It was the humane alternative.

I must do more artwork with food.

Her great nephew believed she lived so long because she had, “a very easy life—easy in the sense that she didn’t have too much to worry about.” She also drank beer with every meal.

Since I lead an easy life by design and generally enjoy a drink or four when I eat, I might live over a century. I’m not sure that’s desirable. Since an easy life with beer might lead me to become a frail shell of who I am now, I shall continue to take inadvisable risks.

“The woman’s wasting her fuse,” Dr. Batlan agreed.

“What a great phrase!” I exclaimed. “Did you come up with that?”

“Of course I did,” Dr. Batlan replied. “I just said it, didn’t I?”

“I mean, did you invent that?” I asked. “Or did you steal it?”

“Create, steal, what’s the difference?” Dr. Batlan shrugged.

Having said that, I’m thinking of buying a kilt and a poncho. Now that summer’s here; the first thing I want to do after a hard bike ride is take my pants off to cool down. A surprisingly large number of otherwise liberal friends have asked me to keep my pants on, a request I feel obliged to honor when I’m a guest. Wearing a kilt—but not for Scottish considerations!—would address my temperature concerns.

I think a poncho would also prove to be an efficacious garment. The first thing to occur to anyone seeing me in a poncho is a two-part question: Is he crazy? And is he concealing a sawed-off shotgun? I think the combination of a kilt and a poncho would be a good way of meeting new friends.

It’s tempting to look back at my time with Greenpeace through a rosy, beery, drugged fog. That’s why I’m grateful to someone I never met, Lafcadio Cortesi, who wrote some nonsense that ended with, “into an eternal realm and where the spirit of the rainbow dwells.” That was all I needed to recall the breathtakingly inept administraitors, the vicious, petty politics, the lame mysticism, and the general incompetence that made Greenpeace what it was, and probably still is.

Although I normally don’t like to collaborate with other artists, I try to keep an open mind. And so, when I returned to my lab, I asked the Internet to tell me something about Monte. This is what the Internet replied:

In 1972 he achieved infamy when he was invited to attend an arts conference weekend-in-the-woods to share transcendental conversations on perspective and grant-writing while nestling paint-spattered jeans in pine needles and toasting hand-dyed marshmallows for “s’mores” in an ultimate artsy outdoorsy atmosphere. Cazazza arrived with an armed bodyguard and sprinkled arsenic into all the food. At lunch he dropped bricks with the word “dada” painted on them on artistic feet. At dinner he burned a partially decomposed, maggot-infested cat at the table. His bodyguard blocked the exit, and several participants fell ill due to the stench.