BEFORE I MOVED HERE

Before I moved here, was I some feral alley cat, bloated by self-indulgence, driven by my monstrous ego and my legendary appetites? Was my self-immolation checked only by my virtuoso propensity for sloth? Was I hell-bent on cashing in my chips in a textbook tragic ending, determined to wrap myself around a highwayside palm tree in a high-speed Hollywood collision? Or was I headed for mumbling disengagement? Mad reclusive obesity; bearded, unclean, paranoid; drooling slightly, sunglasses on, shades drawn and the phone ringing endlessly in my white-shag-rug living room? Where was I going with all of that?

Where I’m going right now is Montreal. For the weekend. Ha.

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CHROME

It’s one of those words the quickly loses all of its ballast if you say it a few times out loud or even think about it too much. Go on, say it; chrome. Chrome. Chrome chrome chrome chrome chrome.

Yipes!

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THE AIR CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE?

Maybe I’m getting too old, but I’m coming at last to appreciate quiet. And there’s a special light blue brand of cool corporate quiet that we get around here on these hot days that I would buy in bottles if I could. It’s the quiet of our deserted lobby, where the receptionist was long ago replaced by a sign and a courtesy telephone. The white noise hiss of the air conditioning gently sways the big professionally fed and watered tropical plants and the bright white light pours in from the noisy broiling world outside but somehow never touches the stillness of the room. You can knock the soullessness, the greedy depravity, the sheer blind stupidity of the business world – hell, I always do – but there’s something matchlessly magical about these sanitized spaces of sensory interlude, these mystic unused pockets of corporate cool that feel just like being under water. People who came up in the corporate world can’t see them. They don’t get it. But I do.

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EXPERIMENTAL

1) Thanks to all readers who wrote in with this. So the ability to smell the asparagus in urine is genetic. We at Mango Pudding Blues suggest you investigate this further with some very close friends at an experimental dinner party.

2) Gamelan is killing us. It was only the second rehearsal and we’re about to get kicked out of the band. Our dreams of future Gamelan fame are fading fast.

3) We are continuing to tinker with the machine that we invented to gather and redirect the mysterious forces of life. According to current readings, we’re hurtling toward self-actualization. But it’s an issue of input analysis. We fear it’s equally possible that this is just an anomaly; that we’re merely cresting a wave that can’t last. The contraption is rattling and we’re not sure why.

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SCANTILY CLAD WOMEN RUNNING AROUND

We don’t want to come out against scantily clad women running around. We like scantily clad women running around. Hell, our middle name is scantily clad women running around. Mango Scantily Clad Women Running Around Pudding Blues. Nevertheless, we got to chatting with the checkout girl at the supermarket the other day about Britney Spears, as she was on the cover of a tabloid for an alleged drunken blowout. Britney was, not the checkout girl.

“I think she’s a bad influence on young girls,” said the cashier. “They like her but they don’t understand the flaunting of sex.”

We nodded at the time, but later thought, aw, fuck; that’s what they said about Madonna back in our day, and she never hurt anybody.

But Britney actually is part of the generation of young girls who got their notions about public comportment from Madonna. And so is it just an escalating cycle of wanton exhibitionism? What’s left for the girls coming up under Britney? I guess it’ll be, as Tom Waits once joked, girls without skin.

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MEAT STINKS

1) For a time in the 1970s, the late afternoon talk/variety show was as popular and culturally important as the late-night talk/variety show is nowadays. Mind you, this was before media saturation hit critical mass, so the fuss was not as big as it is right now over, say, Letterman. No, this was a quaint, harmless kind of popularity and cultural importance.

The rival kings of late afternoon talk/variety were Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin. Douglas was a schmaltzy failed singer who would still whip out the microphone to croon a number now and then, and Griffin was, even then, gossipy and matronly and silver-haired and mildly goofy and sharp as a tack under the fuzzy persona. Both shows hosted a parade of seventies superstars. Britt Eckland. Charro. Zsa Zsa Gabor. Pia Zadora. Señor Wences. Tony Orlando and Dawn. David Niven. Dolly Parton. Buddy Hackett.

2) Frequently joining the superstar parade on Merv’s show was curious seventies couple Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw. Both were biological scientists who had dedicated their lives to one another and to experimenting on themselves with drugs and foods and strict scientific method in a freakish attempt to push the limits of human longevity. Pearson was tall, rail-thin, motormouthed and given to elaborate silver-and-jade New Mexico jewelry and cowboy hats. Shaw was demure, hippiesque and mysterious. Their fat, best-selling pop science tome, Life Extension, a Practical Scientific Approach, included their full self-administered regimen of drugs, vitamins and additives and was a bellweather advocate of the large-dose anti-oxidant vitamin program that would later become the de facto standard doctors’ recommendation. When the limelight dimmed, Pearson and Shaw moved to a secret Nevada desert hideaway to escape the prying intrusions of the desperate who came to believe that the couple knew how to cure cancer.

3) Pearson and Shaw were advocates of a drug, called Hydergine, which was invented by Swiss chemist Alfred Hoffman, who also invented LSD and famously dosed himself with it before riding his bicycle home on the very first acid trip.

4) At a medical conference in the late 1960s, Pearson and Shaw were talking about the potential benefits of Hydergine with Hoffman and a young hippie doctor named Andy Weil, who was then navigating a weird and lonesome path between psychedelic drugs, Eastern Medicine and his top-notch American medical training.

5) Weil would later go on to fame as an author and, uh, wellness advocate with a very popular website called Ask Dr. Weil. An episode of 60 minutes presented Weil as a dubious new age mountebank, but we here at Mango Pudding Blues have always respected Dr. Weil for both his impeccable weirdo sixties and seventies psychedelic street cred, and his tendency to debunk the truly dubious new age claims behind such snake-oil panaceas as spirulina.

6) And so when we were deciding whether or not to start eating meat, we popped by the ol’ Ask Dr. Weil website to see if the good doctor might tell us a thing or two about how to re-enter the world o’ meat. We were surprised to find that he himself has recently started eating meat after 17 years of vegetarianism, citing what he called “vegetarian burnout”.

6a: an aside) We read the bit about vegetarian burnout at the same time we were contemplating lesbian bed death. We had just seen a cover story about bed death on a gay magazine on the racks at our local magazine shop. Bed death being the cessation of sexual passion in a lesbian relationship. We had been wondering why only lesbians get a specially named condition called bed death, when it’s obviously not limited to lesbians. It is, in fact, a long-standing topic of rueful jest among married older men that one no longer gets laid once one is married, or at least not with any frequency, passion or conviction. As for gay male couples, we’re not so sure. But ‘bed death’ is catchy little phrase. As is ‘vegetarian burnout’.

7) We were never squeamish vegetarians. Meat did not tend to gross us out too horribly much, although we weren’t fond of it touching anything we were about to eat. But we didn’t cower excessively in the presence of meat being eaten, and we were a little proud of ourselves that our first meat dish, a chicken stir-fry, did not make us vomit or have any other negative gasteroenterological consequences.

8) And so we proudly, toughly, confidently marched into the supposedly tony Glebe Meat Market yesterday and were, for the first time in 15 years, in close quarters with row upon row of pink and red and brown and grey raw meat products with their pink raw meat butcher odor and their tight shiny wet stretched surfaces, and we were confronted with posters and placards and handbills with pictures of meaty goods being meatily eaten. Sandwiches piled high with pink pork and wraps bursting with shreds of rare flesh and tacos piled with wormy ropes of ground beefy beef. And we were not psychologically prepared and we are embarrassed to say that we were a bit overcome and had to flee, hyperventilating, crying, into the street.

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SCIENCE HANDCREAM

I once, briefly, worked for a company that manufactured hardcore scientific supplies for scientists. You know, beakers, test tubes, chemicals, bunsen burners; that kind of thing. Everything this company made was ultra-mega high-end science-grade. Scientists are very fussy. For some reason, among the thousands of products, there was a science handcream. I am not making this up. I don’t know why. Perhaps scientists’ hands take a beating from being dipped in chemical reagents or something. Anyway, in the washroom at the science factory was a tube of this science handcream for employee use, and it would leave one’s hands so soft and silky that it was almost alarming. I’m talking a full degree of magnitude greater of softness and silkiness over, say, your Lubriderm-type product. Remarkable. And only scientists have it.

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ASPARAGUS

Here at Mango Pudding Blues, we have met only one person more bull-headed, haughty, argumentative and belligerent than we ourselves tend to be, and that’s the Killer. So you can just imagine the fireworks that fly around here sometimes. Of late, our occasional scraps have evolved, or perhaps deteriorated, to their finest, purest form. We actually square off over a topic and say, “Yes it is!” “No it’s not!” “Is too!” “Is not!” and so on. The Killer is also not above the old Bugs Bunny trick of switching her argument at the crucial point to get us to switch ours. Yes.

Take asparagus, for instance. We say it is a well-known phenomenon that eating asparagus makes your pee smell funny. We test this extensively every spring by eating as much asparagus as we can. Lately we toss them in olive oil and freshly ground pepper and then blast broil ’em at top temperature for five minutes five inches from the burners. Whew! Killer, who is making asparagus pesto this evening, refuses to believe, or at least to admit, that asparagus makes one’s pee smell funny.

“Does not!”

Does too.

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