Among Us, There Was A Fungus (Non-humongous).

Or, The Morel of the Story.

A few pieces at a time, I am endeavoring to transfer the one brushpile (a leftover from the Ice-pocalypse) that is still in the backyard to one of the two brushpiles piled by the road in front of the drainage ditch, where at some point in the future I assume the city will make it disappear.

Where it will go, I cannot say. Maybe the city will wish it away into a field somewhere, like that deranged little Opie-esque child/god in the Twilight Zone.

This morning, I was wrestling my daily quota of ten limbs out of the pile and by my feet I noticed a little spongy thing. It was a morel mushroom.

It seems a little early for those, I thought. Don't they come up a little closer to May? But then I realized I was thinking of my childhood.

You see, there is history between us, these little mushrooms and me.

I spent my childhood in Illinois. It's further north, so spring, and hence mushrooms, come later.

We had about an acre of land. It was bordered on one side by the woods and on the back by a neighborhood baseball field.

At the border of the ballfield and the woods, and fifty feet on each side, was prime morel-growing real estate. Late April or early May, somebody would notice one growing somewhere, and my parents and I would gather up some paper grocery bags (this was pre-plastic-grocery bags, but oddly not pre-plastic-garbage bags) and go on a mushroom hunt.

That night, my mom would fry them and it would be enough to feed a family of six, plus whatever hangers-on always seemed to be hanging around the house.

Fast-forward several years and 400 miles south, and I'm in 8th or 9th grade science class under Mr. Prewett. We are discussing the different kingdoms of living things. We get to the fungi.

"Fungi, of course, includes mushrooms. Hase anyone here gone picking mushrooms?" he asked the class.

I raised my hand. Nobody else did.

I lowered my hand, hoping nobody had seen it.

It was embarassing because A. since I was the only one, it set me apart from everyone else and the last thing an 8th or 9th grader wants is to stick out like a sore thumb. The important thing is to fit in by conforming to what everyone else does. And B. I thought it marked me as poor. What, can't you afford to BUY mushrooms, Poory McPoorpoor?

Looking back, we weren't any poorer than most of the people in my school. In fact, we were LESS poor than quite a few. My dad had a Caterpillar retirement check coming in every month.

But we LIVED poor. I used to think my parents spent it all on coffee and cigarettes. But back then, those luxuries were still cheap, so I don't know WHERE all the money went, or why we never had anything to show for it. Maybe it was the livestock. What's the joke -- How does a farmer end up with a small fortune? Start with a large fortune.

But I digress.

My raising, and sheepish lowering, of my hand had not gone unnoticed by Mr. Prewett.

And he couldn't just let it go, oh no.

He launched into a lecture directed specifically at me, in front of the whole class, about how I shouldn't be embarassed about picking mushrooms just because nobody else, certainly no civilized person, does it and how I shouldn't just follow the crowd. This lasted for several minutes.

It was even more embarassing than the thought of everyone thinking I was poor.

That night (too late to be of any help whatsoever) I realized that what I SHOULD have done is told him I misunderstood the question, that I had thought he meant getting mushrooms at the STORE. A lie, yes. But a lie I could bluff my way through and muddy the waters with, enough to run out the clock on the classtime.

That was . . . gawd it must be pushing 25 years ago. And that's the first thing I thought of when I saw the little morel on the ground.

At first, the unpleasant memory was almost enough to make me ignore the mushroom.

But then something clicked in my head -- Hey, that's something I can eat that the government doesn't get a cut of! I don't have to pay an indulgence to Uncle Tom Sam for the privilege of obtaining it!

My first scan of the backyard yielded five of them. Two subsequent scans yielded one each.

They were delicious.

4/2/09 UPDATE: Got five more today. Gonna eat 'em.

Ah, the Government Propaganda Channel!

Missouri undergoes a political earthquake all week long with the MIAC scandal, and what does Jeff City Journal on the Government Programming Channel have on? A couple of token blacks from the state legislature uncomfortably answering non-time-sensitive questions like "How does it feel to be a black legislator in Missouri?" and "Is it lonely?" from the clueless white moderator chick.

Update.

Well, the next day I smoked that cigarette.

I knew I would fail if I tried to quit without some artificial starting point, so since it was only a couple of days until my birthday, I decided to keep smoking until bedtime the night before then, and start all over.

That was three days ago, and so far so good.

Some of my triggers are wierd. I've already discussed boredom and pissed-offedness and the fact that my hands and mouth seem to have their own residual memory of smoking, and they don't want to quit yet. I have others that are stranger.

One is other people talking about my quitting smoking. It doesn't particularly matter what they're saying about it; whether they're congratulating me or telling me I'll never succeed at it, the very fact that they are talking about it at all triggers the "I HAVE to have a cigarette now" subroutine in my brain.

I think it's rooted somewhere in the notion that the decision to quit smoking is a private one (he notes as he tells the entire blogosphere about it), and other people shouldn't be talking about it. So maybe I'm punishing them (I have no idea why punishing others and smoking cigarettes are interwoven in my brain) or at least NOT rewarding them for talking about it.

Another trigger is realizing that in the past X amount of time it hasn't been that difficult not smoking. I'll be going along just fine and the thought "You know, this not smoking thing has been pretty easy this time" will pop into my head, and then WHAM! I will either want a cigarette right then or will want one the very next time things don't go the way they ought to go.

I guess the lesson that one teaches is that, for the rest of my life, I can never let my guard down. And no matter what, I am not capable of having Just One.

It's 8:20 now. Sadly enough, tonight that means it's Time-A-Go-Seepy.

[1-26-09 Update: Another trigger is being unable to go anywhere, which will be the case starting in a few hours and lasting several days with the oncoming Ice Storm.]

The road to underwearlessness is paved with good intentions . . .

I woke up this morning with the full intention of getting a load of white laundry done today.

From the looks of the forecast, there's not gonna be any good hanging-out days for at least another week, and I'll probably be out of socks and maybe underwear by then.

I did a load of colors yesterday, and it is still hanging on the clothesline on the front porch. They weren't quite dry yet, but I thought surely they would dry by noon, so I could bring the basket inside for a load of whites.

Besides, I was out of bleach, so I'd have to go to the grocery store and get some. I did so without incident, also picking up a 12-pk of fake Diet Dr. Pepper for a little more than two bucks.

But I got home and discovered the clothes were not dry. So I went to the library.

Came home. Still not dry.

To make a long story short, I farted around all day and never did get my laundry done, so come a week from now, I may be going commando and foot-commando.

Fight The Power With Pruning Shears and a Handsaw.

Yesterday I'm watching TV in the living room. I look out the window and see a police car backing down the alley that's at the left edge of my yard if you're standing on the porch facing outward.

At the front corner of the yard is a fairly large, pyramidal evergreen bush of unknown species (boxwood, maybe?).

The car is the dark grey 409-3. He backs down the alley a ways and sits there awhile.

I neither know nor particularly care what he is doing there, but it occurs to me that such a place would be a good place to hide in wait for speeders.

He sits there awhile longer, then takes off again.

My bedroom is at that corner of the house. This morning, I realized there was much too little light coming into my bedroom windows, so I took the pruning shears and hacksaw to the bush and didn't stop until there was nothing left of it but six or seven spindly little sapling-sized upshoots, stripped of all branches and leaves up to about seven feet.

Good luck hiding behind THAT.

More Double Coupon Shopping.

Today I got two $1.28 cans of Wolf Chili for $1.76, a $1.32 French's yellow mustard squeeze bottle for $.72, a $.92 can of mild Rotel for negative $.08, and a $1.12 bottle of Joy Ultra dish detergent for $.52.

So in total, I got $5.92 worth of stuff for $2.92.

I'm thinking of keeping a record of every time I wind up paying negative money for a product and sending at least half of that money to the National Libertarian Party.

That would be killing two birds with one stone by sapping money from Borg Queen Obama's economy AND helping fund the Libertarians, who will lose their ballot access in 2012 in a lot of states if enough of us don't vote for them.

38.9972678

He's been ingested, injected,
infested, infected,
protested, protected,
detested, detected,
digested, dejected,
incested, insected,
basted, bested,
tasted and tested

But today the godmonster
slouches toward 39
unbroken and unbowed.

Aftermath.

I managed to get the washing machine half-assed going again, as long as I only use the Permanent Press selection. I hope it'll hold together long enough to give me a little time to scratch up enough money (my people call it "wampum") to get the repairman out here. Again.

The city is still under a boil order, which is a pain because a couple of times today I had a craving for shrimp Cup O'Noodles. I didn't want to use a bottle of spring water for that, because that would make the cup of noodles cost, like, two freakin' dollars, and the three minutes I would nuke the stuff would not be enough to bring the water in it to a boil. So I had a cheese-stuffed smoked sausage instead.

The sunset today wasn't very wintery-looking. It was pastel blue and pink. I remarked to myself that this must be what it would look like if Easter exploded and splattered it's pastel entrails all across the sky.

I bought two Sunday papers today -- my regular Democrat-Gazette and the Springfield News-Leader, which now costs two bucks despite being as high-school-journalism-class as ever. At least it had some pretty good coupons this week. But someone really should call them up and ask them what they use to get the Democrat-blue splatter stains out of the front of their underwear every time they think about the Obamas moving into the Caucasian-American House.

Oh, crap. I forgot to hang out the load of towels I washed this afternoon. I'll have to remember to do that first thing tomorrow morning.

Relapse.

I smoked 19 cigarettes today. Not that it's any excuse, but the world pissed me off.

More specifically, the fact that the world is falling apart and nobody seems to want to do anything about it pissed me off.

Today was the first day in the past several that the mercury rose above freezing. During that time, a bunch of laundry piled up, so I decided to wash a couple of loads.

But no.

Halfway through the first load, the machine quit. It didn't even release the water first. It is about eight and a half years old, we've already had to fix the damn thing three times, and there are plenty of mid-century wringer washers out there still plugging along just fine. If it was possible to manufacture a washing machine fifty years ago that would last decades, why is it not possible now? Why is everything made these days total crap?

So I loaded up my soggy clothes, dripping all through the house, and took them to the laundromat, where I would have to pay $1.25 a load to wash them. I had a five in my pocket.

And the change machine at the laundromat had a sign on it that it takes fives and ones. I put the bill in the slot. It spit the bill out. I tried again. It rejected it again. I smoothed out the VERY minor creases and tried again. It again spit it back at me.

Hateful machine.

I tried a total of ten times. It was rejected a total of ten times. I wanted to punch the piece of $H!T machine. If I'd known for certain that the two security cameras in the place were dummies, I might have done just that.

Some idiot child asked if I wanted his help getting the machine to work.

I don't know what he thought HE could do about it. It was the machine itself, not my technique, that was flawed and causing the rejection of the money. The kid was maybe ten years old, and I surmised he was probably going to grab my money and run.

"No," I told him. Not "No thanks," mind you, just "No."

Instead, I went to the salvage grocery store that's in the same strip mall. I stood in line at the cash register behind some halfwit girl who seemed to be deliberately unloading her cart as slowly as she could. And no, I'm not exaggerating.

That's another thing -- when did it become perfectly acceptable to deliberately waste other people's time?

I finally got to the cashier and got three bucks in quarters and two one.

I got my laundry done, but I was still fuming. That's when my thought process went something like this:

Why do the right thing if the world's gonna screw you over anyway? I'll show the world -- I'll smoke CIGARETTES!!! I'll somehow PUNISH the world by resuming my nasty habit of sucking tobacco smoke down into my lungs! THAT'll teach it a lesson!

I know it makes absolutely no sense, other than the first part. But in that moment, it made perfect sense. The whole world's been shot to $h!t and there's not a damn thing being done about it, so I may as well enjoy myself with a smoke.

Besides, I needed something to take the edge off and calm me down before I came all Angry Unglued on the next dumbass I encountered, like one of the MANY morons in this town who are INCAPABLE of grasping the concept of Left Turn Yield On Green. Trust me on this, you wouldn't like me when I'm Angry Unglued.

Even then, the consequences would have been minimal if I could have bought just one or two cigarettes. But you can't buy just one or two; they aren't sold that way. You have to buy a minimum of twenty.

I stopped at the 24/7 and bought a pack of Camel Menthol Wides and a lighter.

I sat in my car, trying to resist the temptation to open the pack. The size of the box, the texture and temperature of the cellophane wrapper, the faint smell of mint all proved too much for me.

"Fuck you," I told the camel on the box. "Fuck Whirlpool, and Fuck Barack Obama!" I ripped open the cellophane, flipped open the box, tore out the silver inner liner at the top of the pack, and pulled a cigarette out.

I lifted it to the corner of my mouth and grabbed the filter with my teeth. The menthol danced and tingled on my lips. I flicked my Bic, paused long enough to think "Christ I hate me right now," and stuck the flame to the end of the cigarette.

The first puff was long and deep, with a secondary inhalation to let the smoke kiss my sinuses from the inside. The kiss radiated outward, not stopping until it reached the ends of my extremities.

Yeah, THERE it is, I thought. Why hello there, old fried. I hadn't realized how much I missed you until I got you back.

Another puff and the edge began to be carried away on the wisps of smoke, drifting out the window and into the universe.

I flipped on the car's radio, certain that Joan Jett's I Hate Myself For Loving You would be playing. It wasn't. I tested all the presets and settled on something or other.

I finished that cigarette and drove home. I didn't even bat an eye at the water main break at 6th & Chestnut that had the whole town under a boil order and left a giant crater surrounded by traffic cones in the middle of the intersection.

I got home, dipped the water out of the washing machine a cup at a time and poured it into the bathroom sink. And then I hung my clothes on the line.

That was 18 cigarettes ago. I have one left. Will I smoke it tonight? Will I smoke it the first thing tomorrow morning and want more? Will I stash it on top of the kitchen cupboards so that the NEXT time the world pisses me off, I can have just that ONE cigarette?

Time will tell.

It's colder than a Tauntaun's cloaca out there.

About 5 degrees F right now. Sumbitch that's cold, and the bad thing is it's not supposed to get above freezing for at least another day and a half. Supposed to bottom out around zero tonight. Hope the pipes don't freeze; I have the heat lamp on in the basement but even that's no guarantee when the weather falls down to around ten degrees and stays there for several days.

At least there isn't any snow or ice, so we're not trapped in the house, as long as we can stand the walk to the car, and the warmup time for the heater in there, without freezing our fixtures off.

A free box of Afrin and an eight-cent box of cake mix.

I had to go out this morning for a 12-pk of Diet Dew, some bread, and a little bunch of miniature bananas. While I was at the store that doubles coupons up to $.50, I decided to do a little coupon shopping, too.

I got the $4.69 Afrin for free, some $.88 reduced-sugar yellow cake mix for $.08, a $1.25 box of Betty Crocker scalloped potatoes for $.75, a $1.50 can of Campbell's Clam Chowder for $.90, a $1.98 roll of Viva paper towels for $.98, a $.88 package of steam corn for $.28, and a $1.25 pump bottle of Softsoap for $.55.

Double coupons SO rock when you're Fighting The Power.

Why can't things be easy?

It's been one of those days where my thoughts have to fight through the molasses before they can join up with each other and for something approximating coherence.

I ventured out first thing this morning to buy lottery tickets. I usually buy them on the day of the drawing (Wednesday in this case) but the temperature's supposed to drom sharply starting tonight and I thought I was planning ahead to keep from having to go out into the Wednesday cold.

Except that I didn't factor in my town's weekly newspaper, which technically comes out on Thursday but actually can be bought on Wednesday morning if you know where to go.

I knew I was out of shape . . .

. . . but I didn't know I was SO out of shape that the very existence of things called "shapes" was in question.

After all, I've been doing 10-pound curls (am put to 160 of 'em each arm) six mornings a week, and a regimen of 10 situps, 10 pushups, 10 leg lifts, and 10 windmills before bed every other night.

So when I came across a near-mint condition Weslo Momentum 610 for $35 at an otherwise dreadful yard sale yesterday, I thought I had a head start on getting fit.

I think the problem, other than the fact that it looks like the Terminator mated with an antelope, is that it's motion nudges you into going faster than you want.

I can't be on the thing more than five minutes at a time without my leg muscles revolting and feeling like they're being ripped apart William Wallace-style. It's not even long enough to get out of breath. And the rest of the day, my hamstrings are about 6 inches too short.

Too many years of WATCHING The Biggest Loser on TV (usually while eating a bag of chips) instead of trying to get myself fit. I call it Dieting Vicariously Through Television.

So to keep from getting frustrated and giving up entirely, I'm going to have to start small and increase the workout very slowly but steadily. And by "small" and "slowly" I mean "laughably small" and "absurdly slowly." I'm thinking I'll start off burning 10 fat calories a day and increasing that by 1 daily until I get to 10, when I may or may not up the increase to 5 a day.

Rise Of The Soapmaker!

Or, "Is That A Sliver Of Soap In Your Sock, Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?"

My regular minions will remember I am constantly looking for ways to save money by reducing waste and finding new uses for used "disposable" items.

(On that note, did you know you can wash and hang-dry a paper towel an average of three times? But before I digress too far . . .)

With that in mind, slivers of soap have long vexxed me. I tried the Lisa Simpson Method -- smashing them together until they looked like a special effect from the movie Leviathan -- but they would never stick together long enough to wash oneself.

So I gathered up an old sock and put the soap pieces in it, tied up the end, then hung the thing on the shower caddy. My thinking there was to use the apparatus like one would a loofah or a bath scrubby. But it would never put out enough bubbles. Lawrence Welk would suffer an aneurysm waiting on bubbles from that thing. Plus, untying the knot every time I wanted to add a new sliver of soap was a pain in the ass.

Bored a couple of days ago, I found myself leafing through one of my mother's housewife magazines -- Woman's World.

There was a page on urawaza, the Japanese concept of secret tricks to save money, waste, or time.

One of the hints therein was "Turn soap pieces into new soap."

Basically, you throw the slivers into a saucepan, cover with water, and leave them to soak/soften overnight. You might want to crumble them up into really small pieces first (maybe a cheese grater?) or they'll likely turn out chunky and looking like novelty plastic vomit like my first effort.

The next morning, bring it to a boil and stir in two tablespoons of olive oil (I substituted canola oil.).

Pour the mixture into greased muffin tins and let them harden.

If the thought of putting into your saucepan something you have rubbed in your nether regions makes you go "Ewww!" you can pick up an old pan and muffin tins at a yard sale or flea market for, like, a quarter or 50 cents and use those only for soap recycling.

I made the equivalent of about four bars of soap this morning. I don't know if the boiling put more air bubbles in them or what, but they seem to have about double the volume than the size of the ingredients would suggest. (And no, that doesn't mean they shout really loudly.)

And the substance seems to be slipperier than white-market soap, perhaps because of the canola oil. But other than that, it seems pretty similar to normal soap.

I don't know how much money it saved me, when you factor in the water, canola oil, and the energy to boil it, but every cent saved is a cent Queen Borg Barack Obama's economy doesn't get. You also have to factor in the space the soap doesn't take up in your garbage anymore, so that's a plus. If I had a wood heating stove or radiator heater I could boil the concoction on, it would be almost costless.

[BDP] I don't remember the power going out this often in the Reagan Era.

And what you have to remember is that, except for six months in Peoria IL at the very beginning and four months at the very end in Springfield MO, I lived WAY out in the sticks during the Reagan Era. We're talking you-can't-get-cable-here country, where if you were lucky, you could get three TV channels but more often than not it was just two, and it was not unusual to just get one, which was the Government Programming Channel with the poofy-haired painters and the puppets and the in-depth documentaries on Inuit sockmakers.

Occasionally, when the atmospheric conditions were just right, a Mexican signal would overwhelm the KYTV station, an NBC affiliate, and you'd be treated to about thirty seconds of a cornflake commercial where the sparkling green rooster would qui qui ri qui at you for no reason, or some loud, urgent gentleman would try to sell you some gawdawful ugly stone cats. At least I think that's what he wanted. The puppets had only taught me enough Spanish to understand about every fifth word.

My mother was convinced the interference came from Castro, who was obviously trying to jam our broadcast signal. Why Fidel would want to deny us the day's Chiefs/Oilers score from Ned Reynolds (or, as he pronounced it, "Nid Rinnilds,")is beyond me. A few times I explained to her that Castro is Cuban, not Mexican, but it didn't do any good. The next time it happened, she'd be back to blaming Castro. Or worse, she'd be at the local gas station/pop & cigarette store and the topic of bad TV reception would come up.

"It's Castro jamming the signal," she'd tell anyone who'd listen, matter-of-factly, as if it had been proven, or some bit of secret information God had given her personally. It's bad enough she BELIEVED it; did she have to TELL it to people -- people we KNOW? I tried my best to melt into the floor, or to appear invisible and/or adopted.

But I digress about two levels deep. First, let me dig back up to only one level deep.

After about 30 seconds, the KY3 signal would momentarily fade back in, and we'd be treated midsentence to a stern Tony Beason lecture about how, yes, the bottom of the West Plains sewer system fell out, but those of us who were downstream along the many underground waterways of the Ozarks should just pretend we don't see the little brown specks floating in our well-drawn tapwater.

Twenty seconds later, the Mexican channel would re-emerge and there'd be an interview with the country's el Presidente, sitting on a tacky yellow couch that would be circled by a sad clown on a tricycle who would squeeze his bulbhorn at random times.

Ten seconds later, back to KY3. They would switch back and forth like that, at decreasing intervals, until they meshed together into a giant mess that looked like someone had electronically vomited a Dali painting onto the screen and sounded like a banshee was forcibly sodomizing a walrus. That's when you knew there'd be no more NBC watching for the rest of the day, so you'd get up and change the channel (back in those days, you had to actually remove your ass from the sofa and physically CHANGE the CHANNEL, but then there's no reason to channel surf when you only have two channels) and see if the vampire puppet could teach you anything about counting six bats.

But it's time to corral this train of thought and get back to being all non-digressy. What was I saying? Oh, yes -- I told you all of that just to flesh out exactly how out in the sticks I was.

It wasn't suburbia, or even exurbia; there was no urb within a hundred miles. If anything, it was a-urbia. Even the word "rural" didn't do it justice. It was the type of place where you didn't go out into your own yard at night unless you HAD to because, just beyond the edge of the glow thrown off by the buzzing vapor light in the yard, there was a very real possibility that a pack of wolves, a bear, a mountain lion, Bigfoot, Nell, Sling Blade, and the two gentlemen from Deliverance were hiding, salivating at the thought of dragging you off into the darkness, never to be seen again.

That's how remote and isolated it was, and even under those conditions, I don't remember the power going out all that often.

Maybe it's just that we weren't as dependent on technology as we are today, so it wasn't as big a deal as it is now. If the power went out, you could go outside and shuck corn or garden or decorate a Maypole or do whatever else a rural family does outside. Maybe play a banjo or Jew-harp down by the moonshine still until the power came back on, I don't know. Yeah, maybe the power went out every other week and we just don't remember it.

Maybe, but I don't think so.

Because it sure doesn't seem to me like the power went out more than a couple of times a year. The problem was always fixed in a relatively short time, and when it GOT fixed it STAYED fixed.

Here in the present, it seems the power's been going out about once a month for a while now. And like Baghdaders or Californians under Gray Davis or Brezhnev-era Soviets or the beaten-down American society in Atlas Shrugged we just accept this as the Way Things Are and don't believe anyone can do anything about it. Nobody wonders why, with the advances in technology, power outages aren't happening LESS often, but MORE. Nobody wonders, because there's no point in asking questions that nobody can answer. Who is John Galt?

The power went out twice today, once at 3:00 for an hour and fifteen minutes, and once at 6:00 for twenty.

Have some vodka, comerade. It will help you not to wonder why things are the way they are, and why there isn't anyone left in the world with the desire or the ability to do a damn thing about it.