Bad Produce Choices

Let me just tell you something quickly.

I'm a poor cook, and a poor shopper.

I recently went to the grocery store and I bought a bunch of produce. I wanted to make some burritos. I bought beans, onions, a red pepper, some tomatoes, and an avocado. I did what you do with produce. I felt them, squeezed them, looked at them for blemishes.

Perhaps I was tired. Perhaps I just suck. But god dammit I get home and all my produce sucks. I made bad produce choices!

I open the bag and what do I see?! A tomato that looks just like this!

Lol I'm kidding it didn't look exactly like that. I'm not blind.

But it was a bit too soft. Not quite right.

OH AND THE AVOCADO! DON'T GET ME STARTED ON THIS AVOCADO!

It felt like this in my mouth:

LIKE A BIG GREEN ROCK.

Lol okay I exaggerate once again. But this avocado. Too firm. Too fucking firm. 'It should have some give when you press it, but not too much, then you know its just right'. Sorry, dad, I don't know how to follow that advice. I don't know how to pick out produce!

There is one produce metric, however, that I failed to employ: the smell test.

All I did was look at the produce and touch them. Never did I even think to smell them! Then my friend tells me, 'if you have good produce it should smell like what it should smell like. Even a zucchini,' she says, 'should smell like a zucchini'. OH! The smell test! Why you elude my knowledge?! You would think I looked like this or something:

You would think I'm one of those fools that dones't know how to utilize my sense. But apparently I don't!

Oh well! Better produce choices await!

Watching Me, Watching Food

People are watching us eat. Studying our mouths. Honing in on our food choices. These same people are gonna see the broccoli jammed into your front teeth first. They'll feel that green dot crammed in you before you do. They'll instruct you on where it is, what to do. They're gonna smell that garlic miasma hanging out on your tongue; it doesn't belong to them, so they'll smell it all the more. They'll inform you that you reek of garlic. That your tongue is blue from some candy you absentmindedly crunched up. That there's a river of gravy running down your beard. Eating sure is a spectator spot. Plop a starving person down in front of you to study that steak dinner your eating and, assuming they are physically restrained, they'll recap the best parts of your meal like its a songs of the 70's commercial.

 

I don't like when other people watch me eat. My family is somewhat to blame. My maniacal brother and sister police the mean streets of sloppy eating with the sort of ruthlessness that makes even opening a bag of chips an uneasy affair. Its not the same if everyone is eating. Everyone can sort of turn in to themselves and gobble. It's great fun to pause from some enormous feast, only to find almost everyone hunched over, using these tiny, curved tools, scooping bite after bite into their open/close mouth garages. If you pick someone out of that crowd of feasters and just stare, intimately examine their every motion, their every chew, they'll probably sense your gaze and look up. It's the very look of animalistic ownership, of, "Fuck you want? You have your own to eat. Are you disgusted by my eating? Cut it out. Leave me be." Don't try it. You'll upset the order of eating.

Someone at my work likes to talk to me while I'm eating. They are "working" and I am eating. They prattle on about whatever must be mentioned to me mid meal. And I feel like I am getting hijacked. Like they have stripped my lips away and jammed my ears full of their meaningless words. I don't want to think about their words while I eat. If we were both partaking in meals, coming up for breaths that allowed us to take turns spitting out words, that'd probably work. We'd share pace and understanding. Don't misunderstand me, meals aren't solemn affairs of stuffing face. There is room for some language between bites. But there is a styling to a meal that makes people feel like they are sharing an experience. If you are trying to eat and someone has decided it is high time they carry on to you while you are sealed shut by the hunk of cud in your mouth, well that's just unfair. I am not going to snap at this coworker with a nasty, "Can't you see I'm just trying to eat?". That would disrupt the entirety of their personality. They would hate me forever. No. If I could remove myself from the situation I would but that is not something that really works here. So there I am, hunched over my plate, nodding my head, pushing out the occasional grunt of compliance, as their yapping starts to coat my food, leaving it with the bitter taste of unwanted socialization. I shove all the crap down and do my best to sit there and look like a stupid and hungry animal, punishing them with my crystal clear disinterest. 

The Things That Are ALWAYS In My Mouth, Or, On Beautiful Mouths

What do you think about tongues and teeth and saliva?

The answer is plenty.

I think plenty about them.

The other day I was walking down the street. I was listening to music feeling excited about myself. Then I noticed that my tongue was moving the whole time. Exploring my teeth, feeling around my gums, curling itself, always moving.

They say the tongue is the strongest muscle in the body. Proportionally, or something like that. It moves all the time, it never stops. Well, most of the time. And how strange tongues look. Even stranger, they are a whole complex of muscles in my head! Look!

Oh! The tongue! You wacky bastard. What is it that you do!?!?!

You like my teeth, you say?

I find that my tongue interacts with my teeth a lot. I'm very sensitive to the issue of teeth. I think about them.

Personally, I had a lot of dental incidents in my life. A cyst that caused me to lose some teeth, a fence that caused me to lose even more teeth. I spent a lot of time with dentists, orthodontists, and oral surgeons. Fuck that shit. It gave me a very strong sense of my teeth, what they should look like, what lengths we can go to to make them look a certain way, the money that can be spent on such a project!

I find it especially interesting because of a few historical anecdotes I know about teeth. Our sense of teeth, of course, is highly developed and historically situated. I think this is especially true in America. All this money on braces, retainers, dental work this and that.

We Americans, we love our straight ass teeth.

Interestingly, I heard once that during World War II one of the things that the Germans noticed about Americans was how incredibly straight and white our teeth were.

Love it. By which I mean hate it. Hate the way it gives us unreasonable expectations for our bodies, for our lives, for beauty and attraction.

For fuck's sake. Look at this celebrity:

Look at her fucking teeth. They are so white, so straight.

And you know what?

They are fake. Straight up. All of them. Veneers, son! VENEERS!

Or someone like Kanye West? Do you know about Kanye's teeth? If you don't, you best learn:

THEY ARE FUCKING DIAMONDS! HIS TEETH ARE DIAMONDS!

He literally had his bottom row of teeth replaced with diamonds.

Are you kidding me? Is this really what we want out of our world and our money?

Do you want a wet hole in your head to be filled with porcelain and diamonds?

Apparently we do here in America. The celebrities have spoken, and they want their mouths full of precious substances. To enhance their beauty. To brighten their appearance. To kill my soul.

Amazing. Amazing amazing amazing.

These are just holes filled with saliva, tongues, and teeth. And we spend so much time worrying about them. They are the point at which we use most of our language, where we feed ourselves, where we kiss people. We do so much with our mouths.

We want them to be beautiful.

There is something disturbing about mouths. They are on the cusp of abjection.

A famous example: Spit into a glass and try to drink it. You can't do it. It is disgusting.

Once saliva leaves your body it is no longer a part of you.

But right now my mouth feels good and full of saliva. In fact, it doesn't have enough saliva in it. I'm feeling a bit thirsty. I want my mouth to be wetter!

But once that saliva leaves my body it is no longer me. It is abject, caught in the space between subject and object.

Oh well. I don't want to give so much care to mouths. I still want to brush my teeth, and eat well, and all that. But I don't want to fret over the straightness or whiteness of my teeth. I don't want to worry about diamond bars or porcelain veneers.

I want to mock America's ridiculous oral culture. (lol play on phrase oral culture lol).

WWJDD

Jimmy Dean makes all sorts of things. Eggs and meats, breads and cheeses. Microwave safe stuff.  But Jimmy Ray Dean was a man too. He used to be a singer and an actor. He sure was handsome. Don't muck this country boy up with that deathwish lovin, non-sausage-eatin' James Dean. The dead rebel. Oh no. Jimmy was a man covered in powder and tied up in bandannas, yeah, real pretty like. He got to a ripe old age. And sometime in the twilight of his pretty-boy, Honky Tonk days, his name plumb got on up from that dollboy face of his and plopped itself down on some sausages. I mean it. Jimmy Dean became a sausage empire. A name synonymous with breakfast corndogs, with patty sandwiches, with them refrigerated, not too sweet, not too spicy, tubes of meat.



I knew Dean as a kid. We hung out in the mornings. Me unwrapping the plastic from some frozen hunk of stuff. Me rewrapping the stuff in a paper towel like an impromptu X-mas. Me shoving it in the microwave, plugging in some digits...pacing...opening the door...feeling the radiated heat of the warm blanket of paper towel, that hot and pliable give of a gummy chunk of who knows what sausage. The portion vanishing in fevered seconds, mouth juggling hot bite after hot bite. Yeah. That was breakfast ina pinch. Parents still asleep or gone. We kids, the resourceful freezer divers. JIMMY JIMMY yeah. Y'know, a name like Jimmy sure puts you at ease. You expect a Jimmy that serves you food to poison you? Not me.

Fast forward to a week ago. The house's milk has all dried up. No rote cereal for me. Got to get to work. Got to eat on the way. McDonald's is a frighteningly easy path to go down, once you do, no looking back. Something else. Need something else. QFC, grocery wandering, bound to be options. Need food. Mind unformed. Microwaves at work. Frozen aisle, help me. Answer me! Behind a glass door, the words JIMMY DEAN appear like streaky writing through the fog. Terrifying but can't look away. But but but Jimmy, there's eggs on everything. I'm already squeamish about them. And these eggs either look like circular disks from some twisted future where eggs are used as circular currency, chicken overlords etc, or just the entrails of some horrible chicken pinata sprinkled on some heinous invention not meant for this world like BREAKFAST PIZZA BURRITO PIE EGG SALAD SANDWICH.

I scramble up and down the aisles. Breakfast food, that's all I want. Maybe I should just get fruit and yogurt. Maybe I am throwing away my best years. JIMMY DEAN. The words smashing against my face, like they are banging me against their glass prison, beating a new logic into me. JIMMY DEAN has the answer. Look harder. There. Under the egg futures, there's something. Turkey(!) sausages sandwiched on cinnamon bread...no egg chunks to speak of (JIMMY DEAN taunts me with this mention of Turkey, cackling about petty distinctions between the animals. To JIMMY, all good things return to the sausage from whence they came. Titling animals merely calms his hungry brood of followers). There's only 4 of them and its like $6. But I'm flagging and I need to get to work. I slide my card, do the motions and head to the work microwave. Carrying out my childhood DEAN ritual is easy. The cinnamon juices soggy the paper towels. The sandwich burns all over, its microwaved molecules raging through the sandwich like some divine flame. For four mornings I will eat this same sandwich. I have eaten three of the four. I am delaying the inevitable. I fear that upon eating the fourth, none of you will ever see me again. Let these words then serve as a reminder of the unshakable truth that a man can sing and act, can move about this Earth with grace and beauty, can live and die and still, still be there as a name, as a cardboard box or a breakfast corndog, can be ground up sausage, waiting for you to slip and eat 'em all up. JIMMY DEAN can show you, right in your very gut, the expressway to your own sausage grinder.

Nm

Not much has happened in my mouth today.  I started it with a couple cups of YUBAN (I don't care what they say-- it gets the job done).  With a dash of cinnamon, of course.

Make every day a YUBAN day.

I brought a peanut butter (crunchy) and jelly (raspberry) sandwich (buttermilk bread) and a braeburn apple to work.  So I ate those, and they were pretty good.

But right now RJG is cooking this. Dank.

A Savory Treat

I continue to work at a bakery.

I really like this bakery. I think the staff is delightful. We are all working to overcome the stress of a new staff. A new time in life. New shit going on.

Like my dad said today, like is a period of transition and adjustment.

Like my mother says, 'soon this will be a distant memory'.

All things are in transition.

Soon you will be dead.

But there is one thing at this bakery that I simply cannot resist: the turkey and swiss croissant.

Fuck me.

We all know what a croissant is. Tons of layers of butter and dough, folded over on themselves, made to rise all crispy and crazy! Fuck yeah.

You fold that dough, son. You make all those flaky layers for my enjoyment. Yes. Thanks.

Oh.

What's that? You want to put meat in that shit? You are gonna put a bunch of turkey and delicious cheese inside all these dope ass layers of flaky baked ass butter?

Fuck yeah?

Its gonna look like what?!

LIKE THISIS?!

Fuck yeah.

I really just want to fix the formatting on this page.

But I love savory croissants.

I also love latte art. Then I put that latte art in my mouth.

Sip by sip, stretching and distorting the images I have crafted.

I'm working on a tulip. Which, when done properly, looks like this:

Making a heart is pretty simple. And the tulip is merely a series of hearts stacked on top of one another, with a final line pulled through to connect it all.

What fun I have with latte art.

The American Way.

Here is something you may not have known about Uncle Sam--he started the tastiest sub joint ever in Pittsburgh. Today, I was fortunate enough to indulge in his beautiful sandwich art. The experience at Uncle Sam's is nearly always one of a kind not only because of their artistry with a bun but also the kooked out staff. Take today for example, girl with shaved head and piercing through the middle of face tended to my tummy. Every purchase from this ragin girlie has tested my nerves a little. It never fails though, she sweetly takes down my orders and brings me free fries com sanduiche; she might not be as dangerous as her appearance suggests. I haven't decided yet but dig the service.
So now, I have a heap of deliciously oversalted and crispy fries along with one foot long, "Supreme Italian" sub (kinda like pictured above). Sam has earned himself a seat on top of the world for eating his sub, I'm not there yet, but I've been trying to eat as many as possible in hopes of one day getting there. Sometimes I worry that I finish my order too quickly but, in probably ten to fifteen minutes, I'm out of there and on the SLOW bike ride home.
Afterward, I feel kind of like this:


Happy Halloween Seattle!