Ka-Ching!

Money is convenient because if you get a job painting a restaurant you don’t have to carry home like 70 chicken fried steaks and several enormous tubs of potato salad. Money is weird because if you’re a musician a big chunk of your pay comes from encouraging people to drink themselves to death. Money is dangerous because it lets you enjoy the labor of people half a world away without looking them in the eye. I’m more and more starting to think that money is powdered violence – dried out and ground up and sanitized so the smell isn’t so bad.

These pearls ain't gonna clutch themselves.

The disasters don’t even have the decency to wait for each other to finish anymore. All the wrong people keep dying. And apparently the best way out of this hole is to keep digging. We talk about how terrible 2020 is but look, was racism less systemic in 2019? Climate change less threatening? The wealth gap less unbalanced and health care less broken? All of a sudden this year are mean people meaner, poor people poorer, crazy people crazier? No. But we’re noticing. So maybe this isn’t the best year ever, but you have to admit it’s got our attention.

Family in the Wind

Oh for crap’s sake. There’s another hurricane coming. The good news is we may finally get a chance to eat those tinned Vienna sausages we laid in for the last storm. Those little dudes are simultaneously disgusting and oddly appealing, like Abba or Circus Peanuts. It would be amusing to take a few cans to Austria and see how actual Viennese people react to them. Meanwhile, the hurricane. There’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald story where two tornados in rapid succession devastate a small town. And one character says, "This is worse than a calamity. It's getting to be a nuisance."

Oh. And a mint.

I don’t want to brag (I want to brag) but (because) I think I may have timed this exactly right. I showed up for the first round of aperitifs and as trays of piping hot canapes were emerging from the kitchen. I got a good seat. The soup was delicious, the salad superb. There was fish and fowl and meat. Two kinds of potato, three kinds of bread, then some cheese and fruit. Now I think I might have time for a nice dessert, a coffee, maybe even a cigar before excusing myself just as the check hits the table.