LIFE IS SWEET

Bizarly, it rained this morning. We're not supposed to have rain at this time of year, blazing heat is customary in the Bay area in September. Instead it's mid-sixties, cloudy, continuing chance of precipitation. Humid. Which reminded me of a person in Waalre (a small town in Noord Brabant near where we lived at the time) who was exceptionally proud of his large collection of sugar cubes. Hotels, restaurants, and cafés in Europe used to have their own paper-wrapped sugar for your cup of coffee. They had exercised choice and discernment over the exact dimensions, degree of crystalization and granulation, logo, and, if situated scenically, illustration. Old engraving style, simplification, water colour effect, contrast.

People would collect them. See, these are the sugar cubes we brought back from our trip to the sunny Zagtlozp Mountians in Outer Podjolskija. The Grand Hotel Pruderghast had an entire packaged set of six! Lovely colourized engravings. It's in mint condition!
A meaningful commemoration of the time that Graf Von Strudel slept there during the Strumplicz campaign. As is fondly remembered there. Es ist sehr meinungsvoll!

Seven years later, this contributed to the defeat of Napoleon.
So we cannot use this sugar. It has historic resonance.

You'll just have to visit Zagtlozpzamek yourselves.
And you will love the Grand Hotel Pruderghast!

BERGDORF AM SEE, GÄRENDER MÜLLGAU, NEVADA

People who live in very moist climates should probably not collect carefully packaged sugar cubes. It's attractive to the local wildlife. Ants and bees. I have this vision of Mr. Deeksen in Waalre eventually being consumed by ants as he tries to protect his precious collection from their massive invasion. House covered in black, vaguely twitching to the eye, as they take over the building in a dense moving layer of workers. And a day or two later, there's simply a pile of rubble there, under which his skull can be found, gleaming and polished. It's sort of silvery from the mandible scouring it received. Perhaps his death was mercifully fast from asphyxiation as the insects invaded his mouth and larynx. Followed by slow chomping, thousands of little jaws. Methodically.

Or perhaps he moved to the outskirts of Marrakech and rented a ramshackle abandoned French boarding school to house his collection, learned Arabic and Berber, and over the decades became a dessicated zombie that the locals told stories about in hushed tones. Sugar is a preservative.


The Netherlands is filled with Neurotic people who do obsessive things like learning foreign languages, preserving museum collections of mildews and slime molds, and establishing a long-lasting monopoly in sugar a couple of centuries ago. They also like hot sunny places which are dry, and disporting themselves in eccentric fashion, startling the natives.

Parts of California have weather patterns similar to Marrakech at this time of year. Do not be surprised if you run into Dutch tourists taking selfies with bears, mountain lions, and bikers. And asking if any of the local motels or fried food shacks have interesting sugar cubes.



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