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floor pasta
Saturday, July 11 2009
There was a power outage happening when I woke up this morning, so I ground my coffee with a mortar and pestal and used a lighter to light the gas on the stove so I could heat the water for the French press. With a cup of delicious 19th Century coffee in hand, I went down to the greenhouse just to enjoy the beautiful sunny day and perhaps work on some of the details related to the flashing underneath the big panels of south-facing glass. Since my computer was off, I had to rely on whatever FM station my little battery-powered radio could pick up. For whatever reason, my radio hasn't been able to pick up the local public radio stations, so I've had to rely on WKXP, the powerful local country music station. In America, it's useful to have a good working familiarity with country music, and I find myself liking it more than I used to, though the sappy family-oriented songs are best appreciated as unintentional parodies.
Sometimes, though, I find myself straying farther afield from my This American Life-centered radio comfort zone. This morning, for example, I listened to one of the several broadcast frequencies of Redeemer Broadcasting, a fountain of far-right religious nuttery (sadly, as with many right-wing phenomena in this country, there is no left-wing equivalent, at least none with access to a legal radio transmitter). Most of the station's airtime is devoted to unlistenable religious music and truism-rich (though purportedly Biblically-inspired) advice for financial stability. This morning, though, I listened to a program called The Public Square, which ventured out into the realm of politics and government policy. Today's featured guest was a sort of Joe the Plumber figure who runs a parts supplier for the auto industry. Lobbied by one of the auto manufacturers to support a bailout, he rebelled, sending an angry missive to the manufacturer, as well as a number of friends and his mother. His mother forwarded it to her email list, and from there it went viral, making the guest a sought-after participant at right-wing gatherings such as tea parties. His perspective on the bailouts as related on The Public Square amounted to an unfocused populist screed against socialism and "giving our money away." For its relevance to the debate, it depended on common-sense gut reactions. Nobody, after all, wants to "give our tax dollars away" to the "fatcats." And nobody who listens to right wing radio wants "socialism," because that's a political system where it's normal to rape babies, marry fig trees, and worship Satan. Missing from the discussion was something I crave in my talk radio, an dispassionate logic-based exploration of issues. Nobody was raising important questions, "What would happen if Detroit wasn't bailed out?" or "What if the Obama administration just let the economy sort itself out?" I'd love to hear answers to those question from a Biblical perspective. I suspect that the Christian nutjob perspective on politics and economics is similar to their perspective on protecting the environment: there is no future, and if everything breaks down, bring it on, because that can only mean Jesus is coming!
But no, the guest and the host on The Public Square were content to just toss around the perjorative names of recent policy decisions and then declare that, because these unexamined policies were obviously wrong because of what they could be labeled, the entire governmental enterprise is suspect. The host heaped the most blame on the Congress, since it is (under our constitution) the only part of government that makes law. He worked himself up into such a lather that eventually he declared that the Congress was not doing the will of the people and must be fired (ignoring, of course, that the constitution provides a mechanism for determining these things). He went on to say that he would be mailing letters to every member of Congress telling them that they were fired.
There was an unintentionally delicious moment of hilarity when the guest related how, after his letter went viral, he was, with one exception, largely ignored by the political establishment. The exception was a governor who exchanged a number of emails and said encouraging things and seemed to be making good policy choices, choices that, if adopted widely, would put America back on the road to self-reliance and away from socialism. But that governor turned out to be Mark Sanford, and when Sanford was recently caught in Argentina with a woman not his wife, that was it. Now the guest wanted to throw all the bums out.
One final note about the nature of the discussion on The Public Square concerns the lexicon used on it. The host kept returning to the idea that America was founded by deeply religious people, and here he was talking about fundamentalist Puritans in New England instead of the deist and agnostic formulators of the constitution. But then he'd transistion to references to America's founding documents and what they did and did not allow. He included the Declaration of Independence among these documents, as if it had legal authority in our existing system. But the host consistently referred to it only as "the Declaration." This was surely part of some ongoing effort to inflate its importance, though I don't know how. I can understand why a Christianist would be more interested in the Declaration of Independence than in the Constitution, since the latter makes no mention of a being more supreme than the mortal President.
Several times today while passing the abandoned Phoebe nest above the lights between the garage doors, I'd look over and see a lonely Phoebe perched on the basketball hoop at the edge of the driveway. That must have been the male half of the nesting pair; evidently the male plays no role in incubating the eggs. By the end of the day he'd apparently given up on his spouse and had moved on to other things.
This afternoon Gretchen launched an anti-mold jihad in the basement, where the air has become pungent with the smell of fungal funk. It's difficult to say which kind of summer is worse for basement mold: a hot, humid one with little rain or a cool, rainy one like the one we've been having. In hotter, more humid conditions, water tends to condense out upon all the cold basement surfaces. But constant rain seems to discourage evaporation, and so moisture finds its way into places not directly in contact with cold surfaces.
Gretchen's chief weapon today was bleach, though she also removed cellulose-rich materials from the bathrooms. These included towells, magazines, books, and woven trash baskets. Though they'd been down there since we'd moved here nearly seven years ago, those baskets couldn't have been in a worse indoor environment. They were encrusted with mold that needed to be scrubbed away. I replaced them all with gallon-size galvanized steel cans (which I'd dumpster-dived from a pizza place; they'd originally held industrial quantities of tomato paste).
At around 4:00pm, our friends Ray and Nancy arrived from Brooklyn to spend the night. They'd come with beer, wine, and various supplies for cooking us a vegan meal tonight.
First, though, we went over to Penny and David's place to check out their weekend-long yardsale. They'd already sold over $300 worth of stuff, much of it purchased at other yard sales. As in the past, they were drinking wine, though this time they didn't appear to be sharing it with everyone who showed up. We were free to take anything we wanted from the sale, so I ended up with a lamp on an articulated arm and a timer-controlled watering system. I imagine using the valves for the latter system with a custom controller, perhaps for some sort of hydronic project (although supposedly the valves can only be used for controlling cold water).
Back at the house, Ray, Gretchen, and Nancy all started working in the kitchen. Ray was doing most of the actual meal preparation; this involved roasting tomatoes and boiling pasta. He was also fabricating a salad that would end up containing a lot of arugula and entirely too much mint.
When the pasta was being gathered up to be brought to the table, Ray used a large reddish-orange mixing bowl that had broken and been repaired before I moved in with Gretchen in 2001. As he was carrying it to the table, the glued seams gave way and the whole thing collapsed in a mix of pasta and ceramic shards on the floor. What a disaster! But the bowl had been ceramic, not glass, so I deemed it still edible. Gretchen seemed reluctant at first, but then decided the "top layer" was edible. Once she'd taken that, I took nearly everything else, all the way down to the floorboards of the dining room. There were some tiny ceramic flakes in it, but this didn't detract much from the eating experience. The pasta was delicious, though I kept referring to mine as "floor pasta."
Sadly, the bowl was a lost cause, and I disposed of it on the ash heap near the woodshed. Gretchen said it had originally been recovered from her grandmother's kitchen, though she'd never actually seen her grandmother use it. The fact that it shattered while Ray was handling it did nothing to dispel Ray's reputation as a kitchen klutz, at least in our kitchen.
After dinner, Ray, Gretchen, and Nancy all went into Uptown Kingston to see a performance of Godspell by a local theatre group at Backstage Productions. Hearing that Godspell is a musical about Jesus (two of my least-favorite things) and learning that there would be audience participation (that would be a third non-favorite thing), I'd decided not to attend.
I ended up taking a long nap. When I awoke, I lay there in the comfort of the blankets, not really wanting to get out of bed. I lay there for quite some time and then it occurred to me that not a single sexual thought had crossed my mind in all the time I'd been awake. It wasn't that all that much time had passed, but still this was the longest period of consciousness since puberty that I explicitly noted as being devoid of sexual thoughts.
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