Dinner, a movie, old school

At one point, like what seems like years ago, we all thought "how cool would it be to have tons of free time and watch everything we ever wanted to watch on Netflix or Amazon or Hulu!"  Some of us also thought "how cool would it be to have tons of free time to read and read, no one interrupting us, nothing to do but read."  

And now here we are in the reality of that free time (well, some of us who are jobless actually do have that free time)  and what happens?  TV gets boring and even reading gets itchy.  Yes, we all know there are great documentaries out there that we can watch for free or for little money but do we watch them?  Or do we watch crap, like that really bad "Tiger King" series on Netflix?  Or re-runs of "Friends" and "Cheers" and the endless "Law and Order."

Let's talk about dinner.... every online cooking site for the past 4 months has been touting what to cook from the ingredients in your pantry.  Now that some of those sites realize that there is nothing left in your pantry they are reaching out farther afield and are trying to entice us to keep cooking. Who out there isn't tired of cooking?  Who out there doesn't long for a sit-down experience at a real restaurant?  I am not talking about an outdoor venue where the temperature is 95 degrees and you have a lame umbrella covering part of your table, the food is hot and already wilting when it is plunked down on your table and you are separated by 3 - 4 feet at most from  your fellow diner and no one is wearing a mask? That's not the dining experience I want. 

Yes, I know whining about all of the above is stupid and boring. 

Netflix has been trying to help by running a lot of old school movies and I just watched a couple that exited Netflix at the end of July. "Back to the Future" was a star of that line-up, at least for me.  It was released in 1984 which was so long ago.... I was working in San Bruno at a motorcycle dealership and one of the salesmen had just seen the movie and loved it.... a few days later I saw it and totally enjoyed it as well.  Seeing it again, 36 years later, it was still fun. But part of it is the comfort of seeing something that has no part of our current world, and thus seems safe and innocent.  "Back to the Future" was hopeful in a small way.  Our world today seems to have zero hope.

Ah, I don't want to seem so depressed. I made a great dinner tonight, pasta with raw tomato sauce.  Seeded a couple of really good tomatoes, chopped them and into a bowl they went with one smallish garlic clove, finely chopped, some chopped fresh basil, a small bit of chopped mint, one mild jalapeno pepper  salt, pepper, good olive oil and a very small dash of red wine vinegar.  Let that set for an hour or so, then tossed it with angel hair pasta.  Delicious.  With a glass or two or three of Graziano Barbera, made my TV viewing of "Oceans Thirteen" almost palpable. 
Old school still lives on.

more to follow.

OK, that's it.  Thank you for reading along. Here is what Cooper thinks of everything right now.