Well it’s been… yeah… forever. Sorry to leave you all for such a dry spell but it’s been a wicked last two weeks for your humble narrator. We lost someone very special in the Blake universe, and it has kept me from pursuing my more personal… oh hell, “selfish” desires. Without going into too much detail I will simply say that a really cool person passed away last week at a respectable age and one thing he/she had mentioned to me often was the importance of love. Specifically, for all of us to find and share our lives with someone who tries to love us more than we love them. The logic being, that if everyone followed this plan, love would be like a competition. You would try to out-do your partner in how much you love them. They would of course do the same in turn. So on and so on until everything was quite… lovely.
That’s a really “sweet” thought I think. This person lost their partner far too early in life and this made we who knew him/her very sad. This older and wiser line of thinking about love was always dismissed when I would talk to him/her. It didn’t fall into my more selfish line of thinking, which was more about how to keep the girl around than to genuinely attempt love-on-love action. My goal has usually been to ensure you aren’t going elsewhere because you got it better with me. As soon as that was locked up, then I had reached to mark and would just try to maintain. But that’s like giving money to charity only to make yourself feel like you’re good person, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, any charity is good charity but it’s more meaningful when it’s not done for selfish reasons right? Not just trying to find the minimum requirement to be “a good guy” and then stop trying?
“Wow, it’s great he sends those poor starving Icelandic children money for pencil cases, but he doesn’t really care if the damn things work or not. He just cut us a check, told thirteen people about what a good person he was, and then left before we could get him to inspect the damn pencil cases. Hell they don’t even have pencils in Iceland!”
Good deeds done for selfish reasons. I’m gonna keep this one short, but it was something I had been thinking about when thinking of this person. I figured I’d either share this “sugar-enriched” thought with all of you rather than writing up a full article on navy beans. Navy beans, while they are another thing I think of when I remember this person, are rather boring as far as topics go. Damn… now I want White Chili.
Blake would like to apologize to all his Icelandic readers and also to Bjork. Having never visited Iceland under fear it would be “too green” for him, Blake is sure that somewhere in the great nation of Iceland, someone is writing with a No. 2 pencil and not carving in the snow with a pointed stick. Long live our noble Icelandic brethren of the north.
Now because he's a "good guy"...
White Chile Recipe from me to you.
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves of smooshed garlic
Half a cup of cooked green chile peppers (Caned is lame, but do what you gotta)
2 teaspoons cumin
¼ cup of flour (only for thickening… try it without. See if I care.)
1 teaspoon oregano (fresh is better, but do what you have to)
1 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper or two diced jalapeños
30 ounces of chicken broth
3-4 large cooked and chopped chicken breasts
3 cans of Navy Beans (aka. Fagioli/White Beans/Yankee Beans/Great Northern Bean or whatever you call them around your neck of the woods.)
Directions: Everything that isn’t Chicken, Chicken Broth, or Beans goes in the pot for five minutes on medium-low. Stir for Christ's sake. After that, in goes the protein stuff and it simmers another 20 minutes. Stir again for Christ's sake. Serve it with something Bread/Tortilla-like. Simple. Delicious. Simply delicious.
