Downstairs: it’s not my footstool, either.

(Well, to be fair, it started life as a cat condo, but he’s rather too big for it.)

I guess I’ll go do a few sets of pushups.

“Fifty-year-old Chartreuse,” he said. “I saw that movie The Bucket List, and decided there are some things I better just go ahead and experience. Tell me if you think it’s different from the regular kind. Do you know there are five kinds of Chartreuse…?” A geek at heart, he went on at some length while — not being under any obligation to operate a motor vehicle for the rest of the day — I poured a teaspoon of the stuff and investigated. It was woodier than everyday Chartreuse, a little bitterer, just as exhilarating. Possibly only worth the hundred-dollar-plus price tag — over double its younger sibling’s — to someone with plenty of dough to throw around, but then, Rafael is a bachelor with no dependents and a Federal pension waiting for him. He is on a quest for cloudberry liqueur – a Finnish specialty that he drank once, overseas — and has been surfing sites like The Whisky Exchange for oddities.

(I can tell you, as someone who regularly does arithmetic to be sure the mortgage will clear, that the standard green Chartreuse is worth the price. Exotic gardens bloom in your olfactory bulbs when you drink it. Wormwood essences as suave as silk taffeta wreathe your synapses. It is worth it.)

We drank it over the Christmas season, even offering to share with Miss Nickel Catmium, whose reaction to volatiles — all cats loathe them — is especially adorable: she sniffs the glass and does a double flinch. In the case of the Chartreuse she actually jumped back a foot.

Tonight Rafael turned up with something new for me.

That is a plastic — PETE — bottle of Pinnacle Imitation Whipped Cream Flavored Vodka. I have had my concerns about plastic water bottles in the past, at least in hot weather. Acid fruit juices apparently leach more antimony from PETE than water. I can’t imagine what happens with alcohol. Rafael regularly swaps health information with me — cutting-edge, out-of-mainstream stuff about toxins and hormone disruptors and nutrition. I have no idea what came over him. It was a present; what in the fuck do you say?

Whipped Cream?

I am the world’s foremost expert at accepting a questionable gift with an enthusiasm tailored to the intent. Someone, somewhere, may still have a pair of matted landscapes printed on blue foil that I got for a birthday thirty years ago. I hope no one spent too much money framing them.

It’s a two liter bottle.

I ran right to the kitchen after I finished work and juiced eight stalks of chard, two apples, four ounces of lettuce and a beet.

It is worse when the speakers (or writers) clearly do not even understand the words they are uttering.

“This is one of the few unforced errors of the Romney campaign to date,” said one senior Republican strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Voters demand transparency, and what they saw as a sideshow became a central tenant of an unhelpful discussion that cost them.”

Okay, did the guy they interviewed actually say that (ignoring, to start with, far simpler constructions like “the focus of”,  for a term more appropriate to the foundations of a philosophy or a religion, then using the wrong fucking word even for that)? Did the guy who took the quote write it down that way? And are there any copy editors anywhere at the Washington Post any more?

I shouldn’t let it rent space in my head, but I can’t help it.

_______________________

*This must drive other people crazy too. That post is my all time greatest hit, surpassing even the ones with “porn” in the titles.

We have reached an episode featuring Glaucus’ son, an aspiring Olympic competitor with a tireless training regimen.

“Is Young Glaucus going to compete at the Games?” Cornelius asked me. He did not ask Young Glaucus, because Young Glaucus never said much. At the moment he was carrying out an exercise where he crouched on all fours, slowly raising and holding his opposite arms and legs; it would have been straightforward, had he not been supporting one of our larger baggage packs on his huge shoulders at the time. As his sinews flexed and trembled, I felt myself wince.

It sounded delicious. As soon as I could get the Engineer into the gym with me I got down quadrupedally on the floor matting and, to grasp the form, had him set a twenty-five pound plate on my back while I extended alternate arms and legs. The move made refined demands of that cerebellar pivot that maintains one’s center of gravity, while promising considerable honing of the triceps and hip flexors. Even more serendipitously, the effort pointed up an unsuspected evil spirit lurking in my left hamstring, when for weeks I have been trying to exterminate a pain that I thought originated in the adductor group a quarter turn inward.

I felt an enormous urge to contact Ms. Davis somehow and ask what other Olympic calisthenics she could recommend, but it seemed politer to finish the novel first, and the time zones were all wrong besides.

I think I’ll try a forty-five pound wheel next time, if I can get anyone in the morning posse to deposit it on me.

I never expected this hostility from the gallant Fergie, who has hitherto been a compendium of feline virtues, grooming his girlfriend, burying smartly in the litter box, adoring his human Mommy. In fact, since Torvald’s advent, he adores her even more. He sits on me. He purrs loudly. He mews winsomely. He is a neurotic, Woody-Allen-like bundle of insecurity.

When he is not annexing me he pointedly stakes his claim to his girlfriend.

Me? I just live here.

Because apparently, a platypus needs to be soaked regularly. At least in my dream world.

Whether or not this has anything to do with attending a screening of the Song of Bernadette, involving the miraculous healing waters of Lourdes (which emerged in what was originally the municipal dump), is up in the air. Or down in the commode, depending.

I have no idea what exactly she expects to happen.

Don’t ask me about the behavior of quanta. My vision is crappy on a good day and they are dinky little buggers. Still, I can see a lot better than the two legally-blind friends I was ferrying back to their digs in a nearby “senior village” after a pleasant Thai lunch, and I knew where I was, so I should have been a little more on top of things. A man in a uniform, aiming what I at first thought might be a bar-code reader, leapt in front of me as I coasted up to a stop sign with my foot floating above the accelerator pedal, and began saying something made unintelligible by his island accent but out of which I gradually sieved the information that he had clocked me at twenty-seven miles an hour and I needed to pull over, please.

His partner, a good-natured woman with a radio at her hip and a Security patch on her jacket, wrote my name and license plate number up on a citation informing me that the incident had been recorded and habitual violation would result in my being banned from driving on the campus, where the posted limit is twenty.

I guess I was just unlucky enough to hit speed-trap day but I felt quite the desperado;  normally I am the person stubbornly driving the speed limit, whipped around and honked at by drivers in a rush to get to the next stop light. My friends are probably still laughing. I just hope they got the son of a bitch in the Lexus that tailgated me into the place two hours earlier when I arrived to pick them up, hugging my bumper at 45 for the last quarter mile I spent on the Fairfax County Parkway. And I’m glad they didn’t check my breath for strong green tea.

Obama said he did not personally intervene in [HHS Secretary] Sebelius’ decision, but explained that “as the father of two daughters, I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over the counter medicine.” Sebelius “could not be confident that a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drug store would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteriers be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect,” he said, adding, “I think most parents would probably feel the same way.” [Source: ThinkProgress, Dec. 8, 2011]

Earth to President Obama: “common sense” is not the same as “it squicks me out.”

This whole thing reeks of a long-observed (at least by me) tendency of allegedly “liberal” or “progressive” people to be only as liberal and progressive about sex as their comfort level decrees. It’s the sexual-ethics equivalent of “but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one” or “I don’t mind people being gay if they don’t flaunt it.”

Obama and Sebelius, after all, can’t have bought into the social-conservative confabulation of the morning-after pill with the “abortion pill.” I’d be surprised if they really imagined that the drug — a nasty speedball of synthetic hormones good for only one thing, not anything that someone’s going to cook and snort — is going to tempt tween-agers to have sex when they otherwise wouldn’t or to abuse it in some incomprehensible way. For one thing, have you seen the price tag?

No, alas, I think this is just a permutation of what I saw back in the crazy 70s at good old Bard College, sometimes referred to as “The Little Red Whorehouse on the Hudson” after Walter Winchell’s daughter got knocked up there (maybe he really believed it couldn’t have happened at Vassar). Bard was quick off the mark with co-ed dormitories, sexual health treatment and referrals in the college clinic, and a general relaxed attitude toward cohabiting couples that only tightened up if some parent complained. Foolish me, I assumed a moral compass that tended to point in the direction of Robert Heinlein and Bertrand Russell, variously, would place me right at home, but that was before I discovered the Cheshire Scowl — Wayland Young’s deft term for the attempt of liberated-wannabes to have it both ways by finding some line to draw or guilt to trip, so as to say “I still have standards.”

You know how it goes, right? A prude is someone who’s had fewer sexual partners than you, and a slut is someone who’s had more. I met women who were living with their boyfriends in the dorm but got all sniffy and disapproving when, in a moment of idle chat, I was moved to tick on my fingers how many of the dorms I’d had sex in myself. (The organ loft of the chapel was a bonus point, I suppose.) I met guys who were all for sex outside marriage but saw something wrong with contraception (fortunately their views did not affect me personally) because it was “cheating” to “avoid the consequences.” (WTF?) I found out my own goddam best friend from high school, who had gone and gotten birth control pills in her junior year because she was madly in love and determined to sleep with Mr. Wonderful, thought I was a slut because I boinked guys with whom I was not madly in love. (Conversely, of course, there were the people who wanted to call me a prude because I did not choose to join them in threesomes, though that is a matter for another discussion. Freedom means freedom to decline on your own behalf, after all.)

You could say that this is TMI but I am not sure I can make my point without it: about the jaw-dropping personal shock of discovering that “sexual freedom” stops at the edge of some “liberated” people’s comfort zones. Outside that zone, violators are to be shamed at the least and de-legitimized at worst, by people who want credit for being “liberated” but are still looking over their shoulder for the Cheshire scowl of the parents and institutions they claim to no longer depend on for approval.

So here is Barack Obama, with the balls — if I may say so — to ignore research and medical science and the, ah, common sense observation that something which has to be asked for at the counter and sells for fifty bucks is not going to be carelessly misused, or used at all by people of any age — unless they really, really need it.

President Obama can have no direct experience of what that’s like. It’s funny though that, as the “father of two daughters,” he hasn’t wondered enough about it to keep him from talking bullshit.