S n a r k A t t a c k

Lousy Reputation

Good lord, that was a long hiatus from the blogosphere.  Over a month!  What sort of treatment is that, to neglect poor blog for so long?  Inhumane.  Imagine as poor blog was thisclose to wandering about in the lonely woods, to forage about for comments and trackbacks wherever it could find them.  As it was, blog has reemerged, thinner, stronger and snarkier than ever.  If only the same could be said for me.   I shall just say this and then comment no more upon the subject: my love of hashbrowns and bacon nearly undid me over the holiday break.  But oh, bacon!  How I love thee...  (Incidentally, and then really, we're never discussing it again, but I must mention that in an ongoing attempt to eat better, I bought turkey bacon.  As I bought it, I wondered to myself, exactly where on the turkey might one find the baconny part?  Where indeed.  After cooking up a few slices this morning, I was left with four rather horrifying strips whose appearance suggested not the imminent arrival of deliciousness, but "Look, it's healthy protein matter.  Let us partake and then do our sit-ups, shall we?"  Do this:  take some paper, cut it lengthwise into strips (approx. 1" x 5"), take a pencil (#2 will do nicely) and then make some squiggles down the length of the strips.  Then eat the strips.)

So, hiatus.  Inadvertent, really, but I got busy with some other writing projects which, while not paid, at least seem to be on the track to my eventually getting a paying gig which would be delightful.   Money is nice.  I miss money.  Sometimes I think about the track that I was on before:  attorney in giant law firm >> partner in law firm >> partner jumping out of law firm window.  (I know - it's always that last one that kills me.)   And I think, wow, I walked away from what could have been an extraordinarily lucrative career, and instead I'm trying to get a job writing television.  And aside from a few close-calls on the nervous breakdown front, I couldn't be happier. 

What Is This Thing Called Love?

I believe it might be this:  bacon mayo.  'Oh, sure,' you say, 'but I can't eat that for fear of my heart exploding.'  Whatev.  Think of the big picture, people.  This is a 'someday' thing that you can do 'today'!  It's like a GM ad or something involving a white background where hip and sparkly clean people are selling some tiny piece of personal electronica that will make you feel like a better person.  Note, it won't make you a better person, but that's a topic for another day.  (N.B. You are still an asshole.  Oh, I think you know why.)   

Still, bacon mayo:   such a nice idea for someday, like visiting Patogonia or writing a thank you note to your fifth grade teacher.  No one taught sentence diagramming like Mr. S.  And the clip-on ties were just... magic.  The man brought glamour back to middle school and I will say right now, Mr. S., the extra effort did not go unnoticed by this youngster.   

Myself, I've been trying to be better about the getting around to the important things in life - like bacon mayo - rationalizing that you only live once.  Who knows if this might be the last time - to give you a painful example from my own life - that you ever see Sleater-Kinney a/k/a MyFavoriteBandInTheWholeWorld in concert before they dissolve forever.  And you have to say it like that, like one big German word:  Sleater-KinneyMyFavoriteBandInTheWholeWorld.  Breathlessly.  As if you had been felled by the dreaded vapors.  Turns out, like so many maladies, The Vapors are a band.  Ditto the Hives.  Come to think of it, lots of nasty things are now band names which gives you a sense of how hard it is to name a band.  That's why you get asinine names like Panic! At the Disco or I Love You But I Have Chosen Darkness:  all the good names were taken.

Here we are at the garage of Stevie's mom's house (his folks divorced when he was 11) and while it's true that the guy with the garage is usually only in the band because he's got the garage, Stevie's actually got some technique which is why everyone looked to him when it was time to name the band before they played Mattie Jacob's bat mitzvah. 

"Uhhh.  The Pips?"

And so you see:  all the good names are taken.

Confidentially, seeing how it's just us chickens, there IS one name that's pretty awful but I secretly adore the band:  Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

When I was in D.C. - Alexandria, actually - my housemates and I would occasionally try to come up with ridiculous yet plausible band names.  This was the early/mid-90's so grunge was getting big though personally I was wrestling with the inevitable foray into vagina music (Ani DiFranco, Shawn Colvin, etc.).  We came up with strange names like Sneezing In Cyrillic and Make the Door Close, which now don't seem as ridiculous as I thought.    No, on second thought, still dumb. 

But back to the life gastronomique, you can keep the bacon mayo.  You see, what I'm really after are french fries made with rendered duck fat.  Ooh, I can practically FEEL my arteries occluding.  Stand back as I do a duck fat jig!  Cue the lovely musical stylings of Stevie and the Pips!   

What you don't know could kill you

You may go to parties and shut off your brain, but not me.

I listen.

I learn.

I search out the knowledge, people, and then I keep it like a secret.

So, when the aspiring naturpath told me I shouldn't eat pork, I'm going to tell you that I was unusually resistant to hearing whatever she said, mostly because as you well know - I love pork.

"You really shouldn't eat pork," she said. I looked crestfallen and she asked, "Do you know why?"

I asked, "Is it because pigs are sentient animals, smarter than dogs?" She said no.

I asked, "Is it because they taste most like humans?" She said no.

She really wanted to tell me why I shouldn't eat pork, but instead I said, "Listen, if I'm still going to eat pork even after I know they're sentient beasties that taste like people, what on earth do you think you're going to say that will make me not want to eat them?"

"Good point. Now who wants some yule log?"

Speaking of holidays, like you, I've spent untold hours on Amazon.com searching for gifts. Remember when Amazon advertised in two lines at the bottom of the front page of the New York Times? This would be back in the day, back before this little thing called the internet took off, when everything was analog and quaint. These were the days of pneumatic tubes and having to take money out of the bank on Friday so you'd have dough for the weekend. These were not the days of calling money "dough" but I say "dough" because it makes me feel cool in a hey, Mister Kotter kind of way and that is all right with me. I feel like pulling on a corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and grabbing Marcia Strassman for a twirl around our Bronx apartment.

That's what those tiny old Amazon newspaper ads make me think of: the Seventies. Of course, it wasn't that long ago but when you think it was only five years ago that cell phone conversations cost as much as our mortgage, back when our mortgage wasn't more than two thousand dollars a month, back when most boobs were real and most shows weren't focused on how many bugs a person could eat, and you think to yourself, I fully expect to be half-bionic by the time I check into an old age home.

No wonder people my parents' age are disappointed that there are no flying cars - "we were promised flying cars" - having grown up during the Space Race and the invention of Tivo. Then again, the idea of my mom driving a flying car opens up a whole other axis on which she can drive overcautiously and leave her turn signal on. (Makes you wonder, doesn't it, what cup holders and turn signals would look like on flying cars.)

But Amazon: They went from simply selling books to selling All Books in the Universe, to selling CDs and books and appliances - and razors and maybe even toothpaste and perhaps even small Asian children for adoption (Your Gold Box: Quy Loc of Cambodia. You have sixty minutes left...). It's the online megamart for those of us too lazy to go anywhere else.

And yet I find their recommendations so puzzling. I have never bought anything from Amazon that was not a CD or a book, but still they recommend appliances and electronics, like tool belts or vacuum cleaners, and every time I wonder: what is this algorithm that has me, buyer of New Pornographers and Spoon and Sufjan Stevens, pegged as someone who needs a Roomba? If I bought Brooks & Dunn and a Panasonic blender, would it suggest I buy a Dirt Devil (or better taste in music)? Is Amazon a better judge of what I need than I am?

Or, as a pork eater, am I simply not qualified to know?

I wonder.

Incidentally...

My cardiologist called. No more pork- or lard-related posts for a while. Jeebus, you read these last couple of weeks and you'd think I was about to melt into my couch with only a stick and rag for a bath. I would also like to point out that beyond the lard/pork bidness that I have been very busy with other things.

Take last night, for example. I went to Slim's to see the Posies where, true to form, I found the opening acts too loud and got up to get earplugs. (Remember that Janeane Garofalo bit where she complains of having to leave a Weezer concert because it was TOO LOUD? Yes, it's like that. JG and I are likethis. Tune in next week as I dye my hair white-blonde and lose my sense of humor. I will then turn up, brunette again, on the West Wing where that delightful Alison Janney will descend from the mesosphere in order to hear my witty bon mots relating to GDP and the Latino vote, which is to say that I will discuss the Hey-Deh-Peh.) I have zero compunction about wearing earplugs at a concert, especially for opening acts, reasoning that I will accept some hearing loss but only for good music. Yes, I'm talking to you, Death Ray Davies and your odd Cat Stevens-meets-Billy Chenoweth band member who did nothing but hog the middle of the stage and shake his maracas and NO THAT IS NOT A EUPHEMISM. So I went hunting for earplugs.

Bottom of the Hill sells them at the bar, I think, for fifty cents, while the Fillmore asks for a donation at coat check. Slim's gives them out for free at the bar, which I learned only after asking the guy at the merch table for them. "Actually, I have no idea. You see, I'm with the band." "Really?" I asked. "Which band is that?" It's at this point that it should become painfully obvious that while I've listened to the Posies, and I was there to hear the Posies, that I nonetheless had no idea what their lead singer looked like.

I do now.

The Secret Ingredient

The great thing about Macy Gray is that she always seems drunk, high or both, careening back and forth on a Tilt-a-Whirl built just for her. So as I steeled myself to catch up on the latest sadness coming out of New Orleans, I was treated to a beautifully surreal image: Macy Gray on Larry King Live, shown volunteering with the Red Cross in New Orleans, listing towards the camera, towards boxes of supplies and then back again. It was dizzying. And wonderful.

Oh, Macy. Sing us out!

In other news, I spent the weekend in LA. Now, I'm not one for coincidences but I have to think that the successful denouement of the Great Lard Tortilla Hunt of 2005 might have a little something to do with the Pants-Tightening of 2005. I'm sure most of my fellow chow-hounds have never had a real tortilla, one made with lard and not vegetable shortening, one that's soft, fluffy and buttery. This breaks my heart. I think of these wondrous circles of yumminess and I am compelled to do a jig.

Excuse me as I break this mother out.

I've been looking for real tortillas in San Francisco forever - scouring the Mission, embarrassing myself with my pocho Spanish - "?Se venden tortillas de harina hechas con manteca en vez de acortamiento vegetal parcialmente hidrogenado?" Incidentally, that question takes me a full twenty seconds to get out, and I usually give up and ask something like "Hay tortillas hechas con manteca en vez de Crisco?" but then it's not Crisco, it's Creesco. Honestly, Spanish is so easy. Despite my linguistic efforts, I had come up empty, with every package proudly advertising "No Lard," like that's a good thing. Why not just print up packages with "Now, More Ass-tastic!" on them? Because that's what you get when you take out the lard and put in vegetable shortening which replaces the flavor with a delightful plasticky taste and texture. Hail, progress!

My cousin agreed to help me expand the search to Boyle Heights where we felt very tall, indeed. We went to three places, flummoxed that Mexican grocery stores which made their own chicharrones a/k/a pork rinds would suddenly find religion where tortillas were concerned and eschew the pork. Eventually we landed at Lupe's Tortilleria which was not so much a store as a tortilla distribution center. We walked in, fully expecting to be disappointed, and as we gazed at the stacked boxes lining the walls, a small forklift in the corner and not a soul in sight, we figured we'd struck out again. There were a few packages of tortillas on a counter and I picked one up but the soul-crushing phrase "No Lard" was nowhere to be seen. And then, under ingredients, there it was. It might as well have been lit up with neon next to Gloria Gaynor in a sequined dress singing I Will Survive and twirling flaming batons:

Lard.

Verdict: delicious.

Mountain Grown

The day I run out of filters and coffee on the same day is the day my head will explode and the screen fades to white. As it is, I have coffee but no filters so like the pioneers before me, I am forced to use a French press. It seems like somewhere around the late '90's the world went ass over tits for the French press which has the advantage of ensuring that under the lovely layer of crema dwell several millimeters of coffee sediment which you, while dreamily thinking "Hey, whatever happened to Mrs. Olson?" will unwittingly swallow with your final sip of the morning, thereby starting the day on a fanTASTic note.

EndlessPong

On Saturday morning I went to my friendly neighborhood independent bookstore and bought the latest installment of Harry Potter. "Time to get on the train," I said to the cashier as I handed over the cash. Buying the book seemed so inevitable, as did my inhaling it over the course of the weekend. Sometime between the Beer Pong Tourney and the desperate pre-work vacuuming this morning (it was as though the dog had exploded over the carpet), I finished it, all 8 gazillion pages of it.

I then wept inconsolably.

I'm kidding, of course. Good book, and not a waste of a perfectly good weekend at all. Ho, NO!

In fact, the weekend was marked by a tremendous uptick in my Enthusiasm for Life. Yes, my friends, it's time for Body Reclamation Project 2005, Version 4.2. As some of you doubtless know, Version 4.1 was a misguided attempt to once again do a modified Atkins diet if only to let loose my love of bacon, carnitas and all things pork. However, unlike attempts past - Versions 3.0-3.9 - which lasted only a day or two until I would realize that you can, in fact, eat too much bacon before you're just asking for your heart to go kablooey in your chest, this time I attempted to balance the scales of gluttony by quitting drinking for a few weeks. That, and the Catholic in me could only rationalize a Bacon!Bacon!Bacon! lifestyle if I suffered for it. Hence, no wine for the wicked.

For three weeks.

Until there were Special Occasions. There were out of town guests and then a weekend of Pride. I'd have a glass or two, figuring that not to would frankly be a little rude, especially if they're feting me. People, I was being FETED. What could I do? I indulged, somewhat, and discovered that Bacon + 3 Weeks of No Booze + Sauvignon Blanc = Incredibly Cheap Date. The thing is that if you don't eat any starch, there's nothing for the wine to hold onto anyway, so add that to my diminished tolerance for alcohol and I wasn't feeling so much buzzed as I was feeling icky (and yes, this is about the time I lost my award for Excellent Enunciation. A pity, really). I had to rethink the diet. First, I really missed oatmeal. I love oatmeal. (I swear if I hear ONE Wilford Brimley comment I will hoist you by your IP address and - and - oh, I got nothing. Bring on the Cocoon jokes.)

But what really torpedoed the Bacon!Bacon!Bacon! diet was that because you couldn't have starch, it followed that you couldn't have a tortilla and a burrito without a tortilla is just a pathetic tableau of my favorite Mexican, Al Pastor, sitting atop a pile of rice and beans. Poor Al. (My favorite Irishman, incidentally, is Paddy O'Furniture, the only Irishman who's out all night, every night. Second favorite: the Edge.)

So, having seen the folly of my non-starch ways, I've decided to keep the bacon, keep the tortillas and do what I have to do in order to ensure that my heart does not explode in my chest before I turn 35: I'm running. Okay, it's more of a jog, but still. Huzzah, fitness! You thought I was smug before. You just wait until I go all Joan Benoit on your ass. But cuter. Zola Budd, but slow. And with shoes. And without that tripping Mary Decker business. Just like that.

Think of it - in a few months, people will line up to ask me, "How come you're so veiny?" And I will tell them: "It's the bacon."

Next week: Body Reclamation Project 2005, Version 4.3: Bored with running, our heroine goes to a boxing gym and pulls a Ma Cuishle (but without the icky euthanasia business) for one week until her inability to blow her nose while wearing boxing gloves skeeves her out. Watch and learn as she braids her hair while calling everyone 'Boss.'

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

This weekend I drove down to LA to visit fabulous of fabulous friends and family. That, and to remember what it's like to sit outside at 7pm and not struggle to hear your friends over the sound of chattering teeth. Ah, warmth. She is a delight.

Of course, the weekend would have been better, I think, had I flown, because my days of the road trip are over. Well - not exactly. My days of driving down 5 are over because I grew up in the Great Sacramento Valley and know too well the soporific effect of this landscape on the single driver. Orchards? Seen 'em. Fields of green? Seen 'em. Hapless ramshackle shotgun houses sitting unnervingly close to the freeway, surrounded by a handful of windblown olive trees, a 1965 Ford F-150 parked out front on the dusty hardpan driveway? Yeah. Seen that too. And I'll bet you five dollars the cattle dog tied to the post there is named Blue.

The sameness of the drive wreaks havoc with your perception of the basic laws of physics. Like, if I'm driving 90 miles an hour, shouldn't LA be getting closer, faster, than if I were driving only 65 miles an hour? No. You will still get there in 6 hrs. You will see the same orchards you had passed an hour earlier and it will still take you 6 hrs. You will see identical fields of rice or asparagus and you will pass them twice or three times, and it will happen during a 6 hr ride no matter how fast you pass them. It makes no difference when you leave, how well you pass the bastards in Corollas or how much you sacrifice your bladder because you, my friend, are in for a 6 hr ride.

In my case that ride included the usual In-and-Out pit stop, and the reliable sprinkling of salt at 85 miles an hour which shot wide of the fries and insinuated itself into the cloth passenger seat of the rally car. There's also the adventure of eating a double-double while steering with my elbows, cursing the burger wrapper which has absorbed so much double-double goodness as to feel slightly like the double-double itself. Let's just say it: I always end up eating some of the wrapper. The shirt survived without a dribble but the leaning over the steering wheel resulted in some surprisingly large pieces of bun falling into my lap, which is to say between my legs so that I ate half the burger knowing that with every bite the fallen sauce-soaked bun was transferring grease and sauce and perhaps a bit of pickle chip into the crotch of my jeans. Knowing this, I could not fully enjoy the burger. I need a clear mental palate to enjoy the burger and a grease stain in the crotch does not lend itself to a clear mental palate.

Somewhere around this time I became nauseated because I am not a frat boy and chowing down a double-double will result in a white flag from the stomach area, and this is when the raison d'etre for driving in the first place became handy. I handed the rest of the burger towards the back of the car, and awaited the pup to shuffle forward - fighting those monster G's the rally car was pulling - and take the burger gently out of my hand and wolf it down in one gulp. I crumpled up the wrapper carefully and put it in the bag, wiped my hands and the steering wheel down and, convinced that my hands were clean, I did that move so typical of movie theatres when you know an errant piece of buttery popcorn is making sweet love to your favorite pair of khakis: I stood up in the car and swept the seat with my hand, astonished at the sheer volume of food which had landed there. A rather large piece of lettuce. A cube of pinkish tomato. That chunk of bread.

Suffice to say, the time-saver which was taking the meal to go was probably rendered moot after you factor in the tremendous amount of cleaning required after this meal.

Next time I'm flying.

A Unifying Theory of Everything

I swear it must have something to do with bacon.

With My Pie, I'd Like Some Pie. And Some Pie on the Side.

Thanksgiving is, of course, my favorite holiday ever because it's not about the presents and it's not about church. It's about giving thanks. For food.

I heart food and I heart pies and in particular I heart pecan pie, so I don't care if my cousin's boyfriend's parents were trying to get in good with us or if bringing five homemade pies to your house for Thanksgiving is Simply Something They Do: that pecan pie was awesome. And for that, I am thankful.

This was, of course, the twins' first Thanksgiving and naughty little peanuts that they are, they gorged themselves on Gerber's Turkey Dinner and Mixed Vegetables (in this respect, Thanksgiving dinner was like most dinners for them). My niece, who is a bigger ham than I am and who had famously refused to take a nap that day, anticipated her college days by some 18 years and passed out, dead asleep, at the table, her head against the edge of the little table on her highchair. There are several photos of this, with which we'll doubtless humiliate her. Her brother's fate is similarly sealed, as I snapped several pix of him apparently drowning in his own drool.

You lucky, lucky children, you.

In other news, I hung out in my hometown longer than I'd expected to. The weird thing is that it's hardly the same small town it was when I grew up there. There are housing developments and a new junior high. Stop signs where there was only a mildly exciting S curve on the road. A second voting precinct where historically there's been just the one. My mother, who's become one of those biddies who check names on the voter rolls, was horrified to realize how many people she didn't recognize. "Someone ran for school board and she got nearly 500 votes and I've never even met her!" Yet, with all the excitement, you'd think they'd get around to putting in a traffic light. Seriously.

I went bowling with my folks on Friday morning. We were going to play golf but this being November and this being the Sacramento Valley, the tule fog was thick, freezing and not likely to burn off. I wasn't looking forward to standing out on a fairway as the dampness creeped into my socks and up my pant legs, as my mother waited until my father's backswing to ask him where he'd like to have lunch. Instead, a quarter mile from the house I proposed that we not play golf. "How about... bowling?" I adore the fact that my folks are spontaneous enough to change their plans on a dime. I adore the fact that they congratulated themselves repeatedly about this throughout the day. Excellent. Good. But what's this? We're turning the car around? We're going home first? "Well, of course! We have to get our balls and shoes!"

Horrifying. My parents have their own bowling balls and bowling shoes. Who ARE these people?