Wednesday, April 23, 2003 HORLICKS There’s a product called Horlicks that you can go look at in your grocery store. It’s some kind of ostensibly healthy British hot beverage powder, kind of like Ovaltine, I think, and made perhaps of wheat or barley or something. I’ve never tried it. Comes in jars. Anyway, the name of the stuff somehow got caught on some hook in my brain and whenever I pass it by in the coffee and tea aisle of the grocery store I kind of have to say it out loud even though I find it sort of repulsive. The name. Horlicks. This has been going on since I was a kid. * * * Monday, April 21, 2003 TEXTBOOK Our reading this morning here at Mango Pudding Blues was from a textbook that we recently acquired on printing. Oddly enough, we found it not only excellent but erotically charged. Behind its utilitarian explanations of the basic staff functions of your average printing house, we envisioned the entire true lives of thousands of good-looking men and women who every day, today even, wake up and brush their teeth and do their hair and put on the very finest clothes they’re able to find in the closet and drive in their nice, newish cars to the printing plant where they work, which has a front office area that is busy with administrative people and sales people and managers and accountants who all go swishing by one another and who make jokes and drink coffee, and then an industrial back area with rumbling Heidleberg presses and crates and massive rolls of paper and the glorious smell of ink and the constant traffic of tough guys in blue coveralls driving forklifts and truck drivers lounging around gossiping and maintenance fellows tinkering with wrenches and presswomen (yes! We’ve known presswomen!) with nice hips and foxy pre-press people cracking jokes in cool dark rooms filled with the latest Macintosh computers that are loaded with RAM and a couple of big film outputters and maybe one old light table in the back corner as a reminder of the days when jobs were stripped by hand, and all of these people trying to do a good job of getting all those tiny dots of ink to land in exactly the right spot on all of those millions of miles of paper all over the world for their frustrating clients and their cranky bosses and we love that some of them might flirt with one another, might wink at one another on the night shift, might compliment one another on that blouse or that new haircut, might go for a cocktail after work or go to a movie and hold hands or might kiss in the photocopy room or might go home in a taxi and tumble madly into bed together, just once or for years and years and years. * * *