Lovely Wenchy, way down yonder in South Africa, has tagged me to do Five Simple Pleasures, une meme de blogosphere. At first I was trying to read without my glasses and I thought it read "Five Sinful Pleasures" and I wasn't sure if I could get to five before being prosecuted. Figuring that couldn't be right, I squinted harder and came up with pleasures of the five senses, which sounded more better.
Here then is a list of each of my five senses' favorite simple pleasure.
Taste: A bite of a truffle from Joseph Schmidt's and a taste of old vine zinfandel. That is the most exquisite combination I know. I get dizzy just contemplating it.
Sight: I love vistas involving mountains and light, such as sunrise or sunset in the Sierras. It is majesty transcended. All of my senses become stimulated.
Hearing: I enjoy putting on earphones and really getting into music. I can become pure spirit with enough sensory deprivation and good headphones. If I think simple pleasure, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata enters my head. It's one of the first pieces of music that captivated me. It still does. If my classical station plays it, I'll stop what I'm doing and listen to it. It lifts me towards spirit.
Smell: I once lost my sense of smell. I was a chef at the time, so it made it very difficult. It effected a career change on my part. It came back, mt sense of smell, that is. My career as a chef never did. Weird huh? Although not too unusual.
It's actually common enough that it was used as a complicating detail in the movie, Tortilla Soup, a re make of Eat Drink, Man Woman, which I'm told is a remake of something else. I thought it seemed familiar. My inability to smell came in handy one Christmas many years ago I spent up in Girdwood, Alaska with my friend Jim. You see, he didn't have indoor plumbing, and his porta-toitie was gross. Maybe I couldn't smell, but I could still see, so thank god almighty, I was spared the smell! How did I know it smelled? I had lost my sense of smell, not my memory! I grew up with an outhouse. As a result of that , to this day I am the most efficient shitter on the books. I am in, done and out in about two minutes. And that is so much more than you wanted to know, now isn't it? Since coming back though, my sense of smell, I mean, I do not take it for granted. I move through life like an old hound dog, smelling everything I encounter. Flowers, food, people, it's all good. Smell, in my opinion, is one of our senses that binds our spirits to the earth.
Touch: I touch everything I can, including people. Especially people. I give massages to a few lucky people every month. My mother started training me when I was a boy. On a long trip, my job was to sit behind her and massage her neck and shoulders. I discovered feet on my own. The rest is history. My people believe that the ability to heal is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. I'm not in the Made for Television category, but the people I do touch sure do feel a lot better. Touch also keeps us connected to the earth, or at least what we perceive to be the earth: our present physical incarnation.
I'm having a metaphysical crisis right now . Y'see, I believe I'm already spirit, or at least I am a good part of the time. I blame any dysfunction on blogging. It's made us French. We get to intellectualize our very existence.
Y'know, most of the time I'm happy to just be. When I focus on my belly buttom, my life seems to be going well. It's when I realize I'm in the back seat of a car that's running out of control on a dark road along a clift that I start to scream, forgetting for the moment my bellybutton.
Okay, gentle readers, you take it from here. Think about some of your simple pleasures.
Oh I would LOVE to hear your SINFUL pleasures, bring it on baby! :o)
Posted by: Wenchy | February 10, 2006 at 09:19 AM
Not on this blog, you're not going to hear about me sinful pleasures!. I have two other blogs where I confess and tell all, and while they're public, so to speak, you'll have to find them on your on. When I write about really private shit, I prefer to do it thinking that no one can read over my shoulderl
Posted by: Houston | February 10, 2006 at 09:58 PM