No More Complaining

As a writer, I am sometimes ruled by the desire to pour a little light into a darkened corner and reveal the ugly truths about life and the vermin crawling around in here. I've mentioned before the project that's underway on my street and I've also mentioned that I can't seem to determine what it's all about. The digging, the equipment, the bits and pieces of detritus left lying around at the end of each day, have me wondering exactly what's going on and who's to blame. I decided, yesterday, that it was time someone found out.
I dug out my workboots, an old pair of workpants and a spaghetti stained t-shirt and made my way through the half-ton trucks, around the inexplicable piles of dirt that have been left lying everywhere and finally, after picking up someone's hard hat, to a group of men who were leaning on the cleanest backhoe I have ever seen. I walked slowly, dragging my boots and stirring up a cloud of dust, grunting at anyone who looked at me and punctuated my arrival with the loudest fart I could muster. No one looked up and the conversation carried on as if I were invisible.
"...and I told him that if he expects me to stay one minute after three that he'd be paying me $75 an hour.", said the guy leaning on the front tire of the backhoe. Eminem was pumping from the cab at around 120 decibels and the motor was doing double time keeping the air conditioner in the ring against the thirty degree heat of the outside world.
"I know, I know.", said another guy, who rested a can of Diet Coke on his card table sized belly. "That pool of yours don't chlorinate itself, does it?"
"Fuckin' eh, man. An I ain't spending an extra minute in this pig slop slum at the end of my day. If I don't get to Kanata before four, that friggin' pool boy'll be telling my wife that it don't need no scrubbing with the toothbrush today, lazy som-bitch."
"He'll be scrubbing something, though, eh Skinny?", said the guy with the white hard hat, and they all laughed at that.
I didn't really understand what they were talking about but I joined in the laughter just the same and, I suppose now, that was my mistake.
"What you laughing at, boy?", said Coke Can.
"And what are you doing out of your hole?", said White Hat.
"I, uh, just came over to express my outrage at...uh, the corporate man who...uh...", I was caught off guard.
"Are you speaking English, boy?", said White Hat, "'Cos I know you didn't just insult this city and it's wise councilors, the ones that keep you working all day so's you can crawl home to your shack on Rideau and crack up with your whore girls all night long. You must be speaking' some sort of city folk slang, so I'm gonna ignore it. Now get your sorry ass back in that hole and you dig 'til four o'clock and don't come out a minute before, y'hear?"
"Yeah, 'til four o' five, even.", said Coke Can, "And don't think we won't know how long you stayed in there, 'cos these fine poverty stricken' folk living up and down this street will tell me. Not a damn one of them won't phone the complaint line if there ain't at least one man working' after three. Har, har."
"Git.", said White Hat, "And maybe I won't call my brother Bill at City Hall. Union be damned."
I really had no choice. I jumped in the nearest hole I could find and picked up a shovel, despite the fact that it was on someone's front lawn, and I started digging. I knew Coke Can spoke the truth because whenever I looked out from my hole I could see the frightened stares of the people who lived up and down my street, looking at me with pity from behind the drawn drapes of their houses, but I also knew that no one would speak up for me because, in their eyes, I was one of them. I was a city worker.
As the strains of "Smack My Bitch Up" faded into the distance, I took a chance and poked my head out from my hole and noticed six or seven heads poking out of holes up and down the block. It was four o' five and I guess, now that the bosses were gone, it was safe to come out. We all gathered by the backhoe, quiet now and pristinely clean against the backdrop of dirt and shattered concrete and commiserated about sore backs and sun burns and before long a pole thin guy, about six feet tall, said, "Man, I hate that guy."
"The Super?", I asked.
"The Super? Are you nuts? The Super's the reason I got this kick-ass job. No, I mean that little weasel who keeps writing all that crap about us every day. He's giving city workers a bad name."
A chorus of agreement met his pronouncement and I began to feel very small in this wilderness of steel toed boots and Coleman lunch coolers.
"Just think boys, two more years of this and we'll be the ones leaning on the back hoe.", said Slim.
"Yeah, that'll be sweet. I already got my eye on a sweet little place out in Manotick. Got a pool and a hot tub."
"Nice. I'm almost there. By the end of this summer I'll have close to 30,000 saved for a down payment on a place near the river. Might have to sell the 150, though. I should have listened to you guys. I was shooting a little high for a simple city worker."
And maybe I've got it wrong, too. If I had to spend every day doing what I did yesterday, even for two years, I'd want to drive home in the biggest truck I could afford to the biggest house I could afford in the nicest neighbourhood I could afford. As it is, here I sit in my basement apartment bitching about the hole on my lawn.
They'll be finished right around the time summer winds down into fall and we won't see them again until next year's snow melts, but by then the city will have decided that another street needs to be ripped up and refurbished and you'll have to deal with them. Just don't piss them off or you'll end up like me, sore and sunburned and hiding in your hole until at least four o'clock everyday.

"Hello. I'm very clean."

A personality is a sales pitch. I like that. I should, as I said it, and you can use it.

I have decided that when anyone asks me what it is I do for a living I'm just going to make up stuff on the spot. Polite society won't question a thing. We do put a little too much emphasis on things like that. What we should be worried about is if this person we just met is going to follow us home and steal the stereo, or fold over all the pages of the books in the library. We should be asking questions like, "Are you a good person?" or "Have you showered this morning?"
The handshake should take care of the "friendly" part. How often have you considered that when you shake someone's hand you are assuring them that you don't have any intent to hurt them? If you do intend to hurt them you shouldn't shake their hand, just so they know ahead of time. The smile is a tough one. If I smile at the cat he thinks I'm being aggressive by showing him my teeth. He's small but he never lets a challenge like that go by without some sort of rebuttal.
Eye contact is a tough one, too. Too little and you're about to get walked all over. Too much and you might have to fight to get out with your coat. Staring is just downright creepy. Try it and you'll see what I mean. Experimenting with these things will ensure that you have an interesting day.
I have a job interview today so I thought it might be fun to explore the arena of human body language. I'll let you know how I do.

Morning Already?

I have to admit to being a little ticked off at the city right now. They've blocked off my street, loaded it with heavy equipment, some fancy new pipes and pieces of crap I can't identify and then went to work at the other end. For a month I've been veering in and around all of this just trying to get home and the work hasn't even come close to my place yet. I leave before they start, get home after they've finished and can't tell if they've done anything. Summer in Ottawa.

You can take the idiot out of the cesspool, but.... I was happily meandering home a couple of nights ago when I saw a girl on the side of the street waving at me. She wanted me to stop and I actually began to slow down. I think I may have forgotten where I was, temporarily, and thought, "She looks like she needs help." It's not that we don't have prostitutes where I grew up, they just owned houses and raised families like the rest of us.

I stood in the middle of the field, a beer in my hand and two in the bag, waiting for the fireworks to start. There was a lot of yelling and laughing that I didn't quite follow. I was busy looking up at the stars. That was when the first one went off. I single shooter volleyed straight up and flashed briefly against the real thing and from all around me, out of the darkness came the disappointed chorus of hisses and booing. I turned around and began to walk back to the party painfully aware that as hard as we try we just can't seem to come close to the real thing.

I floated on a chaise in a pool that was a degree or two cooler than me, just enough to make the heat seem less threatening. I put all of the concerns and worries out of my mind, which for me is something like building a skyscraper out of wet lasagna noodles, and concentrated on the ticklish feeling of the water lapping at the soles of my feet. I cracked one eye open just as two of the girls passed by the pool in their bikinis, towels in hand, and thought that maybe being single wasn't so bad. I decided that chivalry was the best course and rolled off the chaise and into the water. "Hey girls, you can take this." I am so smooth.

The guy at the corner store, across the street from me, wants me dead. I know this because last month when I tried to quit smoking he persisted in trying to sell me cigarettes. He said, "You can't quit. Here, do you want cigarette? No? You will smoke again, my friend and I'll be here." I thought it was pretty creepy and decided it was time to set up surveillance myself. On the other hand, it may be that he's looking square into a trend that will likely end in his having to close up shop. I don't think that anybody buys anything else from him. After watching him for a week I decided that, while he definitely is a weird guy, he isn't trying to hasten my demise. He's just waiting until I do it to myself. Smug bastard.

I can't remember if I like rainy days or not. Meh, maybe it doesn't matter one way or the other.

P.S.
The spell checker doesn't know what lasagna is.

Redivider

The darkened room had an aura of disintegration that wove a spell around Linus so that he sat confused and surprised while the long hours that had unwound into minutes and then seconds, co-mingled and found partners, joining themselves to once again tally time, just slightly out of synch with their progenitors. The armchair was worn through to wood, here and there, but his mind's eye couldn't discern the direction of the decay. Beside the chair was a squat table, too low for easy use, that was covered in tinfoiled packages of meat, mashed potatoes and peas with knives and forks jutting out at angles that suggested mathematical anomalies to him, as he drifted in and out of sleep.
It was there, in the dark, that he was confronted with the ghost of his father, whose hard and expectant looks made him feel unmasked and at a loss for words. It was there, in the quiet, that he found pieces of some old ceramic bowl, painted garishly to imitate Klee's whispered secrets, shattered into fragments reminding him of fishing lures and then a cottage hidden from view by the trees, over grown and contemptuous. He shrugged these off, wishing for sweeter dreams than these and decided it was time to clean up the apartment and, maybe, go out for a paper.
It was early and the streets were still crowded with the weekend tourists who filtered into the Market for a glimpse, from a safe distance, of the wilderness of human activities that skyscrapers and all night restaurants couldn't disguise. During the day it was quaint and enough to titillate them and slightly rancid with smells that they could take home to frame beside their memories of Europe in '82 and Mexico the year before. Linus didn't smell anything but asphalt and confused it for nineteen ninety six and the road crew that hovered in front of his apartment for three days catcalling anything that moved while waiting for the horn of the lunch truck.
He paused at the entrance of the smoke shop as three young children confused their exit and tried to attach flags to each others backpacks normally reserved for school books and home-made lunches, emptied now for cheap Peruvian treasures and a pamphlet on how to care for their newly applied Henna tattoos. He picked out three newspapers to add to the pile in his apartment and a pack of Marlboro Lights to keep him company and stood patiently behind a woman who had heard that you had to haggle with street vendors if you wanted them to take you seriously. She wore a wildly coloured shawl around her shoulders, crocheted with thick wool, that presented Linus with a blackboard full of potentials created by the shifting angles that her gesticulating arms brought into existence. He resisted the temptation to wipe it clean and start over again and when he looked up she was gone.
He held the plastic bag tight to chest, on the return trip, careful not to bump these cultural interlopers, afraid of the strange viral infections he believed they could pass on to him and held his breath until the elevator doors closed behind him and his ascension was begun. As he shut the apartment door on the noise and the human pollution he registered his anxiety and dutifully waved it off. In the bathroom he stared deeply into to his own eyes, breaking the number one rule of neurotics and laughed to himself while he created the revised eyebrow ballet. In the kitchen he practiced standing absolutely still while his dinner warmed and then he poured himself a glass of milk, even though he hated it, and at last he turned out the light.
And in the living room he settled into the mottled armchair, turned on the t.v. and opened the foil-shrouded Roast Beef Deluxe on his knee as the day, the hours and the minutes, bored by their cohesion, dissolved into their component parts and hid themselves in the darkened room, playing hide-and-go-seek without flashlights, giggling out loud when found and wondering how long they could stay out and play.

The Sandwich Man

Anyone who has ever had the dubious pleasure of sitting down to lunch with me knows how much I like a good sandwich. And probably knows how much I complain about the lack of a good sandwich on most of the menus presented to me during that lunch. In a town where the success rate of a new restaurant is roughly one in ten, I think I have the answer. Put a good sandwich on your menu and you might just survive that difficult first year of business.

I can hear you, already, saying, "O.K. , what makes a good sandwich?", and I have an answer in one word. Bread. Did you hear me? I said Bread.

I know about the temptation to try new things, oh lord do I know about temptation, but the basic definition of a sandwich is something, anything, between two slices of bread. White, brown, sourdough and rye, I really don't care but let me state for now and for all of eternity that wrapping the same ingredients in a flour tortilla is not a sandwich. Wraps. What a waste of time.

In all things, care must be taken to indulge oneself and to search out the small things in life that make us happy. People who smile up and down the halls at work don't have a great secret for their happiness, they have hundreds. Every minute of every day contains the potential for a life altering event, and given the proper perspective, I consider the discovery of a restaurant that has a good sandwich to be one of the highlights of my week. I don't necessarily want a stupendous and mountainous stack of meats, cheeses and pickles but I do want something as good as the one I could make at home, waiting for Coronation Street to begin. If I'm going to give you ten bucks to build me one, you'd better do it right.

Its time for a shout out to my current favourite sandwich place. If you haven't tried it, go to the Mayflower on Elgin, at lunch time, and order their daily deli sandwich. They're simple and yet superb. They're straightforward but still made mystical by their rare appearances around town.
I know you've got your favourite too, so out with it. And I don't want to hear about anything that isn't between two slices of bread. It isn't a sandwich.

Thank you for your attention. Now go back to work.

Butter the Wise

I was there the day that Butter the Wise got his new wheels. It was fucked up, really. This middle class suburban guy on the inside, Jamaican ex-pat on the outside bought himself a Toyota Celica and had it fleshed out with a massive stereo cassette system and the first neon I ever saw I on a car, I shit you not. I was allowed to drive my mom's k-car if she didn't need it for groceries or something and I wasn't allowed to take it out at night at all. The fact that Butter had his own Celica was definitely fucked up.
It was me who first called him Butter the Wise. I didn't know him from Adam when someone told me they called him Butter because he was a fat boy. Big and fat. He played football on the defensive line kind of fat. I was standing in the pit one day and he walked up and asked me if I played guitar. I told him I did and he said he was looking for a band for a party he was having. He was going to charge ten bucks to get in and use the cash to buy booze and food and considering that it was likely that there would be a hundred plus people there he was going to make some money on the side to pay for a band. So I said....
"They should call you Butter the Wise, man.", and the whole place went quiet. Apparently nobody called him Butter to his face, but he knew about it and he was wise, so I didn't get punched in the head and he became Butter the Wise to everybody.
Butter's mom was what you might call robust. She was pretty tough on Butter and his brother but you could tell she was pretty happy with them, too. That summer he threw a party every weekend she went down to Toronto to visit her sister and I have never seen anything close to the debauchery that went on in that house. My band set up and played almost every time but we had to learn a bunch of Springsteen tunes because Butter liked Springsteen.
Saturday afternoon we had to help Butter pick up the beer. He never picked up a fucking case, as far as I remember. He would say, "My car. You guys load the beer." I wanted to point out the obvious but I got lucky once and wasn't sure I would again. But we discovered, despite his questionable logic that Butter had an ear for sound and he became our sound man after that.
The summer after grade thirteen I bought a van which we ripped apart to become the band bus. We managed to get a booking agency in Toronto to take us on and by August we were on the road with Butter following behind, in his Celica, to do sound.
He told me once that he never felt out of place when he drove that car. The universe was his and he went were he wanted. It was a cool car.
I want you all to raise a glass to Butter the Wise. He was man, he was a good man, he was a good soundman, and I hope they let him drive that Celica where ever he his now.

York Street

As the revolutions slow, anybody who isn't jumping rings will end up just as they are now, just as they've always been. I tried to take them two at a time but the glint of the sun off the polished aluminum surface blinded me and I slipped and slid, almost over the edge. As I lay on my face, my elbow aching from the impact I looked up and saw a little girl laughing at me. I smiled back at her, agreeing that I must have looked like a jack-ass. Her name was Lila and she had a flower in her hair. I saw her again, about two years later but she didn't remember me. I'm not surprised by that. I discovered some time ago that I seem to be the only one who remembers. Its made me kind of crazy, I guess. When I consider that the answers most people are looking for are offered up every milli-second of every day without them understanding, it makes me the sane one and them the crazies. Lemon has an inkling but he's also got some serious issues that he can't seem to shake himself awake to. He's compulsive and paranoid but keeps so quiet that even the psychotics leave him alone. Like dogs who can sense death, they circle around him trying to avoid being noticed. He will combust someday and if the fire can burn out the memories that haunt him he might just remember that we've done this a thousand times before and that the next time, if we try hard enough, we might just make it out of here alive.

Sha La La La

It was hard to miss. A man in a lobster suit handed out pamphlets and a server handed out curried chicken samosas. This bar is resistant to change but the atmosphere was festive and the band was tuning up to launch into a series of crowd favourites and that's when I realized I shouldn't have come. I understand the need, in this town, for the band to bust out a bunch of over used covers. The average crowd here is, well, average. They don't want to hear anything but old favourites and are ready to ignore anything interesting. I think its odd in a town that has such an inexhaustible supply of great musicians, all of whom at one point or another have known the shame of playing "Brown Eyed Girl" night after night, they allow themselves to be pushed around by the people that keep songs from forty years ago on the radio. It might be easy to blame Ottawa's classic rock mentality but its time to call a spade a spade.

Anybody who has tried to pick up a guitar and teach themselves to play knows that only a few will persevere long enough, ignoring painful hand cramps and permanently creased fingers that ache all the time, to actually get into a band. Then there's the 'creative difference' element, endless fights over who's actually the singer and who's going to take the solo and then another round of fist fights over who drank all the beer (it was the drummer). Finding a place to practice, trying to get everyone there and then dealing with volume issues pale beside getting gigs and deciding who's on the guestlist. After all that you get set up and start playing songs that every other band is playing? Stop letting bar owners and drunken students dictate what you'll play and then maybe you'll earn back some of the self respect you developed after all those years of effort.

I left after an hour but I felt bad for the guys in the band. They were good musicians, just trying to make a couple of extra bucks and do what they love to do. I really do have to ask, though. Is it the chance to stand on a beer soaked carpet, put up with complaints from the manager about the volume, learning to deal with people who want to come up and sing along with you or the opportunity to chain link arms with the other guys in the band, across the front of the stage, to protect the gear from being used as projectiles when the brawl breaks out? I suspect it is none of the above. Hey, if your dream is to churn out creaky renditions of "Hotel California" for a room full of drunks, have at it, but I still think its time for the music scene in this town to stop pandering to beer sales and start doing what they worked at for all those years.

There, I said it. Feels good to get that off my chest. Now I'll just sit around and wait for the complaints from the guys in the band.

Water Horse

I dreamt of a lake. Deep and dark, it made me nervous to stand openly on the shore. I wondered why I was here when the water burst into the air and the Kelpie emerged foaming at the mouth and black as the night. In the form of the Ech Uisque and it rode the water to the shore and stood in front of me as if waiting for something. I wasn't afraid as I climbed on its back and I didn't resist as it plunged back into the pool but clamped my feet to its sides and grabbed a handful of mane. The Kelpie swam hard and in the murky water I could make out the faces of a generation of the drowned, all reaching for me and pulling at my clothes.
Lifetimes of anger and fear lived here and died here and willing or unwilling they all clamored for the shore to exhaust themselves on the beach. On the back of the nightmare I lost my grip and slid into the depths and came to rest in the mud on the bottom of the lake and from there I looked to the sky, wavering and bright.
I could have awakened myself then, but I don't want to remember this night. I'll sleep until the water clears and I can see the sun, clear and inviting and then I'll swim, Kelpie or no, and pull myself onto the shore.

Forgotten

Robert Southey's motto "Curses are like young chickens; they always come home to roost." reflects the karmic inspiration for today. "Do unto others..." just doesn't seem like enough of a threat to influence behavior. I would guess that we have always been a little more chickenhearted than genial, so it makes sense to fear reprisal rather than to anticipate a return on good behavior. Good deeds take a long time to make it back, often being hi-jacked and stripped of their dignity and time is rarely on our side.

Despite this, and whether you respond to threats or are inspired through reward, try to do something nice today. If its true that your ill-will will outlast you and your good deeds will fade by sunset, who wants to be remembered at all. Its better to be forgotten.

Look Ma, #203

The Lotus Eaters dragged me out of bed early this morning. They stuck me under the shower and poured consciousness into my gullet and here I am. Those girls get on my nerves. Carl Gustav and Ikkyu have been up for hours arguing economics, their half-heard voices a background as Jules Renard and Lucullus stand in the kitchen creating a symphony of clanging pots and clinking glasses, trying to outdo each other with breakfast but it was Kaldi who gave me what I needed; a hot cut of coffee. I don't see Cu Chulainn or Epona and can only guess they've taken the guard dog out for a run. Just as well, Evy gets very insulted if I pay too much attention to either hound.

I have been poked and prodded all night by reconstructed memories and jimmied and jabbed by half-truths and pure fiction, all because today is the first anniversary of this little collection of rants from the basement. Just as our dead become more real and influential as time passes, these posturings have paved my soul with a solace, solid and steady, that nonetheless sometimes disappears out from under my feet when I least expect it. Such is the nature of reality and I will not begrudge a single moment of it.

To the Fabulous Bee, the Cracker, The Prophet, the Photo to my Words, El Jefe, She, Evy, G-spot as well as Two Dogs and Anonymous and to Cato and Susan...Thank you. Without your antics I would never have anything to say.

To my flat-mates, you mordantly cantankerous lot, keep it down. I'm trying to sleep. Damn freeloaders. Now, where's my breakfast?

Inheritance

"I am haunted by the spectre of community. Am I in or am I out? I just wish the city would pick up the garbage when they say they will. Or that the phone company was as direct with their service as they wish I were with the payments. I shrug off those thoughts and concentrate on getting to work on time and not missing my appointments but in the back of my brain the spectre of community dances a macabre two-step, illustrating my dependency and mocking my individualism. If I didn't fear reprisals I would have left years ago, and I guess that's what makes this situation so ironic. I invite everyone over so I can ask them to leave me alone."

It occurred to me then that I never could make much sense out of the things he said. I followed along, dodging the branches he carelessly let loose and wondered how much further we had to go. At seventy-two, he was so much older than me and it seemed that my sole duty was to listen, try to understand and then disappoint him by misinterpreting the messages he filtered to me. How I ended up here, I'll never know. I chuckled to myself when it occurred to me that he had called me on the telephone. He was a phony, I know, but at this point I wasn't going to burst the bubble he'd worked so many years to inflate, wind-bag that he was. I guess it didn't sit well with me that despite my personal feelings for the man, he believed I was his best friend. My fault, I suppose, because I never did tell him what I really thought of him.

As the summit came into view he paused and turned to me.
"You'll love the view, Bern. When I found this place I thought of you and you're penchant for meaningless speculation."

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Now you understand why he irritated me so much. The back handed insults he delivered were hard to defend against. I ground my teeth around my anger and followed his finger, pointing out over the plain.

The sun was sinking low across the valley from where we stood, muted by the atmosphere and the pollution, insulating our eyes and casting long shadows, like splayed fingers, on the floor of the valley. I followed the rough edge of the scree down from where we stood and into the shadows and saw the horses, bunched together, racing across the green and brown vista. I could just make out the weak winding of the stream that nearly gave out before it left the valley floor. I could see the clouds that tried but couldn't obscure the peaks in the distance, far out over this jagged scratch on the face of the earth. I was stunned by the beauty of the landscape and for once, couldn't think of a single thing to say.

"I hope you live a long time, because it will take you years to understand why I came here in the first place. But when you do, maybe you could lift a glass to me. Now let's go home and get something to eat."

A Nice Velvet Soup

The first time she passed the stall, she ignored its frank look, pretending to concentrate on the other vegetables, all of them in a frenzied state, yelling things at her like, "Me, pick me." and "I'm very fresh." On her second round the tray of radish exploded in a sing-songy chorus of joy when her hand passed over them. Their tiny voices rang shrilly in her ears and, annoyed by their jubilant certainty, she refuses to pick a bunch, which sent them into a cacophonic depression, punctuated by threats of revenge. Radish were an unstable vegetable and on top of that they often gave her heartburn. As she listened to the smooth purring of the tomatoes she was intently aware of the large turnip, that sat leering at her from the corner of the stall. As the cucumbers and the asparagus argued loudly over who was more delicious she paused, whirled around and said to the offending root, "Why do you stare like that. It's not polite."

"And why do you pretend to want anything else, when you know that in the end you will take me home with you.", said the turnip.
"Of all the nerve. You are an insolent vegetable and I should let you sit there until the rot consumes you from the inside.", she barked at it, "and perhaps I will. Then you'll not look so smug."
"Lady, you have misconstrued my intent. I seek only to save you time and expense and if by my impertinent speech I have offended, let me assure you that you and I both know where your palate will take you today."
She was impressed with this odd turnip's command of the language and hesitated for a moment while she considered the truth of what it had said to her.

The shade that the canopy provided her was welcome in the heat of the day but she knew that she couldn't dally here, so she simply picked up the turnip and paid the stupefied farmer and began the long walk home. The root, perched in the crook of her arm, was content to ride along silently until they reached the house and she entered the kitchen, where the smooth tongue of the turnip once again began to whisper in her mind. She realized, as it dreamily advised her of its condition and best method of preparation that this turnip was one of the most self-aware vegetables she had ever spoken to. 'We should all be so self-possessed', she thought, reaching for the knife.

"I wish you well, madame, and I hope you find this poor and unassuming vegetable to be to your liking.", said the turnip as the knife came close.
"Oh, you are a smooth one, aren't you?", she said with a smile.