Little interrupts my routine daily agenda. My mediocrity is well settled! My complacency is equally hardened. This being said, the interruption – whatever it may be – is likely not of atmospheric import. Allow me to explain.  My timetable as a retired country lawyer consists generally of a healthful breakfast (sliced green apple, Brie cheese and pitted prunes), bicycling for 10 kms, afternoon amusements (grocery and bakery shopping, searching for white woollen socks, washing the car and driving around, a restorative coffee and writing my codswallop), dinner (raw veggies, tea biscuit and Becel, filet mignon with Keen’s hot mustard and plain buttertarts aka the Sacrament of Heaven), Netflix and sleep. The syllabus is overall interposed with Dosecann THC oil spray which has proven to be a reliable modern laudanum.

Anyone having the faintest familiarity with prolonged pain knows that no matter what its level of insidious insinuation it succeeds to contaminate the simplest enjoyment of life. Mine is not the ambition of a Stoic! Rendering the calculated buoyancy of food, drink, shelter and sleep is sadly but an introduction to the stimulation of nefarious additives. Smugly I report not having had a drop of alcohol for seven years. Though I regularly quip about my erstwhile habit of reading and re-reading the same paragraph of Jane Austen while sipping vodka martinis served in bathtubs on sticks, it is a deprivation I have learned to bear. Thankfully I haven’t extended the purity to include either a march of shame or a religious sanctity. Notwithstanding the compelling features of intellectual refinement and personal discovery, I am satisfied to reduce my intoxication to something more immediate and persuasive.

Today the breadth of my enterprise targeted a box of Maldon salt at Grace in the Kitchen. Getting onto the strip mall off the main drag in Stittsville is itself a challenge.  I parked where I felt the car was safe from corrupt and uncaring Saturday shoppers. I wasn’t out of the car a moment before realizing there was a lineup of people in front of the store. I don’t do lineups; standing immobility is perfect punishment for me! I got back into the car and drove away – well, attempted to drive away after allowing for the stream of aggressive young drivers in noisy two-seaters. Damn kids!

Following this retail defeat I revived my acceleration by taking the car through an automatic wash. I tranquillized the abuse of the lineups by reminding myself I had a small amount of coarse salt in the pantry along with an entirely new bottle of sea salt in a glass grinder (the rediscovery of which reminded me of a jar of unopened crab pâté),  Such is the serendipity of living! Out of the blaze of annoyance arises the conglomerate of peace!