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The Chili Pepper Cure
Jun. 21st, 2026 08:15 amMy life is very quiet. There's little to report.
The weather is fabulous, sunny, bright, but not rising much above 80°, even in the afternoons when the light stretches longest.
I've been gardening. A few of my Roma tomatoes are actually ripening, and my basil is bolting—extremely odd at this time of year. Yesterday I cardboarded and wood-chipped another path and weeded for a couple of hours. I'm sick of weeding! I don't think I've ever had a garden where the weeds, especially nettles, come in so fast, and I don't like it. I may have to woodchip the entire garden.
###
My knee is almost healed. Almost. But it still twinges and when I walked up the hill behind the house the other day, my knee ached the following morning. The whole thing started out with a pain in the ligaments behind the knee, but seems to have shifted to the patella. I'm hoping that's because the underlying musculoskeletal injury puts more stress on the joint itself, knocking it out of alignment. But I suppose at this point, I must also consider whether the pain is in fact a symptom of osteoarthritis—which would not be a good thing at all. Mainly because there's absolutely no cure for that.
###
In Work in Progress news, I've been working on the Flavia backstory chapter: Flavia meets Boy Wonder Architect at Pratt, falls in love with him, blah, blah, blah. He snares high-power job after graduation, starts taking cocaine to keep up with workload, which means Flavia gets hooked on cocaine, blah, blah, blah. Some kind of criminal incident occurs—possibly a felony DUI—so Neal gets involved as a public defender and gets Flavia off coke by feeding her chili peppers—
Chili peppers is how I broke the very mild heroin habit I developed back when I was modeling. Everybody did heroin then, plus huge amounts of legal methamphetamines prescribed by the Dr. Feelgood who was on the modeling agency's payroll. I noticed I was starting to get sick between smack doses. Not good, thought I, and started nibbling habaneros when the sweats kicked in. The pain of the peppers totally obliterated all lesser feelings of bodily discomfort, plus the endorphins kicked in, a kind of smack-like high! I got myself off heroin in five days and never went near it again—though I do gotta say, it is absolutely the best high in the entire universe.
I have never seen the chili pepper diet touted by anyone as a cold turkey strategy!
But hey! It worked for me, and it's gonna work for Flavia—provided I can actually finish writing this thing.
To this day, I ❤️LUV❤️ chili peppers!
The weather is fabulous, sunny, bright, but not rising much above 80°, even in the afternoons when the light stretches longest.
I've been gardening. A few of my Roma tomatoes are actually ripening, and my basil is bolting—extremely odd at this time of year. Yesterday I cardboarded and wood-chipped another path and weeded for a couple of hours. I'm sick of weeding! I don't think I've ever had a garden where the weeds, especially nettles, come in so fast, and I don't like it. I may have to woodchip the entire garden.
###
My knee is almost healed. Almost. But it still twinges and when I walked up the hill behind the house the other day, my knee ached the following morning. The whole thing started out with a pain in the ligaments behind the knee, but seems to have shifted to the patella. I'm hoping that's because the underlying musculoskeletal injury puts more stress on the joint itself, knocking it out of alignment. But I suppose at this point, I must also consider whether the pain is in fact a symptom of osteoarthritis—which would not be a good thing at all. Mainly because there's absolutely no cure for that.
###
In Work in Progress news, I've been working on the Flavia backstory chapter: Flavia meets Boy Wonder Architect at Pratt, falls in love with him, blah, blah, blah. He snares high-power job after graduation, starts taking cocaine to keep up with workload, which means Flavia gets hooked on cocaine, blah, blah, blah. Some kind of criminal incident occurs—possibly a felony DUI—so Neal gets involved as a public defender and gets Flavia off coke by feeding her chili peppers—
Chili peppers is how I broke the very mild heroin habit I developed back when I was modeling. Everybody did heroin then, plus huge amounts of legal methamphetamines prescribed by the Dr. Feelgood who was on the modeling agency's payroll. I noticed I was starting to get sick between smack doses. Not good, thought I, and started nibbling habaneros when the sweats kicked in. The pain of the peppers totally obliterated all lesser feelings of bodily discomfort, plus the endorphins kicked in, a kind of smack-like high! I got myself off heroin in five days and never went near it again—though I do gotta say, it is absolutely the best high in the entire universe.
I have never seen the chili pepper diet touted by anyone as a cold turkey strategy!
But hey! It worked for me, and it's gonna work for Flavia—provided I can actually finish writing this thing.
To this day, I ❤️LUV❤️ chili peppers!
