Sketch of the day

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color

Best of luck, Moe.

I’ve been looking for a fight song. This is all I could come up with:

 

I could make money from this.

I’ve always had creepy dreams. They were never informed by my daily life so much as  horror films, or the chance conversation with a drummer. Used to be , they involved an automobile accident. When I was much younger, the accident took this form:

I am riding on the tailgate of a pickup truck that is overloaded with hay. The truck hits a deep rut and knocks a bail loose, which in turn knocks me to the road, where I experience a spectacularly violent cranial injury.

This,  I am led to believe, is a dream that is symptomatic of a desire for control.  OK. I’ll buy that one.

The next phase of nasty dreams involves a creature hacking at the back of my head with a knife. It leaps on me from a spectacular height, and begins scalping me. In my dreams, I kill it. Usually by turning to face it and looking at it.

I live in a ground floor apartment and I am drawn to something upstairs. The narrow staircase leads to vacant furnished rooms with nasty secrets. Strangely, the penultimate room is the vacant kitchen of a Howard Johnson’s. I make pancakes.

I am driving a car, and the steering mechanism is compromised. It’s a fairly tight  southern Virginia road and I don’t have a chance. I die in the dream.

I have taken a job as an architect to complete a vanity tower for a small block of offices. Near the completion of the project, the contractor is reviewing the work with me. We are at the summit of the tower when he expresses his disgust with the project and walks through a wall to leave. I lack this facility.

My dreams aren’t consistently bad.  A lot of them are hilarious, and I write them down for reference. They get more baroque as I get older. Last night’s series of related dreams were more entertaining than usual, but they had that speck of sadness where the brain is just discussing its death.

I have been discussing the difference in the American right and the British right with Kingsley Amis. He is good humored, and declines a drink, but suggests one for me and my wife through a narrow alley that opens on an andiron building and we are suddenly in a sort of happy restaurant of death. The clientele is mostly older folks, who tell us repeatedly, “If we didn’t get here this way, we chose it!”A very kind elderly woman tells us we have to keep going to find what we really want. I kind of like the bar we’re currently drinking at, and hearing stories about the Boer War and horses, but we move on, and it’s a panorama of cheap karmic retribution  (fuck you in the ass, dream weaver!)

Our next stop is a shredded chicken restaurant staffed by pimpled overweight kids overseen by a nervous man with a pompadour and mustache. I tell my wife this is clearly hell and we’ve got to get moving.

We next encounter our old friend who is a Grateful Dead fan. He has a narrow storefront whose display windows are crowded with giant plush animals. It’s called “The Blue Chihuahua”. He is entirely uncomfortable that we’ve chosen to visit on the occasion of the  annual sci-fi film festival. He reluctantly ushers us in to watch films about a spermatazoid creature being hurled into space through various hyperengineered tunnels.

Fast, mean, and large

What can I say. I’m a sucker for uncontrolled solarization.

yakking it up

Purley. Photgraphic perspective only mildly enhances size of head.

Bodankey appears here with his mama's ass. He's sucking the life out of her.

Purley and Bodankey are putting on their winter coats. While Bodankey looks pretty normal for his age, Purley exhibits some characteristics of Dexter cattle that make me glad we banded him. He’s got very short forelegs and his mama’s crazy. He’s getting better on the crazy part, so at least some of that is environmental.

Rural economies

You throw your lot in with animals, and they  die. This was a way of life I chose  with at least some experience of loss. Having to gather up an animal and shovel a hole, or gather deadfall and  garbage sufficient to burn the poor matte eyed dead thing. But it’s different with a mule, because  they’re always talking to you, and you know that they understand you  better than you understand them. I thought when they arrived here  we would start them on a process of recovery from being treated like machinery, that we would fix their diets so they weren’t guaranteed a progressive diabetes-like death, but we were ultimately uninformed on the subject. Mules are an antiquarian thing. When I woke up Thursday morning and looked through the storm windows someone installed on our back porch-bedroom, Jack was dead. I could see it just lifting my fat ass out of bed: that stretched out, given up thing that we are strangely not resolved upon as death.

The worst is, when it’s your fault. I think Jack got something from the fair. When we were loading them into the truck, Jack and Fred both told me that something was wrong. Then, we went to visit them at the fair, and Jack was depressed. I didn’t listen to them, and I let them go.

I fucked up.

Once more, with feeling

Indolent bourgeous poltroon

Now that I’ve got a place of my own , and my wife is equally at home with squalor, I can proceed with the pattern making that has always been the method I used to get a grip on the natural world. It’s gotten pretty bad, really. Every time I look at a Louis  XIV piece of furniture, an old photograph of an airplane, or a floorplan of an Elizabethan house, I have a compulsion to frame the motherfucker. In wood. To scale.

The government has yet to set up  some clinics for my ilk, and I believe it’s because they rate my little problem as a more frightening prospect than the introduction of broadband porn into mainstream America. I can tell you they’re the fucking same.  Golden age of aircraft, shaved mons pubises, what’s the difference, if you really think about it?

Perhaps they’re right. It’s gotten to the point that when I see anything animate, I automatically visualize them as fins and struts. But in that respect, I’m well behind the curve of the fashion world:

http://www.dependablerenegade.com/dependable_renegade/2009/10/why-do-designers-hate-women.html

Veggie chicken paprikash

Hungarian wax and bell peppers

It was a little muddy for outdoor work yesterday, and we have many peppers to eat,  so I thought I’d give this a shot. Usually if I’m making dumplings, it’s for quasi-Chinese or Thai cookery, but since these are Hungarian peppers anyway, and it’s chilly, stodgy seemed like the way to go.

We buy high-gluten organic flour by the 50lb. bag, and one of the ways I’ve found to get through it before the bugs  show up, besides making craft paste, is dumplings. Don’t be tempted to use more than a cup of flour at a time, unless you’re feeding a dozen or so people. To a cup of flour, add about a half cup of water,  a teaspoon of sesame oil and a little salt. Stir this in a bucket with a wooden spoon until  the dough draws away from the sides, reach in and roll it into a ball. At first it will be lumpy and look like a head of cauliflower.

ugly at this stage

Cover the dough with a thin film of the sesame oil and put it in a bucket with a lid.

Stem, core, and julienne the peppers. Try and get them to look like a Chinese chef’s been at them. In other words, maximize the cooking surface area , but avoid making a slaw

The bell peppers have done nicely this year. Usually they are fairly thin-walled . Here’s a photo of them before I diced them up:

By the way, sorry about the blurry photos. The flash on this camera sucks, and I don’t have surgeon’s hands.

Fry the peppers in about half a cup of olive oil until the skin begins to shrivel, and there’s a little browning.  Reserve the peppers and most of the oil, leaving a little to brown your fake chicken.

These are soy nuggets from Delite Soy, a local company that employs small farmers to  organically grow a special edamame bean, which is subsequently extruded and flavored. Tastes like chicken. If you were making this dish with real chicken, you’d probably want to use thigh meat.

Brown these pieces as you pull them apart with a  a pair of forks,  add paprika, garlic, salt and fresh ground pepper. Add the reserved peppers, stir in a can or two of diced tomatoes, and twelve ounces of full fat yoghurt.

Flour a board, turn the ball of dough out onto it, and add a little paprika. Try and get the dough to absorb all the flour on the board. You can keep adding a small amount of sesame oil and a little flour, until the dough is a little glossy on the outside, and is springy. Flour the board again, roll it to about 1/4 inch thickness,  and cut it into strips with a cleaver or sharp knife.

Add these to boiling water, return to boil, and cook for another ten minutes. Drain the dumplings and add them to the pepper/chicken mixture. Add more freshly ground pepper. Eat.

Good with a plain old rosso.