Egg

I was once instructed not to put all my eggs in one basket.

Why not? Well, if you lose the handle of the basket then you have a bunch of broken eggs which is not good unless you were planning on making an omelette and drop them near a stove. I suppose you could have a separate basket for each egg but that may get out of hand pretty quick. Even a dozen eggs would require 12 separate recepticles which would be pretty hard to manage and carry and you would wind up dropping some of them anyway. Common sense wins out by putting 12 eggs in a carton. But I've seen mega-cartons with 18 eggs in them and I consider that pushing the damn envelope pretty far.

I know a person who raises about 50 chickens and she just walks out and gathers a few eggs each day, does the carton thing and then puts them in a refrigerator. Unfortunately, her toddler son walks around the coop and doesn't change shoes or follow hygiene prompts and he contracted some kind of chicken virus which led to the health department making a visit to the property which then in turn caused the township to send letters basically indicating that it is pretty fucking stupid to be raising chickens in a suburb. Especially when the roosters crow before dawn pissing off the neighbors who own $180,000 houses and have no interest in pretending to live next door to a bed and breakfast/petting zoo.

But unfertilzed chicken embryos- aka - "eggs" refuse to be erased from our culture. We eat them strait in a variety of forms from raw to scrambled, add them to all sorts of stuff (salads, cakes, even meat loaf) , and university students and team building assholes still try and engineer the perfect protective cocoon for them. "Egg on your face" , "Egg him on", " Walking on egg shells"and the most significant quandary ever of " Which came first? The chicken or the egg?" all still apply. Although the above question may seem intriguing, the correct answer of one celled viruses really does destroy any further philosophical debate.

So I conclude the following: adore the egg. Make it your False God and Ovum Idol. Put 164 in a basket, let them spill out, break and cover the earth with yolky goodness. Throw them at teachers you hate, cheating boyfriends, whorish coaches who leave town and any other person who needs to be taught a god damn lesson. If the recipe calls for 2 eggs--fucking double it and throw in 4. Collect crystal Faberge eggs and cheap plastic egg timers. Buy one of those silver egg slicers, put a string of beads on it and wear it as a necklace or better yet, give one as a wedding present. Everyone should respect the egg.

Picture guide: Michelle aka "Cheeze" designing the rare Jim Beam egg.

Seasoning

How in touch am I really with the changing of the seasons ?

Having just come through Winter without really wearing a coat I must conclude very little. Oh, it was plenty snowy and cold but...with the house set at a balmy 72, a remote car starter for the lowlife garageless subculture-(standard on the car I might add), offices and other places heated, uh , what exactly is the hardship?

The weather and seasons may change but the thermostat stays the same...Same deal in the hot hot hot sticky summer. Anymore I hardly notice. 72 degrees: all day, all over, wherever, whenever. Got that"conditioned air" going .

I remember growing up having one small room with a window A/C unit and the door kept closed for comfortable TV viewing for the family. 15' by 15 ' respite. Watched the Reds in 85 degree weather and never even felt remotely connected to what's outside. Conversely, I also had the pleasure of periodically using an outhouse at the lavish vacation get away. In humid conditions and complete with the small but effective hornet's nest above the inside left corner, that tweren't no picnic either. But you sure as fuck knew you were outside and in the elements.

My buddy Paul does not believe in A/C without the appearance of a 9 and a 0 in the temperature. Over 90, he gets conditioned. Under that number and he simply drinks cold beer and sweats.

Memo to self: maybe try and experience the environment a little more, huh?

What say you Mr Wilson?

Picture guide :

Upper left - My neighbor Jack snow blowing my sidewalk/driveway while I usually stand and wave to him in the window wearing a t-shirt and shorts.

Lower center: Kinsley cutting the first flowers in the back earlier today. Took about 5 minutes.

Upper right- Dawn at the Beach. I wasn't there.

Neeley

My grad school buddy Neeley recently died at age 52 likely from either an intended or miscalculated mixture of booze and xanax. He got his JD and then quickly concluded that lawyers were assholes and so returned to school to get his PhD in Philosophy where our paths crossed. We spent 3 years together. He studied and wrote alot . I pretty much just got high, read and then got high some more. We shared a few common pursuits: love of the absurd, getting drunk, laughing, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, thinking, and chasing girls until they spent the night in our great (but sparsely outfitted) condo. A twin mattress layed directly on the floor without boxsprings or a frame does have certain advantages when you are drunk and amorous and spatial boundaries and physics tend to only get in the way. The loves of Stacy Squirrel, Amy BearKitten, The Wilson Sisters, Tina Tank, Cathy Cream Pie et. al. were true and deep if rather short lived and fuzzy.

Neeley once told me he read a comic book about a WWII fighter Ace who would display his trophies, certificates, awards and other memorabilia on the wall. He said that's what he thought life was pretty much about. We just collect symbols of our experiences, hang them on the wall and periodically look at them or show them off to others. No more, no less.... Kids, jobs, vacation pictures, degrees- all the bullshit nuts and bolts of life- are really just trophies that remind us of what we did to get them. He perservered and collected plenty of those. No master plan or deity, just determination and distraction. I'm not sure he was ever happy but he was driven.

He always got really depressed around Christmas and would hope to catch some disease or other debilitating illness for the entire Holiday Season. He liked fast cars, collecting and shooting AK 47's and lifting weights religiously. I don't know what those mean.

He wrote two very scholarly books: "The Constitutional Right to Suicide" and "Schopenhauer: A Consistent Reading" ....You can Google them and buy them but I'm not sure why you would. They are pretty hard to read and follow. He liked to use an average of like 26 footnotes per page. He won lots of student awards at his college for being a great teacher. He took extra time to talk to the kids outside of class about "life things". They weren't an inconvenience but really the reason why he was there. He felt obliged and honored to return the favor that some professor had previously done for him. He liked to drink with them too. And still gave them funny names like Daisy, Katrina by the Marina and Rhonda Rat.

I found out he died by a message left by his "fiancee" who said he had been so happy lately. Usually when he called me and was drunk he just called her a fucking bitch and would then break out into some Country Western tune--slurred and off key by more than an octave. He always called her his girlfriend and I tend to think she was a bit of whack job. I could be wrong, but Neeley was never ever happy. Not now, not then , not ever. If she didn't know that then she wasn't a fucking bitch but would be better described as a fucking idiot.

He and I could be content for a second, satisfied for a bit longer, entertained, distracted, temporarily free through substances ( or girls) , pleased, excited, and proud but, ....happy? Probably not. But it was ok because the other stuff was enough. The collection of life trophies, a good drink, a cold beer, a contemplative walk, a rigorous drive in an old IROC, the intimacy from a woman and most of all a hearty laugh at ourselves, you, our lives and yours.

I hadn't seen him in a while and his recent pictures were that of an overweight, bloated, greying, tired man who looked older than his early fifties. Nothing like the grad school picture you see above. I don't know if that means anything except that the human aging process is not kind.

I'm not sure if it matters to me whether he actively set out to off himself or if it was an "accidental overdose". I guess I'd like to know. Hell, maybe he was really happy for the past month and figured that now may be as good a time as any to make it the last word of the last sentence of the last chapter. But I don't think so. He had just started a new term and above all, Neeley met his obligations--especially to his students. He was like a Philosophy Professor and Navy SEAL combined. He wouldn't have left anybody behind. Plus he would have left a note as his last writing effort.... and it would have had at least 50-75 footnotes in it. And he would have called one more time and sang Merle Haggard drunk and eagerly reminisce about the perfume that Amy BearKitten wore to class and how he fully understood Kierkegaard through her pheromones. And how my long hair looked like a horsetail when it was pulled back and that Stacy Squirrel would braid it in class--- not needing to take notes as there was an implicit, intended contract that a student who sleeps with their TA does not need to stress about tests.

And so I'm pretty sure he wanted to stick around. And that's why I'm sad. "Gone forever" is a fucking bitch too.