PSYCHO ACTING PARROT

How ironic that when I was younger I loved hot weather, and now I don't. The weather gets more absurd every year, and my squawking about how a nice rainy English day most of the time would be lovely thank you very much is more frequent, and more loud. My generation ruined the climate, and I'm peeved at them. They could have stopped to think of me.

About a month ago I bought a bottle of sour plum soup concentrate. A good splash of that mixed with cold tea and an ice cube is most refreshing. Sour plum soup (酸梅湯 'suen mui tong') is a traditional summer beverage made by simmering dried crow plums (烏梅 'wu mui') with a modicum of licorice root (甘草 'gam tsou') and osmanthus flowers (桂花 'gwai faa'). Served cool or cold, it helps the man from Peking or Manchuria deal with the oppressive summer temperatures.

I'm not from Peking. This is Northern California.
I really don't like heat.


Darnitall, I have become a Southerner and I drink ice tea.
What is this world coming to?

Sweet ice tea is, as you might guess, not an optimum late evening beverage. It keeps the spongy-minded febrile Southerner up all night so they go to Dennys or the Waffle House to pick fights with people, or they hitch a bathtub on wheels to their pick-up truck and go roaring down the highway with Bubba Junior in it, swilling a six pack, and "All My Exxes Live In Texas" blaring on their speakers. These seemed like mighty good ideas at the time.
Though the state trooper dealing with their shenanigans doesn't think so.

I only have the vaguest idea what goes on in the Deep South.
And I have no intention of correcting my impressions.
Ain't gonna visit, ever. They've got Bubba.

Sweet ice tea ALSO makes one dream weird.

What with possessing a certain Dutch toughness, caffeine does not keep my from falling asleep. Like a baby. I could probably sleep through the siege of Beirut, unless I need to pee, and unlike coffee, tea has a much slower diuretic effect. Also a much longer half life.
So it can keep you alert until you crash. More psycho-active, too.

All over the South there are men staring into the mirror and realizing that they are still Bubba and still pasty blobs. Despite the fight in a bath tub in the Waffle House parking lot last night. When they were convinced that they were spider man.

The parrots in San Francisco are green with a red head. Not grey.
Unless they're ghost parrots. Then they're grey.
And speak with a southern drawl.


At three thirty in the morning, near the Hell Boy action figure guarding a teapot and some tins of tobacco from Cornell & Diehl which I bought fifteen years ago.
Shut up, Bubba, you'll wake my apartment mate.
I'll go to the bathroom now.



==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================