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why the burperman's towel?
Friday, August 9 2002
I spent much of the afternoon over at a client's house nursing her laptop back to health. It turned out that the main problem with the damn thing was disk fragmentation; it hadn't been defragmented in 602 days. The fragmentation was so bad that I could barely run the built-in defragmentation utility. Eventually I left with the defrag running, but it made little or no progress. Later, over the phone, I had to tell the woman how to turn off virtual memory and reboot into Safe Mode. The laptop ran like a champ in Safe Mode, and this was how we were finally able to achieve defragmentation. This got me to thinking: a slightly beefed-up Safe Mode, with network and large-screen support, wouldn't be bad operating system for most people.
[REDACTED]
What with the money I'd earned, I spontaneously took Gretchen out to dinner tonight. We walked down to Rosewater on Union Street just below 6th Avenue and had dinner in the patio area.
There was a couple sitting about three feet away with a teeny tiny newborn infant, all pink and somewhat shriveled from its nine months as an internal parasite. It was so young that it didn't even cry much, but when it did it made dreadful rodent squeals. More irritating than the infant itself was its father, who kept cooing the most embarrassingly inane, unappetizing things. It started with him cradling the baby on his lap, asking rhetorically, "Whatcha doin' down there? Huh? Whatcha doin down there? Huh?" as if maybe the little monster would answer, "Why I'm sucking your cock, father!" Later we were trying to enjoy our dinner and we kept hearing the father mentioning how the baby probably needed to burp. But was it really burping that the father then tried to get the baby to do? Is "burping the baby" a euphemism for something far more disgusting? I ask this only because the process of burping involved the father first draping a protective burperman's towel over his shoulder and then placing the baby facedown upon it. If all that was going to come out of that baby was burpage, then why the burperman's towel? The kicker was what the father actually said to the baby as he proactively burped it. "Gimme a B. Gimme a U. Gimme an R..." I'm beginning to understand why the Family Circus is so popular with the reproductivity crowd. They seem to be under the influence of powerful tastelessness-inducing hormones.
The food at Rosewater is consistently weird, with odd combinations of ingredients one wouldn't normally think of combining. They all seem to work even at their most bizarre, but they nonetheless tend to be something of a minefield for Gretchen, who has a list of vegetables she cannot bring herself to eat (particularly eggplant, cucumbers, and fennel). Okra is another veggie she doesn't like, but it's not a common ingredient, even at Rosewater, mostly because it is a widely-disliked vegetable in America. There was, however, okra in my lobster mushroom appetizer and it gave me a chance to reacquaint myself with what the fuss is all about. To me, again, it seemed about as innocuous as green peppers or green beans, only more visually interesting. I picked up a little segment of okra and it looked just like the Pentagon, so I flew a piece of lobster mushroom into it as if re-enacting September 11th. Take that, Great Satan!
Later Gretchen and I watched another spectacular women's basketball game which we'd been recording (fair-use time-shifting) while at dinner. I'm finding it unexpectedly easy to get into "the game" as a pure spectator. Women's basketball all the drama of politics, but none of the consequences. This lack of consequence leaves my rational appetite sort of unfed after watching a game, so I find myself groping for some sort of essential meaning, some aspect of "the world is now a better place because the Liberty won against the Washington Mystics tonight" to take with me, but my brain is, it seems, fundamentally miswired for finding anything logical at all. I'm left with a purely irrational, emotional elation. Sports entertainment is, it seems, yet another opiate of the masses.
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