5:10 p.m
I actually started this much earlier today. But, like a time traveler, I have brought the future into the present because I want to feature 2 reporters from the Wall Street Journal: Jacob Bunge and Lucy Craymer before I go back to this morning's events. I have often written poems about their separate stories, but today they team- wrote an article called America Struggles to Take it's Pigs to World's Biggest Market. They work well together, so I am featuring a poem about their story here at the beginning, instead of at the end, of today's chapter. Because I will email them both with the link to this page in the hopes they'll both click on it, read their names here, and become so enchanted with my stellar prose and indefinable genius that they will tell all their other reporter friends and I can collect that Nobel Prize sooner than expected and pay off a few bookies:
China has the world’s biggest appetite for pork. It’s such a beloved staple that the written Chinese character for “home” depicts a pig inside a house. U.S. producers banked on that business being around for years.
That’s changed. As a result of the Trump administration’s clash with Beijing over trade, China’s tariffs on U.S. pork have climbed as high as 70%, making U.S. imports more expensive. At the same time, an outbreak of African swine fever in China has increased demand for imported pork.
To fill the void, Chinese customers are increasingly looking to companies in Europe and South America to fill their orders @WSJ
The world is in love with all swine.
In China tis a valentine.
But Uncle Sam's pork,
just like a school dork,
is shunted aside like strychnine.
******************************
9:01 a.m.Let's start with a list of what old people, people I know personally, obsess about:
- Two men that I know can think of little else but of how the religion of their youth, to which they gave much time, service, and money, has let them down. They searche online relentlessly for feel-good songs and philosophy courses to assuage their guilt at losing their spark of faith.
- A woman I've known for five years has a thing for Rush Limbaugh. She buys all his CDs, books, and listens to him religiously, then mass emails everyone she knows about the latest hidden government conspiracy.
- An 83 year old man who I admire as the best handyman and craftsman I've ever known can't get it out of his head that the Utah Transportation Authority is riddled with corruption, from top to bottom, and has corrupted every single public official in Utah Valley.
- And older woman, known throughout Provo for her kindnesses and charity, insists that Trevo liquid nutritional supplement is all anyone needs to regain their health, and will cure things like cancer, leukemia, arthritis, diabetes, and so forth. She is so hipped on this elixir that she surreptitiously puts it in her lemonade in the summer, which she serves to all her guests, and in her famous squash soup in the winter, which is featured as a great treat all winter long at Relief Society meetings up and down Utah Valley. I lived in her unheated basement for nearly 2 years, and know whereof I speak. I seen her dood it.
Charles Dickens nailed the subject in David Copperfield with the character of Mr. Dick, who could never get the thought of King Charles' head out of his mind. I'm having some cards printed up to pass out to all the tedious windbags I know that reads: "Beware of King Charles' head -- It is happening to you!"
I also know plenty of regular old people who are not nutty. My friend Clara spends her days puttering around her apartment, dusting, writing birthday cards to her numerous grand children, crocheting mittens and hats, and driving others around for shopping and to go see a movie. She never seems to obsess or brood about anything. When I see her in the hallway I can be sure she won't buttonhole me to tell me a story she's told me before or to warn me that there's a yeti up on Y Mountain.
My considered opinion is that people who begin to obsess as they grow older should give up thinking altogether, buy a cheap pocket knife, and take to whittling, like Jed Clampett. Just think of all the sticks and twigs that could be turned into useful mulch if all these compulsive old coots sat outside on nice days whittling instead of slinking about with their idiotic neurosis.
And that includes me, too. I know very well I obsess about food. Just yesterday I spent most of my mental energies on fretting over whether I should make chicken and dumplings for Sunday brunch or an antipasto salad. I went so far as to buy a stewing hen, for six dollars, which I stuck in the freezer. But as I reviewed all the tedious steps to making chicken and dumplings, which I'd have to do Sunday morning, compared to the ease of throwing together an antipasto salad on Saturday and tucking it away in the fridge, ready to serve on Sunday, I realized that I was whipsawing with myself over a trifle. But I'm not the only one with manic tendencies when it comes to food. My friend in Thailand sent me this email this morning:
My dinner salads are getting better by the week.'
Brocoli
Tomotoes
Cherry Tomatoes
Onions
Black olives
Pinto beans
Salt
Pepper
Balsamic Vinegar
Olive Oil
Apple Cider Vinegar (Bragg's)
Pan Fried Chicken, marinated in Salt/Pepper (no breading)
Sunflower seeds
Raisins...
If that salad doesn't add 20 years to my life, nothing will!!
My night caps are freshmade lime squeeze drinks...it's my new regular drink of choice...
But then again, this is the Age of the Diet. Everyone has one or is considering going on one. Reader's Digest just posted an article called 'The Diet That Could Stop Cancer From Spreading.' The writer basically says eat beans, tomatoes, squash, and tofu, and stay away from dairy and red meat. Bathe in olive oil. Avoid sugar like an opioid. And eat ghost peppers like there's no tomorrow. And you might feel better, poop better, sleep better, and when the cancer finally kills you you'll be in much better shape.
I think I'd rather whittle. People with too much time on their hands and food in their bellies invent diets. I bet this type of thing doesn't happen on other inhabited worlds, of which there are many. They're probably laughing their heads off at us right now on Kolob.
Eschatology aside, we now come to the dedication of this chapter of Min Tull. I offered to dedicate it to a friend who emailed me about my vinegar pool and the carbon footprint it makes -- which I think is an excellent point to pursue. So I told him that in gratitude I would dedicate the next installment of my book to him -- for a small fee. He thought I was funning, so didn't send me anything. That's tough for him, cuz I meant it. I can have quite a racket if I can get readers to pay me ten dollars to dedicate a chapter to them. And since my pal decided not to get on the bandwagon, I hereby dedicate this chapter to Karl Dodge, an old missionary companion from Thailand, who told me a story about how his dad kept an old horse fenced inside a small apple orchard, where it ate all the windfalls and cropped the grass around the trees. I have often cheered myself with that mental image, of a sway backed nag happily chomping wormy apples under a blue mountain sky. Thanks, Karl.
So, my good readers, if you wish to become immortalized in this budding classic narrative of inanity, just mail me a money order or do a wire transfer for ten dollars. And if you DON'T send me ten dollars, you mingy readers, I will mention your name ANYWAY, in some terrible way that will embarrass you completely and forever. Call it blackmail if you want -- I gotta pay for my foodie obsession somehow.
Now I'm gonna take a walk down to the Provo Rec Center to stir up my bowels and get in a swim. The ambient temperature outside right now is 55 degrees, with partly cloudy skies. Very light wind. I can see thistledown lazily floating by my patio window. And the vinegar pond looks to be down about a pint from yesterday. According to most online sources, it can't freeze unless it gets below 28 degrees and stays there a while. So it will act as a thermometer this winter -- if there's ice on my vinegar pool I'll know it's 28 degrees outside, or less. That's an old Boy Scout trick I learned from Vlasic.
"Darn fool waste of time, that's what it is!"
