Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   lawnmower versus Chinese lunch break
Thursday, August 8 2019
In the early afternoon, I walked to the Golden Wok for my weekly indulgence of a lunch that had not been frozen pupusas and sauerkraut. Not too long ago, the dish I always get there (mixed vegetables in garlic sauce with white rice) had cost less than $7, but in the past couple months it's been $10. I went to eat it under that norway maple where I like to eat my food when it's takeaway. The ants were there waiting for me. They're not too aggressive, and I always leave them something. My dish (particularly, for some reason, the pieces of broccoli) was so hot that I couldn't eat it at my usual pace. And then some idiot on a ride'em lawnmower showed up to mow the grass around the trees (which might belong to the adjacent Key Bank). At this point it was inconvenient to get up and move, because my dish was open, my hands were both greasy and sticky, and my phone was precariously balanced on my knee, where I could poke at it with my knuckle (thereby keeping it mostly grease-and-stickiness free). So I ate what I could while the guy on the lawnmower kept zipping back and forth, never giving me eye contact. He had a job to do, and no homeless guy was going to keep him from doing it. It crossed my mind that it would be cathartic to attack him (still an option in places without concealed-carry), but it didn't take much imagination to picture what headlines would read.
I should mention that my mixed vegetables in garlic sauce was not up to the usual standards. For some reason there was an excessive amount of fluid among the tofu and vegetables, making it into a kind of soup. But it wasn't the kind of soup I would ever order; the broth was a superheated magma of oil, sugar, salt, and water. I ended up dumping it out (with some rice) at the base of my picnic maple so the ants could have it.
That experience put me a bit off my game. Then I walked past a house (41.9940937N, 73.8745069W) that was proudly flying a Donald Trump 2020 flag from its actual flagpole. This was the same household that had supported the doomed gubernatorial candidacy of Marc Molinaro. My dark mood lifted some blocks closer to work, when I saw a friendly (though shy) off-leash dog hanging out in the parking area of the house with the shrine to Heather Heyer, the woman killed two years ago by a racist car-wielding protester on Charlottesville's Downtown Mall. And then, in the lot next door, I saw a black cat that briefly considered coming out to the edge of the road to say hello. She looked like the late, great Janet, and that was the name I used to address her. Friendly animals are mood stabilizers.


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