“I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Sunday, March 5, 2000
We have a friend staying with us for a few days and tonight we took the whole kit-n-caboodle out to eat, deciding on Chan’s – a popular Chinese joint here in Mesquite.
The menu is fairly ordinary, as these things go, but the quality is high, the servings are generous, and the food comes in cute personal metal woks instead of the usual foam trays. Best of all, the cooking is done behind a glass wall and you can watch. A line of up to six cooks and a handful of assistants line up in front of vertical jets of flame. Oil filled woks are at the ends, one deep frying coated stuff and the other cooking neat. In the center, giant woks are used to stir-fry everything to order, the assistants slicing and filling up bowls with meat, vegetables, or noodles, the cooks throwing it in, flinging the necessary sauces from a cluster of deep bowls, and washing up after each order; all with rapid efficient motions.
In the center was the head cook, twenty years older and a foot shorter than anyone else. He wore a baseball cap on backwards. His arms were thick and corded with muscle from slinging pans for decades. He used a long handled wok and a ladle, swinging and slinging and cooking as if it was a dance, flipping food, dodging high yellow flames or dipping in exactly the right amount of corn starch and soy sauce. Or shouting orders and directing the others, gesturing with his ladle like an orchestra conductor. His black encrusted pan looked like it had stir-fried a million orders.
The cooking is quick and the organization efficient but it is so popular that at the peak a double line stretched from the registers all through the place and out the door.
Nick and Lee were able to grab a prime perch against the glass where they could watch the wokking. I asked them what they thought of it and couldn’t hide my grin when Lee observed, “It’s just like Iron Chef!”
And a piece of flash fiction for today:
from Flash Fiction Online
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.—-Lewis Carroll
Two men, natives of Smeebage, sat at a quiet outdoor table at a restuarant that specialized in snotluber. One sipped a cup of ploygalumph, the other swabed a slice of phortoobgoober across a plate of phverytail and nibbled on the feebrilejunket.
“I like the girl, she’s full of balloophanty, which I like, but after all she’s a marshfartlelist, though, and I don’t snarz that.”
“Seems a little schmiddlemarc too.”
“Not so much schmiddlemarc, but more shatzshorn.”
“Not much to base a mightoris on… if you ask me.”
“Piewhacker!”
“I agree!”
Feeling p’shawshanked, the first man, after finishing his ploygalumph, stood up, walked to the station, and caught the afternoon flushton. He sat down and stared phantuptly at the snagnopholus man across the aisle, more than a little afraid that me might be smeeged. Nothing happened, and the man smiled at the wasted anxiety and quorsux his fears caused him. His step lightened as he left the flushton as his usual stop, West Vuckathall.
Shatzshorn or no, marshfartlelist or not, he could help but think of her balloophanty and decided he’d give her a smallbotz as soon as he arrived at home. He jogged tartoofely and smiled phartly at total strangers – the evening ahead look like it might be full of clarm after all.
“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
All happy partnerships (both professional and romantic) follow this simple but powerful ratio.
Yes, preference cascades can get ugly — hello Romania! — but as ugly as they get they are possibly the lowest butcher bill we’re facing.
Space travel isn’t just for billionaires anymore.
In Louisiana’s disappearing wetlands
Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.
“It occurs to me that I really can’t remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the café, your figure, your dress, that I still see.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
I know I’ve done this (many) times before – but I am always amused in the winter by how the snow piles up on the little plastic nubs on the children’s climbing wall in the Park at the end of my block… and they look sorta like white hair on top of little faces. Makes it almost worth the bitter cold.
“Romanians have a saying, ‘Not every dog has a bagel on its tail.’ It means that not all streets are paved with gold. When I began my career, I just wanted to do cartwheels.”
― Nadia Comaneci, Letters to a Young Gymnast
“that Englishman who came to challenge me three or four months ago, and whom I killed to stop him bothering me”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,–you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
—-Black Elk
From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Saturday, August 4, 2001
There is too much heat and too much driving. I look into the tinted car windows and wonder who these people are and where are they going? Are they looking at me and thinking the same thing? I don’t think so.
There are too many huge houses, identical, newly sprawled across land I used to ride my bicycle through, open plains.
I dance my ghost dance and the suburbs will go away, the buffalo and the coyote will return. The concrete will fly upward. The asphalt will crack and rise in a riot of lifting. Brick and sheetrock tumble upwards, spiraling to the sky in a giant tornado, sweeping the plains clean – down to the black fragrant dirt.
And a piece of flash fiction for today:
“He who controls the spice controls the universe.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune
Craig had some visitors at work. They required hours, tours and conversation.
Because of this Craig was unable to go out and eat lunch. He talked to Helen on the phone, and they discussed plans for the evening and Craig realized that he felt weak and tired. He figured this was because it was about four in the afternoon and he hadn’t eaten anything all day. His work had vending machines, but the food in them was absolute greasy crap and Craig was trying to avoid that sort of thing. So he searched out and found some food left over from a couple of days ago, stored safely away in the office refrigerator.
A jumbo container of pickled jalapeño peppers.
After soaking in… whatever they soak in, for two days, they were just right. Smooth, chewy, yet plenty hot enough to make Craig’s head sweat. One was good, so two must be better, he didn’t stop there, four, five, pop ’em in, swallow ’em down, leave a little pile of stems behind, feel the crunch of membrane, hot skin on burning lips, the pop of hotter seeds. He ate the whole jar.
Craig went to take a leak and while carefully washing his hands first (males learn at an early age to thoroughly wash their hands before pissing after eating hot peppers) he looked in the mirror. His eyes were bugged out, sweat was running down his face, his thin hair was standing on end as best it could. Craig was worried he ate too many peppers.
Now, hours later, he knew he ate too many. A healthy supper of rice and beans wasn’t sitting too well. His guts were churning under the influence of too much capsicum. Craig drank some milk and tried to go to sleep.
He was sure he’d have wild dreams that night.
Bill Chance 