Moldy peanut sauce.

Since my roommate's on vacation, I've been going through the fridge to get rid of spoiled stuff.

A few weeks ago, I dumped out moldy apple sauce.

A week ago, I opened up the Trader Joe's peanut sauce, only to discover a few big mold patches, one near the rim and one on the sauce (odd, since she only opened it up like 6-8 weeks ago, I'd have suspected there were more preservatives in it than that).

As with the apple sauce, I dumped it in the sink and ran water to flush it down the drain, but the peanut sauce was a bit tougher, and I had to stir it around in the drain for much of the sauce to flush down and go away.

Even then, there were two oddly large circular clumps left, one larger and one smaller

I realized that they were like pats of mold, since they were the mold clumps I had seen in the jar.

The mold was resistant enough to stick together in the force of the water dumped on it from the faucet, even when the peanut sauce it fed on was not.

At first it grossed me out, then I thought about how it was just an organism that people study like any other.

Neighborhood Stories: Produce Limits.

Later that same day at the grocery store, I saw there was a sale on cauliflower (limit 5 lbs. maximum), so I got 3 heads for myself since whenever I make curry, I like a lot of cauliflower in it.

I used the metal scale hanging from the ceiling and it indicated just a tad over 5 lbs., but I didn't know what to think, since the last time when I was over by the other end of the produce area weighing oranges that were on sale, the scale said I was exactly at the limit, but the scale built into register in the check-out area actually indicated I had 4.75 lbs, like a quarter pound under what I thought I had.

Nevertheless, when I was in the checkout, I told the cashier I had just around 5lbs and maybe a bit more, but I wasn't sure because of the scale.

"That's okay," she was like.  "Let's see."

As it turns out, I had 5.23 lbs.

"So what happens now?", I was like.  "Do I pay a higher price for everything over five pounds?".

"No, you're fine," she was like, and then she hit some button on the register, and it showed on the computer screen that I got everything for the sale price.

"Thanks," I was like.  "I wouldn't normally do that, but I do use three heads of cauliflower for a recipe I like, and these were the best ones, and as close to five pounds as I could get."

"We worry more about people taking twenty," she was like, and then explained that they instituted the rule to keep local (Chinese) people from buying vast quantities of sale produce for use in their restaurants.

Neighborhood Stories: Pharmacy.

The other day I popped into the pharmacy for floss and cash back, and the line was held up a bit since a (middle-aged) (Hispanic) woman and her (young) son were ahead of us and having problems using a gift card.

When it finally went through, the receipt kept printing out forever and forever and forever, until it was like 5 feet long, and as the (early 30s) (black) (female) cashier called out to her coworker, "Hey, look at this!", she turned and the receipts twisted so everyone in line could see it was mostly made up of "99 cents off" coupons, just one after another after another.

"Man, that makes me jealous," this (late 40s) (white) woman just in front of me said, turning around towards me and laughing.

Odd dream: A friend in need.

The other week I had this dream:

I hadn't seen my one friend from Buffalo in a while, and when I was up in a neighborhood on the north side of the city going to a new bar, my one lawyer friend from Missouri texted me that she was with her at a hospital and then going home, since she had a new place just a little bit closer to the hospital to make it easier on herself.

After lazily biking past some taller brick apartment buildings all up against each other and towards the front of the road during the grey afternoon weather, I next thing found myself on a dirt road in the country, a road that wound around with a bit of space after the road edge and a mild-looking forest beyond, and every once in a while a house or a driveway here or there.

Then, I was at a light blue house with a trailer put on it for an addition, towards its right side, in the middle of a dumpy clearing with tall grass towards its edges.

My one lawyer friend from Missouri and another friend I know through her, a businessperson from Missouri, come out to meet me, and I express my surprise that a house like this is so close to the city, that it's just tucked away like that.

I then say that I had seen these streets laid out on voter precinct maps that I was looking at, but I had no idea the neighborhood was like that, and somehow I know that at a certain time in their lives certain people choose to live in this neighborhood, since they're at a different stage with everything and like the quietness.

Our conversation feels like small talk, and we move into the house, which is sort of empty with dingy white walls and has dirty-looking, very light grey carpeting, and what furniture there is seems beat up and cheap like it was bought at a Wal*Mart or an office supply store, though here and there are swaths of blue-and-turquoise cloth hanging in S-curves from the ceiling, as if someone with taste had tried to do their best at an impossible project.

Then, they say my friend from Buffalo's doing all right, considering, just as she steps out from the hall to the bedroom, looking wan.

I ask if it's okay to look around - as if I don't know what's going on and I'm just visiting the house - and she says a quick look's okay, and I walk through the dirty and bare tiled kitchen with cheap light wood cabinets, and into the bedroom, which is dirty and resembles the living room, and has a few half-hearted swathes of blue-and-turquoise cloth in it.

Somehow, then, I'm sitting on the bed, and my friend is crying and she puts her head on my shoulder and says she never expected it, it happened so fast, but she's pregnant, then somehow from her phrasing here and there it becomes apparent to me that it's twins.

"It's all right, isn't it?", she asks me, as she just cries, and I know that she's not okay with her decision.

Then, we're out by the edge of a cornfield, all 4 of us, and it's dusk.

We're walking down some path that's on the slope of a small hill, with a dirt road on our left and to our right the cornfield and its hacked-off stalks at the edge and bare field beyond, and it's all growing darker.

Further up is a concrete bridge going over the road, and towards us comes this thin figure, a drawn (black) woman with crazy wide eyes where you can just see the whites of them from pretty far away.

My two friends from Missouri are walking much up ahead and she somehow passes them, and then she's by my friend from Buffalo, grabbing her wrist and saying sharp whispered things into her ear that scare her, and I know she's warning against the abortion.

Then, a small (black) girl comes in from the fields, and the drawn woman turns to her and says "Speak!", and I know that the woman has the expectation of prophecy from the young girl.

Then, the young girl says, "That is evil."

My friend from Buffalo immediately turns to me in horror with a deflated expression on her face, and as she does so, I see the drawn woman break character, and I know that she had actually prearranged the appearance of the little girl in order to extort money somehow from my friend.

Then, I wake up.

Mavis Staples concert (2 of 2): Mavis shined with the younger stars!.

The most surprising part of the concert was how Mavis Staples shined most performing with the younger stars:

Win Butler and Regine Chassagne from Arcade Fire on some disco-ish song that she really got into, and the song "You Are Not Alone", which she did with Jeff Tweedy from Wilco and held the entire house in the palm of her hand.

"The best producer in the world!", she shouted out several times during the concert, referring to him.

Interestingly, after the concert I watched to see who of the many celebrities Mavis Staples gravitated towards after the big closing number where the 20+ guest stars were all on stage together, and it turned out to be those same young folks, and not people like random bluesmen, Bonnie Raitt, Greg Allman, and others who were more her age.

I wonder if it's because the younger folks are making new music with her in fresher-inflected genres, and the rest of the people seem to be locking her into her older repertoire rather than allowing her to grow as an artist.

Mavis Staples concert (1 of 2): Ticket strategizing.

The other week I headed up to the Mavis Staples 75th birthday concert to see if I could get a cheap ticket; I would have just gone ahead and gotten a ticket, but the cheapest one was $75 (tax not included), which was too much for me, so I thought I'd risk trying to get one for cheaper out front.

So, I made sure I had like $50 in my wallet, then waited outside.

Fortunately, it was cold, and after talking to a couple scalpers and a guy with 2 $250 tickets from his friends to sell, I talked with a younger (white) (very straight) (rocker) guy with a longer wavy brown hair and a black leather jacket who had 1 $150 ticket because his girlfriend couldn't make it.

He said $50 wasn't enough, then went inside.

Later, he re-emerged and said he'd sell it to me for $60, and I pulled out my wallet and looked through my bills and said I had $57, and I could give him that and all the change I had in my pocket.

"That's fine," he was like, and took the bills I was handing out and handed me the ticket.

Then, I slipped right in behind him as we went through line, so I could call him out if the ticket was fraudulent, though it wasn't.

He and his friends were in the same row way up in nosebleed seats in the upper-middle part of the upper balcony, and every time he passed by me to go get a beer he called me "Slim".

"Excuse me, Slim," he'd be like.

His other friend had the seat right by me, and asked me if I smoked pot.

I said I didn't, and he was like, "Well, I hope you don't mind when we do."

Before the concert, he also asked me what book I was reading.

"A radical feminist analysis of transsexualism," I was like.  "She says that men who get sex change surgery are fetishists who cause women harm on many, many levels."

"Really?, he was like, "Tell me about it between songs."

"Okay," I was like, "If you want."

"I was kidding," he was like.

Later, after I scoped out empty seats during intermission, I moved down into the middle part of the lower balcony and got pretty damn sweet seats; the people there had moved down further to empty seats next to their friends, the people nearby said.

Not bad for $57!

My mother's prophetic dream.

For some reason I thought of this the other week -

My mom for a while has told the story of how back in August 2001, out of nowhere, she sat up in bed one morning full of fear and said, "Osama bin Laden!"

She's said for over a decade now that that was one of the freakiest experiences in her life.