grunchy

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Man I am just so delighted with Lay's potato chips

Just the baseline kind in the yellow bag, straight-up an exact-deliverin' product

If I was Warren Buffet I would be like, "All companies should basically be as perfect as a Lay's potato chip, time and again, Charlie and I will buy them all and take them to our Valhalla of freedom and catered seminars"

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I.

Okay so as you can see that was the type of mind I was in last night, all Cool-Whupped good on some of that Golden Tabloid, my new and only favorite strain of the marihuana that seems to connect all my calls through the operator direct and correct for once.

To review, mostly weed does some pretty low shenanigans on my woggin, straight-up logging me out of society for a shift. Here are some of the ways it typically gets south on me:

1. I smoke it with somebody who is way better at smoking it than me and I feel like I have to pull a good rip of it to impress them and as soon as I set the bong down Popeye squeezes a can of roller coasters down my throat (hyuk nyuk nyuk!) and I got to go hurl and entertain the Eternal Screensaver of the Password-Locked Mind until sleep comes.

2. I smoke it and then every terrible thing I have ever done or been to anybody or probably was or will be to somebody is ready as an instant list, and it auto-plays in my mind as I sit on the couch, from my mama hatin' on being pregnant to the underpaid, hungover guy who has to clean out the old paint cans and jars of unmatched screws of my final carport. Smoke still curling in a slight way off the bottom of my nostrils, moisture visibly at play on the inner surfaces. On this list: (1) A guy I yelled at way too hard while way too juicy on Guinness, for working on his car outside the bedroom window at 2am while Molly was trying to sleep. (2) A really idiotic sexist thing I said about "why Volkswagens are cars for women" once at a nice restaurant years ago, all brassy and Sinatra, and I remember the sophisticated rich lady at the table next to ours saying "Jesus Christ, how much longer do I have to listen to this idiot," but I pretended at the time that she wasn't referring to me. (Now she is referring to me forever in my marijuana memory.)

3. I get really anxious like the universe is that big stone ball that races after Indiana Jones and I am Indiana Jones, but I never see the ball and I am just standing in whoever's kitchen it is and I'm not allowed to look around for the ball, but I know I am about to die from it. And also I concurrently feel that sensation like when you step off a curb that you didn't see and for five inches you know what it's like to die from the first part of a plane crash.

4. On a few occasions the high has been a pleasant enough time. About as often as you get the hundo ring at skee-ball.

So that is regular weed experiences. Golden Tabloid doesn't do that. Golden Tabloid is like the following (which I wrote down in a notebook "while reporting for the Golden Tabloid"):

I am in a sauna, or a room, and no one has ever made a mistake. I am nothing but the lower part of the eye, where the slight pressure from gravity, eyeball against lid, is the only thing that reminds me that I am physically manifest. I love that I can understand, through Tabloid, how great rich people feel when every detail and tax situation has been calmed to their benefit and satisfaction. My car, should I summon it, is a plush white terrycloth experience, like a moisture-less blintz I have snuck inside, where I receive all the good feelings I would have felt had I gotten all the gifts I'd wanted as a child. We are going Christmas shopping in a place where volunteer minks—tall as a parent, with spicy, musky cologne—give you a loving, selfless, genuine hug every time you enter a new store, and you love hugging them back.

When you leave the store, they are hugging someone else, but they make sure to put a hand on your shoulder, smile, and make eye contact.

That is Golden Tabloid. I can also explain it in a shorter way:

I am the bone-love daddy of all of this deal    

II.

So now, the boys saw that Tabloid was doing some right things with me, which I guess meant making me less of my real-ingredients drag, and they were all for maintaining the drip. Apparently they wetted up some black licorice chews, all muling them with some butter-extracted mg's of GT, thinking I could just pop them like my usual Zauberpunkt tabs. Good dudes.

Problem with that plan of theirs was, rodents. My boy Todd, specifically. A rodent has a brain and extremities that lust for crumbs, for protein or copper or a pot sticker you put too much fish sauce on as a something that was a mistake in the first place, and Todd is Chief Survival Officer of that clean-up crew. Little dude found that baggie full of spiked licorice about three seconds after Ray and T left the room, and pushed those nubs down the hatch like it was a damn Japanese contest show. I mean who in a mile can't whiff some hand-wringin' bud like smokey starin' down a red-eyed roadie.

The bag of licorice was the same size as Todd but it was all gone when they found him. Claw marks demonstrate that he didn't even undo the Ziploc, he just tore through the plastic with his face and teeth, getting at the payload fast as he could.

They say you can't OD from weed and generally speaking that is Garfunkel's Sounds of Science but it's guys like Todd that really change the rules. Todd is the mustard in the math that actuaries know they'll take a bath on.   

Of course it is a good thing that Todd was on Golden Tabloid and not some high-creepin Reaver strain like Son Of Saturn or THE OFFICIAL INSTAGRAM OF CHAINSAWS or he might be growin whiskers underground. Because of the nature of this weed though he is currently just floating around all of our houses, no joke, he is prone in a position like how you would be if you were cuddled on your side on the couch, yet he is sort of floating/levitating like a magic dark nugget of tranquility. He floats about six inches above whatever surface is under him, and if he bumps into a couch for example he sort of rises to meet the plateau of the cushions and then floats above those cushions in a direction, until he encounters the next change in elevation. Kind of like a peaceful silent Roomba that wishes you no harm. Like a video game on autopilot until someone puts a quarter in. He floats between our houses and seems to know a safe path. Is this the truest form of high? It is a question.

Anyhow, I got to thank Ray and T on the hands for all the cookin they did up for me. Maybe bring them a tray of my new chorizo and cotija cemita sandwiches. I bought all of the ingredients for these back when I was planning on being high forever but now that I just use the GT here and there to even out the sidewalk I rarely deep dive into Pueblan specialty foods. Yeah, GT shook somethin' a little loose for me, in the brain, like adding a new window to a house, but I ain't obviously ever going to be a central dude of Bob Marley posters and wearing sunglasses indoors.

Oh and uh Happy Holidays. I ain't quite the joy I want to see in the world, but here and there in spots these days I like when I look down a long street and see the trees all lined up and doing their canopy thing, and in my heart I can know a grain of satisfaction that somewhere over the clouds out there the sun is always bright and waiting for me when I can get myself there. And I think I even found a way to let the universe pull me up when I ain't able to pull myself. Thank you Golden Tabloid, thank you some guys who I know, thank you carbon.

Stranger Danger Manger

So there is this app I got on my phone, and it is basically all-day crowdsourced updates from my neighborhood. Like, all the neighbors from a couple miles square, and I learn about their yard sales and lost chickens and a car alarm they got mad at etc. (In the last five minutes: if Lawn-Gro can poison a dog, from a dude who clearly would prefer a suggestion of "wait it out"; a humble-brag disguised as a "tip" about pressure-canning turkey stock; a request for a good celiac-safe naturopathic remedy for kids whose number two is more like a one-point-three.)

Of course here and there you hear about a home robbery or a kid who was trailed after school by a van. I used to think that we worried too much in my generation because with the Internet we started getting bad news from all over the world twenty-four hours a day, but it turns out that if you got your ears on hard enough there's bad news all day long well inside the distance between you and the mini-mart.

Before long this feed started to get me real down, like worried constantly if I had locked the doors, and even turning the car around up to five minutes away to go back and check. I'd lay awake at night knowing that Listeria was growing on the farmer's market potatoes in my refrigerator, and maybe leaping to the soft cheeses. If I drove past a kid in a backpack who was walking to school, I'd fast forward to his parents getting the automated phone call from the Office that he didn't show up for attendance that day, then to the emotionally destroyed dad three days later sliding a pistol into his mouth, etc.

So on the whole as jazzed as I am that I can borrow a circular saw or other woodworking tools from Harvey Brunettoni at 2198 Camino Rosales, and chat over iced tea and have some of his Italian plums that he can never use all of, I think I am going to drop this app. I don't even care that the NIB Asics I advertised ain't sold yet. Whoever came to get them would probably be casing my house anyway. Lord knows I got no firearms. I am just toast in the bed, stabbed and screamin', any time anybody wants to have at it, and I ain't got no need to advertise that.

I Bothered Pat at the Grocery Store: Awesome Edition

Well I guess I shouldn't shame down on Pat's game too hard since he's wavin' his shingle pretty steady, always out hawkin' whatever new sublingual amaranth blastocyst paste or bio-available hoombacha he comes up with. It's the basis of Ages that a folk (this is the singular of folks) got to hustle, got to see what bucket of knots or larvae or Irish-flavor coffee creamers the hand will dip into.

But it is a Moment in the grocery store when you see a fellow don the apron and card table and go against all that is decent and peaceful about tryin' to buy a ham hoagie and personal-size bag of original Lay's, unmolested. It's like, we all came up kids, all the same, and we all came up wary of the salesman and the peddler, but there one of us went and did that thing. We know there's dishonor drippin' from places in his rig, even if the product is fairly decent. We know the hawker passed his greedy mind over the idea of us, and pegged how much markup we could handle before we realized an enemy-type situation, then added ten percent.

So good for Pat, he's on the hustle, wise black support shoes and doctor gloves and embroidered company logo baseball hat with too high of a crown and all. I ain't havin' none of it of course because this man punches my sass ticket like a conductor with a tic, so I walk all up (I believe I actually sauntered but nobody would probably assess that it looked that way) pretty prepared to get damn enquestionated about what he's slingin'.

ME: [Walks toward Pat, still maybe ten feet away, he sees me then continues arranging his samples]

PAT: [Doesn't act at all like I have known him for twenty years and some, and have gotten his ass out of some icky slings, and witnessed him at basically the full low shenanigans of man]

ME: Oh uh hey Pat how is your demo going

PAT: [Keeps looking down at samples, spot-polishes a part of the vinyl tablecloth that has nothing on it] Roast Beef.

ME: So uh Hey Pat what you got out for the public weal

PAT: Bohannon's Macchisandra. [He says this fast and quiet like how a kid vandal caught red-handed might give in and tell his whole name to a cop]

ME: Well damn! I am highly dissatisfied with my current Bohannon's Macchisandra! Always got that thin milky layer on top.

PAT: Hush! Hush. Don't make a mockery of this. It's not for people like you.

ME: You tell me exactly what you got goin' on here or I'm gonna tell the manager you threw a snit about these hell of GMO potato chips! [Holds up Lay's]

PAT: [Becomes suddenly animated] Alright! Alright. No need to involve the promotions manager. No need. I'll tell you whatever you'd like to know!

ME: Because some vendors might just be on probation with the various stores where they demo, due to past outbursts.

[A lady wheels up and stands across the aisle from us, examining a large assortment of canned tomato sauces]

PAT: [Nervously] Heh! So! Sir! Have you, or anyone you love, ever tried Bohannon's Macchisandra, made from ancient Chinese botanicals, camellia sinensis, and the energy-rich nectar of deep underground aquifers?

ME: Let me parse that out loud for a moment

PAT: Let me parse it for you! This elixir is decocted from hand-selected ingredients which are known for their fabled abilities to combat depression, weight gain, and lethargy. Try a sample!

ME: Fables, huh? That's the main quality?

PAT: [Drills into me with the defeated but angry eyes of a wolf looking up the hunter's barrel; smoothly and with a practiced hand draws his lips down to re-sheath any exposed fang]

LADY: [Continues to intently compare labels]  

ME: I mean, so this liquid can basically save America? Can it also make road workers not perform deep sewer replacement at critical intersections until after rush hour? Because tell me that and I am sold! Heh!

PAT: Ha! Ha! [His mouth laughs but there are not the genuine creases around his eyes that betray happiness]

ME: [The perfect unblinking look with unbroken eye contact]

PAT: Heh! Maybe...maybe next time!

LADY: [Typing on phone, seems to be sending pictures of labels to someone]

ME: You know what, I'm sold. That's it. I got to have this. You are amazing.

PAT: Good, good! Here, take our 36-sachet pack. You won't be sorry.

ME: Oh, I better take two.

PAT: [Glances over at lady, picking up what I am putting down] [A little louder] Thank you! Thank you, sir! Here, here's a packet of free...macadamia nuts! From the big island! Taste Elvis himself, riding around under the stars! [Mimes giving me macadamia nuts while the lady isn't looking, I mime keeping my hands in my pockets]

LADY: [Sighs while looking at phone, seems crestfallen, wanders off]

PAT: God damn it.

ME: Dude that stuff about Elvis was so awful that you should get jaw-caught in a pitching machine

PAT: Shut up!

ME: Hey can I uh actually taste this stuff

PAT: Whatever.

ME: [Takes sample, it is flat and thin and stale] Ugh dude this is just cheap dried ginger and bulk oolong of a sawdust nature

PAT: I don't suppose you're actually going to buy those packs, are you.

ME: I don't suppose a lot of things are gonna happen but for six bucks I'll drop these in other folks' carts and maybe they check out maybe they don't you dig

PAT: [Sighs, hands me a five and a one]

ME: Street team, reporting! [Salutes, leaves]

- - -

So, that was my deal with Pat today. Not one of his higher-integrity products, so I felt all right to drag it on the chain a bit. End of day, I made six bucks, which I promptly dropped over at Pho Dac Biet for some of that top round pho, and rice noodle for the long life.

Yesterday (Tuesday)

Alright like so today wasn't gonna be too great of shakes, it was comin' off dumps since lids-up, maybe 6:00AM, the usual. You know just the general nervous about catchin' some sass at every turn, even if alone, and then pretty regular remembering an old bill you and the bill collector both know you're aware of. Then flashbacks to terrible old European PSA videos of stuff that happens to families that get hit by drunk drivers, thoughts of how I'm just about half-cooked on this earth, etc. It was a normal day and not too high of note. I played a Howard Jones song online but felt kind of lame about it, even though it was a comforting old pop song from the soft days of Vans and Jimmy'z. Made myself eat an apple, mostly cause it helps sewer ball things, but also I considered it a Deed for my gums.

(Dang but this is sorry now that I put it all on the table and look at it, Jesus)

Then I drank a pretty large cola (not Coke, but some kind of cola that's not a main brand) because I was thirsty, but also wanted energy. Normally I ain't a main guy of caffeine because the stuff brushes me up the nerves, but I had this strange cocky feeling and thought I could handle it. "I'm gettin old you know, I'll drink a god damned caffeine soda if I so please," you know. I drank that brown old thing then went about my business for an hour (flexing chops with some new web admin toolkits I been hearing of, of late). Soon I felt not at all subject to the worries I got trained into my crannies. Like, I felt like I could walk down the sidewalk and own the moment, not care about the thoughts of suckers comin the other way—to hell with a sucker—kind of "own my destiny" style. It's good to remember that once in the rare while. I got a pretty big head of steam up and ordered a real smoky ham sandwich — I'm talkin' a smoky ham sandwich — straight pickled pepper and mayo. Polished that puppy dogg off with all my momentum, like my brain trained my metabolism to just plow through that sandwich, even catch some speed off it. I felt so blissed havin' that sandwich, like there is a caveman part of my brain that only an inch thickness of ham can summon from the recesses of Time. It was a Survival Five: a high-five from the reptile brain.

I should have known the good times couldn't last though, zero sum game and all. All those insane sandwich calories basically dragged my cola high down like a relative at the Christmas table who loses their shit completely and just begs everyone for money or some excuse to even stay alive, just hammer-down pathetic, you straight got peas in the mouth, and you know they're tweaked on tire bead fixative or the vanilla or whatever you never considered before.  

After that it got dark pretty early due to Autumn and I got a headache, so I sat on the couch and tried not to take a nap. Zero sum day indeed, with an angel's share of my hours piped up into space once again, not mine any more.

Man I got to take it easy on sandwiches or that's gonna be all she wrote.

148 173

Okay so uh Lyle was pretty in his grips the other day, but he had a neat idea that basically I thought could be a money maker around here. The rule of the land is you can't be a booze company unless you jump through just incredible amounts of hoops, and pay taxes out the nose to help cover all the society disasters your product creates, and have sanitation inspections and all of that crud that doesn't matter if your product is basically sanitizer. So to cut to the quick of it, is, I skipped the rules and I am a booze company now. It is weird how that plays out, as I had maybe at best hoped I would be sort of found half dead but not auto-sullied in my britches some day. At best. But here I am, a booze company. Mama come gander at Timmy B. Silktone.

The idea of booze is easy. You put sugar in water. Yeast (a fungus) eats the sugar and sheds off alcohol. When the yeast dies from starvation, you have the most possible alcohol your sugar could make. You boil that water and collect the steam at various temperatures: the steam is your product. Don't collect it 'til you get to 173*F, or it's walleyes and buttersharts for you. Stuff that boils below there is basically like the stuff that they use in dry-erase board cleansing spray, or to help write On The Road. There you go, you have some concentrated, less-deathy booze. It will be harsh, but get this: it will also have boutique cachet. Folks are nuts for somethin' local and fresh-made, so that has got to go for booze as well. I mean hell people buy Monarch gin and that's just nail polish they made clear with gas, expired aspirin, and a canary nobody was attached to.

So I dig this pretty much from the simple science angle, but also I like to finger it up and run this bootleg thing as a kink for the Man. The money won't hurt, even if it's spare, because I don't pay the electric bill around Ray's place, and he ain't the sort to notice a terawatt gone missing.

I was going to name the booze company Hornswoggle, you know, like to "bamboozle," but decided that was just a horrible, horrid type of cleverness that's actually more stupid than smart (also it sounds like what Harry Potter throws up after the Hufflepuff cocktail progressive). So, I got my midnight lumens out and read up on the true recipe of Achewater. Man that took some page-rubbing, but I pieced together a pretty good bunch of the puzzle. Lots of botanical history, regional Southern foodways, ethnic migration patterns, even some phone calls to families nearing defunction. I am making Achewater. Everybody here basically has to buy at least one bottle...but there won't be enough and the X-Y curve will do a little jig in my favor.

Man I ain't too sure what's up with Ray

Dude just came in here all needin' me to do up some computer help, particularly graphics. I ain't too much for Photoshop but after I calmed him down and got his basic wants clarified I was able to teach myself the program fairly quickly as it is pretty intuitive (you have to mentally navigate with the awareness that this is a very old program with a massive feature set yet also has had teams trying to dumb it down for years -- it's like dancing with a beautiful woman, but a church lady is holding a ruler between you the whole time).

Anyhow this is what he wanted me to make:

It is Not Winter

There is I guess an apricot tree or something and its branches sort of stick past the window where I sit and type. Today it completely exploded with white little flowers, like every four inches along, looking straight-up like a popcorn tree. A lot of other plants are acting up now too, and it's that time of year where the gray seems to be gone and cool air pushes like star jasmine and lily fragrances all around. In my brain I get kind of a *click* and I turn some sort of corner out of winter. I need to sit down and figure out what the trigger is so I can pull it earlier in the year.

Trees are kind of like dinosaurs: ancient as all hell, just way slow to adapt, and tough. You can tell how primitive a thing is by how many children it makes, like how spiders and sea turtles make like a thousand babies just to get one or six to survive. Apricot trees are the same way. They make a thousand apricots a year and if every single one took root where it fell, they would kill the mother tree and each other. However, apricot trees exist because they "know" a raccoon and a badger will see *most* of the fruit on the ground and go all NOM NOM NOM...no, this is bad reasoning. Does an apricot seed need the fruit surrounding it in order to germinate, or does it count on an animal eating the fruit and dispersing the seed somewhere else, like in a pile of fresh nutritious poop? I need to go to college. This is like real basic horticulture or botany or something. I wish I had any kind of education at all.

Okay I just got back from lookin' at the course listing catalog for the Community College and I remembered why I never went back to school. If I want to learn about why apricot trees do what they do, I have to pay sixty bucks, sit in a classroom for three months behind some guy who really, really likes the San Francisco Giants, and hope all to hell that the teacher covers that topic. Man that is inefficient.

I think the Community College should just be like a hotline where every professor is an operator and your question gets routed to the right one when you call. Each call could be a dollar. Looks like it's time for some school reforms, based on my new idea of cost-effective learning. Look out, world's education system. Everything changes today, with this blog about how I am too boneheaded to just look up apricot trees on Wikipedia.