The Halloween season and The Fifth Risk in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

If I were the sort of rich person who was already investing full-tilt in saving the world and had dribbles of money left over for jokes, I hope I’d pay for a micro-run of thick, respectable-looking hardbacks titled THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE.

I’d leave copies on bus seats now and then.

The one word in the book, in huge print, seen right when someone picks up the book and opens it, would be “Gotcha!!!”

It is that dreamy window of time when early voting has been going on. A midterm election affecting Congress and the balance of power therein. We will either symbolically reject and practically hobble Donald Trump, or we will not. Levels of early voting are unusually high. The people horrified by Trump & Co. will be out in force. The people who love Donald Trump - most especially the creatures who love him the most - will also be out in force, because the really unpleasant people with the blurriest minds have more of a toehold on America than they ever thought they would get, and they know it very well. Anyway, heaven is in turmoil and the stars are unclear, but, at this moment as the autumn leaves fall, there is more of a feeling of efficacy than there has been in two years, just because there is a vote. The monstrosities continue, but at the moment they are not unanswered monstrosities.

An author who I’ve done two editing passes for, and who cannot afford a short third pass, is trying to push my genial willingness to answer follow-up questions in email as far as it will go. This is predictable. So far - somewhat guided by the awareness that I need him to happily recommend me to others more than I need him to pay for a small third cleanup pass - I have allowed myself to render more unpaid judgment than is really covered in my idea of follow-up questions. I’ll tell him I can’t work for free if he really pushes things, though.

The jack-o-lanterns were a success. The diva, the usher, and the lopsided fellow who accidentally matched Quasimodo. (I’d show pictures, but I still am not willing to pay for an ongoing subscription to an image hosting service. But the diva’s rage is a diva’s rage, and I am very proud of it. The camera couldn’t fully capture it after dark anyway.)

Halloween’s silly season, combined with being able to vote, has been just what I needed. One cannot forever clench. Heedless of personal safety, I persuaded Mom to go with me to the Academy Theater to see From Beyond, that great gaudy pile of 1986 schlock, and it was not a disaster. Last night we watched Bubba Ho-tep, one of the great old-age/rest-home movies as well as featuring ancient evil vs. The (anonymous, aging) King Of Rock & Roll. That was good. I need to add that to my suddenly-waking Christmas list. About nine DVD copies of it.

I am seriously lucky that only one of my Durban Poison seeds germinated this spring, and not all four. The problem with growing a marijuana plant the size of a tree is that you have to harvest a marijuana plant the size of a tree. . . . Which sounds picturesque but does not in fact capture the problem at all, because, when you harvest a fruit tree, you do not have to remove every shade leaf from the tree, by hand, before you even begin the harvest. (And there are a lot more leaves on the branches of a pot plant than on almost any fruit tree.) This can surprise a busy fellow who believes he now has a free day in which to harvest. To say nothing of all the rigmarole you have to do during and after the harvest. I in fact spent a series of days - but ended up only harvesting the top half of the plant! Bravely still growing out there, not yet rotted by the increasing rains and not yet overage, are well-developed buds that could have given me over half again as much of a harvest, and maybe even doubled it.

So - ridiculously long story short - there are now nine full quart Mason jars of Durban Poison beginning the curing process in a dark cardboard box in my jammed half-bedroom. (Half of those jars contained what was left of the cured previous year’s harvest . . . which I proceeded to empty onto our vegetable garden in what may be the most premium mulching in all history.) Unlike the previous year’s Northern Lights, which at least made an overpoweringly relaxing fudge brownie, the wakeful Durban Poison seems to be not really useful for edibles; when smoked, however, it leaves your thinking functionality intact while giving you the next-door-to-healthy feeling that, whether or not you are going to in the end have a nervous breakdown because of Donald Trump, you are not going to have one today.

Gustatorially - is that a word? appropriately enough, it looks like a fat man - there are now lots and lots of chile peppers in our freezer! The New Mexico chile - each one with its skin carefully blackened over a gas burner, then put in a big plastic bag so they can finish steaming each other. Now there are many, many small plastic bags stacked in a drawer in our freezer. There should be enough that there will be no reason not to be lavish with them when making enchiladas. Which we have not made in a while.

Which I suddenly think are overdue. Mmm.

Which I won’t be able to eat very often in any case. I’ve been having trouble with my blood sugar being under control, darn it. Being extreme is boring but works, but moderation is hard to be moderate about - you have reasonable exceptions, and then reasonable exceptions between the exceptions, and then you’ve been eating in the worst possible way for a type 2 diabetic for three months or more. I’m now going back into a more conscious phase, but - in addition to my general supernatural forgetfulness that makes nonsense of the most reasonable and minimal habits - it is difficult to think to test one’s blood when you know the news isn’t gonna be great. Low-carb recipes mostly in any case. Cabbage and kielbasa, here I come. Wintertime is a good season for it.

I need to harvest all the little hot peppers too. All the incidental-warming ammunition. I haven’t yet. They’re still out there on their bushes. Need to do it before they rot in the rains.

The best (or most constructive) book I’ve read about what it is that Trump is neglecting is The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. Which is about the fact that Trump wanted to shut down his transition effort before he was elected - “transition effort” meaning his staff’s legally-required preparation to run the government, because he was red-faced enraged that “his money” (not his money, the money specifically raised to pay for the transition, but he thought of all such money as “his money”) was being spent on it - and he was only persuaded not to shut it down because he was told it might look to a morning news show as if he knew he had no chance - so he let the transition preparation continue until he was elected and then immediately cancelled it, letting everyone go, and never revived it, even after inauguration when the job was actually his.

So all the people waiting at all the government departments to brief the incoming people on what their departments did, with magnificently prepared briefings they had been preparing for months, just waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. No one ever showed up. A couple of the incoming departments’ heads eventually met with them . . . for about an hour.

The title refers to the answer to a question Lewis asked a retired Department of Energy head. What had he thought were the five biggest risks the Department faced? He listed four dreadful possibilities, though he was somewhat hampered by having to be careful not to reveal classified information. But when Lewis asked him what the fifth was, he simply answered, “Project management.”

Basically the book - which, idiosyncratically, comes to no particular end or conclusion section, except for a rather nice point Lewis comes to at the end of his last focus/anecdote - is about all the things that the United States government is responsible for - that Trump and his people uniquely, distinctly, in a distilled fashion, are not interested in.

Lewis describes the “fifth risk” this way: “The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. . . . ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. . . . It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”

So, as you might imagine from reading me, there is now a cluster of cells in my brain that is now obsessively trying to come up with schemes to get this book onto as many schoolroom desks as possible. (I probably won’t come up with a thing. But you never know.)

The Fifth Risk is so far the nonfiction Trump-era book that has turned out to be focused on what’s worth saving.

Later:
No one has commented yet, so I’d be “within the rules” (my own personal peculiar ones) to tack on more things here. I don’t want to risk eclipsing what I’ve already written by paving over it with a different most-recent entry. More here, then. My fingers are still dancing.

After I picked the hot peppers and bagged them up for the freezer - chocolate ghost peppers, scotch bonnets, a few ominous orange Carolina Reapers with scorpion-like “stingers” protruding from the bottoms - I returned to the back yard on a different errand. I went out underneath the big paw paw tree in the back yard - feeling the squishing under my shoes. Underneath the continuous carpet of big fallen yellow leaves was the entire crop of paw paw fruits, which had fallen to the ground a week or so before. I was there to toss the spoiled or moldy fruit in all directions - over toward the mountain ash, into the raspberries, back into the undergrowth by the west fence - so that my mother would not have to feel the same squishing feeling under her feet as she moved along that section of path.

I found a few pawpaws, more recently fallen, that had not had time to spoil (and indeed there are still some of the big green fruit visible high above on the now mostly leafless branches).

The ripe flesh is delicious, if you take careful bites around the edge of the rows of big seeds - it’s like banana custard, only fresher and better in a way I don’t know how to describe - but at this stage I should try doing something else with them. So I am now trying to find some sort of pie or custard to make out of paw paws.

It is an unusual Google experience for these latter days. Most of the recipes are collated in Web pages associated with a few universities in the states around Kentucky. These websites all conform to the appearance standards that were prevalent around 1997. And, in fact, the same set of recipes appears to have been shared verbatim between these different universities, apparently having been originally typed in just one ag building basement. The recipes have a monotone reliance on about the same proportions of flour and milk to paw paw pulp (somewhat high on flour and milk and somewhat low on paw paw, to my eye). Cooking with paw paws has not yet . . . exploded, you could say. No one has really been playing with it, beyond the efforts of frontier families in the nineteenth century. It remains the province of agriculture extension departments.

We’ll see. By which I mean we’ll see tomorrow morning, as those few paw paws are in a bucket on the back porch and they aren’t going to last longer than that. So tomorrow I’ll macerate their pulp first thing after coffee and then I’ll decide on which recipe Mom and I are going to follow.

Hmm. There was actually something else I was thinking of talking about, also involving food - something interesting, propositional, public-policy-and-ethical, and actually a little embarrassing (as I’d have explained, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in it, I will argue so, but I’d still rather not be my own example; it’s that sort of thing) - but I don’t think I quite have the head of steam for it after all. Next entry, then.

Last updated November 03, 2018