In surreptition: A megalomaniac blathering, quart Mason jars, and scary dominant cooks in trucks in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

My laptop has been down for a week or so, a hardware issue needing a serious look that I’m scraping together dollars for, so I am on my mother’s.

This is an uncomfortable situation. My mother barely uses her computer, just to pay bills for half an hour every month and for email for another fifteen minutes once a month. (She still does not really know how to copy and paste or how to change tabs, and certainly online forms seem to love to argue with her.) She is letting me use her laptop - but she is horrified by how I spend hours on the computer and how I do everything on it, and fears that my heavy use will break her laptop too the way she believes it broke mine. Plus she is rather territorial. And an extremely forthright person. Her letting me use her laptop is not stress-free. As I type these words, I am not at all sure that writing in Prosebox is something she would call a legitimate use.

(I feel sure there is an internet cartoon that would capture this situation perfectly.)

I am not in a position to say, through gritted teeth, that if I were to let someone else use my laptop my attitude would be somewhat more open-ended. (While my reality-picture does not have firm enough walls to prevent some guilt from getting through.) So, while the wretch you can clearly see in the cartoon has a breathing space at 5 a.m., some quick updates:

When my laptop was running I was reading some unpleasant stuff, that I was going to write an entry about, and about the reading of such stuff in general, etc.
This included a recent U.S. Department of Justice report on police practices in the city of Baltimore . . . and the ramblings of Adolf Hitler, in a recently discovered collection which has been published under the title Hitler’s Table Talk. Fancying himself a Great Man whose discourses at the dinner table were on the historical level of Napoleon’s at minimum, Hitler had stenographers sit in on all of his suppers while he delivered genial far-reaching monologues to his guests. (The recorder would sometimes include an additional line toward the end like, turning jokingly to Admiral Kranke . . . His guests’ dutiful “Ha! Ha! Ha!”s were not transcribed.) It includes a notable lie for the record, that I realized when I reached it that I had read about sometime before - when Hitler says, with his recorder scribbling, that the silly false rumors about his extermination of the Jews were useful for intimidation purposes, and that really the Jews were merely being settled in “the marshy parts of Russia” - while speaking to his dinner guest Heinrich Himmler, the architect and top boss of the program.

Three nights ago the most marvelously silly thing happened in political punditry, that greatly lifted my heart, and I was lucky enough to actually see it without warning.
The DVR had recorded an episode of the show “All In,” and I watched it during supper a couple of hours after it aired, and, in it, an interviewee, the founder of Latinos for Trump, said something that made me for a moment think that I had nodded off and started to dream:

“My culture is a very dominant culture, and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.”

He followed up with, “I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. The Spanish never conquered Mexico.” Which was just as fascinating — suggesting that this poor guy found something imperishably crawling-chaos about his own people and culture (I found a YouTube rant of his where he said, “I’ll be honest, I have six kids”), or maybe that we face not just Trump’s criminal invaders on our southern border but Tlaloc, in which case I’m not sure what wall could be high enough — but like everyone else I was totally riveted by what he’d said first.

Unlimited taco trucks if Trump loses?

. . . YOU PROMISE???

And people across the internet had had the same reaction I did. It was delicious.
And there was a capper for me, because, when I posted about this on my Facebook, a Trump supporter left this comment:

“Better than a falafel truck on every corner, the way things are going . . .”

?!?!?!?!?

I love falafel. I’m chortling in the dark again now. What is it with this horrifying specter of the food trucks?? YOU CAN’T THREATEN ME, MAN.

Son, we have Korean fusion trucks here in town. I don’t scare easy.

So, the quasi-patriotic experiment is concluded. I have nine quart Mason jars of cannabis curing in the dim guest room. Despite my greedy predictions of poundage, it all comes to less than one pound, 8.5 ounces in total. So, only about 240 grams of high-grade heathen devil weed.

What I’m going to do is to learn how to cook with it. It seems the best way to drag out the obsession as winter closes in. I’ll make canna-butter, and do this other thing where I put the pot in a special bag with fine holes in it and put that in a bucket with some dry ice and crash the bucket around and then shake the bag and let the cold-brittled trichomes sift out through the holes, instant hashish. But then what? You can use it in anything and everything.

I think I’m going to do the unimaginative thing and start with brownies — for the titration convenience. Because I can say, “Have one square. Do not have another one all day.” Because I do not really want to put my eager neighbor Margie into a harmless but probably non-recreational coma.
(My friend Christy speaks very well of a brand of pumpkin-flavored pancake mix that was used at a party she attended, and it sounds scrumptious, but the problem with pancakes is that, well, you stack them, to your preferred height, and then you maybe have seconds, because you’re enjoying your meal of wonderful pancakes. Christy says that her experience with the pancakes was the most stoned she’s ever been. I can well imagine.)

Okay, it’s light outside; Mom will soon be stirring. Time for an end to outlawry.

Last updated September 04, 2016