I wish you were off my body.

“It tastes like vinegar,” she explained.

Tonight, I reached something of a breakthrough with her over supper. Instead of having a polite thimbleful or two of the bottle I opened for dinner, she had a large glass.

“It’s really nice with the whipped cream on it,” she said. “Thanks Davey.”

She may have really liked it, or perhaps the alcohol was doing the talking. At least she’s happy; what more could one want for one’s mother?

Despite the success of my experiment, I’m having second thoughts: one more glass for my mother meant one less glass for me. Or at least it did until I opened a second bottle.

And, humanity being what it is, things get much worse. A couple of months ago I noted that poor Haitians are literally eating dirt cookies. And now, the food situation is even more appalling for the poorest of the poor: the increased price of “edible” dirt has made mud cookies unaffordable for the most impoverished Haitians.

There must be a way of shipping all the lakes of fat liposuctioned off obese, wealthy people to the world’s poorest communities; I hope some international aid agencies are researching such a program.

“There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.”

Professors should teach that in art schools, but they never will if they want to remain employed.

“That’s stupid,” Iris said, “What’s a digital kappastatometer got to do with babies?”

“And who’d want to suffocate a baby anyway?” I asked.

“Ask any mother,” Iris replied. “It’s a miracle of nature that more of us don’t do it.”

Aha; that made sense. I remembered the times my dear mother wanted to strangle me, and not without some justification. I suppose it is a miracle of nature that I’m still alive.

And speaking of famous communists, I discovered that Karl Marx was also a sweetheart; here’s an excerpt of a letter to his wife.

“There are actually many females in the world, and some among them are beautiful. But where could I find again a face whose every feature, even every wrinkle, is a reminder of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life?”

“Thanks,” Derek said, “I’ll give it a spin.”

And that’s when it hit me: music no longer needs to spin. Until recently, to be heard, recorded music needed to spin on wax cylinders, magnetized reels of wire or tape, vinyl or plastic disks, et cetera. Now, however, electronic storage means that I can listen to music from a device with no moving or spinning parts.

All that theory is nice, but, in practice, nonlinear music sounds the same as circular music.

I don’t know much about Dale Carnegie except that he’s the earnest huckster who wrote the book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” In other words, he can’t be cited without evoking images of a zealous, rosy-cheeked glad-hander.

And so, I was at a loss for how to explain my comfortable frugality, which even some of my learned friends confuse with impecuniousness. Or, rather, I was until Gary Snyder came to my conceptual rescue with his observation, “True affluence is not needing anything.”

Fortunately, I have no problem quoting Snyder, even if he is sometimes regarded as a poet.