceral has been my disgust at the idea of war that I'm having an *almost* physical reaction to it. Am I sensitive or what?

And then full-blown flu symptoms appeared the next morning...

But, you know, I really am very sensitive.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

This could be a coded message

This could be a coded message:

"I removed 8 organically-grown carrots from the fridge. Although they had been purchased quite recently, they were somewhat limp which my colleauge observed. She said that I possibly had not stored them correctly. I said that I had put them in the vegetable crisper. What else was I to do? She said that her grandmother had stored them point down in sand. But that was because she had to make them last the whole winter. Where was that, I asked. Europe, she said. After she left I coarsely peeled the 8 carrots and then ate them with spring onion dip. When the carrots ran out, I spooned the remains of the dip ("cream cheese, shallots, sour cream, onion, garlic, lemon juice [etc]") into my mouth with a tea spoon. It was initially delicious but ultimately cloying."

This could have been a coded message.

But it wasn't. In the words of John Berryman, this did actual happen.

It's also remarkable that the label says "spring onion dip" but that the principal ingredient is "shallots."

If it had been a coded message I expected it would have said: "Go on my signal. And wear cotton."