Being Interesting in the Perishable Times

mrG — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 18:00:58 -0400

Jim Elve's Canada's Best Blogs confesses to a bias in the criteria for 'best':

A sure way to stay off this list is to blog about what time you got up in the morning and/or what you ate today.

So in keeping with my overall philosophy of never wanting to be part of any club that would have anyone like me for a member, I'll confess to being guilty as charged and let you know that those lemon-grass wraps make really nice pastrami sandwiches, and for dinner, as Linton put it the other night, if we don't get out to his workplace soon, soon there won't be anything left to have, and to prove his point, tonight he took us all out for pizza, hamburgers, fetuccini and beer for an end of summer wrap up feast on the beach.

You see, this is important around here in these parts at this specifically particular time of summer's end: Unlike where most of you live, the population of our village is about to drop by perhaps 90-95% in just 5 days, and that means services like Lobbies will shut down come quitting time Labour Day, they'll cover their windows with boards nailed into place (to protect from both weather and vandals) and most of the wealth of the village will pack up and head out, somewhere, out there, far far away.

And because of this mass exodus, no one will order new supplies for this last weekend; it's important to their bottom line that a minimum be wasted, so as things run out, it's a ritual clensing, like the rise and fall of the Ganges. This is the Annual Wane of the Perishables, a letting go of grocery diversity, of letting the many luxury things of big-town life just run out, returning us to shoreline villagehood, and every business aiming a complex professional wager and dance against the chaotic happenstance of weather-borne consumer flows, hoping, like in gin rummy, to get the most score by the end game, yet be caught with the fewest points in your hand when the gig is finally up.

And for Jim's benefit, it's worth noting that, fifty-three hundred years from now, archeaologists will care not what I thought today, but will earnestly sift my entrails to learn what was on that pizza, and that's something to think about next time you get to feeling all lofty and intellectual like, and especially next time you hunker down on crystal cold beer with a lemon-grass pastrami roll-up.

TeledyN - Being Interesting in the Perishable Times - Comments

Being Interesting in the Perishable Times