Never Blog and Eat Chili For Supper and Read P.J. O'Rourke and Watch the News Before Bed
Of no interest to anyone except psychoanalysts.

Oh what chili it was. Reba made a five gallon vat of white chili last night. I had some late, having taken Middle Girl to soccer practice then deciding to bathe and get Tiny Girl in bed before I ate. Probably would not have made a difference if I had eaten it an hour earlier. It sure was good, though. Big hunks of chicken, had some taco cheese spread on top, little dollop of sour cream, some tortilla chips, and had both navy and northern beans in it. The beans, I think, are the catalyst for all the rest of the story. That, and of course, chunky soups are not the prettiest foods in the world--almost REGRETTABLE in character.

Anyway, I finished up my bowl, poured up the remaining 4.98 gallons into every single bowl in the cabinet, stuck them in the fridge, and went upstairs to complete the process of haranguing the kids into finishing their baths and getting into bed. It finally got quiet around nine o'clock, so I sprawled across the foot of the bed and got out The CEO of the Sofa, P.J. O'Rourke's homage to O.W. Holmes. Before I became a fawning James Lileks sycophant, there was O'Rourke. I picked up the subversive National Lampoon habit while still in high school, and even though O'Rourke left the magazine in '81, all through college, the only two magazines which I bought on a regular basis were NatLamp and Soldier of Fortune. I'm sure that explains something. I'm not sure what.

In any event, the wonderful old sarcastic, mean-spirited, liberal-baiting O'Rourke was again at his best in his masterful demolition of Saint Hillary's It Takes a Village to Raise a Village Idiot. It made me laugh out loud, hard, and enough to interest Reba in it. I let her read a bit, "He doesn't like Hillary very much, does he?" "No, actually I think it's a defense mechanism to keep him from falling too deeply in love with her." "Yeah." I mentioned that I heard an interview with O'Rourke discussing the book sometime this past weekend on NPR. (What surprised me the most is how smooth and rich his voice seemed now. I don't ever remember it sounding quite like that, and I suppose it is a credit to fine booze and stogies.) In any event, she thought the chapter was funny, too, which is pretty rare for her.

For all of our shared oddities, my sense of humor is turned on more by The Three Stooges and Monty Python, while her fancy is tickled by...I don't know what. But not anything good and pure like the Stooges or Python. Or (usually) by crusty smart asses like O'Rourke. Or (hold your breath now) Mr. Lileks. I remember one night a while ago when Regrettable Foods hit the market, I was looking for it on the Books a Million website. She looked over my shoulder and wondered what I was looking for. "NO! it's not porn. This fellow writes for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and he has this really nice website, and he took these old cookbooks from the '40s and '50s and scanned the pictures of the worst ones, and he writes little comments about the food. Here, look at this." We surfed over to the Institute of Official Cheer and I started showing her all of the horrors of glowing Kodachrome offal. "Look; look at this one! It looks like grubs escaping from a dung heap!" "Yeah, it's Porcupine Meatballs. My mother used to make those all the time; it's just rice and meatballs." "Yeah, but look what he wrote! It's hilarious!" "Mm-hmm." "And here, look at this crap." "Yeah--you know, I think Mama has this cookbook, she used to make that for when people would come over from church." "BUT read what he wrote!" "Uh-huh." Never have I been so taken aback by anyone! Irony bounced off of her like cannonballs off of the Monitor. Snarkiness found no refuge in her, and she was completely immune to well-aimed one-liners. One tough audience, indeed. Makes me wonder how I have managed to last this long.

But, at least she kind of liked P.J.'s take on Hillary. I don't know if it is necessarily O'Rourke, or the fact that someone gave voice to her own antipathy to Mrs. Clinton, but I'll take what I can get! She went on and took her shower, and I kept reading. I couldn't read much without thinking back to the old Lampoon, which brought back memories of college, and my trailer.

It wasn't even a real mobile home--it was a 7x23 Terry travel trailer. It was like living in a submarine--the ceiling was exactly 6 feet high, the shower hose had to be connected to the bathroom sink, the bed was the kitchen table folded down, it was heated with two 40 pound propane tanks. One of the many bizarre occurences of my sojourn in trailerdom was the time I was sitting in the tiny airliner-sized bathroom on the pot, and was about to finish up and take a shower. The plastic hot water tubing was held onto the underside of the faucet set with a small aluminum slip ring. Which took it upon itself to let go just as I was in the process of testing the ol' plumbing, so to speak. At first I heard a spraying noise and then realized water was streaming out from inside the tiny little cabinet under the sink. I opened the little door and found out it was scalding hot water, since it sprayed all over me. Big naked dude, microscopic bathroom, on the pot, with Old Faithful suddenly erupting under my sink. Of course, this being a trailer, there was only one way to shut off the water. Outside at the spigot in the yard. Gosh, the excitement! I unwedged my big arse from between the particle board wall and the sink and grabbed a towel and ran outside, onto a concrete slab covered with pine cones and sweet gum burrs and I think a slug or two and maybe some droppings deposited by my neighbor's hound. Water off. And the start of a search for a REAL hose clamp, after I got my clothes on.

But, it was home. For five years. So what has all this got to do with anything? Good question--I just reread this and can't make heads nor tails out of it. But all of it does help explain what happened when I went to bed.

I turned myself longways on the bed, took off my glasses and did my best Lil' Abner go-to-sleep-before-you-hit-the-bed routine. Sometime during the night, the combined effects of chili with two types of beans, the voice of O'Rourke, trailers, porcupine meatballs, NPR, Lileks, and my mom/mom-in-law/wife, caught up with me.

It was nearly dark, and I was trying to drive down the road to my trailer. I didn't know where it was, so I was relying on some really big ugly woman in the passenger seat to guide me. We took a turn, and I was back at my trailer in Auburn. I went to the office and tried to check my mail, but I couldn't remember the combination to the lock. I went back and noticed that I needed to fix the handle beside the door. I went in, and laid down on the bed/table combination and then heard a really loud noise in the yard. I ran out and saw a Dodge Aries in the yard with "Campus Security" written down the side. The lady inside had some Very Important Information for me. (There was never anything like this at Auburn, but I was also watching the news as I was reading before I went to bed, and there was a story about people in Alabama who serve as elected constables, serving evictions and subpoenas and such, and one of them had a big Dodge van with "Constable" written in tape down the door of his van.) The security lady held out a clipboard with paper on it. I looked at it and it was a long form that had all kinds of check boxes and writing on it, which I couldn't read because it was dark and I was sleepy, but I knew it was bad and it was something to do with my mom. I jumped in the car and laid down on the bed (such things can happen in a dream) and was taken to a motel room somewhere on campus. I was sitting in a chair right by the door, and heard a knock, and tried to stand up and get out of the way. The door eased open and it was my mom, accompanied by a slight fellow with glasses and a goodly bit of forehead. It was James Lileks! I dragged them in and couldn't believe what was going on! "Mom, do you know who this is?" "No." I made them sit down, "He's a writer for a newpaper somewhere and he writes books and he wrote this one on food, you remember--I showed you pictures of Porcupine Meatballs and you said you had made them, or someone had, and he was on the radio talking about his book and he's a writer and all. Remember?" "No." Hmm. "Gosh, Mr. Lileks, it is so good to meet you. You know I have been a fan for a while." He nodded. Then it hit me, "Why is it you're here?" He started talking and it was P.J. O'Rourke's voice from the NPR interview. Basically, he didn't know why he was there, he just showed up. So we made really boring small talk for a while, talked about the weather, sat around. For some reason I got up and shook his hand and someone started knocking at the motel room door, and I realized I was patting the top of Reba's head with my palm and my ring was hitting the headboard.

Only 4.98 gallons of chili to go. Heaven help us all.
posted by Terry at 11:30:00 AM