Pesto Mayo Pizza*

*Italian phrase meaning “Call my doctor; I think I have a blockage!”

Lousy item that no one should buy: AT&T Digital Answering Machine #1738.

This is the crappy answering machine I ordered and have now returned, briefly a companion to my so-so new phone. My outgoing message sounded garbled; ditto the incoming messages. Fortunately, so few people call and leave messages that I was still able to tell one from another even if the caller didn’t say, “This is your mother.”

My mother says she’ll send me the answering machine she is no longer using; plus, Lisa M. vouches for her venerable AT&T 1717. I have warned her not to drop it—perhaps even to nestle it gently in a Plexiglas case—and am engaged in a heart-stopping search for one to buy. There’s one on eBay—oh, no longer there! This store has it—oh, not actually; it’s back-ordered, with no date of arrival listed. Here’s one, but used, with someone else’s cooties on it.

Apparently some answering machines don’t work properly if the phone line is a DSL line, which mine is. I guess everyone who has DSL is also supposed to have a cell phone with voice mail. Maybe the 1738 worked poorly for that reason, and maybe the 1717, if I could even have found one, would similarly have been unsatisfactory.

Lisa M. also raved about a Northwestern Bell phone she has, so I have ordered a cheapo phone of that brand. Maybe it will be better than the one I have now, which I will then take to the thrift store.

At three or so weeks, my feelings about the Tempur-Pedic are these: It’s very comfortable to sleep on. It’s way too hot. It smells funny and I’m afraid it’s going to give Hammett, who spends much of each night between it and the covers, cancer.

I went recently to see my old acupuncturist, Kelly. As when I was seeing her regularly many years ago, I fell sound asleep after the needles were in.

I asked if she had a mattress recommendation and she said that she and several of her friends are very pleased with their mattresses from European Sleep Works, in Berkeley.

It will be great when shopping season is over and I can get back to going to the movies.

That day may never come, however, as I have stumbled into an engulfing new addiction: listening to music samples at Amazon. Because I hardly ever watch TV and because for years I listened only to one hard-rock radio station, there is much in this realm I have missed.

I had never heard a note of Queensryche or Marilyn Manson, for instance, until today! The former remind me a bit of Whitesnake and are rather operatic. They are billed as a blend of heavy metal and progressive rock.

Korn sound quite like the latter, particularly in the vocal department. I nearly selected for purchase the best of Marilyn Manson, as some of the clips I heard were catchy, but decided for now that the overall sound is too murky, though I appreciated the very heavy bass sound.

Next I was off to hear Britney Spears’s “Oops I Did it Again,” at long last, but that was not available. In fact, the CDs on which it appears are no longer available, which was surprising.

Kelly also suggested I read Michael Pollan’s recent essay in the New York Times, available online. He’s the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He sums up his advice at the very beginning: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” “food” being that which your great-grandmother would recognize as such.

I decided to proceed accordingly. The trick will be to advance in this direction while still retaining permission to eat whatever I want, because as soon as something is forbidden, it becomes a binge food.

The other, even more important, trick is not to turn this into a diet: If I eat fewer Tings, which my great-grandmother wouldn’t have known from Adam, I’ll lose weight and then everyone will love me! The idea that being smaller is the same as being more lovable is deeply rooted in my psyche, along with a few other strange ideas that don’t bear up under scrutiny but still hold sway.

Of course, I already eat mostly food and plenty of plants. The “not too much” may or may not come in this lifetime. The opportunity is to reduce consumption of packaged foods, which I think is best done by enlarging my repertoire of tasty dishes, an area where there is unlimited room for expansion, since my diet is highly repetitious. To that end, I have selected four new cookbooks at Amazon, one tofu, one greens, one grains and beans, and Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant.

I have it on good authority that one of my six readers, taking to heart my advice on how to prevent salads from being low-fat, was observed slathering a store-bought pizza with mayonnaise and then pesto before baking it.

Having a pizza instead is a very good way to avoid a low-fat salad. Apparently the result was pleasing, which I well believe.