Wicked and Wild

Monday.  Super Blue Sturgeon Moon.  You've all read about it by now.  They steal all my interests and put them in the bigs.  Whatever.  The moon and I have our own special relationship.  I enjoyed it more, though, when I could say to people, "Tonight is the full moon," and their eyes would pop like I had some special secret knowledge.  The Shaman, you know.  How did this moon stuff get to be so popular?  

They just be rippin' me off, man.  

I'll have to move on to some more esoteric thing.  

I made my $100 seafood stew yesterday.  I'm not kidding.  The price of seafood is through the roof.  A pound and a half of halibut cost $40.  Then scallops and shrimp.  I chopped carrots, celery, and a russet potato, a small yellow onion,  a leek, and six cloves of garlic, and sautéed them in olive oil with salt and pepper.  Then I added chicken stock, wine, crushed and stewed tomatoes, and let them stew for half an hour.  Now since I was taking this all over to my mother's, the trick was to put the seafood in at just the right time.  I cut the fish and put it and the scallops and shrimp into a big bowl and seasoned them with Old Bay.  Yea, I know, but it works.  Then, just before I turned off the fire under the big Dutch oven, I dropped it in the pot.  I wrapped the heavy pot in a blanket and put it into the car.  When I got to my mother's house, I put the pot on the stove and just let it get to a boil again, then cut the heat and took the Dutch oven off the stove.  

With crusty bread and two bottles of wine.  There were three of us.  If I calculated right, we each ate fifteen to twenty dollars worth of soup.  Plus wine.  And we each ended up with a container of stew for lunch.  

Everyone was feeling healthy and a little tipsy.  

Cake and ice cream.  Oops.  

I slept well last night. . . but oh, the dreams.  Now here is a weird observation--I never see myself in dreams just as I never see myself in life.  I'm in the dream, of course, but I must be much better looking there than I am here because my love life there is much more interesting.  Sort of.  

It's complicated.  

And I wonder, if you are reading this blog, have you begun remembering your dreams, too?  

Last night, my mother was telling us of her disturbing dreams.  Not interesting, of course, to anyone but her.  I didn't say so, though.  I suffered through the telling.  

If you are having vivid dreams, that's all you need to say.  Don't narrate unless asked to.  I promise.  Nobody cares about your dreams except Dr. Freud, and he's dead.  

And it is funny because people are interested in the real life stuff you tell, and it is much less crazy or exotic than your dream life.  Another thing to ponder.  

Politics get weird(er) today.  My conservative friends keep sending me TikTok videos and memes.  The one making the right wing rounds right now is of a former Islamic terrorist explaining why he would always vote for democrats.  He says republicans have a strong moral agenda and are to be feared, but he considers democrats stupid.  They concern themselves with gay and trans rights and abortion.  All of Islam, he says, will vote for liberals.  He goes on to point out that Ilhan Omar is for all of that, but of course she would never have an abortion.  She would never cut the life out of her belly.  

My friend's kid is 22 years old, a recent college grad, and he and all his white friends are Woke.  Now it really gets confusing.  They are not liberals.  They are against Jews and for Palestinians.  They don't have any Somali friends but support their culture.  I don't know if they mean the genital mutilations or the Shariah Law or what, but they will be part of the protests at the Democratic Convention tonight.  It could be chaos.  They are excited, of course, the protestors.  It will be big.  It will be wild.  

"So it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for.  Don't tell me I don't give a damn, let's stop this. . . ." 

It's a fitty/fitty shot.  The thing is, there is always that grain of truth in the Big Lie.  There is some recognizable thing that will germinate inside the mind of the willing.  Not one ideological side.  Each and all.  That kernel of truth blossoms into a totalizing nightmare.  

Again, I beg you to read "Winesburg, Ohio."  There are millions of truths, and each person takes one to be his or her--excuse me--"their" truth and it makes them Grotesque.  

But even a malformed apple can be sweet.  

So, yea--Full Super Blue Sturgeon Moon, protests, and a Democratic Convention converge and collide.  Just like Trump said to the Jan. 6 crowd, be there.  It will be wild.