Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   New World parking lot.
Thursday, November 10 2005
Temperatures took a turn for the cold today, dropping into the low forties by evening. I was up on the solar deck putting in horizontal balusters (are they even called balusters when they're horizontal?) until I was miserable from wind chill. At that height the wind made conditions far less comfortable than they were on the ground. It was, for example, much easier to stack a load of firewood that was delivered late this morning.
I also stripped the pickup truck of nearly everything of any value (except the tires), because I'd arranged to have it towed away tomorrow to a local junk yard. The dogs kept standing around excitedly wagging their tails as I did so, thinking I was about to take them for a fun little drive. There was no way to explain to them that the truck had pretty much already gone on to the great squirrel forest in the sky.

Tonight Gretchen had planned an outing at a party being thrown for the Woodstock Film Festival at New World Home Cooking (which is just east of Woodstock on 212). Somehow, and I wasn't clear on the details, it was expected that local victorious Democrats would be there and it would end up being some sort of victory party. But by this evening Gretchen wanted to bail on the whole thing, using her period as the excuse. But by then she'd raised my interest and I still wanted to go. Great, Gretchen thought, she'd be getting some of that essential "alone time."
So I drove out to New World and didn't see anyone I knew, not at the bar or at the "party" happening in the restaurant's "event space" in the back. A couple saw me snooping around without purpose and asked if they could be of assistance, so I said I was there to attend some sort of "election victory party." They had no idea what I was talking about. It turned out that they were New World's owners (something I surmised from their attitude) and they explained that tonight's party was being held for some local arts association. No matter, I said, I didn't know anyone there anyway and would just wait for the others to arrive who would know more about it than me.
So then, as I approached the bottom of my Hurricane Kitty and wondered if I'd come to the wrong restaurant, Jenny from Willow (co-director of the region's other animal sanctuary) showed up, and then her friend Erin (a new vegan on the scene). It seemed Gretchen's idea had been that we would somehow crash the event at New World and that local victorious Democrats would miraculously materialize. But the event was charging $50/per person and was, as Jenny quickly noted, "lame" (it behooves me to mention that these words were spoken by an amputee). Furthermore, there wasn't a single politician to be seen. So we ended up just sitting at the bar shooting the shit about various things, mostly Jenny's suffering at the hands of the Woodstock building inspector and assorted yokels.
At some point we went out in the parking lot, and on our way Jenny asked a couple kids with skateboards (they looked to be about 13) whether or not they were smoking. They looked at her as if she was some virtuous adult lodging an accusation, but in truth all she wanted was a light. [REDACTED]
I was intrigued to note that New World now has pupusas on its menu. "Do you know what a pupusa is?" I asked Jenny, and of course she didn't. So I explained what they were and suggested that she order a serving, that they are always made fresh and she could surely tell our bartender to tell the cook not to put goat cheese in them (something that would render them inedible to a vegan like Jenny). But when Jenny tried to do just that, the bartender explained that withholding goat cheese was in fact an impossibility, because they had been pre-made! The idea of eating reheated pupusas does not appeal to me, so I'll be sticking with the authentic El Salvadorian pupusas at Kingston's pupuseria for the time being.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?051110

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