A Thin After Dinner Mint
How It Brought Me To Sanity
I had been handling things pretty well, what with people drowning in subways and basements from the worst rainfall in New York City history and tornadoes that ought to be muddling around the midwest but instead were tearing through New Jersey and the rest, but really I was OK and I thought I had it all in some kind of perspective and I was surviving, but then came my “mint moment.”
The mint moment refers to a strange soul named Mr. Creosote, a fictional character who appears in Monty Python’s film, “The Meaning of Life.” He is a morbidly obese, middle aged man the size of Rhode Island, who is dining in a very exclusive French restaurant where he is obscenely rude to everybody as he consumes a vast amount of food, including moules marinières, pâté de foie gras, beluga caviar, Eggs Benedict, a leek tart, frogs’ legs amandine and quail’s eggs with puréed mushrooms all mixed in a bucket with the quail eggs on top and a double helping of pâté. The appetizers are followed by the main course of jugged hare, with a sauce of truffles, bacon, Grand Marnier, anchovies and cream. For drinks, Mr. Creosote has six bottles of Château Latour 1945, a double Jeroboam (6 litres) of champagne, and half a dozen crates of brown ale (144 bottles). But despite the mountainous amount of food, Mr.Creosote was alright, that is until he was done gorging himself, and the Maitre D’ offered the big man a final morsel, a single wafer-thin mint, which Mr. Creosote accepts as his stomach promptly begins to expand and explodes, sending Mr. Creosote’s anatomy spreading through the crowded restaurant.
And that was how I have come to give up on the world as I know it. My mint moment arrived without fanfare this morning when I awakened, rubbed the sleep from my eyes and prepared for my morning ritual when I soon noticed that I could not turn on my computer in order to peruse the latest news and nonsense and my first thought was that our very rotund and very friendly white cat had sat on my keyboard and somehow screwed it all up. Until I went to the bathroom, switched on the light and there was no response and I cursed slightly to myself about how could this bulb die so soon as I had replaced it only a few months ago. And then it suddenly and painfully struck me and I scampered into the kitchen to confirm my worst fears and there I saw it, the clock on the oven was out, the lights were out, the computer was out, my Internet was out, those 12 letters that have driven men stronger than I to extinction, “a power outage” had snuck up on me, with no warning and no logic, a full two days after the hurricane’s remnants had barreled through for parts unknown. And all I could think of was that I would not be able to read inane jokes, see inane images and read inane comments on Facebook. That was my last straw, my mint moment.
Climate change is getting out of hand and I didn’t really mind it that much, even though people were drowning in flood waters in New York City subways, multiple tornadoes ripped through New Jersey and the brook behind my house overflowed and it was real and not some nightmarish movie. I was neither surprised nor astonished but I did wonder if out of control wild fires will be next and if that happens, I just don’t know what to do about it and if anybody has some good ideas please let me know and I will forward the information to the right people. Until then, I have learned to cope with feelings of impending doom every time the clouds start gathering, leading to my conclusion that all of the bad news is irrelevant because what’s the point of hearing about things over which I have absolutely no control and actually, that includes most everything. I guess it’s important to know that record-breaking storms are coming so that I can, uh, buy more beer to be ready. And if a tornado or two or three are on its way, the least I can do is, uh, buy more beer to be ready. Mind-altering substances seem to be the only way to cope these days, what with the Republicans trying to turn the country into a whites-only haven, but wait, that’s already happened.
And then I had my mint moment and I believe everybody has their own unique and destructive mint moment, that instant when they can’t take any more, not even the smallest, almost negligible and meaningless inconvenience, like being unable to go on Facebook to see a stranger’s newest meat loaf, not that it matters but the point is that you get to the point where the only way you can fight back is to throw in the towel.
But all is not lost. The JCP&L alert said the power might be back by 11 p.m., Sunday, and that was enough to make me cry like a baby whose had the breast taken away as I thought there was no way that I could survive. However, I arrived home at 5:30 p.m., totally broken and forlorn when I opened the door to see light, there was light, there was Internet, the clock was lit on the stove, there was power, the power had been restored and my world suddenly became worthwhile again, I could watch my beloved Facebook meatloaf and I could check the news to find out the latest cataclysmic event brought on by the behemoth of climate change and I didn’t care because my microscopic piece of the universe was going to be alright, until the next power outage but I say, live for today for tomorrow, you may be without power.
I read the on-line N.Y. Times and Washington Post and I cringed over the stories of the 43 people who were killed by the remnants of Hurricane Ida and the Supreme Court’s ruling not to block a new Texas abortion ban that may spell the end of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, destroying the lives of untold millions of women. And then I clicked on Fox News, because I firmly believe it is of paramount importance to know your enemy, and I saw that Fox had lead the edition not with the devastation of Hurricane Ida but with “How Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan has impacted his already plunging approval ratings” because pounding on Biden is more important than reporting on a record moment of devastation, at least that’s how Fox sees it. And I know that more than half of the country relies on Fox News to help form their twisted world views and I know how absurd that is, but maybe it’s kind of like climate change in that there’s nothing I can do to convince millions of people that they are being fed a steady diet of lies and maybe all I can do is buy more beer. The only thing I have control over is my mind, insignificant it may be, and that’s a battle in and of itself because with all the flotsam that comes my way via the media and the Internet I have considered blowing up my computer, canceling any and all subscriptions to newspapers and seeing how it affects my narrow, little space on earth, and not much, I would guess. Because, I thought, what’s the value of keeping up on world development over which I have no control and no say whatsoever and it seems sometimes like it’s all part of some choreographed play, something like “The Truman Show,” which was a very good movie starring Jim Carrey, I wonder where my head would go if I turned off the news, would I feel starved and out of touch or would I feel suddenly released and all of a sudden feel free to think what I want to think and feel what I want to feel rather than to be continuously at the mercy of the media, not that I think it’s a conspiracy although the more I think about it, maybe it is a conspiracy not to take over the world but to keep me from seeing the important stuff, like whether there will be enough beer at the Bottle King when the next September blizzard cripples this part of the earth.
I could just content myself to be saturated with Fox News knowing that it’s all made up anyhow and if that is the case, which I believe it is, then there would be no reason to be upset by whatever Fox News is pushing today. I wonder what would be left of my brain if I removed all of the topical thoughts of the day and what might pop out of my skull if it wasn’t being filled every minute of every day with the stuff that Fox News and the rest think are important. These rants somehow make me feel better, like binging and purging, because even if for a few moments, I can imagine living free of the mind control in this Internet age where anybody can say anything and if enough people hear it they will believe it and it will become their reality. That is not the world that I want nor is it the world I want for my family because it is often just so stultifying and mind-numbing and just leads me to make sure I have enough beer.
So it took a mint moment to understand just how I can survive against all odds.