Cafe )S:))~

I just realized that I drew a picture of Cafe ):S))~ while I was there. The cook, seeing what I was doing, was kind enough to pose with one of her steamed sump squids. After some digging through my old drawings, I managed to unearth this one. Here it is.

Nigel

Breakfast in Baconeg

I actually visited Baconeg (a Baconeg; I think it's a fairly common name) a few years after I read "Breakfast in Baconeg." The smell is better in the underground marketplace; it sort of becomes a second atmosphere. You don't notice it at all after a while. The underground marketplace is full of people trying to sell tuber fish and clockwork pipe crawlers and whatnot, though, so I don't know if it's actually an improvement.

I never was able to find the cafe where "Breakfast in Baconeg" takes place. I searched through the plumbing district for two days. There were pipework shops and moss grottoes and tank crab vendors by the hundreds, but no Cafe Kurgleglump. The only cafe I found was a tiny, dripping little hole in a gap between two pipes. The sign outside it read ")S:))~," and it served steamed sump squid. Nothing else. Three different varieties of steamed sump squid, but nothing else. If you were feeling adventurous, you could have steamed sump squid with pepper on top. The squid steamer occupied half the cafe. I sat at the little three-legged table that occupied the other half and watched while the cook took the squid from the ceiling (the only place there was room to store anything), steamed it, arranged it neatly on a saucer, and served it to me.

I was feeling adventurous after spelunking through the pipe district for three hours, so I had the squid with pepper. It was the best sump squid, steamed or otherwise, that I've ever eaten. I told the cook so, and she smiled from eyestalk to eyestalk and said "squee mur burgle twergilly." Or something to that effect.

As cozy as the )S:))~ Cafe was, though, it wasn't the Cafe Kurgleglump. For one thing, it wasn't nearly large enough, and the Cafe Kurgleglump served a lot more than steamed sump squid - that is, if the book is at all accurate. I never did find the Cafe Kurgleglump. I didn't search through every alley and back drain, but it probably doesn't matter. If it ever existed, I think it's quite Remembered by now.

Clamophones and Baconeg

You know, Nigel, reading your profile took me back to my childhood.

I actually was once in a town called Baconeg. I never had breakfast there, but I did drive through rather fast trying to get away from some creditors. That was back before the family had money. The town did not smell like somewhere I would like to eat - the aroma reminded me more of large sponges were being cleaned with bleach after being used to scrub the undersides of pligma mushrooms - really ripe purple pligmas, after the algae starts to grow on them.

And clamophones! I know you like them, but they have a different association for me. I showed none of the family's usual talent for music, though my mother had me try lessons on one instrument after another. At first she had her heart set on falsetto balinga, but I could not manage the fingerings at all. Then she tried me on the triple keyboards of the filongering wasoon, but the instructor insisted I'd never make it sound any better than a self inflating rubber kreenax bag being run over by a squad of gnash tanks on maneuvers. Treeboon, gillyhorn, queezoo, pilleran fortzo, and even one handed klanga were all tried and abandonded in despair. The instrument where my mother finally gave up was the clamophone. The teacher had a nervous breakdown and the neighbors signed a petition to have us evicted.

I love music, but clamophones make me think of angry shouting and people dropping stacks of plates in nearby houses...

Virgil