Friday, September 4, 2009

Confessions of a Lactobacillus Bulgaricus Eater*

(* or How to Cultivate Yoghurt in Your Spare Time for Fun and Profit)

London, Saturday, Aug. 24, 1974

This is England. At this very instant in that ghost-written script that is our lives our insipid explorer sits at a small neo-plasticine table outside a pub in the same subterranean nation that spawned such postoperative luminaries as Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens, Drake, Churchill, Newton, John, and McCartney.

The spiritual and creative implications of this intellectual climate are too numerous to enumerate.

The sands of time slip inexorably through the treadmill of my day-to-day existence here, and before I know it, I've been here a week.

Of the many cars which dot the arteries of organic England, I have only seen four which have borne American brands: a Pontiac Firebird 400, Corvette Stingray, Chrysler, and last and certainly not least, a baby-blue Lincoln Continentalac. These bicarbonated behemoths belong here as much as a lady wrestler at a Girl Scout cookout. Mother is debating whether or not to rent a Mini (or generic equivalent) to take a tour of the North Counties and maybe Scotland. This would be fun if I could ever get used to driving on the wrong side of the road. (And the Hebrews do it backwards, which is absolutely frightening.) Damned clever, those Chinese.

The weather has been brightly sunny and in the 70s (using the antiquated Farenthold barometer) for the past four days. Nobody here can believe this. They tell me that it usually rains with great regularity and frequency even in the summer, so the benign benevolence of our maker the mad molecule is indeed welcomed. (As these very words leaked from the barrels of my quadri-colored pen, a torrential downpour of wisdom erupted, washing out the cosmic contact lenses of our infant king and his uncle the adenoid.)

“Trite but urbane, trenchant, and enlightening.” -- The California Independent Observer

To revert at once to the student idiom: Reject the recording, fold, spindle, mutilate. Then (if all else fails) reverse directions.

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