Modern Drugstores

I developed a severe pain in my left wrist. I had broken it twice in my life. Maybe those misfortunes are coming back to haunt me. I tried taking aspirin but it gave no real relief. External arthritis creams were no better than potions from a medicine show. I was complaining to a friend and she suggested I get a splint. That was a great idea. I go to Walgreens to find a splint. I walk in the store and I see aisles of Christmas stuff, items as seen on TV, candy, sodas, makeup but no splints. I see in the very back of the store, the foot remedy section. I figure maybe next to the ankle wraps I could find a wrist splint. Sure enough, I found them. They had the splints on a rail stuck into the wall with a hook at the end. The first splints on the rail were extra-small. For those who know me nothing needs to be added, for those who don't, I haven't been extra-small since kindergarten. I found that the extra-large splints were in the very back of this rail and the only way to get them was to take off the bunch in front.  I do that and grab the extra-large and when I read the fine print, I notice that it was for the right hand. I had to repeat the process to get the left handed splint. By this time, my wrist is hurting and I am grumpy. I am not paid by the store to restock their rail which in my opinion is a stupid way to stock splints. So I leave a pile of splints below the rail. The splint has really helped the pain which is still there but not so constant.

UPDATE: This thing really worked. The pain has almost stopped. I don't have to wear the splint all the time. If ACE wants me to go on TV and say how it worked, I'm available.

Free Food

Last night I dropped into a grocery store. It was the one that was named Boney's, then Henry's now Sprouts. It still has the same market niche even with all the name changes. I found what I was wanting and I saw some ladies unpacking a box filled with jars of cookies. As I got in line, one of the ladies offered me a choice of cookies, either a cocoanut macaroon or vanilla macaroon. Normally, I don't take samples. But I was tired, waiting in line and I didn't eat any dessert at my last meal, so I took it.  These cookies were really small. Just a drop about the size of a Hershey Kiss. As I popped it into my mouth, the lady showed me the container which had in big bright letters ONLY FOUR CALORIES. I figured a cookie of that size should be about 12 calories, so the realization hit me. I asked her does it contain sugar? With great enthusiasm she said no, it had an artificial sugar. And then the chemical backtaste flooded my mouth. It was wretched. While all this was happening, an Asian woman slipped in front me of so I missed my place in line. I was desperate to get out of the store so I could rinse out my mouth. I would rather do without sweets than eat fake sweets. You know, there is not a single study showing that artificial sweeteners are effective with weight loss. So I avoid all of them like the poisons they are. I see people, fat as me, swilling diet sodas, so obviously, they have no effect. I prefer water anyway. The worst calories are the calories you don't want, so I got four calories that I didn't want without any satisfaction.

Wolf Crooks

My Senior year of high school I became good friends with Mike C. who was a pk.  Now, for you who do not know, pk stands for "preacher's kid". There is no greater holy terror than a pk. If there is trouble to get into, the pk will find it. If you wish to be led down the path of degradation, there is no better guide than a pk. Yes, they know how to rebel in the finest way.  So one lunch, Mike tells me, lets go get some Wolf Crooks. I, having no idea what Wolf Crooks were but having to maintain my air of coolness, agree.  Ok, for those who are as ignorant regarding Wolf Crooks as I was, here is the scoop. These are cigars soaked in rum. The ad from that time states "if you were soaked in 149 proof rum, you'd be a little crooked, too." The effect of all this rum soaking is to make a smelly, nasty, rank cigar. The kind of cigar that if a man were sitting in front of you at the ball game smoking a Wolfie, you would get up and walk to the bleachers to get away from it. (I know, there is no smoking now in stadiums, but back then there was smoking allowed everywhere and especially cigars at the ball park enjoyed with a cup of draft Schlitz.)

So Mike and I take off in his dad's 1965 Cadillac. It was a land yacht. White and huge. We get the pack of Wolf's and smoke them like we knew what we were doing inside the car driving around.  Finally, it is time to go back to school.  One thing I hadn't considered is the smell of the Wolfs lingered. It was in my clothes, hair, skin and breath. I stunk like a week old ash tray. My first class that afternoon was gym. So fortunately, I could change my clothes and put on my smelly gym clothes and be home free from my lunch of degradation with the pk. As I am changing my clothes, Garry arrives. He says to me "Someone has been smoking, I smell tobacco." I freeze. I'm busted.  But wait, the muses call out to me with the greatest inspiration to occur in my life to that time. I say "Garry, I smell it too. I think we should try and find who it is."  Well we looked all over the locker room to try and find the source of the stench. I looked high and low. I sniffed locker after locker. We just couldn't find the source of the odor and we had to get to class. So we never found the smoker. I didn't tell you, this was a private school. Not just any private school, but a church school. Not just any church but a Seventh-day Adventist Church school and the SDA's do not allow their members to smoke. It is forbidden. It is one of the eight mortal sins. Ok, SDA's don't have mortal sins but if they did, this was number eight. So I survived another day with my pk buddy. By the way, I didn't take up tobacco.

Magical Realism

When I was in law school, the contracts professor explained the use of weasel words in law.  The idea was a weasel would suck the juice out of an egg leaving the shell. So a weasel word was a word that would suck the meaning out of another word. The notion of Magical Realism was first used in art but soon was applied to several Latin American authors. For example, the book, Like Water For Chocolate is considered to be in the genre of "magical realism".  The problem with that is the word "magical" sucks out the meaning of realism. It gives the idea that the events described are not real but fiction or a creation of the imagination of the writer.

Thus those things described that are not congruent with a European world view are considered magical and not real but the story presents them as if they were real.  Here is the problem with this notion. It denies the reality of the Latin American experience. Much of this literature present an alternative reality that has just as much validity if not more so than the traditional European world view.  Victor Villasenor ran into this problem when the book company that gave him an advance on his book Rain of Gold wanted to publish it as fiction. It was fiction to those who could not accept the reality of the world view presented by Villasenor.  When I first read Rain of Gold, I had to suspend my world view to accept what he wrote. Now that I have read all the works of Villasenor, I have come to realize he wrote about a reality that is of another dimension then the European world view, but real nonetheless. The use of the term "Magical Realism" is a subtle put down of what Villasenor and many other writers have written.