A bit of a dark cloud above the old corpus

Health insurance, that fair-weather friend of the aging, had me down at the doctor's this morning, getting a complete physical work-up. The good news is that I am not dead in the conventional sense; the bad news is that high blood pressure requires me to drastically reduce my intake of salts, fatty foods, alcohol, and tobacco. You do not misread me: the four seasons of my day are to be shuttered and replaced with a regimen of, oh, I don't know—foraging for cucumbers in tight black pants, or something like that. I'm a bit downcast this evening as I have a last hurrah with a plate of speck, taleggio, crusty bread, and a stiff pour of a favorite aniseed beverage. Tomorrow it's wild cucumbers and strained tomato-water for this old varsity coat. If you pass me in the street and I am the ghost of a wisp of a man, his eyes sunken, his skin lacking that vitality which comes with cholesterol and pleasure, do not mock me, for I will have my cucumber-rifle packed with dry powder, and although its sting is a modest one, it does drive home the point that I've suffered enough for one day and there is no room at the inn for your barbs.

A terrible bit of angling!

Word around the Crab and Pickle last night was that the bluegill were jumping, so this morning at dawn I was a fixture on the old banks of the creek, casting and reeling, casting and reeling, my creel opened just-so, hanging in quiet anticipation at my side.

Though the flies and little white moths (I still do not know their name, those rice-sized silvery flits) did dance thickly above the surface of the water, not one bluegill in a thousand could apparently be roused from his watery bed to feed. Perhaps it was the barometric pressure, which was particularly low this morning. We once had a dog which would sink into a deep despondency as fall arrived. She would look at her food dish as though it contained worms which bled from between their segments, and trot backwards from a good ramekin of beer like a nun presented with a ramekin of beer.

At any rate, all this thought of firm white fish with crisp skin has put me right into an angling frame of mind, and I'll be lightly damned if I'm not frying up a bit of the cornmeal-crusted tomorrow evening. What's a fellow who can't catch his own dinner, after all?

Someone has left a cornichon in the toilet.

Someone has left a cornichon in the toilet, an act I find as immature as it is distasteful. For a fool to make it the distance between the refrigerator and the commode thinking the entire while that this act would tickle or otherwise give humorous pause to his fellow housemates is supremely disappointing.

Furthermore, I believe it was one of my cornichons.