ThoughtQuarks

Red ripe garden tomatoes. Yes, we know they’re fruit. In fact, they’re ovaries. Yes, fruit are the ovaries in the plant world, sorry to break it to you.

Plucking each tomato’s genetic lineage right off the vine, yesterday, hoping to end it in a lasagna, I filled my basket.  (Sure, I could harvest the pesky little seeds and start over next year, but I hate tomatoes. I planted them for a friend coming to visit from Switzerland this summer and now I have hoards of them.)

When I was little, just the smell of a fresh tomato triggered my gag reflex. I could pick chunks out of salad, but if a slimy seed stowed away under a lettuce leaf and managed to breach my mouth, I had the sensation and flavor of a corpulent garbage truck trailing that stinky trashy piss-water down a dusty alley that joined with mouldering leaf run-off to trickle a confluence of inexplicable expletives into my mouth.

In other words, probably allergic, but only to the raw acid. How could nature be so mean, masking something so foul-tasting in such a festive color.

Tomatoes and deadly nightshade are cousins, and that says it all: Lurking among their shared genes from the family Solanaceae is the gene for foul and deadly taste.

Cooked is just peachy. I love pasta, pizza, bouillabaisse all the way down to the humble tomato soup, anything red! red! red! No chunks, tho, please.

How was I ever to process these little beasts? My first attempt, I threw them in boiling water, then mooshed them hotly through a sieve, grinding their shiny backs with a marble pestle, tossing the seedy detritus. Soup tasted like battery acid.

For the second attempt, I decided to drain all the acidic juice. In fact, I could save and make fresh tomato juice, if I wanted to pull a Hamlet on the last scene. (“No, no, the drink, the drink,–O my dear Hamlet,–The drink, the drink! I am poison’d.” -Queen Gertrude, taking the first quaff)

This time, I turned off the boiling water, let the monsters bob for a couple minutes, then plunged them into an ice bath (to preserve my flesh this time), and then coolly skinned them alive, noting the lurid magenta flesh beneath the otherwise tomato-red skin. Initially, I had lopped the tomatoes in half and scooped the seed from all the tiny labial cavities, reserving the flesh for the food processor blade. What a waste of time!

Inspecting where I never dared peered before, though, I could plainly see that the seeds nested in oblong mucous pods just inside the periphery of my particular tomato variety, especially if I peeled down the outside layer. All I had to do was grip the skinned red ovary in two hands and squish! The subcutaneous seedy mucous came squirting violently out the bottom and top, nearly putting out my eye (“out vile jelly, where is thy luster now” –Lear) but leaving only a few loiterers to scrape from within.

I rototilled the meaty flesh, simmered the puree, then thew in sauteed shallots, garlic, ground turkey and beef, jalapeno, shredded eggplant, carrot, zucchini, and basil; layered it up with spinach, real, expensive mozarella, aged cheddar, jack, and freshly grated parmesan, sea salt, peppercorns, and a bit of thyme and oregano hopefully not harboring minibugs from my organic garden. And the teeniest smidge of cinnamon, a trick I learned from my daughters’ Top Chef summer camp, ostensibly disgusting, but does indeed add just a bit of complexity.

My husband and I were on a lycopene high. Had to have a couple glasses of a big red to bring us back down.

I could dig the seeds out of the compost, plant them, and squeeze more ovaries next year. But tomatoes, I am sure, are vicious viners, whether I retrieve them from the compost bucket or no. As soon as we mulch our fruit trees with our cooked compost, we will probably go out and find some volunteer Jill in the Tomato stock climbing our peaches, strangling them to get back at me.

Flatiron Building, NYC.
Spiderman’s day job at the Daily Bugle

I used to wonder why I was only one of five protesters during the first Gulf War.

There was so little national dialogue. Father George did gather an international consensus, and everyone agreed Saddam was creepy, his state stability built on crushed knees and chemicals, so, OK, fine.

He annexed Kuwait (like we annexed Texas) so we galloped right awn in. Some of us were concerned about the oily proceedings.

The second Gulf+ war, a few more of us showed up to “dialog” with signs about Junior George going after the people who went after his daddy. “Surf not War” exclaimed some flip-flopped dudes’ boards, along with the No Blood for Oil ones.

Still, our country was relatively silent, and has been, while trillions of money trickle away into grave destruction.

Are we relatively quiet because TV doesn’t show bloody soldiers?

Are we quiet because our bank accounts don’t take a direct debit hit in a pay-as-you-go fashion for these wars? Lulling us into thinking we, personally, are not actually paying for them?

That’s a hell of a smoke screen, krazy king george!

Or are we quiet because we’ve learned to be patient and submissive. We have a big monster coming, boom boom boom–some impossibly large implacable and complicated problem that we KNOW we can’t solve, but by the end of the movie, one (or a few more)

will come dashing in to save us.

Hollywood Americans. We are so well trained to wait for someone to fix everything. Like quiet anticipation. Knowing, trusting, it will be over soon, all will be well, wrongs righted, life askew tilted and tipped back to normal.

This movie has gone on too long. People have left quietly down the side exits, gone back to work, home, mildly confused they haven’t gotten their just-deserved denoument, but they’re not asking for it very loudly. They just put the confusion somewhere else, in a drawer somewhere, in the garage, out in the garden shed, to be attended to at some later date, perhaps.

A whole generation of kids, raised on transformers, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, the Green Hornet, The Federation, are having to rise to the occasion. Become the mythical superhero in Jesus-fashion, mere mortals taking on the human world and its ills. Asking their father, little king daddy G, “dude, what’s up?” (Translation: Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?), not realizing that he’s really not there.

But they are. And their whole adventure is not ending according to script, for us or them.

I turned you on.

Before we got started, there was just the blank screen, the inner sanctum. Everyone else sees only the outside shell, a flashing Toshiba logo stamped in fine metal. The flip side—after I unlatch and unfold you at the joints—is what only I will see, for hours on end.

I will dive in, deep into the inside while remaining, I must admit, in the shallows this side of the flat screen.

The flood of my thoughts will scandalize future grandchildren. They will have to clean up after me, like throwing out the old pill bottles an old person saves for some indistinct future use, memories I’ve held onto. Like cleaning the moldy muddy damage left after a global-warming-scale hurricane, this smear of life. Strip the hard drive, they will say.

Revelare! I open and reveal you.

A face stares back at me, from a darkly reflective glossy screen. Startled at first, we stare at one another, me and my indentured bank account projecting back to me as me. I set my forefingers above f and j and wait for Windows. What a blank, uncomposed expression, caught unawares in the Toshiba mirror. I might have composed myself, had I anticipated my face.

Toshiba, why did you have to install a mirror for a dead screen? Should I smoke while writing? Is your mirrorlike screen for the sophists who check their appearance in every passing window—why do you give us our face before you undulate the calming blues of Microsoft?

Right before I pen, you know, just a little literary story (that someone will try trace to experiences in my own life, as if it’s always about me and probably is, that some journal will accept in return for a free year’s subscription)—why must I first ponder this face, pale white flower, like the stars that shine against the drowning waters, already curling, browning around the edges, now fading, as I fall, fall, into the beckoning blues of Windows.

Mizu no kokoru. Mind like water. If I imagine my mind like the surface of clear, undisturbed water, I can reverse narcissism, according to the East, mind expanding out and encompassing everything, including nothingness. A clear, calm surface reflecting everything around it perfectly. No turmoil, peacefulness.

I should leave it at load and not go on Word, ripple what is quiet, ripple up a hurricane.

Mizu no kokoro. Mind like water. You win, Toshiba, against Western mythology. You give us what we want so we can drown, with the speed of centrino technology, in our own solipsistic waters. Starting out with our blank face.

The blues have arrived. My middle finger points, just a little ways, inevitably, up and a bit west—to i.

I’ve finally turned the corner, after two weeks of either viral meningitis (can’t test for that, tho the spinal tap showed inflammation) or a bad reaction to not resting after oral surgery.

Just a simple tooth extraction and bone graft. My inner world can be so chaotic that I ground myself by grinding my teeth in my sleep. A firmly clenched jaw apparently keeps me tethered under the troposphere but also can fracture a molar clear down to the mantle.

• Tip 1: A Doctor’s Nightguard ($30 at retail pharmacies) is cheaper than extraction and implant ($3500).
• Tip 2: An implant costs as much as a family cruise to the Mayan Riviera.
• Tip 3: The Mayan Riveria is a hotter, trendier destination than an oral surgeon’s chair with tools.
• Tip 4: If you are a grinder and haven’t broken a molar yet, buy the mouthguard and treat yourself to a cruise, complete with gourmet lobster dinners and complementary champagne. You deserve it. The only headache you’ll get is a hangover, which actually responds to pain killers and leaves you alone a lot faster.

My dentist says grinders make him very rich.

On the third day waking and barely able to speak, move my head, blink without pain, I went to the ER and enjoyed cruising Curious-George style down corridors for my CT-scan. I wanted to cry out “wheee” and wreak havoc, but I wasn’t up to it.

Could you just decapitate me to relieve the pressure? I asked Mark, the ER doc, who was slightly nervous with Charlie lingering nearby (voted San Diego’s best doc for three years, with the bennie that I get to call all medical personnel by their first names). Mark said that’d bring up other issues.

Trepanation? I countered. No, Mark said, that has side effects, too.

Well, it worked for ancient Mesoamericans. Or maybe not. In the Museum of Man I saw lots of ancient skulls with triangles and squares carved out with the surgical equivalent of Stone Age hand axes; whoever goes through that kind of pressure relief without anesthesia (OK, maybe there was some loco herb involved) must have had a whopper of a headache. Either way, they were gonna die.

I’ve been able to cut back on pain killers these past two days; the splitting disabling headache has turned into vague twinges and mush. I am embarrassingly not sharp. (I can hear my brothers jumping on that one.)

But—yay—I went outside into the garden on Thursday, my first foray out of bed. I propped some weighty steroidal tomato vines, then shuffled right back to that other bed. After two weeks of forced bed rest I have NO core strength left! Wah! It hurts my back to stand or move about for more than 10 or 15 minutes.

I cooked an omelet yesterday and discovered my strength/endurance time can be measured in omelet units. That’s all I’m good for. Back to horizontal!

Poor poor Charlie still has to do ALL the cleanup. Yin-yang: always a silver lining (not to be confused with mercury filling; isn’t it comforting that “mercurial,” after the Roman god Mercury, refers to the erratic, volatile, unstable? My grinding probably trips the Richter).

No silver lining for Chas, working 10- to 12-hour days outside the home. He’ll ask for the next headache.

Yoga? Oh my god. I can only make the last pose. Corpse pose.

I’ll try to show my face at this Saturday’s class, tho I’m not sure my brain can take any pressure. Usually I’m happiest upside-down.

I figure doing lots of omelet-unit reps in household/gardening tasks this week should bring some strength and Charlie back. Can’t wait to go outside and hang.