Dear God.
I know this will come as a surprise, but not only is the pizza delivered by electric cars, but they include hemp in the process whenever possible. In the paper for the menus. In the brownies. (It’s that special non-buzzy hemp, the O’Douls of the stoner world.) There’s hemp in the Rasta Pasta. All the energy comes from “wind-generated power,” which is an interesting idea; I wasn’t aware that one could specify the source of one’s electricity. If I could, I’d ask for mine to come specifically from nuclear power plants whose cooling towers were painted white and bathed at night by black light lamps, which would be totally cool, as well as freaking out the guys who had just smoked up a few miles down the road.
Don’t miss the interior, which I’m sure made sense at the time. Everyone had a roommate who got a great idea at 2 AM and rearranged everything according to some spontaneously generated aesthetic concept.
And don't miss the Vision Statement. The slogan, “Pizza with a conscience,” suggests that ordinary pizza is sociopathic, or at least has no opinion on factory farms and doesn’t care that the cheese cultures were kept in small smelly pens all their lives, or that the green peppers were doused with pesticides to make them robust and tasty. If your corporate pizza had a conscience, man, you would hear the ingredients weeping as you opened the box. Which is such a buzz killer. Eat me! Chew hard! I cannot bear this burden any longer – would that I crisped up in the oven and ended my life as a black wisp of smoke, evaporating like the cry of a baby seal in the cold arctic air. Yes, that’s what I want. I want the pizza shop’s slogan to be something like “Sausage so fresh the screams of the pig still bounce off the slaughterhouse wall!” Really I do.
Lovely weekend, mostly. Rain and sun, sun and rain, both in the same hour, both contending for Most Dramatic Entrance. The rain would come suddenly and howl down, only to be shouldered aside by blaring sun, coming in like a Bruckner horn section. Saturday I went to Home Depot to get cedar chips. I need about 100 bags. A few years ago I had them delivered, and I expect I’ll do that again – but I wanted to get a start on the project now, so I bought 15 bags, threw them in the back of the Galileo. There was no one watching or checking receipts, incidentally; I had room for at least four more. But that would be wrong. Before I put them down I weeded, and let me tell you this: it’s a nice feeling to stride through the hostas, picking up the tall shoots with the shallow roots, yanking them from the dirt. (The soil gives them up easily, like someone who answers the door, sees cops, and jerks his head to the room up the stairs.) You get a rhythm going. You step, bend, grab, yank. Step, bend, grab, yank. You could do it all day, right up until the moment when you step, bend, grab what does not really look like a rose bush, but is.
Well, the blood is good for the roots, I hear.
That was Saturday, more or less. Hauling up bags, dumping cedar chips, rearranging the lighting, then standing outside in the Jolly Green Giant posture beholding my work and savoring the cedar aroma. Went inside, showered, finished up Doom 3. Yes, I saved earth from Hell. You’re very welcome. I listened to old radio, watched “Man on Fire” – essentially, a Charles Bronson revenge movie set in Mexico with a fine lead actor and supporting cast, a brisk enough script, a Heart-Tugging Relationship between a sullen man at the end of the line and the young child actress who gives him reason to have an emotion worth repressing again, and the usual ADD direction from Tony Scott. It’s a graphic novel, really – complete with subtitles to emphasize the dialogue, even though the dialogue is in English. Nice touch, but you can only do it once. Also watched the spiffed up reperfected version of THX 1138, the second half of which can be FF’d without missing a thing. Bottom line: it's bad to be shaved, drugged, and living in a totalitarian dystopia. I'm glad George cleared that up for us.
Tonight I’m with Gnat while my wife is at a movie, and that means I’ve been playing board games and doing puzzles while trying to work. Which means no work has been done. I’ve banged this out in the few minutes while she watches Spongebob (let me tell you, if have the slightest headache, Spongebob’s laugh is enough to make it a very large one.) This is also the night where I'm trying out Adobe GoLive CS, which has proved itself useless for on-the-fly editing; on my 1ghz G4 latop it has about a two second lag between typing a letter and seeing it appear on the screen. It’s a column night too. Also the start of the Screedblog, where polarizing grumpy reactionary drivel can be placed in a cordon sanitaire, leaving the Bleat as neutral ground where we can all get along. I advise those disinclined to like my screedish side to avoid it, since the spotty quality, haphazard reasoning and predictable conclusions will only serve as a depressing reminder of what I have become. On the other hand, it may be amusing to see what a jackass I can really be. Everyone’s a winner!
Unless you think that getting pizza from a guy in a hemp jockstrap is somehow ethically superior, in which case we will have to agree to disagree.
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