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").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   psychedelic Richard Scarry
Saturday, November 24 2007

setting: Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland

The plan today was to have lunch at a great South Indian restaurant called Woodland Indian Vegetarian Restaurant. This plan had received an additional endorsement on Wednesday night when the guys at the Murugan Hindu Temple in Lanham, when asked for the name of the best Indian Restaurant in the area, had volunteered "Woodland".
Woodland is in an interesting multiethnic community to the Northeast of DC. In the parking lot in front of Woodland, Hispanic day laborers stood around in clumps, waiting for someone to come and give them a day of hanging drywall, planting bulbs, or writing book reports.
Food-obsessed, that wouldn't be a bad characterization of either Gretchen or her father. They love food, and can geek out together for long swaths of conversation on nothing more than the details of food preparation. Don't get me wrong, I love food, and I love good food even more. But I don't need a language to talk about it any more than I need a language to talk about sex. It's a holy thing I'd rather not demystify with words. When we got into Woodland, I was starving, but everybody in my entourage was walking slowly around the buffet just looking at it, not getting any of it and certainly not eating. What, was this a purely intellectual mission? Had we only come to look? For two or three minutes there I was about as miserable as I ever get.
But then I was eating! Oh, and it was delightful, in that way that Indian buffets are always delightful. I won't ruin the memory by trying to articulate it any further.
Meanwhile, just to my left, sat my three year old nephew. He was, his mother said, going through a "white food" phase. The only food that interested him was white and completely flavorless. You'd think it would be hard to find such food at an Indian buffet (where things tend towards yellow and spicy), but white food is something of a human universal (perhaps because being three is also a human universal).
When my nephew was done eating (and I don't know who finished first, him or me), his mother busted out some art supplies and started drawing pictures for her son on demand. She's not the most talented artist in the world, but she's settled on a few conventions that seem to satisfy her son. For example, a triangle with a number on it balanced on two small circles is an acceptable stand-in for a race car, his most popular drawing request. Today, though, she branched out a little more and drew the gable-ended elevation of a house and some stick-figure humans. Her son can be a harsh art critic, so she was nervous about filling in the details of the house. At this point my mind went into full on psychedelic culturejam mode, and I pictured a house not with doors and windows, but with a human face instead. I asked for a pen and started drawing on the back of my disposable paper table mat.
Soon enough I had a house featuring a human face, which looked pleasant and whimsical at first. Soon enough, though, I'd given it a set of crooked teeth and complexes of age lines, making it much creepier than anything you'll ever seen in a children's book. I also drew a picture of a snake equipped with a normal human head. By now my nephew was fascinated by my ability to draw convincing pictures, and began requesting various additions. At some point he asked for a "body" and though he probably meant a body for the disembodied head that was my face-house, I took this to mean "dead body." "Dead body?" I asked with delight, hoping perhaps there was little more darkness to being three than I'd yet seen in evidence. But my nephew said nothing so I just said, "Okay!" and drew a dead body beneath a small cloud of flies.
At some point my nephew started demanding that I give little text labels to the things I was drawing, so by the time we left Woodland, my doodles looked like a book by Richard Scarry on LSD.

After lunch, we went to a nearby store that specializes in Indian groceries for the Indian community. There we got two big sacks of basmati rice, various herbs and spices, and a bag of spicy cashews.

On the way back to Silver Spring, we stopped at a small park built around a rainwater runoff collection pond (an essential fragment of open space in the heavily-paved suburban landscape). Gretchen's father had been attracted to this place by the Redwing Blackbirds who live here in the summer, but it was well past their season and now the pond was the exclusive province of Mallard Ducks and Canada Geese.
Later, at Dina's Parents house, there was something of a "baby naming" ceremony for Dina and Gilad's baby Mia. Similar ceremonies had already happened in Tel Aviv and Toronto (where Gilad's family comes from), and this one was mainly for the benefit of Dina's friends and family. There is no formalized system for making a fuss over a new baby girl in the Jewish tradition (there is no bris), so Dina and Gilad had to improvise. This improvisation involved no sharp knives, genital exposure, or blood, though there was plenty of wine to drink and food to eat. Most surprisingly of all, it was possible to get coffee complete with caffeine, and this was how I lost a bet with Gretchen's father.
I spent most of the baby naming hanging out with Gretchen and her childhood friend Val, both of whom provide reliably entertaining conversation. I also spoke for awhile with Joe, a youngish man who had worked in the military as an Arab language expert and who had lived in London and gotten paid to listen in on tapped telephones. After being disgusted with the inefficiency and pigheadedness of the military, he quit that job and became something of an expert in biodiesel. Joe now lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, only 25 miles from where I spent the majority of my childhood.

Back at Gretchen's parents' house, Gretchen was jonesing for a teevee fix. She'd thought ahead and programmed the TiVo to record Women's Murder Club, one of her favorite shows. We all watched this together and then watched a few other programs in the TiVo, particularly old episodes of Look What I Did from HGTV. In Look What I Did, regular people build elaborate things such as backyard waterparks, palatial treehouses, or enormous dollhouses. It's better than most shows on HGTV in that I didn't feel like I'd completely wasted a half hour passively absorbing subtle corporate messages after sitting through an episode.

Later Dina and Gilad came over and we sat upin the living room talking until very late.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?071124

feedback
previous | next