Bah-Bah-Koo Time

It is now the 100^th day into this year as I begin writing this. I realize that with lockdowns happening, my talent or craft for some cheeky, humorous writing really has been suffering, noting how I haven’t found anything to give me much joy about relating to a bigger audience as we have fully entered into year two of this pandemic. The same joie de vivre has dwindled a lot for all the other activities that I ordinarily enjoy doing and sharing, namely cooking, with me rendered with a lack of gumption and focus from being in this sort of funk like many others with varying degrees of it. I’m returning to blogging to put a depressive state back in the can more than anything. 

After many months of negotiating, better fortune has finally happened, and I have come across a bit of a not-so-instant windfall. Not enough to radically spin my life around for the better, or have me ensconced with luxuries, but enough to make practical moves to replace and improve some things I have that have become inferior and useless from being aged and worn out. To pull me out of my funk, I finally gave myself some permission to stop instantly using my money to react to everything I see as an emergency, and to treat myself to something (affordable) that could bring me back to my happy place.

I was wondering out loud as to how I’d be using my bit of newfound money as I perused the online flyers for home fixtures and appliances in the company of one of the residents whom I serve, both joking around and getting her involved with my decision-making. At work, with the people I serve being clamped down under the restrictions of the pandemic measures, and with nothing much new having a chance enter and transpire in their lives because of halted outings, I’ve been finding myself more prone to taking stories of the ordinary and adding some zany and silly linguistic twist to them: to at least keep something novel and stimulating happening there rather than them being reduced to just having to endure the boring sight of me day after day. Some days it’s a struggle to do, but we do at least keep ourselves entertained that way. Anyway, it was a moment when I was imitating things said by some weirdo Cajun guy from some TV programme I overheard, for my pleasure in seeing her laugh and making her crack up. The only semi-intelligible thing I remember him saying at that time amid his hyped up jibber-jabber, was something like, “Ah sho do wanna gits me summa dat der bah-bah-koo!”  I adopted the word bah-bah-koo* (I assumed he meant “barbeque”) into my own lingo since that moment, as I thought about the sad state of my own propane grill. The word “bah-bah-koo” is perhaps most fitting word for it because, referring to the grilling system I’ve been using, it’s as shabby, beat-up looking, unkempt, and unsophisticated as that witless bugger from the Bayou from whom I first heard saying it that way was. For the longest time, I kept meaning to replace it; now with sales going on for them, and some means to do so, I could now commit to it.

People who know me are shocked to learn that despite having some flare/bit of passion for good cooking, I don’t already have the crème de la crème of BBQs to use for grilling at home. The acquisition of my old propane grill years ago, as I was still settling into this new place, was an odd enough event. I serendipitously found it at a winding up garage sale as I was cruising around on my bike through the ritzier neighbourhood north of me. Getting it was the ultimate reflection and testament to my stinginess and frugality. It was an already very abused and shoddy-looking specimen of a grill, but the owner claimed that it was still functional.  It’s only appeal to me then was that it had a sizeable cooking surface, it was ergonomic for my standards in dimensions and propane containment, and yet compact enough to fit and be stored in the corner of my miniscule deck space. Amazingly, the ignition button still worked, since it’s usually guaranteed that that’s the thing which first goes kaput on cheap quality grills, as one would expect on this one that was that old. After some strange course of haggling, I managed to get it for nothing and the guy even offered me five dollars just to get that hideous piece of shit off his lawn, as it one of the last things he had for sale, and he was in a rush to wrap things up and move on with other affairs of his day. I rode home quickly and returned there with my car, and loaded this dilapidated thing clumsily into my trunk, weirdly satisfied that I yet schemed in an extra five bucks to buy some sausages to grill once I got propane for the damn thing.

The old, Ex-Bah-bah-koo

Well, this thing I dragged home then was jury-rig repaired with some wire and a semi-compatible nut and bolt to haphazardly refasten the lid for it. It had served me well enough while continuing to be a degrading eyesore for another eight years; I still managed to make good things with it. However, it has got to the point now where this region’s weather has gave it a harsh ass-kicking, and there’s too much rust and corrosion in the firebox, where the venturi channels around the burners are starting to flake away and crumble to pieces. Cooking with it now would risk it heating unevenly: charring parts of meat too much while at the same time leaving other parts at risk for being raw enough to foster food-poisoning (something I don’t ever want to experience ever again) or, at the worst, being a complete fire hazard all together ready to blow up in my face. Time for a new bah-bah-koo!

This time, I decided to splurge a bit since I got this old one for nothing. However, getting my replacement grill was not easy. With my luck, I should have never expected for that to happen as such. I found a compact unit at one of the national big box retailers. I wanted to avoid public exposure as much as possible, but the store was filling up too quickly to capacity for my liking. I wanted to leave quickly. It was my just luck that the fates gave me the stupidest of useless boobs working there for assistance, who was young enough to be completely estranged from writing with a simple pen. He was writing up a slip for me to take to their warehouse, and with his handwriting, that he apparently couldn’t even read, he jotted down the wrong inventory number, listing me another model that was $600.00 more expensive than the one I wanted. I tore up the warehouse requisition slip in front of him as turned around and walked out the door. I then resorted to purchasing online, and then was notified that it would be ready for pickup the next day. I felt a little better for doing that, believing then, what was later proven to be false, that I had broke some link in this establishment’s chain of human stupidity.

The next day came, I got the email notification that my order was ready for pickup, and I show up at the service desk of the warehouse . . . and then, I really entered bizarro world. I gave my order number to some woman, who then was angrily barking orders at one of her subordinates, telling him to go and get me my kayak! Somewhat bewildered, I assert myself in correcting her that I came to pick up a propane barbeque grill (remembering at the last second not to call it a bah-bah-koo to create further confusion and misunderstanding). She then shoots some bizarre look at me with a flash of anger, as if I had some totally unwarranted audacity to challenge and defy her authority there, and for a split-second it looked like she was determined that she was going to send me home with a kayak, whether I wanted it or not! She shuffled her papers on a clipboard and mumbled something about a computer failure. It was an excuse that didn’t do much for her in saving face. Then along comes some guy ushering me to drive up from the loading bay to another storage locker. “Finally . . .  I got my BAH-BAH-KOO!”, I thought. However, I got there to discover that, even though this model of BBQ is more compact than the old one for deck space, the box it came packaged in was way too big for either the back seat or the truck of my wee little car: by about only 5 centimetres of clearance on the smallest dimension, and we could not compress or squish things down any further. Yep, I should have known that it wouldn’t be that simple. I was at least lucky enough to track down my brother who did have a sizeable enough vehicle for hauling it, and thankfully, he could find time to deliver it for me. He also availed himself to help transfer a big awkward box up some stairs with me without risking me getting another coronary episode. An hour and a half of assembling later . . . Voila . . . brand new bah-bah-koo!

I decided perfect thing to start grilling on this brand new virgin unit is going to be a well-aged steak for me and my girlfriend for our supper, despite the fact that it’s threatening to rain or snow. After that, there will be plenty of time to try to experiment with and master this thing and its nuances and features, with no fear of having my eyebrows blasted off my head, or my own self being left nice and crispy. Since there’s not yet much happening for social events in the coming warmer months, cooking more at home is still a pandemic reality. Maybe grouchy warehouse lady was indeed right, and maybe I do need to cut lose and get a kayak and go somewhere, but I haven’t got much faith that the tide of the pandemic will ebb just yet for that, and that it will be another summer of mostly solitary staycations. At least I have the happiness of being able to perform one culinary art with some greater satisfaction in the months ahead during the next 100 or so precious summer days we do have.

*- I became curious as to what Google Translate might actually come up with for this crazy word. It turns out that the phonetic (babaku) means “my father” in Sudanese.  

The Ethereal Nature of Money

With the Covid measures in place for over past an entire year plus a few weeks, the action and memory of using physical currency to pay for anything is quickly becoming estranged from me. Zero physical contact equals cards or e-transfers for purchases. I realize that one normal life thing that I miss since Covid came is the handling of actual cash. Before this whole shit show began, my last clearest memory of me consciously and physically handling real cash for some amount over $50.00 was for foreign exchange. It was when I was departing Cuba, just a few days before national lockdowns become a reality, using one of the currencies in a weird and complicated dual-currency system. Tourists, like me, were permitted to use the CUC (Cuban Convertible Peso): a special currency for foreigners to use, in which I was prohibited to remove from that country upon pain of imprisonment for suspicion of exporting it. Now, after reflecting on that trip. I learned that since January 1^st of this year, Cuba is no longer using the CUC; they will be phasing it out over a six month period. The two-currency system has since then has unified into one. Those same Cuban national banknotes, which could have gotten me arrested and put into a world of hurt by their government’s order, had I risked and been caught daring to attempt to smuggle them out of there, are now being rendered valueless and useless to everyone. With Covid arriving, we are all learning the hard way of how quickly the course of history can change, and the nature and use of money itself typically becomes a reflection of that as well.

Sometimes in my dreams, whenever there are significantly life-altering changes due to come to me (either anticipated or unbeknownst), I often get glimpse of me being involved in transactions where I’m handling strange forms of currency: handling coins or banknotes with unique characteristics on them that don’t exist in real life. These dreams are the most significant, sometimes even prophetic, once given some interpretation. Those ones usually involve manifestations of “money” with some sort of strangely engraved images on coins; or bills with some sort of weird colours, denominations, or depictions of wealth/power/influence/fortune/value. This recurring theme in my dream world has developed into a hardcore superstition in my conscious life: in which whenever I unexpectedly come upon finding some foreign currency, either as coins in my change, or finding and handling foreign banknotes, I will be soon due to have some sort of great or radical change in luck or fortune (not necessarily involving money, but not excluding it either).

The extra time being shut in during the pandemic has made me more inclined to explore my more eccentric, yet harmless, interests. Thus this conjunction of superstition and will for betterment of good fortune has morphed into the renewed interest into one of my other minor hobbies: collecting various forms of currency for the sake of ephemera. They are merely collected for the decorative and aesthetic fancies, such as with collecting stamps, matchbooks, or beer labels.

The banknotes and coins that I collect mostly have little to no value anymore except for that of their unique artistic flourishes, or some wild alternate paradigms of when they were once valued, or some representation of a caption of geopolitical history during the time at which they were once used as bona fide legal tender. A banknote is a thing that was an important element of peoples’ everyday lives, despite having no intrinsic value, and monetized for only a temporary period, where people put energy into, and take energy from through its course of the transactions of living. Because I’ve worked in museums with historical artifacts and had been immersed into studying tangible bits of history, a subject like this prompts me to do a bit of curatorial writing about it.

Most of the bills in my collection are now defunct and obsolete, mostly happening for the better in some

cases. Like in the picture here, in the top left corner I have this $1000 Confederate States of America note. It was a serendipitous find; I found it wedged in a book I had bought at a yard sale. It’s a reminder that some forms of money are based on precepts of pure evil. I look at it and I am reminded that the value of this terrible American Civil War relic was once reliant upon an economy based having plantations full of slaves, and that the denomination of this bill, perhaps this very banknote itself, may have once been used to buy and sell Africans as property for forced labour. Thank goodness that history came to be such that the only thing that this is good for now is for a book marker. Beside it is a ten rand note from South Africa; this one was once circulated during the Apartheid days. I keep it by the CSA* note as a reminder that more than one hundred years later, the stain of segregation/racism is slow to wash out, and it even sadly remains an integral part to some economies for a long time. I have an Irish Pound here: worthless in value, and beside that a 1000 bolivar note from Venezuela, a reminder that once I was in a place and time where I technically became a “millionaire” overnight, but also even that wasn’t doing much differently in terms of effecting my substance as a person. It did though bring me closer to more humility as I was immersed and operating in a society that was struggling in many ways. Ever since then, I have been ever more grateful that I have been born and raised here in Canada.

Since it is April Fool’s month, I can’t ignore the weirdest, most outrageous, token note I now have in my collection. Representing the abhorrent nature of hyperinflation happening during my lifetime and the surreal nature of economics and monetary value is my golden 100 trillion dollar banknote from the Republic of Zimbabwe. At the time when that banknote was last circulated, it’s value in Canadian dollars was approximately a whole . . . 50 cents! To break this down into some understanding of what a single Zimbabwean dollar was worth, I’m going to use a universally recognizable commodity for comparison: plain white rice. When I last bought rice, $1.00 Canadian bought me 500 grams of the stuff. Assuming (according to Wolfram Alpha) that a grain of rice is about 65 milligrams, then there are about 7728 grains of rice that can be bought with a loonie. Therefore, upon further conversion, a particle of 1/3.864 x 10¹¹ of a grain of white rice can be purchased with a single Zimbabwean dollar. I won’t go further into calculating how many actual starch molecules that actually is being bought on this scale. It’s a question too stupid for Wolfram Alpha to even compute.

This note is something I keep as a reminder of having a balanced attitude towards money: not to be too reliant on it for security, but not to be ignorant of it either. God forbid that someday our own dollar could crash and become instantly worthless overnight, or with the influx cryptocurrency, a whole new system will change based on different economical viabilities and regulate what this stuff can and cannot buy. Last month, even we here in Canada had a recent demonetization of some banknotes: the $1000 bills printed years ago are no longer usable as legal tender, and neither are any paper $2 banknotes. They are now just left to be collectors’ items in the numismatic sphere.

Of all the international monies that have existed, one of my favourite terms for money is the one that was used by the Germans for their former national currency: the mark. It’s like a true cognate with the English word “mark” which fittingly means an indication, a label, or a representation, not necessarily something that is fixed or substantial. The German word is a truer reflection of the way money really is. Marks for you is a reward; marks against you is a debt. By and large, at the end of it all, marks are insubstantial and don’t mean much of anything if they can’t keep you fed and secure. History-conscious Germans should know better than anybody. In more modern history, the German Republics in their various forms are perhaps the prime examples of how even a modern, progressive society can experience extremes in political upheavals and war, the reflection of them in regards to volatility of currency values since the 1900’s

The truth about money in its essence is an incredibly elusive thing. Two things would probably happen if you just walked down the street like a curious three year old, and asked random strangers if they knew what money really was. First of all, they would probably look at you like you were some sort of alien with two heads; bewildered and wondering as to how it could be that you don’t know or understand what such a ubiquitous thing like money is all about. Secondly, if they weren’t deluded, and truly honest with themselves, they will eventually realize that they don’t really have a sufficient idea, or an adequately simple, concise, succinct answer for that question either. Most of us operate only on an elemental level of knowing that we rely on it to survive and progress. The average person on the street can’t adequately explain how or why a currency attains a certain value, or how it relates to a central banking system and the many rules that regulate its circulation, or how its value fluctuates in comparison to others, or plays through the dynamics of things like inflation. It is further changing into something that gets even more complicated and abstract through this phasing into an era of digitization.  You need a computer scientist to explain and interpret the very esoteric features and details about how the 1s and 0s that represent my credit card debt are secured and different from the 1s and 0s compiled to form this typed paragraph. Good luck even finding 1 in 5000 people born in the last century who can correctly explain how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies work. I freely admit that I’m no better than the average person at deciphering and making better sense of all this stuff either. I try at times to actively thwart this ignorance with some more intense focus on the subject. However, the only good thing that happens when I begin reading books/tuning into podcasts about banking, finance, commerce, and economics is that I find that they serve to be wonderful sleep aids whenever I have insomnia.

On a basic philosophical level, the only truth I believe to be evident about money, and the influence of its value, is what happens when one gets a large windfall of it. It accords to what I think billionaire Warren Buffet once said about the power of money on a person. What it really then becomes is an energy intensifier of what is already in your true character and personality. It will show others the real level of your altruism and kindness, or alternatively, your level of avarice, egotism, and overall malevolence, It will give an accurate depiction of how (im)practical one is as a person. If you are already a genuinely kind, beneficent, industrious, and generous person, when you have more money, it will enable you to be even more so, with an honourable use of such wealth. If you are malignantly greedy, slothful, egotistical, rotten, squandering, power-hungry, narcissistic, exploitative, impractical, superficial, with unfounded pride/sanctimony, or a false sense of privilege, and generally uncaring towards the rest of humanity: the way you use money when you get more of it will in all likelihood just unveil how much more of an asshole you already really are at the core of yourself. You only need look and see the example of type of personality of someone who would purchase a gold-plated toilet to figure that out for yourself.

*- Just because Confederate States of America and its currency are a past evil doesn’t make the current US dollar any more of a wholesome thing. For example, think about how most of the international narcoterrorism cartels are funded, and the how the US dollar is used primarily as the preferred backbone vehicle currency of that whole operational organism of smuggling, bribery, corruption, cartel violence, and actively creating another economy of enslavement (in Latin America and other production locales, and by fostering addictions) and the social strife that entails all that.