Food for thought…

The rent is due. My son’s private school fees are due. And yet I spent today (meaning yesterday) at home, away from the first day of a $100k plus a month job, and not going in to collect a considerable sum owed to me by the Chronicle, not going out and “hustling that ass” (or brain, rather) like I can do so well when the mood comes upon me.

I have been fortunate that I am blessed with good friends, an understanding landlord and landlady, and a puzzled but supportive family. Make that, good friends with money. I have a quirky moral compass when it comes to the work that actually makes me a living. To sum it up, I can make a decent piece on the side churning out editorials for Pravda (formerly know as the Guyana Chronicle) and even better money if I get a bit more fully involved in the news gathering/manufacturing process. And I don’t necessarily have to go into the office. Yet I refuse to, sickened as I am by the rabid and infantile efforts at propaganda that is pervading virtually every page of “the Chronic”. Where are the good old days of Roberto? Lord knows I may not have agreed with every single pronouncement but at least the man was anything but inept.

Martin Carter, who is remembered – and quite appropriately so – more for his poetry than his stint as Minister of Information under LFS Burnham, of course put it beautifully with his statement about a mouth being always muzzled by the food it eats to live. The thing is, I’ve never been particularly fond of soup and as whorish I can be with my talents, I am also very selective. Particularly if its peanut soup.

That is the primary reason that, as I am writing this, I have a total about $30 in coins on my kitchen and have just finished a delicious meal of curried curry and rice. Yes, I meant “curried curry”. Quick recipe – take an old piece of bread accidentally left over in the fridge and thus dehydrated, two spoons of Indi Special Madras curry, some all-purpose green seasoning, a spoon of achar, a half-spoon of butter, a couple leaves of fat-leaf thyme and fry that fucker in a nice thick saucepan, then add water until it reaches a nice thick consistency. Serves one starving artist for both dinner and breakfast.

On that note, I leave you with another snippet from one the stories to appear in Fictions:

“Of course in the end you do not ever reach the point where you sell your soul. But when the twin wolves of hunger and debt come a-baying, you discover that you may – as no doubt Shakespeare and Carter did – in fact hold it in pawn just a little…”

Excerpt from “The Hardest Thing”, Fictions