I should be finishing the other blog post.
The one I started two weeks ago.
But I ran out of my Moonlight Earl Grey tea.
And the replacement (read: cheaper tea) hasn’t deigned to show up yet.
I am sad.
….So very sad.
The cheaper tea is not as good as my favorite tea.
It could at least be prompt!
Thank goodness for the thousand and one other teas I have that are keeping me company while I wait for my black beauty to arrive.
Through a friend, I was invited to join fellow service women in an community-based artistic endeavor of a most mysterious kind–one with the thrill of possibly ending up shellacked and put on display!
How could I say “No” to that?
Continue reading Artful Creations of Pain and VisionIt is entirely possible there is such a thing as too much isolation.
It leads one to very odd flights of fancy.
…especially when shopping after hoarders have ransacked the produce aisle.
You end up bringing home a quirky specimen.
I’ll admit, I’ve been curious as to what these things might taste like.
A session of mad shopping–the kind where you duck and cover whenever another shopper comes anywhere near you–results in a new and unusual purchase.
I’ve successfully nabbed some much-needed cleaning supplies when the victory over the nearly-empty shelves turns sour. All it takes is a near-hostile exchange with people unaware that a pandemic is taking place.
I’m stopped by dawdlers at the wall of cheeses. I glare at the young couple with their two kids standing in front of the refrigeration display debating the merits of one plastic wrapped cheddar over another for approximately an hour until I want to scream “IT’S ALL THE SAME DAMNED CHEESE, JUST PICK ONE!” and make their kids cry.
[NOTE: I don’t actually scream. But I do seethe for about five minutes waiting with toe-tapping impatience until I loudly interrupted them, “I would just like to get some cheese, if that’s okay?” in a most passive aggressive appeal.]
It is on my way to check-out that post-anxiety, impulse shopping occurs.
Back home, the dragon fruit sat on the counter, as it aged enough to get the required ‘wilted leaves’ by which point it was a lot less photogenic.
Once cut into, the white interior with its plethora of tiny black seeds is revealed.
If I had to describe the taste, I would tell you to go buy one yourself. It tastes nothing like I imagined it would. Pear comes close. If you took that pear down a back alley and blasted it full of buckshot until all the flavor and sweetness had been drained like life blood into the garbage strewn darkness.
Or, as a friend said when I asked her whether she’d like to try some.
“No thanks. I’m good. I’ve had it before. Once.” She paused and added, “It’s not bad or anything.“
I joked, “Yeah, but it’s not good either.”
She laughed and said, “Yeah.”
“At least the seeds aren’t noticeable, unlike kiwi, which are crunchy when you eat them, or as bad as pomegranates!” I spoon up another pallid mouthful.
I chew a few more bites. The tastelessness does not grow on me, despite my desire to like the fruit. The stuff is probably a delicacy in the arid regions where it grows. A king among fruits in a desert. This makes me think of something else.
“It’s like an old boyfriend, where you pretend that they aren’t the problem before breaking up with them. Except that in this case, you’d tell the fruit ‘It’s not me, it is totally you!‘”
“Yeah, it’s the fruit no one would pick if they had a choice.” The friend obligingly humors me on my line of thought.
I wrap up the second half of the much despaired cactus flower progeny and toss it back in the fridge. It was at least filling.
“So much for the exotic potential.” I say. “Dragon Fruit-–the ex-boyfriend of fruits.“
____________________________________
Stay Tuned as the mind numbing boredom of the stay-at-home-or-else order continues. I may break down and try that Durian that’s been giving me the stink-eye whenever I see it.
If you give your kid a book of cookies, which one will he pick?
The hardest recipe? Not necessarily.
But he might pick an unexpected one.
Continue reading Double-Ginger? Oh Snap!This has to be the most click-baity (not to mention misleading) title ever.
If you were looking for pictures of yours truly in a bikini throwing down with other middle-aged women in a pay-per-view mud rink, brace yourself for disappointment.*
I recently received an unexpected gift in the mail.
And in person…
And in several persons…
But first, it began with a cup of tea.
___________________________________________
In case you are wondering how my year is going and why I am offline…
2019 kind of blows!*
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:
*This is karma in action, I swore I wasn’t going to buy any more tea until I drank all I already have…but I just can’t kick the loose-leaf habit.**
**Fingers Crossed People. Otherwise, get used to the pithy new mode of blogging I can achieve typing with one finger on my cell phone. On the upside, I can now blog while on the toilet. So this is a case of the glass being half full, really.
Walking the public pier along the Holland State Beach allows one to appreciate both an exercise in free speech and the quasi-felonious joys of graffiti expressionism.
I have never been so brave or confident in what I had to say that I was willing to risk a $250 fine and possible jail time to tag a public edifice in order to say it.*
Vandalism is, at the very least, a misdemeanor offense, but what I want to know is…is it art?
And if it is art, what is it saying?
Based on my hour spent cataloging this year’s liberal art tributes on the rusting canvas of the masses, the message depends on the viewer:
Positivity Abounds:
If you look hard enough, you can find answers.
Although….you may also be left wondering what the question was.
Thoughts from Danny Duncan!
Danny thinks “It’s fine!”
But, he scrawled his sentiments in a tucked away place on an overhead pipe, so I suspect he’s playing it cool.
Some people put themselves out there, courting ridicule…possibly unaware that a Tinder Date may be using a pseudonym.
Everyone has an opinion…whether that opinion is worth scrawling on a pier support is in the eye of the beholder.
Dreams are apparently dictated with impermanent ink scrawled on a blue-green background and will melt with time and the coming rains.
Lacking the words to express their deeper emotions, some fall back on a classic:
Friends slap high fives (or low ones) wherever they can.
Some HIGH FIVES bury the headline:
OTHER HIGH FIVES come with best wishes from ON HIGH!
Emotions run high…leaving some confused…knotting their hair with suspense.
Perhaps the message echoes an earlier time—a plea for Peace, Love and Hope symbolized by a badly divided pie chart?
The VEGANS were a bit demanding and psychedelically so:
Some pier polluters promote poignant pleas:
Perhaps what you take from the message boardwalk is only that which you brought with you?***
For example.
One word scrawled among the masses stood out. I was astounded that classics such as Shakespearean language describing a two-week time frame have made it to modern vernacular (even if the spelling hadn’t):
Then, later, during a rare session of live tv watching, I was bombarded by a commercial which dispelled my illusions. (And possibly also my allusions.)
I almost despaired to have lost a belabored delusion of the persistence of language.
But then, after watching King Lear drop bodies at Grand Valley State University, I decided that Fortnite actually is a modern variant of Shakespearean storytelling—if only Shakespeare had lived in the age of the rocket launcher.
It seemed an obvious thing to me that there should be an image of Shakespeare with a rocket launcher…SO I MADE ONE:
If art is a medium of expression, then I believe those who congregate at the water’s edge to exchange selfies and tag nearby crumbling infrastructure are at least trying to get a message out.
Or, maybe they are all just succumbing to…
Maybe this isn’t art.
But I say, “Let he who is without talent, shut the hell up.”
And let it be what it is.
*-*-*
The need to express ourselves, our souls, may be the most human characteristic.
That we do it in a destructive, transitory medium is even more so.
Will words someday become anachronisms?
After digital communication leaps past verbal utterances to an all-emoticon communication system—how will we express nuanced emotions?
The phrase a “picture is worth a thousand words” takes on a scary new meaning when all you have is a demented smiley face to look at.
Until that day, cherish words, however they are conveyed.
Whatever cryptic message they share may be just for you!
Maybe the mystic words will heal what is broken.
Release what is hidden.
Find what is lost!
Maybe a body just needs to scream into the void and hope that someone, somewhere, is listening:
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:
*I vandalize the internet from the safety of my blog instead.
**The internet laws have not yet caught up with the violations of free speech rampant in the digital stratospheres. When I become dictator of the universe, trolls will be hunted for sport.
***I suspect I’m stealing this line from Yoda. Or Harry Potter. A writer somewhere is feeling a sharp pang of plagiarism.
Do you like a stinking good time?
Do you appreciate the rare? The exotic? The exceedingly slow burn to coition?
Do you savor the anticipation an eighteen-year wait brings?
Then you may be ready for the giant phallus. The amorphophallus titanum to be precise.
*
If you happened to wander into Meijer Gardens this week, you may have stumbled across the shy and retiring Titan Arum–a bloom colloquially referred to as a Corpse Flower.*
I’ve been a long-time fan of the gardens, but even I was caught by surprise about the arrival of the local beauty–nicknamed Putricia for her odiferous nature. On impulse, I dashed to the gardens on Tuesday to get this shot of her before she made her full-blown debut. The garden staff estimated that she wouldn’t fully bloom until Friday…but they were to be caught off guard.
Wednesday night, the spathe–or giant solitary petal that goes around the spadix (the stabby, sword-like center spike) was still tightly closed.**
For a better description, you can go to the Chicago Botanic Garden’s website for a great breakdown of the particulars. The site was extremely helpful in providing the follow image to steal:
Rumors abound around this hard-to-get coquette. According to this chart, it may bloom every four to five years. I’ve read elsewhere, it can take much longer because it relies on perfect conditions being met in order to propagate. The flower is in danger of becoming extinct in nature because of habitat loss and other causes.
At the Meijer Gardens, Putricia took eighteen years before she was ready to blossom. But she is finally strutting her stuff. And perhaps because she was so slow in arriving, she hurried up her appearance in time for me to dash over to meet her on Thursday. And, I have to say, she put on quite a stately show.
I couldn’t say how many people came, but the lines curled throughout the building when I was there. If you are brave, you might get to see her yourself–at least, for the next 24 hours anyway.
If you want to save your feet (and nose) the effort, a link to video of the flower’s expansion, you can find it in this article located in the Detroit News.
Here’s the picture I snapped with my cell phone:
Personally, I wasn’t overwhelmed with the stench by the time I got to her. She’d already lost some of her bloom. (Probably being visited by thousands of people takes a toll on a girl.)
Whether standing in line for over two hours for a minute in the limelight with this sultry Sumatran Stinker is your idea of fun, only you can decide.
As for me, I am happy that I went and hope we can look forward to a bright future ahead.
And now, I have camping to get packed for. My son is totally puzzled as to why I would bother to stop and chat with you for this long anyway. For this reason, I’m attributing any typos to his impatience.
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:
*Strangely enough, no one requests a corpse flower for their bridal bouquet. Probably due to having to wait decades to ensure you’ll have one in time for the nuptials.
**Look, I’m not a botanist. There’s plenty of sites you can go to for actual plant terminology and description. But we both know you aren’t going there, are you?!
Warning: Graphic and disgusting subject matter. Not for the faint of heart. Reminiscent of my prior post on the topic: The Diarrhea Diaries. Which, as it turns out, was volume one of an unfortunate series.
*
Dear Diarrhea:
The US Food and Drug administration recommends two to four servings of fruit per day.
I don’t think they had this in mind:
If you visited the CNN article I referenced, you get why I fear produce. If you didn’t trip the above link, the 20-point, bold font title of the article pretty much says it all:
Now the fact that pre-cut watermelon has been spreading salmonella throughout the midwest wouldn’t ordinarily concern me except for two things:
I did not buy my melon at any of the stores referenced in the CNN piece on salmonella contaminated fruits. This does not stop me from putting a very strong set of coincidences together and coming up with a likely culprit to my week spent regretting everything I’ve ever eaten that I did not personally sterilize in a 1400 degree Fahrenheit kiln.
I spent the last (gets calculator, does math) 168 hours visiting the powder room. HOURLY. Sometimes more frequently. A brief itinerary of my adventures can be summed up this way:
Day 1: 6:00 a.m. – stomach lets out initial howls of protest. By 4:00 p.m., I am so sick, I’m curled up on the floor of my son’s therapy office wishing I didn’t have to drive us back home.
“Can’t we just live here?”
Day 2: After waking all night long to tango with the toilet, fever strikes and I shake my digital read-out thermometer convinced it has to be wrong.
Day 3: Have decided that having a will to live kind of sucks. Scrounge through medicine cabinets to find decade’s old Tylenol and take it, hoping it will kill me.
Day 4: Fever finally breaks and I would celebrate, but I’m getting low on toilet paper and there seems to be no end in sight.
Day 5: Am now reconsidering my agnostic stance and will willingly convert to whatever religion will cure me.**
Day 6: There may be light at the end of the tunnel, but I suspect they are the tiny sparks as each of my brain cells implode from dehydration. I gird my loins and guzzle Kefir straight from the carton.***
I wipe curdled cream from my lips and scream:
“Take that, you plague-ridden, bacteria bastards!”
Today is Day 7. It has been a week and, slowly, I am feeling somewhat human. Though, of course, the diarrhea hasn’t given up trying to kill me. I counter its vicious attacks with a chemical carpet bombing of Gatorade and Live-Culture acidophilus pills.
I’d really like this to be the worst thing that will ever happen to me, but I known I am just not that lucky.
As for whether this was a case of Salmonella or not, who knows? If it wasn’t, I sincerely pity the people who’ve had it worse.
If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the bathroom…freshening up.
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:
*Hint: it was not a Law & Order Marathon either.
**I’m looking at you, Vishnu, you beautiful blue man. Although, Shiva the Destroyer makes more sense in the circumstances.
***Kefir – the sound you involuntarily make after tasting fermented yogurt drink. Which tastes just as bad as it sounds.
Feature image stolen from UK Pinterest site. Please forgive me, I have no energy or desire to get my own watermelon and recreate your excellent work. Although, Gallagher’s work on expressing rage by smashing fruit with a giant mallet is starting to make a great deal more sense to me now.
A trip through life with fingers crossed and eternal optimism.
Anna Fonté; the things she writes want you to look at them.
One woman's observations on her way through life
sharing the stories of interconnection
"Nothing that happens to a writer -- however happy, however tragic -- is ever wasted." ~ P.D. James
Financial Services Executive
Erm, what am I doing with my life?
by Peach Berman
A trip through life with fingers crossed and eternal optimism.
Anna Fonté; the things she writes want you to look at them.
One woman's observations on her way through life
sharing the stories of interconnection
"Nothing that happens to a writer -- however happy, however tragic -- is ever wasted." ~ P.D. James
Financial Services Executive
Erm, what am I doing with my life?
by Peach Berman
Like Mother Teresa, only better.
Nature needs Nurture
Happiness is Baseball
Watercolor stories project - Finished 2021
Never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer.
Looking forward...from back here, a journey through the second half
محمد القربي
The Wanderings and wonderings of a sentient cloud.
TheDustSeason 