I don’t remember when or where I first heard that old gag. “Chili today, hot tamale.” It sounds like something the old man would’ve said.
He picked up some Spanish down in Panama and he’d toss fragments of it at me and my sis as a call-and-response joke come bedtime. We had to repeat each phrase after he uttered it. (“Repitan ustedes.”)
“Hasta la vista.”
“¿Como se llama?”
“Buenos noches.”
This last became “Buenos snowshoes” at some point. Lord, what white people will do to someone else’s language.
Anyway, it’s chilly today, so I plan to make chili today, from a Pierre Franey recipe. No tamales, though. Eso es demasiado como el trabajo.
A nearly full moon and a bowl of jambalaya will spice up your dreams.
Eating spicy dinners as a full moon looms is a recipe for weird dreams.
The Wolf Moon won’t arrive until tomorrow, but it’s been howling at me for a few nights now, ever since I made a pot of jambalaya, a favorite dish adapted from a recipe by Judy Walker and Marcelle Bienvenu by way of The Washington Post.
Last night I dreamed I had been confined to an assisted-living facility, and was sitting at some sort of crafts table with a couple old biddies, one on either side of me.
I was trying to write captions for some photos — longhand, on paper, since I had no laptop — and the biddy on my left kept crowding me, piling napkins and letters and whatnot onto my workspace. The one to my right asked me what a young pup like me was doing in the old mutts’ home, and I explained that I had apparently gotten my bell rung in some sort of bike mishap and was being held for observation.
This led to a good deal of cackling, especially after they asked how I was paying for my stay and I said I had no idea. Certainly not by writing those goddamn captions, ’cause I wasn’t making much headway there. If Herself had thrown me over and the Repugs had finally croaked Social Security and Medicare I was in a world of shit. “Golden Girls” meets “Cuckoo’s Nest.”
When I woke up it was in my own bed and Herself was still here, so I made her toast, tea, and oatmeal just to stay on her good side. You never know. There’s a bad moon on the rise.
I’ve put more white powder than that up me snout on a weeknight.
I know, I know — don’t tempt the Fates, never let your blog write a check that your ass can’t cash, and so on and so forth.
But sheeeeeyit: You call this “snow?”
The Bread Box is baked.
The appalling lack of precipitation aside, it was not so warm outside today, and not so hot inside, either.
Our $20 garage-sale bread machine seems to have toasted itself after a year of medium-heavy use, churning out a bleak pan of something one might expect to find in the toilet at a dive bar on St. Paddy’s Day if the menu featured a questionable shepherd’s pie and some heavily stepped-on blow.
Thing is, y’see, I have about 20 pounds of Bob’s Red Mill whole wheat flour on hand. So I may be forced to learn how to bake bread the way me forefathers did, only without the dubious advantage of being knee-walking drunk.
Well, that’s that. Another holiday crossed off the calendar.
I threw out my back just in time for the festivities, so I was not the usual jolly old elf as I tottered around the kitchen assembling Emeril’s chicken cacciatore and Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash while listening to my favorite traditional Christmas carols (“Christmas in Prison,” John Prine; “Merry Christmas From the Family,” Robert Earl Keen; “Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis,” Tom Waits; “Christmas in Washington,” Steve Earle; and “St. Stephen’s Day Murders,” The Chieftains and Elvis Costello).
Having a bad back is like having a bad dog. You can feed it and scratch it and take it for walks but you never know when the sonofabitch is gonna bite you.
Nevertheless, I persisted, and with an assist from Herself (lemon bars with whipped cream) we took a bite of supper with Herself the Elder and then relaxed with some 22-year-old standup from Marc Maron, Dave Attell, and Mitch Hedberg on Comedy Central.
Eye see you.
This morning it seemed some portal to another dimension had opened while we slept off the grub and giggles. You can see it up there to the right of the backyard maple.
And unless I miss my guess this other shot at right is either of the Eye of Sauron or Cthulhu’s bunghole. Red eye or brown eye, it’s not something you want to see before coffee, especially with a dodgy back that hampers your ability to flee in terror.
The sun is peeking out now, and I may go for a short hobble, see if I can jar all my scattered bits back into their proper places.
But I tell you what: If a chiropractor had beckoned to me from that interdimensional gateway, I’da jumped through it like a bad dog hopping a fence, howling, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn?” (“By any chance do you take Medicare?”)
As literature loses ground to memes and emoji we’re inching back into nomadic life, killing each other with knives and bows.
Well done indeed. Can’t be much longer before we’re all living in caves, pulling the rope ladder up come evening and dropping rocks on the neighbors’ heads if they pop round to borrow a cup of fire.
Speaking of fire, our journey to the Dark Side is complete. Both furnaces snapped on this morning. Happily, I’d already plugged the sprinkler system into the wall to keep it from exploding like a baked potato in a microwave or we might have a skating pond in the back yard.
Our ovens are baked.
The joys of home ownership. Lately they include the decline and fall of our wall-mounted Whirlpool ovens, which date to 1990, if I read the serial-number code correctly.
The top unit has a bum element and runs 50° below proper temperature, while the bottom can be as much as 20° off the mark. The thermostat may have gone to its reward, too. And of course parts are hard to come by for ovens with this much white hair in their ears.
I suppose we could always roast a haunch of whatever in the fireplace. But in the meantime we’re going to roll the dice, replace the element, see if that’s all it takes to get off the bench and back in the game.
If not, well, then we’ll start shopping, see what the 21st century has to help a fella melt the cheese on his enchiladas. But a quick peek at the Lowe’s and Best Buy websites made my wallet pocket slam shut faster than a banker’s door on a homeless dude hunting a loan for the used van of his dreams and a river to park it by.
Mad Blog Media 