I’m sorry.

I’m not.

Avocado comes from the Aztec’s Nahuatl language, and means “fruit of the avocado tree” and “testicle.” I wonder which definition was first? Perhaps the ancient Aztecs who discovered the first testicle said, “Damn, that sure looks like the fruit of an avocado tree!”

Petra served some excellent guacamole at her party this afternoon, so I employed my guacamole conservation strategy. It’s simple: I just stand by the chips and guacamole, and greet everyone who approaches the table with the same question. “Say, did you know that the word avocado comes from the Aztec word for testicle?” A few people still go for the guacamole, but most shuffle away with a nervous smile.

“You can’t trust people who cook as badly as that,” Chirac told the leaders of Germany and Russia. “After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.”

Chirac continued after Gerhard Schroder and Vladimir Putin laughed at his centuries-old stereotype.

“The only thing they [the English] have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow,” Chirac added.

“The thing one must remember about the French,” retorted Britain’s Tony Blair, “is that all the smart and ambitious citizens were killed during the revolution, and all the ones with a modicum of spine died in subsequent wars. And thus what we have today is a nation of primitive agricultural peasants subsisting on European Union handouts.”

I think the British and the French would be lost without each other.

“Oh,” I replied, “it says on the receipts; those were for office supplies.”

“You needed that many office supplies for a week?” she asked with professional skepticism.

“It was for those ridiculously expensive little ink cartridges,” I lied. “My portable printer blew one of the centrifugal Meizner pumps and it went through globs of ink.”

“Oh, I see,” she responded, even though we both knew that she didn’t.

In fact, the receipts provided printed documentation of all the beer and kimchi I purchased from grocery storess. But, since she couldn’t read the Korean characters, she was happy to pay for my OBs and snacks.

I wonder if there just might be such a thing as a centrifugal Meizner pump?

I told Heinrich it was fine with me if some poor, unimaginative advertising serfs in Frankfurt “appropriated” my work. (I used the word “appropriate” in the spirit of fairness, since I never plagiarize, but I do appropriate freely.) I added that I also didn’t mind the Germans’ lame homage since their imitation was inferior to my original.

I’d just about given up on having an aesthetically rewarding experience when I finally found a piece I liked. The untitled sculpture consisted of a couple of two hundred and fifty-five gallon oak wine barrels, one of which appeared to be half saturated with red wine. Both barrels had a question mark chalked on the front.

The work smelled just a bit like vinegar, a rare olfactory dimension. I wonder why so much art stinks figuratively and so little art stinks literally?

When I asked a curator about the piece, he told me he was not a curator; he added that I’d wandered out of the sculpture garden and onto the vineyard’s loading dock. As for my favorite sculpture, it turns out that he and his learned colleagues were trying to figure out what was fermenting inside the old barrels.