Confessions of a Consumer--I'm off bottled water

So long, so sad, too bad -- goodbye Aqafina, goodbye Dasani , goodbye Voss and even future brands of bottled water —Johnny Tsunami, Rikki Lake, River Phoenix, Oceans 11, Sea of Love--- I am stopping the insane practice of buying bottled water. I have perfectly good water coming out of my kitchen tap. Even my toilet bowl has drinking water—our dog will be glad to show you.

Relationships run their course and so, Bottled Water, I am through with you. Goodbye, au revoir, sayonara, hit the road Jack, cease and decease. No more designer water for me. I’ll take it wet and cool-- if you want flavor toss in a lemon. Oxygenated? Insert a straw, take a breath and blow.

I was raised on a tobacco farm and when you work all day in a hot sandy field without an iPod, cable TV, laptop, cell phones and without access to PC’s, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, you are forced to listen to your father-- for hours.

My father invented cheapo conservatism (though he was a Democrat by religion) and would claim my decision deserves no applause— “What took you so long, Beaucephus?” he would have commented. He spent his life resisting the temptations that corporations tried to force on him--- things he didn’t want or need. He would no more buy Rocky Mountain air than he would French soil. We plowed with a mule until they had a fire sale on Farmall tractors—used.

The CEO’s of Perrier and Acqua di Cristallo made millions off those of us, you and me that wanted to rise above the unwashed masses. We convinced ourselves we could be healthy, liberal and progressive and so in restaurants people paid for a bottle of Perrier as though it were an aged Merlot. We felt it lent sophistication to our grilled cheese sandwich.

So what other useless things in my life should go? Recently at a gathering a woman pinched my cheek and informed me “You’re beginning to get jowls. You know face tucks are not very expensive.” Oh Sweet Momma! A man lives to hear that—you sure don’t want to be walking around with your face looking like melted candle wax. Thanks for the heads up, Princess. Anything else? I can’t pronounce the capital of Tibet either. Please, do go on, improve me.

I gave up watching TV years ago when I realized I’d forgotten how nice an evening walk could be and realized I missed the sound of lawn sprinklers and water slapping on the hydrangeas. I now refuse to buy an iPod and put wires in my ears because I like to hear people talk.

Take it from a jowled rehabilitated consumer---reform is good. You pull back on the throttle just in time to clear a line of trees and see clear blue sky and life is much sweeter. So likewise I choose to stop buying bottled water. I’m back in control.

There is much in the universe we do not understand---Christmas tree lights for example. You pack them away neatly; close the lid and a year later open the box to find they’ve become entangled, practically grown together—why is that? Stephen Hawking, the famous wheel chair bound physicist probably doesn’t have a clue. But everyone can understand the foolishness of buying bottled water.

If a country boy can understand the need to stop buying something we don’t need in order to reduce spending, shouldn’t Washington be able to figure out the same thing? There comes a time to cut back. We’ve drank bottled water long enough, Honey Bunch. Deal with it.

Pradise lost or burnt or whateverrrrr

Jim was from Arizona. As we stood ankle deep in the ocean surf with water whirling around our ankles I realized that it is possible this day and age to fly 6 hours due east (Jim did it), land on a strip of land surrounded by water and still enjoy the protection of the U.S. Stars and Stripes which is a most amazing thing when you think about it. It’s paradise in fact but right then Jim was more interested in telling me about his taxidermy business.

Later you sit comfortably with your wife in your white linen beach shirt enjoying a king crab salad under a palm tree and realize the problem with Paradise is that it is temporary--- you really don’t want to stay too long. Your resort neighbors are not the kind of people you want to share a property line with and so paradise is heaven until about mid-week.

You’re in a town that remodeled itself for tourism and when you look at the malls, the souvenir shops, pastel colored restaurants and the freshly paved black asphalt main highway you realize nothing here predates 1990. The plastic pirate statues look like they were dressed by a fifteenth century Tommy Hilfiger.

The people around you are in different degrees of relaxation but we know that people are at their best when they are engaged in a quest for something---love, happiness, excellence in golf, Broadway and Park Place, the perfect sandwich—but once accomplished they change. We were originally hunters and once we’ve taken the woolly mammoth down and gnawed his bones suddenly we become lazy and stupid. We throw down our spears, collapse in lounge chairs and forget sunscreen.

Right now I’m watching some people around a pool below my balcony. Old codgers and their codgerrettes look frazzled amidst a squealing mob of grandchildren—exhausted from never ending questions ( Grandma, what are we doing tomorrow, huh? Can we rent a movie, huh? Can we go to the water slide, huh?) and they long for a quiet sit in a deck chair with about three Long Island ice teas. The grandpas with their huge flabby chests sit like walrus’s, surveying their territory and digesting their krill.

A long white yacht glides by close to the water front and stirs up a memory. Some years ago I was a guest aboard one as it plowed through the coastal waters on a cloudless hot day. There is no boredom like the boredom of a boat. You sit under a small canopy watching the owner steer with one hand, the other hand clutches a small bucket of gin and he natters about how clever he is and how much he enjoys his boat. Real conversation ended hours ago, you’ve been holding the same can of diet cola for over an hour, the sun has baked your brain into a marinara sauce and you long to get back to land—you begin to identify with hostages.

Yet when you were growing up you imagined the thrill and pride of owning just such a boat. Thank God it never happened. You could be just another drunk with too much to say.

And such is paradise about mid-week. The serpent of boredom has entered the garden.

Tomorrow we will pack our bags and depart from this coastal Shangri-La. For the last three days I’ve stayed mostly in air conditioning or sprinted from one spot of shade to another. I’ve been whimpering a lot too and if you touch me I shriek. Take a tip, Sweet Cakes, never come to Paradise and forget to use sunscreen the very first day. Never.

Mortality, it's tricky

Here’s a tip—stay out of the obituaries as long as you can.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a well written obit as well as the next guy and what with people my age showing up in there (say what!!??), that whole section of the newspaper is beginning to resemble my high school yearbook. But you never know what they are going to write about you.

Not long ago I thought I might be writing one for my oldest sister. She fell while going to her mailbox—she broke her arm, hit her head on a rock, was knocked unconscious and taken to the emergency room. So I passed the time jotting down some notes about the more interesting parts of her life---her volatile on-off relationship with Elvis Presley, the invention of cosmetics, her hobby of buying up small islands around the world---but she came to and suddenly remembered all the words to the song “ American Pie” so for me the pressure is off.

Obituaries avoid speaking ill of the dead and lean towards comfort and glossing over the rough spots of life. However the real purpose of an obituary is to summarize a life and remind us of our mortality. One day the world we leave behind will take a cold academic look at our lives and attempt to record our contribution to the overall good of mankind (“He was well behaved and his Sunday column was always submitted before the deadline with very few spelling errors. His editor mourned the loss stating “ The little guy would always spring for lunch”.) Hey, it is what it is.

I”ve arrived at that place in life that makes me shudder when the message blinks on my cell phone screen and warns “You have been disconnected.” I cringe when the sensual husky voice of the English lady in my GPS unit says “ You have reached your final destination”. And when the airline attendance tells me that “You’ll be on the ground shortly” well, I just want to cry. Is that anyway to talk to someone like me? The attendant seems to imply that shortly I will be lying prostrate with emergency personnel tearing open my shirt, applying paddles to my chest and screaming “Clear!” then a high pitched whine and ZZZT!

It gives me pause when I see an old gray faced cat wander through our front yard on a wonderful summer evening when everything else seems so full of life. At twelve years of age he moves slowly, this is probably his last summer. I want to write something poetic about this moment but I used up all my despair over death by the time I was 22. I was a writer then though no one knew it —that was one of my best kept secrets and still is. I roamed the college campus with the rest of the writer wannabees listening to Janis Joplin and Jimmie Hendrix and writing volumes about death and mortality. Then we went out for pizza and beer.

I don’t want to wait for emergency service personnel to tell me to lie quietly, that everything will be just fine. I want to stomp into a dark biker bar, order a drink that comes in a used oil can, light up a fat cigar, shoulder my way up to the meanest looking guy in there, blow thick blue smoke in his bearded scarred face and announce to the room “Which one of you ladies think they can take a 58-year-old newspaper columnist?”

So live boldly, light a candle in the darkness, make a difference…but don’t go crazy.

Why I don't Kitchenaid anymore

The wonder of gourmet cooking and fine dining has left me. I knew this the moment I was sitting in a five-star Italian restaurant and realized I wanted a hot dog and fries. Not gourmet hot dogs imported from Greece mind you, but the wieners you find on sale at Food Lion and the frozen crinkle cut fries from Oreida. I wanted the kind you used to get at a corner drug store:



Hot Dog Recipe
One hot dog bun
One cheapo hot dog, cooked
Ketchup and mustard
Onions, chopped
Eat while reading the latest spin-off of The DaVinci Code

We have dozens of cookbooks in our kitchen---James Beard, Graham Kerr, First Baptist Church Cookbook of Favorite Recipes----all leftovers from the early 90’s when men grew bored with space exploration and elephant hunting and realized you could dominate another man by using graters, recipes and Kitchenaid mixers.

In those days men compiled stock portfolios, smoked imported cigars and they became cultured and were ultimately drawn to pastels. Everyone began writing a book or interpreting art so in the natural course of things they discovered bouillabaisse and saffron.

I had a Peterbilt food processor and carried a Smith & Wesson nine millimeter diesel driven nutmeg grater in a kangaroo leather holster (you had to have a concealed permit for it). I spent hours in the kitchen throwing together marmalades and andoullie sausage vinaigrettes infused with 5W-30 motor oil all tossed using ratchet wrenches ----Voila! --- women swooned. Most men could not boil an egg and there I was, Master of Julienne Cuts, pouring cabernet sauvignons and blathering about poached quail eggs while careful to leave the toilet seat the way I found it. A man that could poach and understood bathroom etiquette! Women slipped me their phone numbers on napkins.

In those days I shopped only at Williams-Sonoma and kept 37 types of paprika and stored a small amount of specially produced bay leaves from Uganda in my gun safe. I was intense and would brook no insinuations about the virginity of my olive oils---I’d back it up with a fistfight or a shotgun. I once scoffed at a man’s untidy arugula salad (his parmigiano shavings were too thick) and he broke into tears and came at me with a melon baller. Now we’re best buds and ride motorcycles together.

And then there was the time in Laredo I spied a young cowboy wrapped up in white linen, wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay. He’d accused a man of using thyme in a spaghetti sauce, but he was wrong. Dead wrong. Alas poor Yorick, I knew him.

Then one day it ended. I served 10 dinner guests Chilean sea bass with a chocolate risotto and they claimed they’d never eaten anything so wonderful in all their lives and wept, they were delirious with joy. I realized I’d reached the pinnacle of cooking. I no longer needed to make the best crème d’spam or peanut butter gazpacho. I dropped my plutonium whisks and left the building. That part of my life was over. I don’t talk about it anymore.

Now at Thanksgiving I serve processed turkey with mash potatoes, yams and cranberries that all comes in a waxed box that you microwave. Dessert is Twinkies right out of the package—chased with cold Red Bull.

Our Lord said that He came that our joy might be full. He meant we should enjoy life and He did not obsess about soufflés.

It’s not about food, it’s about life. So get out there Honey Bunch, enjoy the sunshine and buy a friend a hot dog.