Well, have you read any Hemingway lately?

    Johnny Goodner's cruiser, Narwhal, where they were waiting for Roger Davis, was headed into the ebbing tide and astern of her in the same slip, made fast so that the two cabin cruisers lay stern to stern, was the boat of the party that had been at Bobby's place all day.  Johnny Goodner sat in a chair in the stern with his feet on another chair and a Tom Collins in his right hand and a long, green Mexican chile pepper in his left.
     "It's wonderful," he said.  "I bite just a little piece and it sets my mouth on fire and I cool it with this."
     He took the first bite, swallowed, blew out, "thew!" through rolled tongue, and took a long swallow of the tall drink.  His full lower lip licked his thin Irish upper lip and he smiled with his gray eyes.  His mouth was sliced upwards at the corners so it always looked as though he were about to smile, or had just smiled, but his mouth told very little about him unless you noticed the thinness of the upper lip.  His eyes were what you needed to watch.  He was the size of a middleweight gone a little heavy; but he looked in good shape lying there relaxed and that is how a man looks bad who is really out of shape.  His face was brown but peeling across the nose and the forehead that went back with his receding hairline.  He had a scar on his chin that could have been taken for a dimple if it had been just a little closer to the center and his nose had been just perceptibly flattened across the bridge.  It wasn't a flat nose.  It just looked as thought it had been done by a modern sculptor who worked directly in the stone and had taken off just the shadow of a chip too many.
     "Tom, you worthless character, what have you been doing?"
     "Working pretty steadily."
     "You would," he said and took another bite of chile.  It was a very wrinkled and droopy chile about six inches long.
     "Only the first one hurts," he said.  "It's like love."
     "The hell it is.  Chiles can hurt both ways."
     "And love?"
     "The hell with love,"  Thomas Hudson said.
     "What a sentiment.  What a way to talk.  What are you getting to be?  A victim of sheepherder's madness then on this island?"
     "No sheep here, Johnny."
     "Stone-crab herder's madness then,"  Johnny said.  "We don't want to have you have to be netted or anything.  Try one of these chiles."

-a brief excerpt from Hemingway's Islands In The Stream