You all probably know that my Google Adsense account got reactivated, and that I’ve been running Google ads almost exclusively for the last couple of weeks.

Well, I was flipping through the last week of strips, and this page had an ad that read, I kid you not:

Dark Matter
Dark Matter for sale. aff Check out
the deals now!
www.ebay.com

I searched for Dark Matter on ebay, and I found lots of products that had Dark Matter in their names, and more than a few books about astrophysics, but I did NOT find actual Dark Matter for sale.

*sigh*

It’s probably a good thing. First they’d start selling clumps of the stuff, then there’d be Dark Matter chia-pets, and before long you’d have Dark Matter monsters in the sewer. That’d make the Paan’uri really mad, I bet.

–Howard “reading too much of my own writing lately” Tayler

Open Letter, August 20, 2005

Thursday I got the urge to do some experimental cooking. I’m no student of the culinary arts, but looking back at the results of this particular project, I think I have a gift.

I wanted to make molé (moh-lay) sauce. There’s a restaurant in downtown Salt Lake called The Blue Iguana that serves several different molé sauces, and on my current budget my hankering cannot be sated with a trip out to dinner. A few months back I went to the local mexi-mart and bought a bottle of something claiming to be molé sauce. It looked like someone had gotten sick in a jar of molasses, and it tasted awful. Chemical analyses later showed that something in the La Brea Tar Pits was, in fact, pregnant.

So I turned to my good friend in the culinary research field, Monsieur du Google, and dug up four molé recipes, each quite different. Apparently there’s more to the word “molé” than “sauce made of ground beans.”

Here’s where I begin to think I may possess a gift for this kind of work. I laid out all four recipes, and made a master list of their ingredients. I then substituted things that I figured would probably work in place of things we didn’t have (no almonds in the house, but we have walnuts and pistachio kernels, for instance). I then started gathering ingredients, and throwing them in the blender. I was just eyeballing it, but I could TASTE what was happening without putting things in my mouth. These flavors that I needed to blend together were familiar enough to me already that my brain engaged on some primal, channeling-the-tongues-of-the-ancients level, and I became a blending dervish.

My goal was to end up with two to four cups of experimental sauce. In tweaking the flavors, though, I kept having to add water to get things to blend, and by the time I was done I had a GALLON of pseudo-Mayan pureé bubbling away on the stove. I say tweaking — the flavor of the walnuts was wrong because the walnuts I used were NOT last year’s harvest from our tree out back. They were a harvest from Chalain’s inlaws back in 1998, and they’d gone bitter. Working THAT taste into something nummy took quite a bit of dilution, the addition of some sweetness and a bit of vinegar, and possibly the distant smile of Qetzlcoatl.

Sandra came home just in time for it to be done. She tasted a spoonful and declared it “pretty good.” Then she looked at how MUCH “pretty good” there was, and declared it “I think we need to make a dip out of this for the potluck this coming Saturday.”

So I poured it into some it’s-not-real-Tupperware boxes, and put it into the refrigerator to steep.

Friday morning I folded a tortilla around some grilled pork, poured a good half cup of Howard’s Holy Molé on it, grated some cheddar on top, and then cooked it authentic Mexican Restaurant Style — in the microwave (Note the wording: this is authentic to the style of local Mexican Restaurants, not authentic to the style of actual Mexicans, nor any other Central Americans of culinary distinction).

By the iridium of Chixculub, it was GOOOD. Three ‘o’s of good, at least.

You want the ingredients? Okay: In no particular order… onions, celery, canned pinto beans, home-bottled tomatoes and green chiles, crumbs from the bottom of a big bag of corn chips, olive oil, cheap balsamic vinegar, sugar, splenda, almost a cup of Hershey’s baking cocoa, pistachios, I-wish-I-had-picked-better-walnuts, raisins, garlic powder, basil, cumin, chili powder, and probably a quart of water.

I know, I know. You’re looking at that list and thinking “that’s NASTY.” That’s fine. More for me, pal.

Latter-Day Saints (you know, the Mormons) have a commandment to not partake of “harmful drugs.”

This gets interpreted variously, but for the most part it means “don’t take anything illegal, don’t take recreational drugs, and be careful with prescription stuff.” Mormons in Amsterdam, for instance, aren’t allowed to smoke marijuana, even though it’s legal there.

Intellectually, I understand this commandment. Chemicals that alter your consciousness can block your ability to cope with the “real world” around you, and cloud your ability to listen to the Holy Spirit. A drug that makes you feel happy and peaceful may prevent you from taking appropriate action in times of trouble.

That’s my “intellectual” understanding, and until now it’s all I’ve had. I’ve never been drunk, high, or had any sort of “trip” with the help of stuff that I swallowed, snorted, smoked, or injected, so there was no practical understanding.

Until now.

This evening I took two Lortab. They were the first two I’d taken in 48 hours. Shortly after taking them I felt really, REALLY mellow and happy. The massive workload I’m staring at here in front of my computer couldn’t shake me from this blissful, peaceful sense of “it’ll all work out.” I’ve had that feeling before when I’ve prayed for help with a problem, but at those times I had to work for it, and the feeling came with a bit of edification. In THIS case, however, I’m just happy for no reason.

I like this feeling. I see the attraction of being able to pop a couple of pills to be happy. I was grumpy, irritable, and in pain prior to dropping a 15mg dose of hydrocodone, and now I feel like most of us probably wish we could feel most of the time: HAPPY.

The bottle of Lortab is almost empty. I’m smart enough to know that the feeling I’m enjoying is drug-induced, and the thought that I won’t be able to do this anymore makes me scared. But the scared feeling can’t quite cut through the happy feeling.

So… I’m happy, and mellow, and smiling like a fool while the little Howard in the back of my brain worries about where we’re going to get the emotional cash to pay the piper when the prescription runs out. The doctor might be willing to refill it if my shoulder is still giving me grief, but Sandra will not let me ask him to. Smart lady. Smart, and acting on the express instructions I gave her a month ago.

–Howard

I don’t know what happened, but I was wiped out today.

I woke up at 8:30, and felt like crap. I had breakfast, took a hot shower to loosen up the mess of knots I had in my back and shoulder (which still complains about our little separation incident 5 weeks ago), and then went back to bed at 9:30. At 11:30 I woke up and was exhausted. I puttered at the computer, and then went back to bed at around noon. At 1:30 I got up and felt pretty good. I got an hour’s worth of work done, and then felt wiped out, and ready for another nap.

I made it to the Temple for this evening’s shift, but ran out of steam around 8:00pm, just four hours in. And do note, please, that the four hours I was there were spent propped up on ibuprofen and around 25mg of caffeine. “Propped” up, not “hopped” up, thank-you-very-much.

I have three theories:

1) I’m getting sick. My temperature is 98.2, so it’s a possibility.
2) Not taking narcotics at bedtime (I tried to do without on Tuesday night) threw me for a loop.
3) Accrued interest on my sleep debt reached the point at which the First Metabolitionist Bank of Howard foreclosed on my Wednesday.

Hopefully tomorrow will go better. I’m on drugs again now, and am starting to feel the sleepy-loopy pull of them, as they summon me to the fluffy one-sided softness of sleeping always on my left side. I miss being able to see my bedside clock. (I’d call it an “alarm” clock, but that implies use of the “alarm” feature, and you can bet your summertime jammies I don’t use THAT these days.)

–Howard

p.s. I got email from a couple of schlockers. Terry sent me Tommy Shaw’s “Girls With Guns” track, and totally made my day. That song is punchier and happier than I remember it being, which is unusual. Most “memory lane” tracks have a lot of suck in them when I listen these days. The other email was from Jeff, who pointed me at Overclocked Remix. I now have a remix of “Lemmings” playing in the background… if this ain’t fitting music to draw comics to, I don’t know what is. But there’s some heavy-hitting “DOOM” remixes waiting for a chance to inspire me…