Ultramundane: It’s Just Not Natural

Standing in the kitchen, eating a piece of bread you made yourself (in the bread machine) with the compound butter you mixed yourself from fresh herbs, while you wait for the baked red-and-wild rice mix and brussels sprouts to finish…at times like that it’s easy to fantasize about being the next great cooking celebrity. Launching my own cookbook…making up credentials for the Food Network…planning my next episode…

Getting take-out for the next several nights afterwards is kind of like a commercial break.

An extended commercial break.

Six thousand pieces of mail in the last 12 hours. All bounce messages and spam notifications from a spammer spoofing my domain in their return address. There is no circle of hell harsh enough for the hate I have for spammers.

I hope my iPhone isn’t trying to download them all.  I may cry.

Probably you should IM me today if you want me to respond.

I was having the hardest time deciding between the two. Did I feel more racist or sexist today? Everything else was pretty easy. Bonds, Casinos, Destroying a Historic Landmark so Hippies can do a Peace Dance on the Remains. But I hesitated on this last vote. The array of choices, printed months ago on the ballot before some of the longshot candidates had dropped out from lack of money or media attention or just because they had to go back and defend their current seats, taunted me. “You had options once,” those graying names said. “Now you have only two, and if you haven’t been paying attention, it feels more like one.”

I gripped my pen and made my mark. But in the moment before, I quietly said, “Sorry, Dennis.”