confession (and so it goes)

edit: fixed markup so it actually makes cognitive sense

I didn't like Vonnegut.

He had one good book in him (Slaughterhouse-Five) and then he kept writing it again. Norman Mailer had a similar trajectory. The war, then The Naked and the Dead, followed by celebrity and admiration and a string of terrible books. Vonnegut had good ideas after that, but not very good books. He's a bad influence on other writers, and he was a bad influence on himself in the same way. That self-important, nearly echolalic fairy-tale storytelling style never varied. Reading Vonnegut never felt like hearing a story; it was more like being backed into a corner at a cocktail party by the man himself while he told his too-familiar stories yet again.

Like Tom Robbins and John irving, Kurt Vonnegut wrote young adult novels that were sold to grown-ups. Like other counterculture heroes and hippie gurus, he was an unmoveable conservative who never changed his style or his message. And like the Grateful Dead, he had armies of fans who would never doubt him.

I've felt this way about Vonnegut for a long time. There's been more violent opposition to this opinion is than most of my tiresome and admittedly annoying political and philosophical ideas or even my macaroni & cheese recipe. I have lost two "LJ Friends" over Vonnegut and I shouldn't talk books with some of my friends in case The Topic comes up.

I can't say so for sure, but I think Vonnegut himself tired of being a sacred object.

Drug Addiction

1. Yesterday I ran out of milk. This is a "can't happen" in my household because I put milk in my coffee. Without milk there is no coffee, and a day without coffee is like night. When I staggered into the kitchen I realized how screwed I was. I knew I had some chocolate covered espresso beans in the fridge, but that wouldn't be a complete solution. From experience, I knew that nothing but liquid coffee would do.
   
   In the carafe was yesterday's leftover coffee. It was tepid and slightly burnt from going the whole two hours before the heat element switched off. There was about a pint of it. I poured it into a pint beer glass, chugged it (blrughggl), and chased it with two of the beans so that the chocolate would sweeten the acrid taste of room temperature slightly burnt coffee.
   
   Then I realized it. This was the morning that so many alcoholics had described. Bad liquor with no ice, chased with something else, because without the hair of the dog the DTs would start. With the bitter rancid taste of dead coffee on my lips I started to laugh at myself.
   
   
2. I'm taking Vicodin right now for torticollis and focal dystonia of shoulder muscles. I don't take painkillers, haven't since I was 14. I'm always interested in risk, so I read up on the stuff. Obviously one shouldn't take more than what's prescribed, and it's not a long-term solution to anything. And it's well known that mixing the stuff with alcohol is dangerous.
   
   Of course this stuff is widely abused because doctors and dentists give it out freely and people share and trade and sell it. And the abuse is sometimes just taking many at once, and sometimes washing it down with alcohol. This is clearly risky behavior because of the synergistic effects and the possible coma/breathing problems/brain damage/death.
   
   But there's something else about Vicodin. It's what used to be called "Tylenol #3," and it's a blend of codeine and acetaminophen (Tylenol). It's recently been noted that Tylenol is a liver toxin in large amounts. For example, people do a suicide gesture with a bottle of the stuff and later feel fine, and then drop dead a week later because their liver has been killed.
   
   And as you can imagine, Tylenol and alcohol is a very bad mix. Because drunks get a lot of headaches, they sometimes eat handfuls of Tylenol or painkillers that contain it, worsening their liver damage tremendously.
   
   Since the last 20 years has seen a huge rise in abuse of drugs like Vicodin, particularly mixed with alcohol, one has to wonder: what kind of liver disease wave are we going to see starting in about ten years? Do any of these people know that they're not only rolling the dice with coma, but destroying their livers so fast that it's not so much dice as just suicide?

Mac and Cheese Video Pron

http://ignatz.buzznet.com/user/video/play/219188/

I was particularly happy to capture the sizzling noises right out of the oven in the big cast iron Dutch oven.

Embedding doesn't work from there to here. Gotta fix that.