Green Tea-Crusted Insalmonia

OK, what raving genius invented "green tea-crusted salmon"? The same free spirit who first dipped whole coffee beans in chocolate? What's next? Meth-infused cupcakes? Cocacinos? Polonium speedballs?

I guess the better question is what the hell was I thinking when I ordered something so wrong for dinner? The worst of it? I loved it. Perversely cursed with a taste for all things caffeinated (except soda pop) and a system that just can't handle caffeine, I periodically lapse into a willful disregard of the facts, facts that might stick with me were my intolerance likely to provoke anaphylactic shock or even hives rather than insomnia, the (very) invisible killer. So tonight, at dinner, at Yaffa Café, I had this nutty dish, the likes of which had never before crossed my palate. And I had it all. Every last crunchy twig of green tea crust. Yum! Kill me now. So here I sit, twitchily typing away the pre-dawn angst after twice flying out of bed completely unable to sleep.

Don't think I'm not tempted to use this rocketing wakefulness to recount all the adventures of LordZim since the last post, but it's just too dense a constellation. Sorry for my absence.

The issue is that so much happens here in the precincts of LordZim that it’s hard to capture everything. To do it justice. For example, recent weeks have found your humble narrator prosecuting two circumnavigations of Manhattan Island. Exploring shipwrecks on the Hudson. Moviegoing. Spectating the modern dance. Spectating a rocknroll "Woyzeck" in Dumbo, where the river-bridge-citylights vista was so colossally magnificent my eyes nearly exploded. Traversing the Brooklyn Bridge back by night. Dining at fancy spots for free before or just after their openings. Riding the bike along the railroad tracks on a gravelly track of fist-sized chunks of rock well into Riverdale. Lassoing parking meters at midnight in Tribeca. Doing battle with the forces of evil at Palm Inc. and Verizon. Working more than usual. Waxing nostalgic. Visiting L.A. for 10 days -- and hating it. Observing parrots -- wild quaker parrots -- in Brooklyn profonde, where the committed birdwatchers are even more watchable than the birds themselves. Ruminating on the end of an era at the last days of Tower Records, where thousands of pop CDs sit unwanted in disarray, yet the classical department is stripped.

There's more, but hey ... I'm getting sleepy.

As for this sudden onslaught of winter ... I love it. Sure, call me up in a month and see how I'm doing, but for now, I bask in the freezing wind as the parched man flings himself into a brackish pond.

Glub.