J'Accuse!

I've never eaten at Olive Garden. I'm leery of restaurants named after Popeye characters. There isn't an Olive Garden up here anyway. What we have is McDonald's, Burger King, Jack in the Box, Taco Bell, Colonel Sanders, Quizno's, Subway, and Round Table Pizza. Every other eating establishment here is local, unless you count ice cream as food (I say it's a drug), and then there's Baskin-Robbins. Oh, there is a regional chain soft-serve ice cream place called Foster's Freeze (at least I think it still exists), but I don't consider soft-serve ice cream to be either a drug or food. It's more like sickly sweet air conditioning for the tongue.

But there is no Olive Garden, nor is there a Denny's, a Sizzler, an IHOP, a Wendy's, nor any of the other famous fast or semi-fast food establishments which are ubiquitous features of most American settlements. The town, despite its population of about 27,000, and its distance of a dozen miles from the nearest city, has been largely ignored by the food service corporations which have sprinkled their colorful logos across the landscape with gay abandon. Thus, when I read about people going to places of this sort, I must rely on distant memories from my years in Los Angeles to help me conjure up an image of the experience. Living in this place makes contemporary America seem a bit foreign to me, like a place I visited once, but a place where the pictures I took didn't turn out, and now it's gone all vague with time.

All this is apropos of nothing, really. I just wanted to say that I'm leery of restaurants named after Popeye characters, and the rest of it just sort of turned up like a severed finger in a bowl of fast food chili. Yeah, true, I put the finger in there myself, but I obviously wasn't thinking clearly at the time.

Anyway. It's been partly cloudy tonight, and, of course, I like it to be partly cloudy, except when there's a meteor shower, and there won't be another of those for quite a while, so I'm happy with the partly cloudiness. I'd be happier if the clouds brought a little rain, but I'm sure that won't happen.

Old Meme? If so, I've never seen it: For the edification of the digital generation, MBs upon MBs of unexplainable illustrations from Originaldo. Liberace was Cleopatra. Tom Cruise was Queen Victoria. Plus Jesse Jackson's Million Man Bar Mitzvah. Must be seen to be disbelieved. All this, and my favorite picture ever of Duncan Reynaldo, one of my childhood heroes. This explains much, I'm sure.

I will sleep. When I wake, I shall be myself again-- alas!

Dampened

Slight rain has fallen, accompanied by distant thunder. It was cold rain, coaxing an autumn smell from the damp soil and the accumulation of dead leaves. The best part, though, was the big bruise of dark clouds which blotted out the sunset except for a thin line of gold at the horizon, like the last glint of light from a bright room as it is concealed by a closing door.

Day was full of woodpeckers and hummingbirds, gusty showers of brown leaves, acorns clattering on rooftops, and wisps of smoke drifting from chimneys long disused. There was a cup of hot orange spice tea as the last bits of blue sky and last rays of chill sunlight were veiled by gathering clouds. I had a sudden craving for cinnamon toast, but didn't want to spoil my dinner... "Don't eat that now, you'll spoil your dinner!" echoing out of the distant past that blustery October days conjure. Some doors never entirely close.