Wednesday, April 2, 2008

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

3 comments:

signifyinguyana said...

liked the peanut soup bit. As an adjunct instructor in English and a freelance writer, I can completely identify with low pay for invaluable work (some of those illiterates who refuse to pay well for good copy really deserve to see their own shit in print).

Got to try that curried curry sometime.

Anonymous said...

bread,curry,butter,seasoning achar? that's just nasty!

Anonymous said...

Go back to your PC days and make some Smush. Bicuit crushed in milk.