The Note

T h e  N o t e

While I was thinking about a topic for this The Note, there were ideas I rejected.

We're days away from a Presidential election in the United States. Maybe you read about it. We'll keep the guy we got or put in a new guy. Whoever it is will always have a man nearby with a very special briefcase containing the End of Days. I don't want to write about the election because I've come to despise the political system. The choices we are given. The choices we make for ourselves, really.

I don't want to write either about 1's and 0's. About how much of my life consists of some kind of human activity on my end which gets converted into binary streams and conveyed great distances to provoke some other activity which is converted into other binary streams and beamed back at me. It may turn out that something is getting lost in the conversion.

If I was a competent food writer, I might write about the smoked turkey at the Urban Cookhouse in Birmingham, Alabama, which tastes like it's been in a housefire, but in a good way. Or I'd try to write about my late mother's cornbread dressing. Maybe the chicken and waffles at Maxine's in Indianapolis which will induce a heart attack and/or a hyperglycemic daze just from you looking at a picture of it.

Thought about maybe a Note on some Japanese artist. Yukio Mishima. Ryuichi Sakamoto.  But you can read Spring Snow or you can listen to Sakamoto's soundtrack to Silk and you'll know they don't need to be written about.

I've done dozens of these Notes. Wrote about Conan the Barbarian. About a dead and featherless parakeet. Memphis pork ribs. (More food!). The complexity of the US Federal tax code. I did a comparison of the titles of RHP issues and the titles of James Bond movies.

Sorry. I'll have an idea next month.

I hope you enjoy this issue. I never want to fail, at least on purpose, to thank the contributors, those who submitted, and our co-editors and readers.

Later,

Dale

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