All Wrong

Tonight, I was cooking dinner; Grilled pork chops, bulgar wheat, and oven-roasted baby carrots.

Now, when I’m roasting stuff, I often use a heavy frying pan. I own a number of very good such pans, and they go easily from stovetop to oven.

Most of my frying pans have nice, stay-cool handles. No matter how hot the pan gets, the handle stays touchable. At least, that works when you’re on the stove top.

I have trouble learning some things though. Little things, like fire burns.

So of course when my carrots came out of the oven, I plated them nicely, and then turned to clean up, picking up my frying pan to move it toward the sink.

The handle – like the rest of the pan, and the carrots that were in it, and the inside of the oven – was something like 375°F. And of course I don’t have the sense to just drop a hot pan, but instead, tend to set it down carefully (respect for my cooking gear runs deep; much deeper, evidently, than self-preservation or pain threshold.

You’d think eventually I’d learn, right? Well, ok, maybe not. Not if you know me.

There’s really nothing like the sound of skin sizzling, is there?

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After plunging my hand into icewater, I took a look and found a handful of blisters in a palm similar in color to the pork I’d just taken off the grill. Guess I don’t have quite the calluses I used to.

This I thought, is going to smart a bit.

I finished my dinner, and then washed down a double handfull of vicodin with a Duval. And then wrapped my hand in ice and figured, you know, what goes well with vicodin?

Morphine.

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She had black hair like ravens crawling over her shoulders
All the way down
She had a smile that swerved
She had a smile that curved
She had a smile that swerved all over the road
It’s all wrong all wrong
All wrong all wrong
She had a way of making people feel good to be around her
As it should be
It’s all wrong all wrong
All wrong all wrong (x2)
All wrong
And when she laughs I travel back in time
Something flips the switch and I collapse inside
It’s all wrong all wrong
All wrong all wrong (x2)
All wrong

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I don’t do favorites lists the way I once did.

I used to have lists; favorite albums, favorite bands, favorite songs. Favorite concerts. They’d be ordered (if fluid), and they’d be conditional (favorite songs to have sex to, favorite driving albums).

I had them ordered and ranked, and at one point even sorted my Lps by favoritness, rather than alphabetical.

It’s all way too much work for me now; and in any case it’s generally too fluid to mean anything beyond right now.

There are exceptions. I can pick a favorite single album; I have a list (un-ranked, but consistant) of my five favorite jazz albums. So when one of my daughters asked me the other day, what’s your favorite band, instead of my usual I don’t have a favorite (an answer they hate), I found I had one.

Morphine.

I don’t need more on the list than that; If I think about it I start feeling like Dick and Barry from High Fidelity. But there’s that one.