With the pending baby comes a need for more space to put our family in. Pictured here is the house we’re currently living in and need to sell before we can move on. It’s about 1620 square feet with (at least) the following amenities:

• fenced back yard
• extra-wide garage
• neighborhood pool and playground
• big-ass kitchen that we’re really going to miss
• big-ass living room with vaulted ceiling that we’re really going to miss
• big master bedroom with cavernous walk-in closet and whirlpool tub
• vaulted ceiling in one of the two smaller bedrooms (both of which are about 11×13, which isn’t terribly small)
• bay-window in the dining nook (no formal dining room, though)
• gas logs
• pretty good attic space

When we’ve thought in the past about what we’d like in a new home, we’ve agreed that we wished we could have our current house with an extra room or two. It has a superb layout, a kitchen that’s almost too big (because all the counter space makes it easy to leave dishes out unwashed for days at a time), a living room that makes you feel like you’re not in a room at all, a very comfy master with more closet space than I’ve seen in a home less than $400K, and two other perfectly nice, above average (I’m guessing) sized bedrooms. Who could ask for anything more? (Err, besides us, as we’re clearly asking for more square footage.)

So, if you happen to need a nice little house or know of someone who does, I hope you’ll let me know and set up an appointment to swing by for a look.

A few months ago, when we started our vegetarian kick, we got a Moosewood cookbook at the suggestion of a veggie friend. The Moosewood Collective is a group of people who’ve run a veggie-friendly restaurant in New York for two or three decades. They’ve published a number of cookbooks sporting recipes they prepare in their restaurant, and we settled on Simple Suppers, which provides a decent variety of general veggie options, all designed to be fairly simple to prepare. After the introduction, they publish about a dozen pasta recipes, followed by a dozen sautes and curries. Next come bean and tofu dishes, followed by egg dishes, main dish grains, main dish salads, soups, sandwiches and other things of that ilk, fish, side grains, side dishes, and side salads. Then come dressings, seasonings, condiments, sauces, and finally desserts. The cookbook wraps up with some short guides to keeping an adequately stocked pantry and some tools and techniques.

As someone who was pretty skeptical about being able to find vegetarian recipes that were tasty (I came into this whole veggie thing not crazy about some curries and coconut milk, though I’ve since had a change of heart) and not a Byzantine undertaking to prepare, I’ve found this cookbook to be an eye-opener. In a good way. Of the half  dozen or so recipes we’ve tried so far, we’ve liked most of them a whole lot and are a little dubious about only one. All but the one are things we’d definitely eat again. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to call some of the recipes simple, they’ve all been manageable enough, though they’ve all also taken me more time and effort to prepare than the book suggests. This is probably user error, though there may be a dash (sorry, couldn’t resist) of underzealous estimating by authors who do these preparations many times a day. In any case, the recipes are doable and have so far been a hit among those I’ve served them to.

Now, on to a few of the recipes. Let’s talk cauliflower. In the last month, I’ve made two dishes from the book that relied heavily on cauliflower. The first was “roasted vegetable curry” (page 53). I was serving for four vegetarians, two omnivores (so it was a side for them), and two kids (who don’t eat much). The recipe is designed to serve four, but because I knew we were a hungry bunch and I wanted there to be leftovers, I tripled the recipe rather than simply doubling it. We ate just about every morsel, leaving one small portion for the next day. It was heaps and heaps of food, so the shortage is a reflection of how yummy it was and not of portion size deficiencies. I don’t know what all fair use will allow me to publish about the recipe; here’s hoping I don’t overstep. You roast some cubed sweet potatoes, cauliflower, and chopped onion for a half hour or so. Then you pour a curry sauce (coconut milk, diced tomatoes, ginger root, and curry powder or garam masala) over it and roast for a few more minutes. I served it over basmati rice, and it was, as noted, a big hit. Prep time was longer than advertised for me, partially because I have a lousy grater and ginger root isn’t the easiest thing to grate anyway.

Next up in the cauliflower department was the dinner I cooked (on a whim, thumbing through the cookbook and finding a recipe for which I happened to have the ingredients) tonight. Flip to page 120 for “curried cauliflower and chickpea soup.” For this one, you make a soup of chickpeas, cauliflower, onion, curry powder, water or broth, ginger root, and diced tomatoes. Even though it’s billed as a soup, I served it over rice, and we loved it. The recipe recommends serving a chutney with the soup, and I think that might have added a little tang that would have been good for the recipe, which nevertheless stands well enough on its own. We’ll be eating both this and the roasted veggie curry again. This one also has the added benefit of being pretty darned low-fat (I’d guess), a can of chickpeas weighing in at 6.5 grams of fat (and chickpeas are by no means the foundation of the soup) and the only other fat I can account for being the little bit of oil you cook the onions in.

A few weeks ago, I made a tofu and mushroom marsala from the book for a covered dish affair. Here I have to correct my previous statement about these recipes all being things I’d eat again. I liked this one well enough, but it’s not great for leftovers, and who wants to cook a dinner that’s good for only one meal? I also found the portion sizing on this one to be way off. The recipe claims to serve four, but it should be upped to 6 or 8. This was a fortuitous thing for this outing, as the host made the only other main dish, and we’d've all had room left in our tummies without my contribution. The other thing that bothered me about this one was that though I think it’s supposed to be a plated dish, people kept calling it soup (even though after doubling the recipie and putting a whole bottle of wine in it, I was still a little short on the proposed liquid amount). Again, possibly user error here. It’s something I might make again after halving the recipe to avoid leftovers, but I’d eat one of the cauliflower dishes first any day. That said, one of my fellow cover-dishers said (and not in the backhanded way it could have been said) that it was the best tofu dish she had ever had.

Next in the lineup is the “roasted ratatouille” (page 50), which is accompanied by a gorgeous picture of the dish, which is what made me want to fix it in the first place (there should be a federal law that all recipes in books should have beautiful representative pictures). It’s basically roasted eggplant, zucchini, onions, tomatoes, red or yellow peppers, and garlic, served over the pasta or grain of your choice. We thought this was really tasty and nice to look at. Next time, though, we’ll probably see if we can come up with a sauce to give it a little more zip. But I think there is a next time in the future of this recipe.

I’ve made a couple more of the recipes, but I’m running out of steam here (as probably are you). There are a number of others that I’m ready to queue up (navajo stew, sesame tofu with spinach, and shortcut chili top among them). If you’re in the market for a veggie-friendly cookbook, I’d say this one’s probably a pretty good bet. The recipes aren’t all quite simple, but neither are they terribly difficult, and your mileage no doubt varies with relation to how fast you are with a knife. Portion size seems a little uneven so far, but in my experience, portion sizes are never understimated, so who can really complain? I do wish there were more recipes (the egg and fish ones don’t particularly interest me at a glance, for example), but then, Moosewood publishes a number of cookbooks, so the lack of variety in this case is a function primarily of my frugality. At $30-plus, I think this cookbook has already returned on the investment, but it’ll have to return some more (and it no doubt will) before I’m ready to drop another $30-plus for a little more variety.

The style of this post is pretty self-indulgent and maybe not so fun for anybody but me. If you want to know the basic content but don’t want to slog through the prose (thereby breaking my heart), here are the high points:

• Our gestating child is larger than a lime and has a heart that beats at around 155 beats per minute.
• I thought I was getting fatter again, but I weighed in at 188 today — just 8 pounds above my low for the last year (and on the high end of my average for the last 6 or so months) and really not too shabby given that I weighed 240 a year ago, have been eating like a hog lately, and haven’t been hitting the gym.
• My daughter is amazing, and we should probably go ahead and get her a helmet to prevent an ear amputation because Van Gogh’s got nothing on her. If you disagree, I invite you to go straight to Hell without passing Go.

A few years ago, on some blog I wrote on (whether it was this one or another one I occasionally posted to I don’t remember), I developed the habit for some time of writing posts with comma-separated titles. I’d link a couple of fairly divergent topics in some clever and probably poignant way and put a title at the top that spoke to each of the topics in some literal way but that was a sort of hook into the post because it linked the two topics in a simple, interesting way, sort of the way that if you tell somebody that you love peanut-butter-and-bologna sandwiches, their curiosity will be piqued and they’ll comment rather than just thinking “oh” and moving on (as they would if you told them you liked PB and J). Or that’s my impression of how it came off, at least.

Tonight’s post contains no such cleverness. I just have three things I want to write about.

First, 155. We had a doctor’s appointment for the pending baby on Friday. I went along because it was a likelihood that we’d get to hear the heartbeat. The new little squirt’s ticker registered 155 beats per minute, which I gather is pretty much normal. In other pending baby news, we can actually feel the baby moving around some now. By this time with Lennie, Mleeka could feel her moving internally, but it was some time later before I could feel any external movement. Last night, I was able to feel some vertical rippling movements and the occasional thump on Mleeka’s belly. (She assures me she wasn’t just trying to pass gas off as the baby.) (Go ahead and groan at the pun; it won’t hurt my feelings.) Tonight, we got a flashlight out to see if the baby was sensitive to light, and the baby seemed to respond. We tried to get Lennie involved in shining the light, but she lost interest quickly. Mleeka’s 15 weeks along now, and we read in our weekly status update from Babys R Us’s online service that the kid’s legs are now longer than its arms and that it’s got eyelids but they’re fused shut. That’s all I remember from the update. They’ve stopped for the time being telling us what size the baby is, but I think it’s more or less lime-sized still (or like a lime with arms and legs, I’d guess). Before too long, they’ll report that it’s the size of a mango and then of a cantaloupe. Early on, it was a lentil. They really like comparing gestating babies to food, which if you think about it too much is a little gross (couldn’t we go with ping-pong ball, golf ball, raquetball, wiffle ball, shot put, softball, volleyball, soccer ball, and football [though then I suppose you're comparing the baby to objects that we hit or kick, and that's only slightly less distrubing than comparing it to things we eat]? I suppose those sizes aren’t as univerally known, though it can also be said that there can be a wide variety of sizes among lemons, and one person might think of key limes and another of regular old slightly-smaller-than-most-lemons-sized limes). At our doctor’s appointment in about four weeks, we’ll get to do the big ultrasound and (with any luck) find out what the baby’s sex is. Mleeka sort of doesn’t want to find out, but there’s no way I’m not finding out. I’ve offered to find out and just not tell her, but she’s not so keen on that. So in four weeks, we’ll be able to start thinking in earnest about names. I’ve pretty much refused to date to do much real diligence on that front, both because we can’t see to agree on any names and because if we wait until we know the sex of the baby, we have to do half the work. If Mleeka insists on not learning the baby’s sex, I’ve got a backup plan: We’ll name the baby in advance and, regardless of its actual sex, we’ll raise it as whatever sex its name is (sort of the way Joe Lieberman is a Republican but calls himself a Democrat).

A quick baby break here for the 188 referenced in this post’s title. This is one of those things that I record for my own memory, and you can probably skip it if you don’t care about my fatty tissue. (Side note: When I was in college, I took a Southern Lit course during which we read excerpts from the journals of some 18th/19th-century guy who wrote on a daily basis about “doing his dance.” I guess we had all glossed over this as some weird anachronism or perhaps as a literal statement — those old folk being kind of weird and prone to dance — but our professor asked us if we knew what he was referring to and colored a bright red — being himself something of a dainty and reserved and proper Southern man — when someone posited that the gentleman was documenting his masturbation. As it turns out, his euphemism was for taking a dump, and our professor pointed out that in those days of widespread gastrointestinal horrors and generally poor accurate health awareness, it was important to document such things, because you’d kind of want to know if you’d gone a week or two without a BM. All that in mind, I’d like to take a moment to tell those of you reading my blog in textbooks in 200 years that when I talk about my fatty tissue, it’s no euphemism — I mean quite literally the yellow masses of globular fat that have accumulated in mostly my gut. Also, as noted already, I just document this stuff so I can remember my own history; this seems related to the old dancing-his-little-dance gentleman’s impulse and probably speaks in a more general way to what’s behind the impulse of casual bloggers like myself to document anything about our lives, except that we know that others are reading [really -- I have a stats tool that proves it].) If you made it to this point, you’re a real trooper and I really don’t deserve you as a reader. So, now to the point. I’ve had trouble lately telling what my physical health was like. Until this morning, I hadn’t been to the gym in a month or two for various reasons, not the least of which is that Lennie now arises right in the middle of what used to be prime gym time for me and the fact that I just haven’t been able to get my butt out of bed at 5:00 a.m. to get to the gym and get back in time to be around for when Lennie wakes up. This week, I was telling Mleeka that I was having trouble telling whether I was a fat slob again or whether I was at least maintaining [cross reference the last paragraph here]. My arms, for example, remain as cut [which isn't terribly cut, honestly] as they’ve ever been, and I have some lines on my abdomen that seem not characteristic of a fat slob. At the same time, I have a little muffin-top [more frontal than lateral] that makes me wonder if I’m not heading back down the road to fat-slobville. Plus I’ve been eating like there’s no tomorrow. So I was expecting, after having weighed as little in the last year as 180, to weigh in at around 200 again. But after a gruelling workout that left me sort of physically ill, I measured — you guessed it — 188. Not a bad showing, really. If you made it this far, you’re not only a real trooper, but you probably deserve at least a gold star and probably a dollar and quite possibly a purple heart.

Now on to my daughter the prodigy. When Lennie was very young and just getting started out drawing, Mleeka boasted about how good an artist she was. Apparently, most kids that age tended just to scribble in one place. Lennie would cover an entire page. I wasn’t alone in our family in thinking that Mleeka was just being an over-proud Mom. More recently, I’ve begun to have a better appreciation for Lennie’s art, though. Note exhibit A to the left. The careful observer will note three smiley faces, a red, a yellow, and an orange (the yellow and orange more obvious than the red). She draws this sort of figure consistently now, often placing eyes and mouth with great precision and in such a way (probably by accident, I’ll admit) that they approximate the view of a face from an angle. You really don’t get the full effect from these blunt watercolors that you can get from a picture drawn in thin marker lines. The other day, she was consistently drawing a wheeled vehicle. We had read a story about a girl named Lisa who rides bikes, skateboards, scooters, etc., and Lennie drew what amounted to a wheel with a sort of amorphous frame and said “Lisa scooter.” Then she drew it again, recognizably similar to the first figure. It was a willful representation of something. She holds her markers and pens in a more “correct” way than plenty of adults, and even when holding them from the top of the implement as she sometimes does, she has absurdly good control of her drawing.

Note here exhibit B. I forget the significance of the bottom picture, but the top picture contains squiggles drawn with a control that would probably defy even my abilities (not that my abilities are that great, but I’m 12 times Lennie’s age, so let’s give her some leeway). So, with these latest drawings, I begin to rethink my skepticism with respect to her artistic talents, and I’m thinking we need to get her into an art class as soon as possible so that we can nurture an apparent talent.

In other news, she goes to sleep in her own bed now without a great deal of coaxing. For several weeks, we were putting her down in her bed, but the routine often involved our snuggling her for as much as an hour after finishing books, and that quickly turned into a big drain. Eventually, we started tucking her in and finding various ways to convince her that we’d check on her later. And it worked. She sometimes calls plaintively for one or the other of us after we tuck her in. If it goes on for a couple of minutes, the desired parent will run in and kiss her goodnight, and if she quits, she goes to sleep. Either way, we have her in bed by 8:30 most nights without spending an hour or more snuggling her to sleep. It was the successful initiation of this behavior that allowed her to spend her first night away from home on Thursday. It’s been a good break for Mleeka and me during this time of preparation for another hard couple of years with a very young child, and it’s good for Lennie’s development as well.

And that’s it for this installment of a slice of my mundane life. If you read the whole thing, I officially owe you a Congressional Medal of Honor when I get elected to Congress.

From a late-night IRC conversation with a Flock staffer and a Flock community member. It’s sort of a running joke that, a Southerner, I partake of all the bad habits and am characterized by all the provincialisms generally associated with the South.

daryl: (sorry, it’s late here and I’m working on a blog post entitled “My complex relationship with meat,” so it’s fitting that I should be in a weird mindframe
yosh: mmmmmmmeat
daryl: yosh, I’m occasionally eating meat again
daryl: we ran out of vegetables in Tennessee
daryl: except for tobacco, that is, and it tastes really bad
yosh: well, TN really didn’t have that many
yosh: daryl: tobacco can be good with the right sauce
daryl: like a durian sauce?
yosh: durian-natto sauce
daryl: heh
daryl: actually, I’m mainly eating meat b/c my newly pregnant wife craves it and I’m tired of cooking two meals a night
yosh: heh
[redacted]: daryl: you actually eat tabacco?
daryl: [redacted], it’s a staple in Tennessee
daryl: that and buggering cows
daryl: (no, I don’t eat tobacco)
daryl: (though I am married to my sister, who is also my grandmother and my third cousin six times removed; and my father)
yosh: daryl is his own grandpa
daryl: and grandma
daryl: I’m also my own sandwich
daryl: (my other grandpa having mated with a tobacco plant, that is)
[redacted]: daryl: good (you don’t eat tobacco)
daryl: opium, now that’s a different story

A few years ago, I cooked a couple of big steaks. Impressed with their heft and the real estate they took up on our plates, I said “now that’s an assload of meat.” “Is it, now?” or something to that effect, Mleeka answered, coyly inviting further comment. “Yeah, I get that all the time,” I followed up. Pregnant pause. “So you’re telling me that you get an assload of meat all the time, huh?” Ah, the crumpling feeling of having a double entendre intended to speak to the substantial girth, length, weight, and general power and desirability of your manly parts turned against you in such a way that it (according to the old sensibilities about manliness and accepted male sexual tendencies) is at utter odds with what you were (with an ironic PC wink, of course) going for.

I don’t have a smooth transition here. I just like that story, and it turns out that my topic tonight is once again meat, and given the title I had dreamed up for this post before thinking of incorporating the anecdote, it seemed an appropriate intro, if one that it turns out I don’t have a smooth transition out of. File your complaints with the management and keep holding your breath for my book deal; it’s looking like it’ll be a while yet in coming. Ahem.

So back at the end of March, I posted about leaving meat behind, at least temporarily. At the time, I was just tired of cooking meat, of looking at the “glistening cold red slabs of flesh” (band name, anyone?). Meat didn’t appeal to me. For several months, I didn’t eat meat, or cook it. But then we had a few family gatherings at which standard cookout fare was more or less expected, and I’m certainly not one to push my eating habits on others. So I grilled frozen pre-fab patties, and it didn’t bother me (they’re not glistening, after all). Then I knocked Mleeka up. And she couldn’t eat much of anything because the thought of eating anything made her want to hurl up the very soles of her feet. But she occasionally craved some morsel or another of meat. So I started cooking meat for her and Lennie from time to time, but stuck to tofu or beans myself, not as a matter of principle but merely because the meat didn’t appeal to me. It was much the same as the way I sometimes cook corn but often don’t partake of it myself because it just doesn’t appeal to me.

I don’t remember the precise sequence of events, but some time recently, I cooked some (baked) barbecued chicken for Mleeka and Lennie, and I went ahead and ate some too because I didn’t want to cook something separate for myself, and sugar snap peas and a biscuit alone just weren’t going to cut it for me. At around the same time, we stopped at Wendy’s after Lennie’s dental surgery, and rather than stop at a second place for my meal (Mleeka was craving a Wendy’s burger and a frosty), I just went ahead and got a burger. And because I’m not dogmatic about not eating meat, it didn’t bother me. I enjoyed my Wendy’s hamburger (thin as it was) and my beef tallow fries. Last night, Mleeka was craving Chinese (she described a dream in which we had gone to a Chinese place and she was waiting in line or for takeout or something, and she finally got to the buffet and was craving mashed potatoes and mac and cheese, which happened to be on the buffet in addition to piles of wonderful Chinese food), and so we went to the buffet (which sadly didn’t have mashed potatoes or mac and cheese). And I partook of great heaping piles of chicken meat that I enjoyed (though my GI tract paid the price for all the grease today and I think I would have liked the flavors applied to tofu just as much). Both yesterday and today, I consumed tube steaks. It was a weenie fest, to be sure.

Here let me break for a stupid pun that just came to mind that seems entirely relevant. You’ve heard of the Beatitudes, no doubt. (After googling Beatitudes, I’ve discovered that my pun is not only stupid but also incorrect, as you’ll see momentarily.) I was thinking that the Beatitudes were the part of the scripture where you have all the “there’s a time for this, and a time for that, a time for this, and a time for that.” (Here’s where I was wrong — it’s the part the Monty Python crew lampooned with “Blessed are the cheesemakers” — an entirely different set of repetitive phrases). And but so given my recent attitude toward meat, I was thinking it was appropriate to say that there’s a time for chicken, a time for tofu, no time for beef, a time for fish, etc. The name of this little litany? The meatitudes. If you were camped out in my head and could hear the running internal monologue, you’d be laughing, I promise. It’s hard to capture the genius in print.

Ahem. So it seems that I have an informal and actually uncharted meat matrix that governs what I’m happy about eating of late. It’s not a set of rules but is more like a set of prejudices I’ve begun to notice emerging. And it seems so far to go something like this:

• I don’t really want beef if I’ve had anything to do with its preparation or if it’s recognizable as something I might have prepared (my patties are six times the width of a Wendy’s patty, so a Wendy’s patty isn’t recognizable as something I’ve made, and it’s dubious that it’s recognizable as meat). I don’t object to it, but I sure don’t want it.
• I’m ok with chicken sometimes, preferably white meat and preferably in small chunks (a la the Chinese buffet). I don’t really want it if I’ve had to prepare it myself, but if it’s a matter of eating a few bites of chicken or having just some peas and a biscuit, I’ll probably eat some chicken if there’s no fake chicken around.
• If there’s a veggie option available, I’ll generally choose it. Meat is something of a last resort.
• Although I’m not dogmatic about not eating meat, I feel like a little bit of a failure if I do eat it because I have the weird sense that I’m failing to live up to some commitment I made, so in addition to my general lack of desire to consume meat, I have an additional incentive to avoid it if possible, though it doesn’t outweigh practical considerations like not wanting to make two left turns across a busy street at a peak traffic time to go to two drive-through restaurants for separate dinners or not wanting to prepare two dinners each night.
• Again, this all seems to be a matter of transitory preference rather than of, say, ethics. I just generally don’t want much meat lately, much as I usually don’t want corn, though sometimes it (corn) appeals to me.
• For corn, I’ll just omit the dish if it doesn’t appeal to me; for meat, I feel compelled to find a substitution, preferably highish in protein.

There you have it, the beginnings of an understanding of my complex relationship with meat. Where it’ll go from here, who knows? I’ve got a yummy curried veggie dish planned for Labor Day, I know, and I’ve got a couple more veggie dishes I’m just dying to make soon. I gather meat will remain a satellite ingredient in my diet. It’ll be like that distant relative you don’t really care to correspond with but with whom you must occasionally maintain polite contact.

A few days ago, I blogged about the fact that I had been eating women’s protein bars without knowing it. Empirical as I am, I thought that I should perform an experiment to determine the fitness of these LUNA bars for my consumption. Naturally, I set up a proper experiment. In the photos pictured here, you can see me eating both a feminine LUNA bar and a manly CLIF bar (which I take to be the male protein bar produced by the CLIF company, which happens also to produce the LUNA bar). I’ve drawn my own conclusions as to which protein bar is more suited to my constitution, and I’ll afford you the opportunity to form your own opinion as to which is best for your constitution. It seems clear from the photographic evidence, however, that the LUNA bar is indeed more feminine and the CLIF bar more masculine.

While eating a LUNA protein bar today, I happened to notice a section on the wrapper that was some sort of salute or dedication (”to mom”, etc.). Below it is a call to action directing me to compose and send my own LUNA dedication at lunabar.com. Weird. So I go to check it out, and the site is clearly targeting women. This makes me look back at the food label, which clearly says “The Whole Nutrition Bar for Women.” I’ve been munching these things for weeks now. At 10 grams of protein with only 5 grams of fat, they’re pretty hard to beat for augmenting the vegetarian diet. Now that I take a closer look at the label, I note that the figures posing in silhouette on it do have feminine figures. I suppose that these bars are, like Secret deodorant, strong enough for a man but made for a woman. I’ll have to check and see if Clif (the makers of the LUNA bar) make anything just for men. In the mean time, I think I’ll just have to power through and continue to be secure in my manhood as I munch on LUNA bars. The smores and the oatmeal raisin ones in particular are tasty treats.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been carrying my camera with me everywhere I’ve gone in hopes of snapping a photo of this guy. I saw him a couple of times on a corner on my route to and from the gym, and I was curious about what he was peddling. I have to say that displaying a big sign like this on a busy corner isn’t the best way to get your message out. I was never able to read it. Of course, he also has a little microphone setup, but I was never able to hear him (thanks, Doppler). He also has, um, a dummy whose mouth he moves as he talks. It’s all very intriguing.

The other day, I saw him and was able to read something about Noah’s having received a revelation and using his ark as the instrument for its fulfillment. The sign also said something about his (street corner guy) dummy being the instrument for his revelation’s fulfillment. Or something like that.

Mleeka recently got a few pictures of him, and in one of them, you can get the gist of one side of his sign. Here’s my transcription (all obvious things sic):

God reveal to me the first beast over 23 years ago Revel.13 18 Ronald Wilsom Reagon 666. Also one of his seven heads or members was wounded unto death an was healed Revel.13.1,3 Now the second beast is out their an he is coming from this nation. Also he might be in power Now is know time for you to be living in sin. My friend turn unto the lord Jesus now people and he will save your soul. Jesus is the only way.

So, there you have it.

I’ve been slowly reducing the size of my book collection. There’s a big used bookstore in Knoxville called McKay’s that I’ve patronized for years (along with the rest of literate Knoxville). When I first moved here and was getting into ebay, I spent some time buying up cheap batches of sci fi and mystery novels there and reselling them for a decent profit at McKay’s. Naturally, I always opted to get store credit instead of cash because you get a much higher return that way. Until this weekend, I had five sets of bookshelves in my office. For a long time, they’ve had books crammed in every spot and then stacked up sideways in front of the shelved books and in some cases stacked on the floor and in other spots of the house (there’s usually a stack of four or five books on my nightstand). Several times in the last few months, we’ve taken big boxes of books down to McKay’s to resell, just to help get rid of some of the clutter. We’re considering selling our house, and as part of an effort to do even more cleanup, I stayed up very late Sunday night cleaning up the office. In the process, I eliminated two bookshelves and produced the stack of books pictured here, some of which I’m having a really hard time getting rid of. It just bothers me to get rid of Yeats’s collected poems, for example, though I haven’t picked that book up more than five times in the last seven years. The same goes for a book of Hardy’s poems (and several novels) and the book of Restoration and Augustan poets and of that Chekhov I’ve been meaning to read for years. And then the books of Renaissance theater history and literary criticism I cling to with a special urgency even though I’ve cracked none of them since college.

But it’s time to pare down. I’m finally admitting to myself that I’m not the literary consumer that I used to be and have always wanted to be. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m keeping the books that are the most important to me (DFW, Gaddis, Pynchon are going nowhere; nor is Melville; nor are my old, old volumes of Longfellow and Jonson and Byron). But I am finally sloughing off the books that I’ve held onto for years almost out of a sense of (not necessarily premeditated) pretension or self-importance (”If I have all these books on my shelves, people will think I’m well-read and smart”). As hard as it is to get rid of some of these, it feels good to eliminate some of the clutter from my life.

It’s not so much a question any more of whether I’m getting a tattoo but rather of what and where. For a while now, I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo. That there are a couple of shows on cable right now showcasing the art has probably influenced me. It’s a strange yearning for me. Many people get tattoos to symbolize or commemorate something in particular — the death of a loved one, for example, or religious faith. I don’t have anything in particular I want to say with body art. I just think it might be neat to have a tattoo.

Not having anything in particular I want to express causes a bit of a dilemma in that I have to come up with something meaningful to me or go with something arbitrary and probably boiler-plate (so to speak). In trying to come up with something not completely lame, I’ve felt a little like a high school student told to write a thesis and working hard to come up with a thesis and support it.

I thought about doing something with pi, but I don’t think pi stands alone as a tattoo for a guy who can barely tell you what pi even is (for the record, it’s the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter). Carl Sagan said beautiful and interesting things about pi in his novel Contact (the movie version of which I recently re-watched). Pi in some form or another is something that I notice on a more or less daily basis. Beginning in college, I noticed that I frequently happened to look at the clock when it read 3:14, and Mleeka and I settled on pi day (March 14, or 3/14) for our wedding date when we had no other special day in mind. In response to my mini-obsession with pi, my parents recently got me a pi dish (a pie dish with the pi symbol in the bottom and a few dozen digits of pi around the rim). Pi by itself has no special significance to me, but it is a number and a symbol I have enjoyed in a layman’s way for several years, so it’s a solid candidate. I still hold that it doesn’t stand alone as a pictogram to be engraved on my body, though.

So what else? Mleeka proposed a whale. If you know me reasonably well, you probably know that I have another mini-obsession with Moby Dick. Tattooing is very much present in that venerable tome, and it’s not lost on me that scrimshaw (animal bones and teeth carved with elaborate designs by whalers, which art form I have yet another mini-obsession with) and tattooing share something of a kinship as carving arts. So a whale tattoo maybe makes sense for me. But it’s a little too close to blue-anchor-retro to really be fitting for me. I think maybe there should be a law against getting a whale or otherwise seriously nautical tattoo unless you actually have something to do with whales or sailing. Plus I think it’d be really easy to get a crappy looking whale tattoo.

Now what? Let’s turn to word-origin and -play.

According to Melville (who was wrong, but quaintly wrong), a whale is a fish with its tail turned sideways. So, whale = fish. The latin word for fish (plural, I think) is “pisces.” So whale = fish = pisces. And pisces, if you’ll grant me some license here, is a homophone for “pi seas” (which calls to mind for me the phrase “chicken of the sea,” which is actually a word-playful way of saying “fish”). So whale = fish = pisces = pi seas = fish = whale = one nice big circle of equivocation and linguistic chicanery that appeals to me while at the same time touching at least tangentially (recall from high school geometry precisely what a tangent is?) on a couple of the ideas that have appealed to me for tattoos.

But wait, there’s more.

In college, I latched onto the fish (and the hunt for the fish and catch and release and the fish as a religious symbol and losing the fish and all manner of other similar things) as a metaphor meaningful enough that it became the centerpiece (and a part of the title) of a manuscript I wrote while completing my writing minor. This was all before I read Moby Dick, mind you, and Melville did a much better job in his treatment of the metaphor than I managed, naturally. The point, though, is that the pi and the whale ideas crystalizing in my mind through word-play (something else that’s a largish part of who I am) to converge on the idea of the fish, which has also been meaningful to me in what I once considered my own little art and thought — well, it’s nice. It’s appealing, if not as significant as paying homage to a dead loved one by duplicating his or her tattoo (for example).

What remains is to figure out exactly what kind of fish I want to get, if I do in fact determine I have the stones to get a tattoo. I’m not interested in a colorful fish or even a realistic one (see note above about how easy it probably is to get a bad whale tattoo). Stylized Koi look great on some people, but they’re just not my bag. I’ve looked around at a lot of images online and finally settled (at least for the moment) on a derivative design of my own creation (or derivation), two drafts of which are pictured here. The basic shapes, especially toward the front of the fish, come from a tee-shirt design I found. The innards of the fish pictured on the shirt are rather more maze-like and less fish-like than the treatment in my current draft. I added gills (note that they look a little pi-like) and modified the spine and tail pretty substantially. I’m not terribly happy with the back half of the fish, which seems a little inconsistent stylistically with the rest of the image, so I’d probably take one of these images to a tattoo artist to provide a starting point.

So there you have it. The “what” I mentioned initially is more or less resolved, and I need now to figure out the where (on my body), which may require the advice of a tattoo artist.

If I chicken out (and if I do, I think it’ll be because I harbor a tiny worry that I’d regret a tattoo in 20 years), I hope you’ll think of me as the chicken of the sea = pi of the seas = pisces = fish = whale. And we all know how messing with the whale turned out for Ahab, now, don’t we?