I basically got to not have any tequila

Dang so on Friday night at Ray's we got pretty crapped up on the stuff and Saturday mornin' I was in all kinds of pain. I had the sweats you know and my gut was just all kinds of feeling like an angry blowfish was wrigglin' around in there which based on how much antics we got up to may well have been the case. I real sourly cooked up this huge egg and cheese scramble 'cause everybody's always tellin' me that greasy food cures a hangover, but the whole time I was makin' it I could just feel myself gettin' sicker. When I finally got it on the plate and sat down at the table with a fork the stuff just welled up in the back of my throat and I ended up Drivin' the Marinara Bus straight into the kitchen trash can. Oh it was so foul, it was foul as a boy dog's ass.

So I kind of grouched around the place all that day not goin' in the sun or having food be at all appealing to me and later on Molly came by with some Jammin' Juice fruit drink blends that she said would help the fog clear. She said all that stuff about eatin' greasy food is just nonsense-bolunkus and is what wasted people say as reasoning to go to Denny's at 6am. The fruit drink actually helped the pain go away so before too many hours had gone by I was able to put my feet in the hot tub and later on we watched some old X-Files about like these Amish people who had a soap cave that led to hell or something.

Had to give knife back

Dang so I finally had to return that weird hundred dollar knife because I was startin' to have trouble sleepin' and was all imaginin' it moving slowly toward me at night, at one point I even mentally made a little calculation of how long I could afford to sleep based on how far the knife was from me. When you start doing awake-in-the-dark mental math based on a knife crawling towards you to kill you, you basically have a problem on your hands. I put the thing in this nice heavy black workman's lunchbox and took it down to Granite earlier today when Molly was at work, and they gave me kind of a hard time about having them open the lunchbox and eventually called security, so I gave in and opened it and they agreed to lift the knife out while I stood a little bit over by the cookbooks. I got to tell you my nerves were real weird and at heightened sensations.

Anyhow they credited my debit card and on the Reason For Return form I just wrote "My problem, not yours" and took off. I ain't ever expect to be back there, you know.

Granite

Dang so maybe if you don't know this or you do there is this fancy cooking supplies shop down at Hidden Hills Select Shoppes, like where you can pay upwards of $8.50 for a five-ounce canister of sea salt which came from such preferred salt-having areas as the Inner Balkans. It is called "Granite" and we went into there today, Molly and I, because she got the cooking bug after spending some time at this new falutin' place she has been waitressing at. I didn't know what particular product she was after but I guessed it would come in a fancy box and somebody in a fancy slate-gray "Granite"-embroidered apron over a button-up shirt would sell it to us with a smile and damn serious of a commission. (Never buy anything from a live being is what I always say and I suspect this has saved me a dollar in my time.)

So we got into this place and immediately there are five kinds of thermometers for food or pastry or candy-making, a cheese slicer that was made in China (in China they got basically no cheese at all), and the usual assortment of upscale Micronesian salts. I considered it a bad sign that she immediately picked up a basket as though to procure more than one kind of regional salt and perhaps a limited edition maple-handled boutique pasta-forming implement.

While she was wanderin' around raisin' my blood pressure I tried to cool off by lookin' at their more sensible items such as a dutch oven (keeps heat real well, real long-lastin'), and their knives. I was takin' I guess a pretty long gander at this nice German 8" number when Molly snuck up behind me and said "Why don't you get it!"

I said pretty quick that I didn't want to get it because it cost exactly $120.00, but then she started talking like all this magic kitchen talk about different cuts of meat and carrots and there was this line like "the most dangerous knife is a dull one" and my brain thought that since this knife is expensive it is the knife which will never betray me, that is what I am paying for, a lifetime of safety and happy Thanksgivings where the meat is perfect and I walk out of the kitchen to huge applause, both hands held high, bandage-free. I thought back to that two-dollar Safeway knife I been usin' in the pool house at Ray's, that one where if you try to cut a tomato in half it presses down so hard and bad that eventually the tomato just gives up and forms ketchup, and damn if I didn't buy a DOG GAM KNIFE that cost over a hundred dollars.

I got it here next to me at the keyboard now, and it's a heavy old thing. It's got like this kind of "activity" around it, you know, like an automatic transmission car that rolls slowly forward even though you are not pressing on the gas. It wants to cut things. Man how do the Germans do this. I know they sit around and talk about perfection for hours but damn they can shape inanimate steel to want to move forward. It is like having a basic earthworm beside me, only it is a worm that seems like it might be able to learn and hate, and if I look away it might be gone about its duty. Nobody ever said it would be easy owning a hundred dollar knife.

Oh and for her part Molly bought this fancy vanilla extract for using in cookies, it was like five bucks so I just tacked it onto my bill even though I knew nothing about it in advance.