Monstrous vermin

Belgacom. It's not finished. We have a name for the person who made the ripoff order now, we have a receipt for all the unsolicited crap we brought back, and the incompetent, fraudulent fuckknuckles still haven't sorted out the €200 they're trying to charge us. But at this point, I mind a little less, or rather I'm a little less furious, as the situation has been illuminating. As the F-word pointed out, it's been the very definition of kafkaesque, and I'd always thought 'kafkaesque' was just an adjective pretentious jerks use to describe things they don't understand. But now I can reflect on The Trial and The Metamorphosis and see them as realistic allegories of dealing with European bureaucracies, rather than as the paranoid ramblings of a tubercular depressive living in an increasingly violently anti-semitic environment. On Saturday morning, for example, before going to the Belgacom shop, the F-word warned me I was breathing like an attack dog. That never happens.

Anyways, I've calmed down and refreshed myself over the weekend, thanks to Frisbee - pardon me, 'flying disc'- sleep, marijuana, three Mel Brooks movies from the 1970's that I'd never seen before because my parents never let me watch movies that had the word 'fuck' in them and after that it just never occurred to me they might possibly be good because Men in Tights and The Producers were so bloody stupid, the eventual appearance of the Belgian sun, a range of not-fit-to-print activities, and the conversion of a bushel of tomatoes from Sunday's fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck market into tomato sauce.

What really helped calm me down, from both my Belgacom fury and the range of other little annoyances cluttering up my life, was the tomato sauce. I can't wrap my head around childless people of liesure like me who think cooking is a waste of time, and making tomato-sauce is something that makes me extra baffled about them. Forget the fact that homemade sauce is a zillion times better than anything that comes pre-made, which I've been subject to at friends' and relatives' houses, and forget the fact that cooking it from the fresh fruit instead of the canned fruit yields such a cleaner flavour. The process of cooking it from the fresh fruit is lovely. Popping the tomatoes into boiling and then cold water and skinning them is fun in a slimy, Halloween sort of way. Getting two batches on the go at once and thinking of the subtle base flavours to give each lets you speculate on the delicious shape of meals to come. The knowledge that now your household is going to have something really delicious to eat because of your efforts - the prettiness of the smells - the sizzle of the pre-frying - the sight of all those full jars lined up afterwards - there's something deeply satisfying and calming about it, and I don't understand people who don't understand that satisfaction and calm.