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Monthly Archives: June 2016

Nothing If Not Messy

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That Guy Stepping Off the Seesaw Has Just As Much Power As the Politician

That Guy Stepping Off the Seesaw Has Just As Much Power As the Politician

On this election day (for me, the California Primary), I am reminded of one of the things that Donald Rumsfeld said in which I actually believed: Democracy is messy, sometimes incredibly so. This horrible election year of 2016 brings us a contest between two politicians that many Americans would readily damn to the infernal regions.

But we seem to have bought this whole two-party system thing. But what happens when people start to lose faith in both parties? Just because I donated to Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, my mailbox is full of solicitations from Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her minions. Although I tend to vote Democratic, I still consign those solicitations to the circular file with as much alacrity as an ad from Herr Trumpf.

Why would I donate money to a political party? I vote for candidates, not parties. And if the party cannot produce a good candidate, why then, bugger the party!

Yet I still vote. There I was at the Stoner Recreation Center at 7:15 this morning to vote for Bernie Sanders, despite knowing that Hillary Clinton would clean his clock. That doesn’t matter: If she gets in, then she has to listen to the forces behind Sanders or go down to defeat to the candidate that Jon Stewart would refer to as Fuckface von Clownstick. That would be … very … bad.

Nopalitos

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You Wouldn’t Think These Cacti Would Be Good Eating, Would You?

You Wouldn’t Think These Cacti Would Be Good Eating, Would You?

The first time I ran into the pads of prickly pear cactus (Opuntia) in a supermarket, I received a nasty shock. Out of curiosity, I handled them and found that the spines were still in them. My first impulse was to think, “Now why would anyone eat this stuff?”

But curiosity won out in the end. I think I first saw nopalitos on the menu at Paco’s Tacos in Culver City and decided to order them. First of all, it looked very different from the fresh cactus pads:

Hmmm, The Spines Are All Gone!

Hmmm, The Spines Are All Gone!

For one thing, the texture was all different, kind of like pickled okra—and the spines were all gone. Gingerly, I ate some with a fresh corn tortilla and loved the flavor.

Later, when my Type 2 Diabetes required some changes to my diet, I was delighted to find that nopalitos retard the absorption of sugars by the digestive system and thus have a low glycemic index. In Southern Calfornia, one could buy bottled nopalitos in virtually any supermarket and eat them as a salad, in the form of tacos, or cooked with scrambled eggs and chiles.

I don’t know whether it’s possible to find nopalitos outside of the American Southwest, but I think it’s worth making an effort. They’re delicious!

 

Doctor Destouches and Mister Hyde

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Louis-Ferdinand Céline

French Author Louis-Ferdinand Céline

There are some writers in which critical opinion is inevitably polarized. Especially Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who committed the unpardonable sin of being politically incorrect to the nth degree. On one hand, he was the kindly Doctor Destouches, who ministered to the health needs of the poor without overcharging them. On the other, he wrote three anti-Semitic pamphlets in the lead-up to the Second World War that endeared him to the Nazi occupation forces and earned death threats from the French Resistance.

Not mentioned in the above paragraph is the fact that Céline wrote two of the greatest books of the 20th Cemtury: Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936). His postwar trilogy about his travails for his “war crimes” is almost as great: Castle to Castle (1957), North (1960), and Rigadoon (1961).

The Young Céline

The Young Céline

In his biography of the author, Patrick McCarthy aska:

What remains alive of Céline? When one looks beyond his period and and beyond all the different roles he played, what remains of the man and his work? His life was dedicated to probing the pain that men feel at their contact with the world. Each person knows, as he goes about his daily round, that one part of himself does not join in. It remains outside, permanent and untouched. One tries to ignore it but it is there. It was Céline’s destiny to face this “otherness”: to look hard at it and to liberate it. It rushes out in his work as fear: the fear of man abandoned to himself. In Céline’s vision this fear engulfs all existence. It expresses itself in many ways: as pain, loneliness, hatred and pity. These are the guiding demons of Céline’s work—inseparably interwoven. But beyond all of them is this fundamental and total fear. It explains why reading Céline is such a shattering experience. It is not that fate dominates or that death lies in wait. It is that every moment the “otherness” is rampant. It runs around screaming that the nightmare is real and the waking hours only a dream. It imposes on the reader a very special kind of pain—reminiscent perhaps of Shakespeare’s wildest moments in King Lear.

When interviewed by an Italian journalist, American poet Charles Bukowski ended by saying, “Don’t shout so much. And read Céline.” That’s good advice.

Muhammad Ali’s Long Journey

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It’s Been a Long Journey

Somewhere Enroute, He Became a Beloved Hero

He was handsome. He was strong. He was a big time bad-ass. Cassius Clay seemed to flout all the standards of the world of the 1960s. Then, when he converted to Islam (influenced by another bad-ass: Malcolm X), the now Muhammad Ali seemed almost Satanic in his majesty.

Today, the same boxer who frightened us out of our wits died an old and much-beloved hero. He may have floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, but he became ever more enlightened and benevolent as he aged. In 1996, he reached his apotheosis by lighting the Olympic Flame at the Atlanta games.

Although it was not unexpected, I am still broken up by Martine’s announcement of his death as I was on the last page of a biography of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Somewhere along the line, we are all on the last page of the book of our own lives.

A Death in the Mountains

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Tahquitz Peak Near Palm Springs

Tahquitz Peak Near Palm Springs

I used to have a good friend named Alex (or Iskander) Toubia, a Arab Christian from Nabatiyah, Lebanon. He married a cute blonde nurse from Cincinnati and had a daughter by her. Then something happened to the marriage, and the wife left with the daughter.

Then began a period of depression for my friend. He was in business for a while with his brothers in a manufacturing company that made parts for the auto industry. He bought a big house in Orange County. One year, he went to Rio for Carnival and engaged in some dissipation, bringing back some soft core porn videos.

Somewhere around this time, I lost track of Alex. One day, I decided to do an Internet search for his name and found out what happened with him: He had gone hiking on Tahquitz Peak in Riverside County wearing crampons (for the first time). He slipped and fell—fell quite a long way, striking his head against a tree, killing him instantly.

The website from the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit that describes the attempt to recover his body is still up on the Internet and is well worth reading. One of the rescuers suffered a similar fate, hit his head against a tree, and went into a coma—from which, fortunately, he recovered.

The whole story sounded very much like Alex. He loved to go hiking, and he had become something of a loner. That’s not the best combination. I love to hike, too, but would not venture on a difficult trail on my own, especially in the mountains. Life is fragile enough as it is.