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Chili Bowl, 2018
Saturday, February 24 2018
After a pleasant (and hygge-rich) Saturday morning coffee in front of the woodstove in our recuperation-fort-free living room, Gretchen and I went to an event called Chili Bowl. Chili Bowl is an annual event designed to raise money for something called the Women's Studio Workshop. Local potters donate their rejects and restaurants donate chili, and people who buy a bowl get a free serving of chili in that bowl. In the past, the event was held somewhere in Rosendale, though this year it moved to the cafeteria of SUNY Ulster (that is, several miles in our direction). Gretchen had often wanted to go to the Chili Bowl in past years, but this was the first time she (and I) would actually go. We brought the dogs because the weather, through dreary and occasionally spitting rain, wasn't too cold (and our attendance at the event would be relatively brief). As we walked in, Gretchen explained her intended strategy. The plan was to get there at the beginning (which we were more or less doing), before all the best bowls were sold. This meant we would each have to pay the $5 admission fee (which is charged only for the first two hours of the four hour event). When we arrived, the cafeteria was mobbed with people, most of them grey-haired white women in their 50s and 60s. We quickly found a bowl we liked, looked over the rest, and selected two more we'd initially passed by. There were a great many people holding cups and bowls they'd yet to buy, so it was possible that someone would be putting down something we would like, though that seemed unlikely. The truth of the matter was that most of the bowls offered were mediocre at best. One of the ones we bought was clearly better than anything else there, though the other two we carried for a time were not bad. In the end, we abandoned one of three, keeping the best one (it had a repetitive floral motif in muted colors) and a cheerful one featuring colorful, crudely-drawn fruits.
As for the chili, there was "meat chili" station, which we naturally avoided. At the veggie chili station, there were three kinds on offer. The middle one had lots of squash in it (which neither of us are crazy about), so we went for the one to the left having corn and not too much green pepper in it. I could smell on the way to where we would eat it that the chili had been burnt, as food often was back in Harkness, the hippie co-op at Oberlin where Gretchen and I first met back in 1988. Burnt food is always the result of neglect. It's something one expects from a 19 year-old cook fretting about a term paper, not a restaurant (in this case, the 1850s House in High Falls), which should properly be using the event as a marketing opportunity. Not only was the chili burnt, but was also a bit too peppery for a general audience. I didn't mind, but I'm edge case. Happily, after a few spoonfuls, I'd completely adjusted to the burnt flavor and was able to enjoy it.
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Before driving home, we walked the dogs into a swampy area near the tennis courts and then back. Neville still had to be on a leash so he wouldn't overdo it on his still-healing knees, but Ramona managed to range as far as a stone wall with a sign specifically forbidding the presence of dogs. She didn't care.
Back at the house, I had a couple headaches resulting from broken equipment. The first of these was my fault, as I backed my wheelchair over my reliable Logitech USB headphones (the ones I use for videochats). I immediately set about fixing them by heating a piece of wire and burning it through its plastic armature in three places to form a new support and pivot (sort of the way the jaw hinge on mammals moved from where it was on their reptilian ancestors) that is strong and functions nearly as well as what just broke.
The second headache came when I tried to use an old 17 inch monitor mounted high on the wall from an arm attached to frame of the laboratory's north window. It only stayed on a for a few seconds before going black. Something was clearly wrong with it, but, knowing that perfectly good LCD monitors are left out in the rain outside the Tibetan Center thrift store, it doesn't make sense to look for the underlying problem.
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While Gretchen was out, I watched one and fraction movies I'd found in my search for those similar (in some respects) to episodes of Black Mirror. The first of these was EXistenZ, a David Cronenberg sci-fi horror flick which does its best to confuse reality with simulations (and simulations within simulations). It dates to a time (1999) when the only use for such technology that could be imagined were "games," which trivializes what is much more properly understood as either a simulated experience of a shared hallucination. In any case, it gives Cronenberg an opportunity to gross us out with dozens of fantastical semi-disemboweled amphibians, like something from a lingering acid trip. Those psychedelic aspects were the best thing about EXistenZ. The wooden, stylized acting made it hard for me to care about the characters or the things they were up to. And the constant shifting ground of what was or was not reality made it even harder. Still, EXistenZ wasn't as bad as
Transcendence, the film I only managed to watch part of, whose dreary story of the emerging singularity couldn't be saved by its all-star cast.
Gretchen (in the maroon sweater) checking out the bowls. There were only a few women there not in their golden years.
The bowls we eventually bought.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180224 feedback
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