Flanging pearls before the swine

Figaro has developed a fascination with the word 'flange', which I take some blame for. When it first came up in conversation he was giggling over it not because of its naughtiness, but because it sounds so funny in his moon-man antipodean dialect - he'd only heard it in the context of its engineery definition. When I told him what I knew of the word, it seized on his imagination. I must say I can see why.

My use of the word 'flange' was shaped by two forces. The first was a Brighton boy who taught at the school I worked at in Piemonte. He used something like definition 2 in the Urban Dictionary's 34 (!!!) item list, with more emphasis on the notion of overhang. He was fascinating to me as he was the first 'retired' party boy (ie too much E and so met a rich Italian girl, settling down to a life of drug-free, fun-free, drinking-and-smoking-a-little-too-much idleness) I'd ever known well, and I'm inclined to believe him in terms of the word's usage because I don't think he ever thought about much else. "Tha' Kay'ee! I be' she go' no flange a'awl!" Could never say T's, it was absolutely adorable. The name I was going by there has some T's in it so I'd try to make him shout it. And try to make him say 'Tahiti'. It was hilarious but annoyed him shitless, like when bastard Americans try to make me say 'the mouse caroused about the house'.

Anyways. The second force was Not the Nine O'Clock News, a show I've never seen. I've been persuaded for years - like the Oxford English Dictionary of Collective Nouns - that flange was the noun for a group or troop of baboons. Apparently this is from the authoritative mouth of Gerald the Intelligent Gorilla.

Hee hee hee . . . box

Yesterday saw the delivery of my first Good Food Organics box. It’s come to this . . . I’m one of those snobs who snobbishly refuse to eat pesticides. I’ve always loved them, or at least the delicious foods they were on, and like my cigarette-quitting this spring I wasn’t ready to stop. The dear ciggy poos I stopped because they started making me retch while I was trying to enjoy them as was my long-addicted wont. The pesticides I’ve had to stop because I’d decided to eat more local produce, because local produce tastes better. Do you understand? I still love pesticides. It’s just I want to be able to taste my fruit and vegetables again, like a normal person or a European.

I guess it was time to start eating organic though. I’m always yelling at Noam Chomsky-reading ugly-haired morons to quit their goddamn whining and act with their dollars and their votes to change the stupid fucking world if it’s all that bad, and lately it’s been striking me that yes, indeed, it is all that bad.

There were three options for local produce:

1. Farmer’s markets (I’ve been doing this and it’s been fun, but they close down during the winter, I’ll want to spend less time cycling around the city to them and more time making love after Tuesday, and they’re full of people who walk stupid)
2. The WOW Box (delivery straight to door with a purely local produce option, but seems to be less value for money based on paltry contents of normal WOW boxes)
3. The Good Food Box (pick up at native resource centre two blocks away, organics option which mostly features locally grown produce and has a few what-the-fuck-are-those exotic organic options thrown in, and apparently better value for money than WOW Box.)

This first Good Food Box had the following:

A bag of Spring Salad Mix
4 oranges
2 pounds of red potatoes
a musk melon
some Japanese Mustard
a big eggplant
4 ears of sweet corn
3 tomatoes
an avocado

First of all, I'm super curious to try the Japanese Mustard. Second, that cost $22. I’m not persuaded it was worth $22. Maybe I should jump off this wagon while the farmer’s markets are still in town and jump back on come winter. I shall discuss it with Figaro. Unsettling to think my domestic decisions will soon have to be made in consultation with a human being who isn’t my cat.

Beating the frustration

Rodelina mailed me a package of Marks & Spencer Dark Chocolate Ginger biscuits. They were gone in seven minutes, which is a new personal best. I really need some sauce . . . thank god the F Man is getting here on Tuesday. Chastity is for the aged.

On to less personal matters. A little while ago I saw When We Were Kings for the second time, after a gap of . . . since whenever it came out. I’d remembered that as the best documentary ever, which now I think was an exaggeration. Microcosmos was better. As was that Enron movie and the one about the jackass who got himself and his woman killed by the grizzly bears. But When We Were Kings was still great, mostly for the footage of the boxers themselves. Also it was a little more interesting after having done a masters in international relations and actually sort of understanding a little bit why Zaire was so fucked up.

The really cool thing about seeing it again was that the only special features on the DVD were footage of the entire Rumble in the Jungle AND the Thrilla in Manila. As some of you know I ruined my knee in a fighting class, spent months fathoms deep in love with my fighting teacher and really like beating things. I think fighting is cool, in other words. So you’d think I’d like watching boxing . . . I don’t really . . . always seemed a bit silly to watch professional people fight since a proper fight is over so fast, and the abstract notion of two guys putting on big soft leather gloves so that they could whale on each other longer seemed silly.

But those two matches, at least, were pretty fucking cool. They made the whole idea of two guys putting on big soft gloves to whale on each other make perfect sense. It was artistry. Well, the Thrilla in Manila was artistry. Ali and Frazier taking so long to find each other’s hitty points and moving around so cleverly while they did it – you know, with a really distinct personal style but still a great deal of creativity. The Rumble in the Jungle was strategy, superb upper body muscles, marvellous shit-talk and a few stunning combinations that simultaneously left me breathless and made me think of that episode of the Simpsons Moe exploited Homer’s thick skull to turn him into a professional boxer. That was cool too.

Rough sleep

Had a dream about Gilbert Jordan and those poor women he killed – why do I read the obits at work? I don’t need to, I’m such a morbid fuck – women who had been hopeful and cheerful and loving once, one assumes, and then some beady-eyed baldy fuck decides it’s alright to kill them and a whole justice system full of people decides it’s alright to let them die. Towards the end of this documentary-style dream, when the evidence had become overwhelming against Jordan and he was being marched off to prison, I sat down in the dining room of the Royal Hotel in Scarborough, snapped open a newspaper, saw the headline “Thank God for the Good People Who Stay Good,” and woke up howling with distress.

I fucking swear, every month I appreciate the appeal of agonistic religions a little more. I want the freedom to point at something and call it evil. The last thing that set that instinct off was reading three or four commentaries about how okay Israel is because at least Israel has the decency to be tormented by civilian deaths. How can someone type that without a merciful God breaking his fingers? How can they not see the sick degree to which that devalues the humanity of the Lebanese in particular and of Arabs in general? Devalues their understanding, devalues their emotions, but most of all devalues the great losses they suffer; devalues their pain, agony and torment as much as the justice system around a man like Jordan devalued the women he assaulted or killed by deciding it wasn’t worthwhile labelling him a dangerous offender.

Thank god, indeed, for the people who stay good. It makes me want to keep right on howling, to think there aren’t more of them. But thank god for the ones there are.

The Red Dragon will not celebrate meaningless milestones. . .

but this is my 301st post. Blogging is something I thought I'd never do, much less like, until I started doing it, like snatch waxing and anal sex, and here I am doing it every morning. Blogging, that is. . . . it's funny because it hasn't replaced the diary, either, but it's been such a nice new release to write a bunch of things that are personal in the sense that they come out of my brain but not personal in the sense that I'm going to blush when people read them. So thank you, people who read and don't make me blush. Thank you, Mr. Internet. I shall propitiate you by paying my Rogers bill when I get paid on Friday.

In a week I'll be waking up stupid with sex, insha'Allah. It's been so long I think I've forgotten how to do it, unless all my memories are wildly off the mark and Figaro in fact has batteries. But I had just been going on about writing a bunch of things that weren't personal. Sorry.

Okay. Do you think the use of organs on baseball diamonds has successfully desanctified the instrument? I went to an organ recital in the local Anglican cathedral a couple of days ago and even as the sun streamed through the stained glass and the religious iconography around me made me deeply take to heart and meditate over the notion of a tripartite God, the music kept making me want to stand up and yell "Charge!" You know, if I ever get married I wouldn't mind a religious ceremony, if that's the way my possible bitch wants it. I was raised in the Catholic Church, I believe that Jesus's words are the basis of the good and noble life, and I'm suitably intimidated by priests. But I don't think I'd be able to hack any organ music. In a situation that solemn anything would hit my ears like The Baby Elephant Walk.

Modern Red Dragon in search of a soul

Really one is spoiled for memoir titles. Take any navel-gaze ever written by a man for men, change one or two words and there you are. In this case that's not fair. So many of Jung's clients and students were women, and the attitude to women in the Jungian system is much less naive and blindly, blandly eroticized than in older systems of psychology.

I was thinking this morning about how the cultivation of children lately requires some larger-than-life hero - fair enough - it always has, right? I'm worried about what happens to us now, though, that our celebrity system has spread its tentacles from the fine arts, where it had become ubiquitous, into the wider bank of potential heroes. Especially into our wildly populist political systems (even in Canada - don't tell me there aren't an ocean of idiots who were successfully dissuaded from voting for Paul Martin's Liberals because he was uncharismatic and had been successfully nicknamed Mr. Dithers).

I wonder what that means in terms of useful role models when every ingloriousness of anybody we could aspire to be like is laid out before us - every achievement criticized in the light of anything comparable that came before it until novelty becomes a fetish - following hedonistic impulses more fêted than the realization of some goal or dream that goes beyond simple appetite satisfaction. Call me hormonally imbalanced, but this morning it's depressing me some. Maybe we should look more to private heroes, even if our education is to worship fame beyond all else. People have gone against their education before.

Cruising the gentle dragon

So I stopped the Marvellon and I don't think I've ever been happier to be alive and more good-willing towards my race, besides a deep and abiding shame I feel to be Canadian right now. Thanks a lot, right wing dilettantes. "Ooooooh, we need something a little different. I'm not in the mood for a Liberal government anymore. Harper's not as bad as you think." God, if I hear another person choose who they're going to vote for as though they were choosing a hair colour . . . well, I shan't let them forget it.

Anyways, the Red Dragon has never been so docile, I suppose out of biological gratitude I stopped throwing extra progesterone at it, making it work day-in-day-out. I don't understand why conspiracies to encourage people to go to war are so elaborate, you know; all governments would have to do to is throw an unbalancing amount of hormones into our water supply and read us Italo Calvino novels.

I'm so glad I quit the hormones before my mum was here and re-grew human feelings so we could have a nice time and Important Talks. I got my grandparents some Pohutukawa honey and wished for better. My grandfather has always had the most vicious sweet tooth - he's 97 and still covering everything in sugar - lord. I wished I was going with her, though I don't envy her the trip. You know? Whatever. Now my oldest brother is still here so I'm not going to North Bay for the long weekend at all. Wha'evs. Lots of pretty concerts here this weekend.