The Eggplant Trap
Feb. 5th, 2009 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSo I’ve spent the past five days doing nothing. Literally. Nothing. It’s kind of like that thing that happens to cats when they’re crossing a road and that ten ton truck comes bearing down on them: they freeze.
Cannery Row is completely dead. We expect this during the week in January, but the new twist is that it’s also dead on weekends. The Little Store’s revenue flow is pitiful indeed. Not that this keeps the Cannery Row Company and all my other creditors from clamoring for their money.
It’s a horrible feeling to owe people money.
I’d pay them if I could.
I'm suffering from a kind of situational ADD, only eased by playing endless games of Scramble on Facebook, and flitting aimlessly back and forth among 24 hour news networks on the tube in hopes that one will reveal a new provision in the bailout package specifically aimed at rescuing America’s invaluable hot sauce industry! I’m happy to have my executive compensation limited to $500,000, if that helps any. Oh – also I reseeded the lawn. And planted many flats of impatiens and primroses. I don’t like impatiens and primroses, but they do well in the shade.
The one thing I want to be doing – because I won’t have any time to do it once B takes off for Robbins Bros in March – is write this goddamn book. Eggplants have become a kind of King Charles Head.
“Why the hell are you writing about eggplants?” B asks. “They’re not peppers.”
“Well, no. But they are members of the deadly nightshade family.”
“They taste like snot.”
“Tofu. They taste like tofu.”
“Tofu tastes like snot.”
I shrug helplessly. “Well, see I’m trying to establish her Sicilian cred and eggplants were about the most Sicilian vegetable I could think of, plus you know I’m throwing in all these recipes because then I can pitch it as a foodie book –“
“Don’t market your manuscripts before they’re hatched,” says B primly. “And for God’s sake, nobody wants to eat eggplant if there are other options.”
Transitions are the hard stuff for me. Possibly this is the negative consequence of keeping a journal all these years – you don’t have to worry about transitions in real life. They just happen.
So we have Our Beautiful Heroine being hired into a job she has absolutely no qualifications for. Why? Because the interviewer thinks she’s Sicilian. (The interviewer has seen The Godfather one too many times.) But all being Sicilian means to Our Beautiful Heroine is having an insane, chain-smoking nani. In the old country this nani would spend a lot of time scuttling up and down cobblestone alleyways on her way to mass. She’d dress entirely in black; she’d have developed her dowager’s hump by the age of twenty. Here in the States though Nani takes Citrical as an osteoporosis hedge, wears whatever garish polyester pants suit was on sale at Walmart’s two weeks ago. She does cook, in fact is instructing Our Beautiful Heroine how to prepare a traditional peasant eggplant marinade, a scene that rambles on for twenty pages but is not what the book is about, and which I cannot seem to stop writing…
This is supposed to segue back into the description of the interviewer’s delusions that being Sicilian means Our Beautiful Heroine is somehow a strategic thinker.
Shaky connection at best, I know, I know.
Honestly? It’s hard to hold on to the overview right now. In more ways than one.
Cannery Row is completely dead. We expect this during the week in January, but the new twist is that it’s also dead on weekends. The Little Store’s revenue flow is pitiful indeed. Not that this keeps the Cannery Row Company and all my other creditors from clamoring for their money.
It’s a horrible feeling to owe people money.
I’d pay them if I could.
I'm suffering from a kind of situational ADD, only eased by playing endless games of Scramble on Facebook, and flitting aimlessly back and forth among 24 hour news networks on the tube in hopes that one will reveal a new provision in the bailout package specifically aimed at rescuing America’s invaluable hot sauce industry! I’m happy to have my executive compensation limited to $500,000, if that helps any. Oh – also I reseeded the lawn. And planted many flats of impatiens and primroses. I don’t like impatiens and primroses, but they do well in the shade.
The one thing I want to be doing – because I won’t have any time to do it once B takes off for Robbins Bros in March – is write this goddamn book. Eggplants have become a kind of King Charles Head.
“Why the hell are you writing about eggplants?” B asks. “They’re not peppers.”
“Well, no. But they are members of the deadly nightshade family.”
“They taste like snot.”
“Tofu. They taste like tofu.”
“Tofu tastes like snot.”
I shrug helplessly. “Well, see I’m trying to establish her Sicilian cred and eggplants were about the most Sicilian vegetable I could think of, plus you know I’m throwing in all these recipes because then I can pitch it as a foodie book –“
“Don’t market your manuscripts before they’re hatched,” says B primly. “And for God’s sake, nobody wants to eat eggplant if there are other options.”
Transitions are the hard stuff for me. Possibly this is the negative consequence of keeping a journal all these years – you don’t have to worry about transitions in real life. They just happen.
So we have Our Beautiful Heroine being hired into a job she has absolutely no qualifications for. Why? Because the interviewer thinks she’s Sicilian. (The interviewer has seen The Godfather one too many times.) But all being Sicilian means to Our Beautiful Heroine is having an insane, chain-smoking nani. In the old country this nani would spend a lot of time scuttling up and down cobblestone alleyways on her way to mass. She’d dress entirely in black; she’d have developed her dowager’s hump by the age of twenty. Here in the States though Nani takes Citrical as an osteoporosis hedge, wears whatever garish polyester pants suit was on sale at Walmart’s two weeks ago. She does cook, in fact is instructing Our Beautiful Heroine how to prepare a traditional peasant eggplant marinade, a scene that rambles on for twenty pages but is not what the book is about, and which I cannot seem to stop writing…
This is supposed to segue back into the description of the interviewer’s delusions that being Sicilian means Our Beautiful Heroine is somehow a strategic thinker.
Shaky connection at best, I know, I know.
Honestly? It’s hard to hold on to the overview right now. In more ways than one.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-05 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-05 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-05 10:23 pm (UTC)So there.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 06:08 pm (UTC)Man, that's such a white people thing.:-P
My first year at Tulane as a grad student somebody screwed up and cancelled my fee waiver, and I started getting tuition bills. Believe me, there's no need for a laxitive with those things, just sit on the crapper and open an envelope that says "you owe us $38,000! Pay up, or we'll turn you into a jelly doughnut!"
My landlady Miss Evann told me, "the trouble with you white people is you're ashamed to owe money. You think that Delorean guy was ashamed to go bankrupt? You think Donald Trump gives a shit if he owes a few mill?
Next time those jerks call you up and say 'when can we expect payment, Mr. Doheny," you tell em they can expect it any time they want, but they'll get it when your ass is good and ready."
I eventually straightened it out, but in the meantime her attitude adjustment really helped.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 07:50 pm (UTC)I'm afraid the Jewish guilt quotient (mother) is huge in me. Combine that with the Catholic shame quotient (father) & I'm cooked. I tell myself all day long I'm not A Horrible Human, just one of millions of footnotes to Depression 2.0. Doesn't help. My self-esteem is in the crapper.
Here's what I don't understand though. All that prosperity was imaginary, right? The bubbles -- real estate, the Internet before that, whatever came before that and so on, and so on -- were a consensual suspension of disbelief. The creation of wealth as a function has long since been wrested from the working class (who actually do create it) and assigned to people who manipulate pieces of paper with no inherent value. Since it is all imaginary, why can't we just go back to believing it's real? Poof! The depression is over...
no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 09:51 pm (UTC)Remember that Monty Python sketch called, I think, "The Hypnosis Arms," about the apartment buildings created by hypnosis. "They're perfectly safe...as long as people believe in them.":-P