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flavor scream
Sunday, May 25 2025
Gretchen had set up an elaborate granola bar for our guests this morning, using a series of nesting bowls, each containing different ingredients and arranged largest-to-smallest. My contribution, as it usually is, was a french press of coffee. Fern's father Pete, who is a professional architect, wondered about the flooring in the basement, which he seemed to think might actually be a wood product. "No, that's all vinyl!" I said. I then talked about what a perfect product it is for basements, given that it is unaffected by water and will probably be here long after the rest of the house "dissolves away." I also mentioned how I had machined grooves into the cut ends of planks in order to be able to use them (as opposed to having to just throw thwm away. (As I did, Gretchen appeared to be beaming with pride at how resourceful I am.) Our attention turned then turned to the wood flooring there on the main floor of the house, and I said that it was the most genuine flooring in the house, a simple tongue-and-groove made of some tropical hardwood, probably from an old-growth forest that had once been home to orangutans. (Gretchen was horrified to hear this, and then seemed to chide her former self for her obliviousness to the environment.) "But we were on a limited budget back then," I offered as an explanation. This led into the story of how our real estate empire began, with us buying this house in Hurley and then hoping Gretchen's co-op in a brownstown in Brooklyn would sell even as we ran up debts on zero-interest (for twelve or eighteen months) credit card loans. Gretchen then told the story of how, when the check arrived from the sale of the brownstone co-op, we bought a round of drinks for everyone in the Hurley Mountain Inn. Gretchen then talked about how she and I are averse to debt and don't usually even want to have low-interest mortgages. "But you have mortgages on your rental properties, right?" Fern asked. The answer is that we don't, though this is partly because of the help Gretchen's parents have given us. At some point they figured out that they will always have more money than they can ever spend, and that their children will be the beneficiaries of a large inheritance. So, partly to avoid taxes and partly to be alive to see what we've been been able to do with the money, they've been generous with giving us money while they are still alive. Fern's parents apparently hadn't thought about such things and said they should perhaps thing about doing the same thing. They also wondered why doing this isn't more common. "Well, not everyone can be depended upon to not immediately squander it," I offered. Gretchen then pointed out that squandering money is also something that can happen after someone inherits money conventionally. Then Fern detailed a theory she'd just come up with, that people want to think of the end of their lives as an event that then provides a massive windfall to their heirs, adding a joyous punctuation mark to the end of a life. "Like a piñata?" I asked.
Our Australian guests had a lunch they wanted to go to with Fern's old Aikido instructor. With them out of the house, I made repeated visits yet again to me westward extension of the Chamomile Wall, once with a beer in my hand, and I made good progress building it. At this point, it's a striking feature, the size (and general shape) of a small boat or very large canoe, but made entirely of stacked stone. I'm finding that even fairly shoddily-stacked walls become surprisingly solid once capped with a large piece of stone spanning the gap between the walls. I take measures as I work to make it so new rocks can not easily be "rocked" (like a rocking chair) using tiny wedge stones. But even so, the walls often are sketchy and/or narrow, but once there is downward pressure on them, they transform into something solid and durable.
This evening Gretchen went to some workshop to train community leaders on how to respond to ICE presence in neighborhoods. ICE is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement are of the Department of Homeland Security and the agency Trump has found to be the most-easily weaponized into something approaching a Gestapo. They show up randomly in neighborhoods to terrorize the locals with their propensity to incarcerate and deport. The people they target can consist of undocumented aliens, green-card holders like our friend Ray, people with student VISAs like Fern, and even long-time resident Canadians like our neighbor A. ICE usually shows up in unmarked American-made vehicles, and agents typically do not wear uniforms. But women can be identified by being unfamiliar women with ponytails.
While Gretchen was off at that, Fern did most of the work of preparing dinner. She heated up a small pre-made vegan lasagna and then made some air-fried battered mushrooms from ingredients Gretchen had set out for her. Meanwhile her parents were both playing my version of Spelling Bee without having created logins. (Fern has a login, and she'd been playing too.)
When Gretchen arrived, it was time for dinner. The lasagna was tiny but extremely rich and, for some reason, contained hundreds of small globular lentils. These were "French lentils," and perhaps served as a hamburger substitute. I thought the lasagna was really good but the lentils might've substracted from the experience. I'd been reading an article in Hackaday.com about an art installation where a large language model is prompted to monologue on its existential horror, so the idea of having no mouth but still needing to scream was fresh in my mind. So later when we discussed the lentils in the lasagna, I said that the lentils had produced a "flavor scream" as I bit down upon them, a construction Fern immediately identified as a great idea for a band name. (Her quoting someone as having said that dialog is nothing but a series of band names has been a recurring theme in our friendship.)
Of course the best part of the meal was the air-fried batter-dipped mushrooms, of which there weren't quite enough.
After dinner, Gretchen demanded that I give Fern's parents a tour of the laboratory, so that happened. It went about the same as such tours always go.
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