By way of introduction...

This post originally appeared on Humpday.com's Brownian Motion on March 20, 2006

This is the story of how I acquired the hottest pepper plant in the world:

One cold February evening about nine years ago, I walked into a little shop on 124^th street that specialised in hot sauces to see a short, bearded man leaning awkwardly against a bare shelf on an equally-bare wall (bare but for the shelf and awkwardly-leaning man.) Err...I didn’t actually walk in specifically to see a short, bearded man leaning awkwardly against a bare shelf on an equally-bare wall; the store had just opened a few days before and I was naturally curious as to what sorts of hot sauces they offered so, in actuality, I walked in to browse hot sauces and instead encountered the tableau described above.

Anyway, before I could ask what was going on (but after I had opened my mouth to do so) a well-dressed woman entered and, without looking up from the Post-it^® she was carrying, asked where some particular art gallery was.

“This isn't it,” The man responded tersely, in a thick Scottish brogue.

“Well, the address reads, ‘124—”

“Look, I told you it’s not here, and I’m in no mood to argue with idiots, so get the fuck out!” Not surprisingly, she did.

As I turned—mouth still agape—to leave as well, he added, “And my back’s killing me from holding this fucking shelf. You!” he pointed to me, “Come here and hold this against the wall.”

Being generally an affable and helpful fellow, I complied, and took up his position leaning awkwardly against the wall while he sat down at an empty table and put his feet up.

“Would you like some wine?” he asked after a moment’s silence.

“Well, er, I…” I stammered. (So far, only 1.6 minutes had elapsed since I entered the store, and I had not uttered a single word nor closed my mouth in that time.)

“Ah, it’s not a hard fucking question! Do you want some fucking wine or don’t you?”

Of course I accepted, and, after I was permitted to leave my post and sit down (“If the glue’s not dry and the fucking thing falls, it falls!”) we sat down and he proceeded to give me a quick and dirty introduction to West Indian cooking. (Apparently he had left Scotland to find a wife and succeeded, albeit temporarily, in Jamaica.)

A bottle of wine later, I left with an armful of canned coconut milk, a baggie full of turmeric, a habanero seedling, and some recipes for coconut milk curry. I think he only charged me for one of the cans of coconut milk.

Twenty minutes later, I burst through the door of my rented house in Belgravia, interrupting my roommate and his girlfriend in yet another of their on-the-verge-of-breakup conversations, and in a style somehow reminiscent of both Gandalf the White and Kramer, loudly proclaimed, “Behold…I hold in my hands the hottest pepper plant in the wo-o-o-o-o-rld!”


This is the story of how I lost the hottest pepper plant in the world:

Nearly a decade later (i.e. last week), someone brought boxes of chocolate to my work to sell to raise money for their kid's school. (In my day, this would have been for a ski trip; today it’s probably so they can purchase science textbooks that don’t subdivide members of kingdom Animalia into ‘critters’ and ‘varmints.’) To their credit, they left the boxes on a little table with an envelope for payment so as not to have to pester their co-workers. Either that, or they’re just plain lazy. At the very least, there’s no pressure to buy, so the purchasing of the chocolate is completely anonymous and voluntary. Seen from another viewpoint, it is the paying for the chocolates that is voluntary.

The chocolates cost $3.00 ($3.00 being the universal cost of fund-raising chocolates), but my vast fortune consisted solely of a toonie and an appetite for sugar and endorphins. Naturally, I put the toonie in the envelope with an I.O.U. for $1^†.


How do these two stories relate, you ask? Well, I was going to write some smarmy bullshit about the random walk and the title of this blog, but then I thought I'd think I was a pretentious asshole if I were the reader of this rather than the writer. And then I'd think really hard about leaving a comment about how I was such a pretentious asshole, but not actually leave a comment. And then I'd sulk for a bit, and go start my own blog about random stuff just like this^‡.

And so I did.

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^† Lest you think that I'm evil, I did sign the I.O.U. and redeem it as soon as I had a loonie.
^‡ I like song lyrics. Scratch that: the voices in my head often take the form of song lyrics, and so I will occasionally reference a song in connection to a phrase that I or someone else has just uttered. It often confuses the people around me unless they also know the particular song I'm thinking of.