I trust my enemies; they rarely disappoint.

“What are you up to?” I asked. “I’m always looking for ideas to plagiarize.”

“Actually,” she admitted, “I haven’t exactly quite figured out what I’m doing yet. In fact, I’ve been drinking liters of cough medicine and hallucinating, but ‘working on a new art project’ seemed like a better thing to say.”

“One person’s demon is another person’s muse,” I replied.

I haven’t slurped cough syrup since I was a young boy; I wonder if I’m missing out on anything?

“Eat my food.”

Dr. Poticha has a huge cabinet full of whisky and wine. Unfortunately, none of those bottles may be considered as perishables, and are thus off-limits to a relatively ethical housesitter like myself. And so, that left the bread basket and the refrigerator.

The icebox yielded many rewards: smoked salmon, cheeses, yogurt, and lots of other goodies that might be technically inedible in a couple of weeks. And then there was a container labeled, “Taboule Bulgar Wheat Salad.”

The wheat salad looked disconcertingly disconcerting. White speckles peppered the greenish mixture, perhaps mold? The alleged food looked suspicious, so I tossed it into the garbage can.

On the other hand, the bowl of pesto was covered in an unmistakably blue-fuzz fungus. I scraped off the disgusting growth, and enjoyed a delightful repast.

And so, there’s an evolutionary moral to this story. Tasty foods like pesto survive; weird concoctions like “wheat salad” do not. Pesto will no doubt be around in a couple of millennia; I wouldn’t be surprised if taboule bulgar wheat salad dies before I do.

“That’s like talking about one’s approach to sex,” I replied, “it’s something well-behaved and genteel people don’t discuss.”

“And neither do I,” I added after seeing Cedric’s quizzical expression.

“What would you say if I put a gun to your head and asked you the same question?” Cedric continued.

“I suppose I’d ask you what kind of gun,” I replied. “Maybe it’s my fond memories of Austria and Austrians, but I’ve always been partial to Glocks.”

Cedric took a more practical approach: he put a bottle of Bunnahabhain to my head, then again asked me to describe my approach to art.

“I think it’s important to set impossible goals,” I replied uncertainly, “so I want to put the bomb back in bombastic.”

If I can’t remember any details, I suppose oxygen really isn’t that interesting after all. The more likely possibility, which I’m reticent to acknowledge, is that I don’t have even a tenuous grasp of anything to do with science.

These recordings, made when I was entering puberty, are sadly hilarious. It’s obvious that the editors has little original visual material with which to work, so there’s lots of gimmicky “special effects” spliced together with lots of images of the musicians’ derrieres. Ironically—or perhaps not—the ensemble’s videos got worser and worser as the quartet became famouser and famouser. Despite my firm belief that beer is not a depressant, I thought it was pathetic that the films got more sophomoric as the musicians became more senior.

As usual, there’s nothing wrong with whole lot of dross that whole lot beer can’t ameliorate, mostly. Those ginormous Elvis Presley sideburns, though, still deeply disturb me.

“How can you eat such a monstrosity when people are becoming morbidly obese?” Antoinette asked Conrad after he asked for extra guacamole and sour cream on his burrito.

“How can you justify eating that when people are starving?” Conrad shot back after Antoinette ordered a simple rice-and-beans burrito.

“Relax,” I advised. “Here’s how you eat any burrito. Bite off a piece. Chew. Swallow. Repeat as desired, but stop before you vomit.”

Fortunately, my atypical words of wisdom ended that debate.

Antoinette and Conrad grudgingly accepted my argument. I think they finally realized that a burrito parlour is a place for culinary satiety, not a greasy venue for sophistical discussion.