Adventures

I just ate a half-teaspoonful of an exotic flavoring agent.
We were at a tiny, amazing hole-in-the-wall place where the menu changes every night and they love to offer weird traditional ingredients like rootbeer plant. There were fish quesadillas, with something spice-like sprinkled on the fish cuts before searing: tiny brown and yellow granules that resembled very fine cornmeal. They told me what it was and I had to ask again because it sounded like: “Fly eggs.” But it was fly eggs.

Cooked onto fish, they make a delicious seasoning. They’re harvested in lakewater, somewhere out in the jungle where they do things like that, and dried in the sun. I tried tasting a little pinch by themselves. They had a fascinating flavor: with just a few in your mouth, you can’t taste anything, you only get a little mealy crunch, but with enough of them spread over your tongue you’re hit with an unmistakable strong rich savor of ponds and fish and mud and algae and stagnant, fragrant water, such a savor as maybe you’d be advised to forgo, but totally worth trying once. Though afterwards you will want to rinse. R was afraid the flies would hatch inside our bodies. I said not to worry, because of course they won’t!

I’ve had infection lately that I picked up somehow the day after we went to a mezcal tasting at a little art gallery, which you can do here if you like stuff like that: yoga, slow food, dance, meditation, all somewhat casual and seat-of-the-pants. The pain started in my throat and I was hacking a lot and now it’s migrated on to my inner ear, and I don’t know whether to be relieved that I beat it out of the throat or alarmed that it’s persisting in my ear. With every new location we are collecting new complaints, and hopefully forging new immunities. The idea is to grow more resistant to the opportunistic bacteria and more susceptible to the virus that is language. I tried gargling with tequila, which is a folk remedy that actually seemed to do the trick and also felt adventurous.