Just Desserts

It must have been almost thirty years ago that the family decided we could probably shake up a few traditions without pissing off the gods, and we examined the Thanksgiving dinner menu with fresh eyes. That's the kind of thing you're allowed to do when your family traditions include items from the Jell-O and marshmallow families. Dave and his sister didn't really like turkey, but the rest of us thought that was non-negotiable. Possibly even a matter of law. Punkin pie was mandatory also, but there could be a little wiggle room with other desserts. "What this dinner needs," Susan said, "is more chocolate." Or any chocolate.

I'd recently run across a promising-sounding recipe in a magazine I, as a letter carrier, was supposed to deliver, and printed off a copy of it at work at the expense of the stamp-buying public (thank you, America). I couldn't remember what it was offhand but I offered to have a look. "Does it have any chocolate in it?" Susan asked.

I located the recipe under a rumple of papers on my desk. "Let's see," I said, smoothing it out, "it's called 'Fudge-Slathered Fudge Cake.'"

"Bring it," Susan instructed.

The next day

It was one of those recipes that starts out as a pain in the ass. You preheat the oven to 350 and then you find square pans and grease them and then line them with tin foil and then grease that and flour it and knock out the excess flour, and by then your oven is preheated and you haven't even touched an ingredient. But the ingredients are tremendous. A pound of chocolate, a half pound of butter, eggs, sugar, walnuts, brandy, and two tablespoons of flour just to restore order and discipline. It's still a bit of a pain in the ass but you can feel confident it's going to be great, because chocolate butter sugar brandy. You do have to whip the egg whites and egg yellows separately and "gently fold"--god, I love that--the whites into your chocolate sludge. If there's a way to do that without losing all the loft from the egg whites, I have never found it. Then you bake your two layers, and they puff up sort of randomly, and you let them cool overnight on a rack.

The next morning your little square cake layers look all stomped to hell. They're lumpy and shrunken and flat as an old lady's tit. Or so I'm told. It's a panic situation, that first year, but hey--that's what the frosting is for. It starts out as cream and sugar. You're supposed to boil those and then reduce to low and let it bubble for ten minutes whilst "occasionally washing down sugar crystals from the side of the pan with a moistened pastry brush." Like I'm ever going to do anything with a moistened pastry brush.

The frosting is fabulous and the cakes go together beautifully, with walnuts pressed into the sides for the jazz of it. It's a hit. Anyone who ingests more than about a two-inch cube of it has to lie down on the floor for an hour, but it's a hit. And a tradition is born.

Embiggen for recipe

The next year, and all the years after that, the cakes do the exact same thing, but by then you've realized that they're only in the recipe to keep the fudge frosting layers apart, like a semi-colon holding back a pair of clauses. But the frosting doesn't set up properly. You review your ingredients, find them accurately measured, and frost the cake anyway as is. After a while someone notices it's crawling off the counter and heading for the hinterlands at a dead gallop. It's a family effort to corral the frosting with a deft posse of fingers, and even if it doesn't look like it belongs on a magazine cover, you still have to make it again the next year.

Discoveries are made over the decades. A few years in, I scribble a note in the margins: no need to grease the pans first. Duh. The tin foil slides right out. Some years the frosting works and some years it doesn't. I finally realize it's one of those heat things. It's chemistry. Chemistry was my favorite subject but when it slides into the kitchen arena, it's black magic. This frosting business is one of those candy-making deals where you have to check if your balls are hard or soft, and it's all too embarrassing. At some point I recognize that my frosting works if I let it bubble at a higher temperature for a slightly longer time. I scribble that in my margins.

I could have taken a full degree course at a culinary institute and figured this out faster than I did on my own. But I've got it working now.

Dinner is great. Dave makes a plaintive and utterly futile motion that we have prime rib instead of turkey next year. That's a tradition, too.

The Snot Garden

I have this little weather app on my phone. It's been pretty reliable. And that is how I learned that we were about to dip below freezing. I stood at the back door and looked out at my garden. Flowers and tomatoes were sparse, but everybody looked plump and green and contented. The next day, they would all look like something that's been in the back of the refrigerator for a year. It'd be a massacre. It was like looking at a passel of pink pigs lined up outside Hormel.

Plants, most of them, can't get out of the way of an arctic blast. They are famously stationary. They might flap around a bit, but they've basically got their feet in a bucket of concrete, and winter comes on like the deep dark sea. Some of them have ways of coping. They might have nastic movements, which is not what you're thinking it is. A nastic movement is one that is triggered by something like sunlight or cold. All their little cells are lined up like subway tiles and as each cell shrugs or slouches or stretches in response to a stimulus, the whole apparatus moves admirably. The sunflower tracks the sun across the sky. The rhododendron curls its leaves inward and toward the ground, reducing transpiration. That's about the extent of it, for plants. Mostly they have to stay put and take what comes.

For the non-hardy plants in my garden, they're not going to take it well. They're going to turn into snot. What was giving them such good posture all those months was their cell walls, and once the goo inside the cell freezes up, it busts the walls apart, and your plant has all the bodily integrity of pudding. All those plants do just fine in warmer climes. You get far enough south, your lantanas grow to be the size of Volkswagens. But up here, they hit the freezing point and they take to their beds with the vapors. "I swan," they drawl briefly, and then it's game over.

But what are those other plants doing--the ones that sail right through the winter? Most of them concentrate sugars in the spaces between the cells, and that acts like antifreeze. In fact this ploy can take some plants down to -40 degrees (that's Fahrenheit--and Celsius is even worse). The plants that survive below that are dehydrating, evacuating water from their cells, and what remains inside is basically jam. It's the same thing Norwegians do, only they replace their body fluids with butter.

The wood frog has the same idea. A better idea might have been to live south of Alaska like a normal frog, but the wood frog is a non-conformist. He sugars up his cells and goes right ahead and freezes, stuck in the pond mud. The wood frog is, for several months of the year, basically a puck. And then when he thaws out, he reconstitutes his former glory bit by bit until he can hop away. Takes upwards of 24 hours and he's good as new. He doesn't much feel like having sex for a while longer, but eventually he gets a notion.

My Agapanthus plants are the ones that surprised me most. They're really not supposed to be hardy here. But they still look fine, all fat and fleshy, unless it gets really cold, like it did last winter. Then they turn into snot. But they store their secrets and passwords in fine stout roots, and the next spring they pop out again, although they won't flower; if they have a mild winter after that, they'll flower the next year. So they're just like the wood frog when it comes to sex. They don't want it quite yet, but just you wait.

My heart twists a little for those innocent tender plants in my garden, who don't know what's about to hit them. But then I realize: they're not like us. They don't have grief. Because they don't have existential dread.

Because they don't have an app.

On Cloud Fine

When it first occurred to me that I should have some kind of system to back up all my literary output, rather than having it merely traced into pixel vapor, my friend Walter gave me a lot of good advice. Redundancy was the key. I should have my documents copied on all my computers. I should have all data sucked into an external hard drive. I should print out everything I write and mail it to a friend whose house is unlikely to burn down at the same time as mine. I should transfer all my files onto  a thumb drive nightly and strap it to a homing pigeon. I should engrave my novels onto granite slabs and rubberize them against acid rain.

And I took all that advice to heart and bought an external hard drive, parked it next to my computer, and put new batteries in the smoke detectors. I felt marginally relieved.

What the external hard drive does is copy all my files and jam them into a little box, and it does this faithfully for a couple months, and then it does a big stretch and a yawn for another month and then sends a little oopsie note to the computer, which says "oh, by the way--you haven't backed anything up for the last month." This earns the external hard drive a trip to the mothership via US Mail, and another one shows up on my doorstep in a week. The new one does the exact same thing. So does the third, but by then the factory is no longer interested in sending me a new one.

But times have changed. Now it is possible to Back Up To The Cloud.

This sounds like something a good Christian would do to get out of dying. But I am not a good Christian, and I have no confidence that the Cloud will have me. Walter sends new, updated advice and a link to a backup service. Inasmuch as he did all the research for me, I believe I owe him the effort of sorting through the reviews on the backup service. And there I encounter this:

"After many, many kernel panic crashes, trips to the Genius bar, and drive wipes, I uninstalled Crashplan and never had another problem."

Kernel panic crashes?! I'm unfamiliar. But if it's anything like suffering an abrasion of the dip-nodule or having your winkle spindled, I want no part of it. I'm totally on board with the trip to the bar and the wiping, so I tend to trust the guy. And the prospect of never having another problem is very attractive to me. So I'm going to uninstall Crashplan.

I'll have to install it, first.

The Answer, My Friend

We just had a big wind. It was something that got ginned up in the South Pacific and then spun through the Aleutian Islands, and then Alaska flang it back down to us, and it was something. The house groaned and the wind roared like they were in a sumo match, outcome unknown. I tend to enjoy these events, up to a point. It's exhilarating, until you realize that those are all your next breaths out there, and they might be whipping by too fast to catch them.

They say that those sustained strong winds will drive a person crazy. Technically, this is not true. What really happens is that all the non-crazy people are inside behind thermal windows with a toddy, and that makes the crazy people easier to spot. But it is true that there is something deeply exciting and spooky about wind. Because you can't see it. All you can see is garbage cans flying past your house and trees bending over and hats shooting off people's heads like popped corks, and any one of those sights would freak you out if you weren't already familiar with the concept of wind. It's like an invisible hand is pushing everything around.

Religions have been founded on less. I mean, look: here we all are, inexplicably, and there's all this stuff, and it's moving around, and we're being blown about in ways we can't understand, and most of us just feel better if we have someone to pin it on. Preferably, someone that is a lot like us in familiar ways, only much, much bigger. I'm as fascinated by what I see around me as anyone else, but I personally get no juice out of that particular notion. It's an unsatisfying explanation. It just passes the buck.

Of the many traditions that postulate the existence of the way, way larger Beings pushing everything around, I'm most comfortable with the ancient Greeks'.  They at least observed that all kinds of shitty stuff happens to people who don't necessarily deserve it. So they figured the gods were just having themselves a fine time amongst themselves, and if someone gets his liver pecked out or gets swan feathers in her hoo-hoo, that wasn't really any concern of theirs. We're game pieces; we're collateral damage. In contrast, people who plant their flags on the idea of one single really, really large Being--one who is presumed to be affectionate and have our best interests at heart--those people get themselves all pretzeled up over their own misfortunes. We take everything so personally.

One of the times we had a huge windstorm, a 100-foot-tall Douglas fir tree came down on the deck of our cabin. Then another came down precisely on top of the first. Then another. We had three gigantic trees stacked up right alongside the house and they only nicked a little flashing off the roof. This is the sort of thing people like to think of as a miracle. We weren't home at the time, but we take things so personally that even the preservation of our real estate holdings gets to count as miraculous. I call it dumb luck. Even if there were a really, really large Being in charge of aiming a falling tree, who's to say the effort was on our behalf? It could have been the grand comeuppance of a naughty chipmunk who was overdue for a smiting. It all depends on your viewpoint, and it pays to have more than one.

Now, if the wind ever blows the Cubbies into a World Series championship, that would be a miracle.

In Case Of Dire Rear

As many of you are aware, I have a deep personal interest in poop. No point in false modesty: I'm good at it. I enjoy the process and the result. I am prouder of some results over others, but I regard them all with the same interest as anything else I made by myself.

So I rarely suffer from either constipation or writer's block. If anything, I have the opposite problem. This doesn't bother me. It's interesting too. The only problem arises when there's a lack of receptacle ("toilet," or "publisher").

This is a recurring consideration when you're a mail carrier. There is a limited number of opportunities on any given route to conduct deeply personal business. Say you are walking along with your mail satchel and suddenly the bowel alarm trips (whoop! whoop! whoop!). Three delivery points away is a small law firm with a reliable toilet. You'd prefer to have delivered the two intervening stops first, and you make the calculation that such a thing is possible. This is one notable area where having an optimistic outlook can backfire on you, as it were. Things begin to feel urgent (whoop! whoop! whoop!) in a hurry. You motor on with your butt cheeks clenched hard enough to crack walnuts.

Diarrhea is a lot like life. You always think you have more time.

Finally you make it to the lawyer's office and walk in like Mrs. Hu-Wiggins. Your clenching musculature has come through for  you. It has seen you all the way into the bathroom. It has seen you through to the dropping of the postal-blue culottes. And it damn near has gotten you safely to ground zero. But not quite. Never quite.

It is a small law firm. An intimate office. There's nothing wrong with your underpants that a good solo ride in a hot washing machine wouldn't fix, but you determine that the personal cost of transporting your underpants home in their current condition is greater than the price of new underpants, and you stash them into the wastebasket of the bathroom in the intimate lawyer's office. Bury them. Study the result. And decide to put a solid knot in the wastebasket liner and carry it off in your satchel until you find a dumpster.

This is why it is always best to use the services of a gigantic, impersonal law firm; and why it isn't the worst idea to wash your hands after you open your mail.

And this is where Instant Underpants comes in handy. Instant Underpants is a real product that comes in a small, discreet tin. The underpants are compressed mightily into a tablet shape, but if they are dropped in water, they expand with Sea-Monkey Technology into a serviceable pair of one-size-fits-all underpants. There are two drawbacks. Number one, one-size-fits-all underpants fit New Jersey Governor Chris Christie better than they fit you. Number two, your new underpants are wet.

The makers of Instant Underpants claim that damp underpants are better than no underpants. This is not true. No underpants are better than no underpants.

Yes, that sentence made sense.  I wonder why I can't find a publisher?

The Mat Cat

I kinda got how Dave trained our old cat, (Saint) Larry. She was more or less willing to do any old thing, as long as there was still a prospect of a lick of someone's ice cream cone, or a plate of chicken left in a nabbable location. Just the thought of such things put her in a biddable mood. Also, she was raised like an Amish child with no television: she had no access to the list of privileges that accrue to a cat simply by being a volatile mammal with pointy fingers. When her claws emerged the first time she saw a mouse, it was probably a huge surprise to her. So when Dave taught her to roll over, and shake hands, and tell time, and monitor the phone for solicitations, it seemed kind of normal.

The outdoor-cat privileges came later. First she was only allowed out on the porch when Dave went out to smoke a cigarette. After a bunch of years of that, she was permitted to meander on to the patio, and no further. Sparrows could line up along the perimeter in sturdy confidence. Larry was pretty much a perfect cat, except for that pooping-any-old-where thing, but even that just showed how laid-back she was.

But Dave quit smoking long ago, and Tater is a whole different cat. She's a rolling vat of verve. When she gets a notion to verve all over the house, she registers on a seismograph. She's also been raised Amish, but she seems to have more of a direct line to her instinctual heritage than Larry did, and that can only be bad news. Sure, she rolls over when you tell her to, but you can't get her to shake hands for anything, she never RSVPs, and she does not give one shit about ice cream or chicken. But, twitchy and avid at the window, she certainly gives the impression that the only thing keeping her from extinguishing a raft of birds is us, and our doors. Minus our intervention, the entire bird population of the back yard would be reduced to pillow stuffing and a gnarly pile of guts.

So I hollered the first time I saw Dave leave the back door open. Tater strolled out on the instant. Dave looked calm. "Sit," he said, and she sat on the welcome mat.

"Mat Cat," he said to me in explanation, and I began to object, and then I realized: he's going to do it. Later we sat out on the patio at beer-thirty. After about five minutes, Tater affected a long stretch and repositioned herself a few sly feet away from the mat. "Mat Cat," Dave said, using a tone, and pointing, and she circled back to the mat. "Sit," he said. Tater sat.

I don't know how he does it, but he does it. Hell, I haven't strayed in years.

Meet The Priss

The atmosphere in the ExxonMobil Room was electric. The new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pranced in on his coal-black unicorn Republican Wave, slid off with the agility of a much younger man, and bounced up to the microphone, his cheeks pink with arousal.

"Well met, well met, well met!" he boomed archaically. "I'd like to welcome you all on this suspicious Caucasian. The American people have handed us a mandate for change. The American..."

"Sir, before you claim a mandate, would you care to comment on charges of voter suppression?"

"Please. Have you seen the turnout? Those people voted longer than anybody. Leave it to the coloreds to have nothing better to do than stand in line all day to vote! Am I right? Now. The American people have spoken, and they said it's time to get things done. The American people said they're not interested in climate change, so: Job One. We're getting rid of it. Poof!"

Cheers erupted as Mr. McConnell waved his tiny wand and a swirl of black dust settled over the room. James Inhofe, presumed new chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, patted his fingers together in ecstasy and had to be excused when he sprained his face giggling. Republican Wave whinnied and hawked up a loogie while Lamar Smith, chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee strolled in to enthusiastic applause, flanked by Adam and Eve and a triceratops.

"That's right, sir," he said.  "The American people sent us here today to solve problems, and the biggest problem we face is science. That's Job One, right, guys? Let's all give a hand to our friends here, Adam, the little woman, and this big fellow."

Adam nodded shyly and patted the triceratops on the thigh, his fig leaf beginning to flutter. "Found him in the Garden of Eden," he said, as Eve cast him a demure smile. The triceratops rumpled up his face plates in confusion and motioned for an interpreter.

"But you can't--" the reporter winced as if in pain--"you can't just wave a tiny wand and make science or global warming go away. You--"

"Just did, son," McConnell said, his hand in a complimentary bowl of Cheetos. "It's the responsible thing to do. Look. You can have all the airy-fairy theories you want, but at some point you need to grow up. We can't fix climate change and burn fossil fuels both. And the American people know what they want. We're not going to stop giving it to them until all the money is drilled out. We're the greatest nation on Earth! We'll be fine."

"But--but that's like saying Hiroshima was no big deal, because the Enola Gay had comfy seat cushions."

"Exactly." Member of the assembled new Republican majority shrugged in unison, pleased at the consensus.

"Job One number three," House Speaker John Boehner put in, dabbing away a tear, "Repealing Obamacare." He held his hand up, acknowledging the ovation. "We're going to rip Obamacare out by the curly hairs, and replace it with a good Republican plan that guarantees a marketplace of affordable insurance options, prohibits the cancellation of coverage for pre-existing conditions, and allows children to stay on their parents' insurance until age 26."

The reporter appeared to be working out a kink in his neck. "But that sounds exactly like O--"

"FreedomCare," Mr. McConnell inserted. "It's completely different, son. And we're adding a phrenology benefit and a free annual balancing of the humours."

"But--"

"And no website. Am I right? We'll have Marge and Phyllis back on the switchboard, doing what they do best for America. Make no mistake: we are here on America's business, but we are extending the crabbed hand of cooperation and hoping the President will agree to meet us halfway. Say, the sixteenth century," he concluded.

"I would like to point out at this time," whined Harry Reid from a low stool in the corner, "that the room is fast filling up with unicorn and triceratops shit. And your friend Adam over there is looking a little gassy. Can we adjourn until such time as we get this all cleaned up?"

"Cleaned up!" McConnell was tinkly with laughter. "Let me show you how it's done, my friend. We don't clean up. We'll just adjourn to the GlaxoSmithKline Room for now, head over to the Monsanto Cafeteria for lunch, pee-pee in the BP teepee, and reconvene tomorrow in the Johnson and Johnson Senate Chambers. Clean up!" The room had collapsed into hilarity, with several members off-balance from attempts to connect with a high-five.

Boehner honked merrily into a hankie. "It's not like we're going to run out of rooms," he wheezed.