Chili Con Carne

Ben's got a new passion. A project. He's always in the market for a project that he can really get into and play the odds. He's very good at it. He has a new project practically every time I see him, and they all end up tanked from his getting bored with them and ignoring the attention they need to subsist. I guess that's what we have the most in common about.

I remember during the years of my teen age angst asking my father why people didn't just live on their own land and be satisfied with what it sot before? "Taxes.", he told me. You gotta pay your taxes with cash. Subsistence farming is just hard work with no rewards other than merely surviving. No government barters for taxes. Either you pay them in the coin of the realm the current Caesar dictates or they come and take what you have, and you'll be lucky they don't kill you for their troubles, and your family to boot. Life's a bitch, and then you die.

So, that was it. God had used my father as an oracle in order to tell me the God's own truth. You'd think I'd give it up and concede to the way things are, but I didn't, and still haven't. I didn't ask to be born. Not that I'm consciously aware of. Who I am was before this wasn't asked it's opinion. It was put upon me by the sky gods. The Debil not withstanding.

If I weren't asked to come here, and I was either sent here or sent enced to be here, then as far as I'm concerned, the world definitely owes me a living. Even murderers and rapists get fed enough to keep them alive when they're put in a cage, even if it's just long enough to hang 'em. "Hang 'em from the highest treeeeeee... Oh, woman would you weeeep fo' me?" (Roger Miller) I've thought that way since I was a child just old enough to comprehend the ways of the world. A week or so ago I turned seventy years old, and the world has thus far recognized it's debt and fed me and kept me (for the most part) out of the weather when it shows it's displeasure.

It's a little ridiculous for me to write this, but when I look back at the things I've done to learn how to live, I automatically reflect on what I've learned about how to die. Today, I'm think it is about chants and hymns and mantras and death wishes. I can dismiss the fundamentalist ways the moderate Southern Baptist Church I attended as a child, but it's not so easy for me to trivialize the hymns I learned in my youth. When I take a hymnal and find those familiar hymns we sang ritually every Sunday, the lyrics can be a completely different missive than how the local church interpreted them to be like.

The series of extemporaneous mutterings and shoutings of the traveling evangelists, itinerate preachers, and long-faced ministers that flowed through the local churches I attended (usually holding my older sisters and/or mother's hand) was truly amazing. More so now, in my memores, than it's true facticity can reveal. '-)

I can't tell the difference between now and then so much anymore anyway. Presently I'm questioning if I ever could know one thing from the other in real time all that coherently. Ever. At least to my own satisfaction. Most of that (that wot flutters down to my me in syncopated tappings and symbolic tapestries) are interspersed with the dream time along with all the other hypnagogic colors and potentials at the end of the rainbow.

Maybe life imitated art. Maybe I did get something from those Jackson Pollock painting I never could fathom in real time. Then, when I stood myself before them and let my eyes roam whimsically as they would, one following the other in complete and utter devotion, I didn't get it. I walked away disappointed. In retrospect, however, when I'm lost in thought, and wandering the uncluttered halls of some daft miasmic vision, I recognized in some haphazardous immediacy that Pollock painted places I could visit and recognize in my own mind. He was a sort of landscape painter of interior potentialities, all spattered around, waiting for the ti-me to co-me when the chance was gone.

There was no "thee" in the museum painting itself. I couldn't me-and-thee with the painting proper. Without me-and-thee-ing to give my visit meaning I was forced to walk away from those graven images. They weren't the thing-in-itself. Like "my country 'tis of thee" is. "'tis of thee"? What the hell is that? "... 'tis of thee." "...'tis of thee"... sweet land of liberty... of "thee" I sing. I think maybe this "thee" isn't a somethingness that can be lifted upon a pedestal for to be worshiped or sung to in your usual way.

All Fall Down ~ Herlihy

I've never taken 'thee' out for a walk before. Yes, I know I've promised.. and broken that promise... and promised and broken it again. But, this time, baby girl, I'm telling you the God's own truth... I hope my die... I am is. I wrote a poem once and entitled it Who Will Be My Woman Tonight hoping the song would do my work for me, and the girls would just come right up and ask me to make love to them and give them a baby before any of the other girls did it first. It rarely worked, but when it did I felt like a blooming genius for conceiving it.

There is a pattern to my madness. There is something very reliable about that simple fact. There is a hole in the bottom of the sea. There a whole on the bottom of the sea. There's a hole... there is a whole... there's a hole in the bottom of the sea. It's a simile to the taste I like in Campbell's Tomato Juice. The wonderful thing about Campbell's Tomato Juice is that it always tastes predictably the same. That's exactly what I want from a condiment, because I in deed taste it way before i ever put the pan on the stove.

I don't like the tomato paste stuff used with "original Italian cooking". The idea of eating tomatoes that have been stewing on the stove for hours and hours make me wanna puke. That's what made people think tomatoes are poisonous. Anything that eats the lining of your intestinal tract away should be considered poisonous. I prefer the sweet taste of fresh tomato juice. Puree-ing fresh tomatoes and cooking with them right off the vine omits the bitter taste life must be like in old Italy. Tradition is a great burden from which one can only run... run for your life!

I make spaghetti and chili the same way. To me, spaghetti is just boiled pasta with chili on it. When I'm fat, like I am now, I leave off the pasta and call the spaghetti sauce, chili. What's simple is easy. I had to stop writing to go downstairs to check on the chili I'm making now. I'm spoiled for my own chili. I make it with plain reconstituted Campbell's Tomato Juice because there ain't no such thing as ripe tomatoes for sale anymore. Just fiberous red vegetation designed for shelf life. Campbell's a sweet tasting reconstituted tomato juice that probably has lots of sugar in it, but I'm beyond the point of caring. I have an incurable disease, and I'm gonna enjoy what I can before it gets to where I can't feed myself. When that happens, and it's only a matter of ti-me, I'll try to come around and act grateful. Either that or die in a strait jacket for being a bother.

I think one of the more basic reasons I have lived to be seventy years old is because I prefer to eat out, and especially, to choose from a menu, and be waited on like I was the Sheik Of Araby, and thereby have avoided for a very long time having to eat food I've cooked for myself. The other reason I feel like has helped me to stay alive is to have thought about killing myself practically every day since the turn of puberty.

My first wife was a great cook. In fact, she was a professional dietician who supervised the diets of hundreds of hospital patients on a daily basis. It's no wonder she wasn't all that charmed by the idea of cooking for me when she got home. I had a trophy wife who I couldn't afford. In fact, it happened twice. Why am I always the last to know?