I Got That Work

(If/when I write a book that requires a cover, I sure hope that Pen and Pixel is still in business)

There's freelance-related anxiety that concerns having too much work, and there's freelance-related anxiety concerning not having enough work, and there is the rare and beautiful anti-nirvana state that is achieved when those two nervousnesses occupy the same consciousness. Obviously there are hundreds of thousands of worse things than feeling jittery and overworked, but as explanations for falling behind on my own self-spammery goes, it's a pretty good explanation. So I'm taking a brief break from attempting to take a longer break to get caught up on my catching up. Then I'm going to make this chimichurri for a party I'm supposed to make chimichurri for, and maybe spend 45 minutes staring at a Word document containing an assignment that I have avoided working on because of how much I hate it and hate working on it. But right: a break. So here's what I've been doing instead of blogging or feeling comfortable.

The good news is that there are some things, besides the usual Daily Fixery and daily day-jobbery. Foremost among these, probably, is the fact that I'm writing a sports column called The Mercy Rule for Vice Magazine. Which is a cool but also an intimidating thing, both because -- with the exception of my Awl NFL columns, which was not so much easy, either, but also just sort of felt different -- I've never written this sort of thing before and because, you know, it's Vice. That obviously means something different than it did back when it was Do's and Don't's and mid-aught cocaine libertarianism/libertinism -- it's a different and more serious and more complicated thing now, and my editors are both quite serious and good at editing. Also the commenters are kind of hilariously negative, so the fact that I've only gotten one "TL;DR" and been called an "asshole" once in three columns is actually kind of good, I guess? But yeah: overall the response has been good, and I'm enjoying doing it. The three columns I wrote, about Frank McCourt, the NBA lockout and Not Saving The All-Star Game<, are here and here and here. Feel free to hit the comments and call me a retard or whatever.

I'm also still doing the Yakkin' thing at The Awl, usually with the very great David Raposa. That David R, though, also has work, and this week was covering a Lil Wayne concert when he would ordinarily have been on gchat with me making fun of Ron Gardenhire. Which is a pretty good deal for him, and which gave me an excuse to write something stupid about baseball and food, which is the sort of thing I don't actually need an excuse for. But I liked doing it, and was especially delighted that one of the more ridiculous bits of the piece -- a totally made-up bit involving paunchy journeyman reliever Mike Fetters running a renegade concession stand at Miller Park -- actually seemed to have convinced Larry Granillo, the man behind the great Wezen-Ball baseball blog, that Mike Fetters was indeed hauling a cheese-vat around a big league ballpark. See if it convinces you:

While Fetters says that he "does fine" on his mobile concession, it's clearly a labor of love—only love, after all, could compel a 40-something man to pull a bubbling cauldron of Colby cheese and that cast-iron skillet around the ballpark while evading Miller Park security. Fetters charges fans just $2 to dunk any of the other concessions available at the ballpark into the "cheese tank," and will put a fried egg—that’s where the skillet and hot-plate come in—atop any concession for just a dollar. And I do mean anything: during my visit, I saw Fetters put a fried egg atop a pile of nachos, a double-patty burger ($11) from Gorman Thomas Prime, and directly into a New Era fitted cap. "Security guys are going to bust balls, because that's what they do," Fetters says. "Food inspector guys, same thing. But the way I figure, these fans gave me a lot when I pitched here. A lot of love, a lot of support. I want to give them something back, too."

Incidentally, the idea of a ballpark steakhouse called Gorman Thomas Prime is actually my favorite joke in the piece, and this is a piece that has a few hundred words of totally made up Guy Fieri BS. You can read the whole thing here. Or you could not, that'd be fine, too. I know how it feels not to have time to do things. I know because I need to make chimichurri.

Schnatter'ed

Tonight I celebrate the one-week anniversary of my first and last Papa John's Pizza, which I dis-enjoyed in an EconoLodge in Bangor, Maine, near one of America's worst-lit airports. This week, I plan on writing something about it, either here or for The Awl. It won't just be about that. But also this pizza thing is maybe being taken a bit far and ALSO I do not take back a single thing about Papa J and his fantastical gluten-delivery discs. Because really now, this was just about exactly what I expected. Domino's without the soul. Or at least without the sauce and weird cornmeal crusties and sense that someone gave a shit. So keep your eyes peeled for that, provided I actually get around to writing it.

Here's the face it made me make. Not so much like the shrieking lipid-beasts you see high-fiving Sir Schnattz in his commercials, but then again I was in a (fucking) EconoLodge in (fucking) Bangor, and saved the receipt because I thought the experience might become tax-deductible. So different strokes for different folks. By which I mean that people who eat this pizza a lot will get strokes.

Leftover Shrimp Pizza

I imagine that, given the few hours and great many words I spent on the subject, I'm now officially on the record as regards Pizza Hut. Which would ordinarily be the place to leave it, since I am not running a pizza blog, here -- although, of course, if anyone knows anyone else who wants to fund a long-form pizza-based literary quarterly or something, obviously that person should get in touch. There is also the matter of the thousands of words of copy I have due to various people this week. That as well. But there is, astonishingly, one thing I missed about Pizza Hut in my novella-length exploration of its manifest and manifold objectionabilities. And that is the fact that these fuckers have lobbyists.

The fuckers in question, I should be clear, are Yum! Brands, the Louisville-based garbage-cuisine concern that owns Pizza Hut, KFC and, presumably, a lot of stock in whoever makes Lipitor, diabetes meds, and scooters for the obese. The world needs lobbyists, of course, if only to ensure that extra-formal steakhouses stay in business. But probably only for that. Yum! Brands, though, needs lobbyists to advocate for the cause of allowing the elitist communo-fascist Takers-coddling program formerly known as food stamps to be used at Yum! Branded fat-dispensaries. From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Yum! Brands Inc. is lobbying the Beshear administration to make Kentucky one of only a handful of states that allow food stamps to be used at restaurants by certain groups of recipients. Under the federal food-stamp program, states may authorize that use by the elderly, disabled or homeless, who often have difficulty preparing meals. Only Michigan, Arizona and parts of California have done so.

...One of [Yum!'s] top executives has helped raise money for Gov. Steve Beshear's re-election campaign. And the company has presented the idea to officials of groups ranging from the Kentucky Restaurant Association and the Louisville Urban League, who have written letters of support to Beshear.

“We think it's a win-win,” said Paul Carothers, the company's vice president for government affairs. “It's obviously of interest from a business standpoint, and it provides access to the elderly homeless and disabled who are often underserved.”

It certainly does sound like a win-win, unless you actually eat the food in question! In which case it sounds like groaning-in-bathroom and feels like a clammy complexion, grease-coated tongue and an inert and un-fun sleepiness. Which are all, to be fair, all-natural organic feelings that your body delivers when you try to kill it with cheese.

Over the past day or so, some dear friends -- my sister, my good friend Matthew Abrams, the chums-I-have-never-met of Twitter -- have sent me pictures and links to some of Pizza Hut's legitimately insane and truly avant-garde pizzas from the rest of the world. And while I am obviously not looking for an abalone-and-hotdog pie with extra mayo -- or the similar Asian nightmare pies our corpo-pizza buddies have made available -- I at least get those. Different cultures have different ideas of what terrible and terrible-for-you food is like, and it's incumbent on Pizza Hut and other Yum! Brand arteriosclerosis distributorships to deliver that food-misery most effectively. That's their job, and I suppose they should do it. I would just prefer if, here in the United States -- where despite the best efforts of your president, Barack Hussein Obama, we are still FREE TO CHOOSE any shitty, life-shortening garbage-food we want -- we didn't have to subsidize it. You know that shrimp mousse pizza was not the product of any nanny-state food stamp BS. That exists because... oh wait, that actually exists. Huh. Okay, I'm going to need a minute.

Our Pizzas, Ourselves

The other day, I linked to this site in an email to a prospective employer. As with all of those sorts of emails, it felt like kind of a longshot. I don't necessarily know what makes editors say yes or no to a pitch, and I have the track record to prove as much. But one thing that might not help, or which at least could conceivably influence decision-making in one direction or another, would be if the person pitching you an article idea linked you to his professional page and the top item was a series of barf-centric St. Patrick's Day limericks and if the obvious purpose of this purportedly professional page was to air some amorphous grievances with Papa John Schnatter.

I am not unaware of this. But unless and until I can find a paying venue for my musings on our nation's pizza corporations, I'm going to use this site to air those particular amorphous grievances. These particular amorphous grievances. Which is to say that I'd like 1) to remind any and all readers that my grown-up writing work -- which I am proud of and I like to think pretty good at, and which generally has nothing to do with pizza -- is over there in the right hand column and 2) to rap at you about offensive pizza for a minute.

And I don't just mean pizza that tastes bad. That sort of pizza will always be with us. You can go back to biblical times on this -- about the only thing I agree with in the Pauline Epistles is when Paul instructed the Corinthians not to get a slice with toppings on it at the average pizzeria, because (and I'm quoting from memory) "it's just a regular crappy plain pie that they kind of threw some mushrooms on, and is probably like a week old." Which is wise and forward-thinking and generally the sort of thing that makes you surprised at how rigid and sour Paul was on other matters. But my point -- to the extent that such a thing can be said to exist in a post that is (spoiler alert) about stuffed-crust pizza -- is that pizza mega-brands have no kind of lock on wack slices, and that bad pizza is just an irksome fact of modern life, not unlike libertarians or allergies.

It's also easy enough to avoid, if you eat pizza often or have decent eyesight -- pizzerias that display slice pies featuring, like, ziti or salad or sliced breaded chicken cutlets where toppings should be are generally worth avoiding. Pizzerias that do not at least attempt the odd parm-style sandwich are kind of suspect to me. Places with gross-ish names -- there's a Fat Sal's near me, which just sounds kind of unappealing -- are probably worth a pass. Misspellings aren't a good look -- I'll deal with a "calzon" on a menu, but I don't really appreciate "Our Heros" and will not abide a "Sweaty Vin's Pizzaria" on the awning, because come on with that shit. You probably know all this already, or at least know the non-crazy stuff.

And you probably know, too, that nothing good is coming out of a place called Pizza Hut or Papa John's. (You may think nothing good will come out of a Domino's, and you may be right, but for a series of complicated reasons I am not sure I agree with you) Everyone knows this. Papa John's helpfully reminds us of this by actually showing its pizzas in its television commercials, and in so doing revealing those pizzas as less pizza-as-pizza than as garbage fires that were extinguished by six pounds of cheese, and then resold as foodstuff. I don't like looking at Papa John's commercials very much -- and I especially dislike the parts featuring Schnatter himself, which scan like the ads of a Club For Growth-backed congressional candidate from the Indianapolis suburbs -- but they are kind of instructive. This goes beyond Schnatter, although it starts with him: if you can deal with his I-am-the-brand self-seriousness and new fakey Pawlenty-style imitation country voice and strained what-are-my-muscles-doing-this-feels-weird smile, you can deal with the pizza. If you are the sort of person who sees televised images of something called "The Tuscan Six-Cheese Pizza" (or even the meaningless words "Tuscan Six-Cheese Pizza") and thinks "fuck yes, and let me get some breadsticks and a side of ranch with that," then the commercials work for you and of course good luck with your diabetes. If you see those commercials and do not think that, then you just avoided engagement with a Tuscan Six-Cheese Pizza, and also probably dodged a clammy and miserable evening of junior coronary incidents. So maybe I should bitch less about Papa John's, I guess? Pizza Hut, though, deserves no such quarter.

Pizza Hut, as far as I know and can imagine, is no one in the world's favorite pizzeria. Where during my youth the (oddly, Wichita-born) macro-pizza corp dealt in crummy buffets and suspect-seeming deep dish cholesterol supplements, Pizza Hut has responded to the challenges of the current pizza marketplace -- foremost among these, I have to imagine, being a nation of physicians telling patients "never for lunch and dinner, unless you want to be riding around in those sad Tea Party scooters by age 40" -- by first attempting to rebrand as an Italian bistro, and then finally and terrifyingly embracing a strange and high-fat avant-garde. The former didn't work because Pizza Hut is one of those places that would rather pay teenagers as little as possible than pay more for people who can be trusted around a hot oven, and also because no one, ever, has ever been enticed by the words "ravioli from Pizza Hut." The latter... I don't really know about, honestly. The chain is not yet in Chapter 11 -- which is more than bankrupt lukewarm-pizza dons Sbarro can claim -- and continues to run national television ads and loose its horrible pizza-vations on an American public that will apparently eat essentially anything. So I'll assume that Pizza Hut is doing fine. Their frontier-pushing new stuffed crust pizzas, though, are proof that Pizza Hut cannot and will not do good.

Of course, Pizza Hut has been putting cheese into pizza crusts -- where it manifestly does not belong -- for decades now. What makes their new endeavor different is that they're now jamming either pepperoni or what I'm pretty sure the TV ads refer to as "meaty" (full stop), which is a short way of describing a pizza crust crammed with shards of sausage, bacon and "beef." Pigs and cows, in other words, but only the parts of which are choice enough to be cheese-jected into pizza crust. I should mention, I guess, that I eat all those things/animals, and that natural ambivalences aside I imagine that I will continue to do so until a doctor gives me the Tea Party Scooter Speech mentioned above. I don't eat them all the time because 1) what-am-I-made-of-money and 2) is a bit more complicated.

Because at some point -- probably about 600 or so words ago -- it doesn't matter if a bunch of assholes jam sad bacon crumbles into pizza dough to appease a broad and uncool national dedication to high-performance lardassery. It matters to the pig whose body became a punchline, presumably, but I can't really write that particular essay right now. (That is, I can't write it as long as I continue to consume cured pork products with such aplomb) What's a bummer about it, for me, is the whimsification of meat and the dumb carelessness with which (especially) bacon has been turned into some sort of man-status-bolstering bro-condiment. (Note: the gnarled, glib, chuckleheaded bloodlust of upmarket foodie writing is just as gross to me -- my ideal food writing is, I think, a Ted Berg sandwich review) No one really turns to pizza for a monastic, austere experience. The opposite, I know. (Note: I tend to like my pizza monastic, but I am a doofus and have already written like 1200 words on this)

But even if pizza is what we eat when we want to feel like kids, or to remember a time when eating was just a fucking blast -- even then -- I don't know why macro-scale pizzas have to be so dumb and bro-branded and irresponsibly fatful and aggressively un-foodlike. I understand that, nationally and discursively and in an increasingly dangerous way, our nation has had a hard time distinguishing between "better" and "more" for a few decades now. Of late, at least in our politics and also I think in our other smaller life-decisions, that indistinctness has curdled into a sad, babyish nastiness -- alternately an hysterical fear of being asked to make do with slightly less excess and a childish petulance at the prospect of ever and anywhere being told "no." Finding ways to jam more More into everything -- regardless of whether or not grafting a pepperoni roll to the perimeter of your meat lover's pie could possibly taste good -- is no way to go through life. It's a decent enough way to go through second grade, and a popular one. But if you're an adult who understand where food comes from and what effects it has on one's body and environment and economy and so on, this is no way to eat. Which makes it all the weirder and more distressing that our tax dollars are funding this ongoing national extra-cheese order, but which is also another reason to do the one simple thing that will prevent any reasonable person from ordering a baco-stuffed crust meatstravaganza pie. That one simple thing being to think, even briefly, about what you are about to eat, and whether you are sure you can't maybe do a bit better by (for starters) yourself.

Ride Things Or Die: The Paula Deen Experience, With Brendan Flynn

Paula Deen's giant howling orange face and Chico's be-swathed form is alternately and simultaneously one of my most and least-favorite things on television. The Food Network fry-mistress is one of the absolute monsters of our time -- with the complexion of a photographic negative, a brash and brazen ignorance that she wears on her linen (always linen) sleeve and a jones for butter so severe that it could coax a reproachful "dude, you are an addict" from Tom Sizemore, Deen embodies every glorious, galling excess currently on display in our culture. But while her goes-to-11 shrieking is tough to take, and while it's a bummer how fearlessly she has made her howling and proud lack of interest in any type of cooking but her own a part of her brand -- she's basically a culinary Tea Party, demanding a return to some unhealthy and imaginary yore in which the streets were viscous with shortening and men were still free -- she's also weirdly gripping to watch. Guy Fieri, for all the myriad things that are profoundly wrong with/about him, at least wants you to know that he knows how to cook. Deen just wants to laugh too loud at what didn't even seem like a joke and then shove cookies into your face.

Anyway, the internet is clearly in P-Deen's thrall as much as I am, and today the very amazing and very strange Paula Deen Riding Things photoshop tumblr lit up the parts of the web where I hang out. I discussed this with Brendan Flynn, one of our generation's foremost tumblr-readers, someone who reads Cook's Country for the articles, and who is as taken with the mysterious and richly umber Deen as I am.

brendan: Paula Deen Riding Things, currently trending on twitter. Internet 1 Brendan 0 today.

David: Yeah, I saw some of that earlier. The internet is just better at this than we are. I didn't even know I wanted to see that.

brendan: and Paranormal Blacktivity. that's also trending. but yeah, the internet is better. Paula Deen is terrifying. I can't even watch the top chef she's on. it just sits in my dvr box.

David: Sits in your DVR box, screaming and getting cream cheese on everything.

David: I also cannot imagine her food being good? Her show is fascinating, though. I watch it until I get too nauseated to watch it. I like when she drags her poor dumpy family around.

brendan: no, it doesn't look good. and I like Durkee Fried Onions a lot.

David: Her husband looks like a grumpy Southern Santa Claus, and she's just pulling him around like France, screaming about something and terrifying pedestrians with the force of her great gusty laughter. The guy looks ashamed to be there, but also like he'd rather be at home, eating chips.

brendan: grumpy southern santa claus is awesome.

David: Big golf belly hanging out. He should have his own show. His orange wife in loose Chico's linen garb, howling. Her giant teeth. She dresses like Missy Elliott in the "I Can't Stand The Rain" video, only the weird garbage bag outfit is from Chico's in her case, and she's screaming about frosting, and how you can-too fry it. Did they let her grade the food on Top Chef? Did everyone have to make tartar sauce, and then she did a shot of it and decided which version she liked best.

brendan: he's sort of the opposite of the barefoot contessa's husband.

David: I haven't seen that dude, although I guess you don't get to be a Contessa without a Count in the mix. What does he look like? A banker? A duke?

brendan: a banker, which he is. and been a clinton appointee. seems incredibly affable and happy to eat/listen to a story.

brendan: according to Wikipedia, he also was in the Nixon whitehouse, dean of yale school of management and at one time managing director at lehman brothers.
wow.

David: Affable plutocrats, man. Can't beat 'em. Paula Deen's husband ran a gun shop for awhile, then retired because he felt like he wasn't eating enough fried fish. He was sick of the bullshit.

David: So who do you think wears/owns more loose-fitting linen pants, The Contessa or Paula Deen?

David: And I do have a follow-up.

brendan: it's a push, maybe. But I'm going with Deen b/c they're probably cheaper (contessa is strictly lands end) and she seems to favor volume

David: That was my follow up -- which one's wardrobe comprises more linen by yard, not by item. How did you anticipate that.

brendan: it just makes sense.

Thanks And You're Welcome

I'm back in New York City after four days in the benign sensory deprivation/regression therapy experience that is the ancestral home in New Jersey. Me, the wife, my parents, and the excitable bathmat pictured at left, hanging around a weirdly cold house -- the 64-degree setting on the thermostat was seemingly non-negotiable, with my mother going so far as to offer a sweater to a small/elderly/beloved Thanksgiving guest rather than goosing the temperature a few degrees. Eccentric parents are going to be eccentric parents, though, and I brought sweaters. And that giddy little shag carpeted animal is going to be cute, but it's also going to be fed weird things by my parents -- cheesecake? goose-liver pate? -- and then my parents are going to blame each other for feeding it weird things. And then the dog is going to poop in various places throughout the home, usually on or near one of the half-dozen or so wee-wee pads(tm) that have been scattered about the house in an attempt to both minimize carpet-related damage and define down the definition of "housebroken." This is all normal. I know it doesn't look that way, but it's normal.

It's actually not at all normal, I know. But the ways in which my annual Thanksgiving trips to the happy, underheated, secretly weird home have become normal -- the unconscious rapprochement I've realized with my family and hometown and past, and which you probably have, too -- has been much on my mind of late. In part, this is because -- belatedly, so incredibly freaking belatedly -- my novel is finished, and in the hands of my estimable agent, and because my novel is (subtextually, I guess) mostly about that topic. I write what I know, just like anyone else, and while I don't necessarily know what to make of the passage of time's effect on my family and myself, or on that cluttering, chilly homestead, I am at least aware that it is happening, and that the fact that it is happening makes me feel something.


The easiest label for that "something" would, I guess, be nostalgia or regret. This is because a sort of vague melancholy is my default mood/mode, but also because that's a pretty normal response to the passage of time and the inexorability of change and all that. We, or at least I, tend to struggle for a sense of control and equilibrium all of our days, but the accretion of all that time is something we can't control, no matter how on point we are about calling people back on time, getting up when the alarm goes off, et cetera. I battled myself to get the novel finished, while all around me my life rose in great teetering piles, and it has been a strange sensation, facing all that accumulation and wondering what to do with/about it, what to do next. And if I hadn't been alternately anxious and busy, if I hadn't spent all this time knee-deep in lame-brand scotch and inertia, the same accumulation would've happened. I'm not totally sure what I'm writing about, here, but I think I could write a lot more about it if given the opportunity.

I was given such an opportunity by my good friends at The Awl before Thanksgiving, as part of their Real American Thanksgiving Cookbook project -- a sort of compendium of essay-fied recipes by Awl staffers and commenters and adjunct semi-regular humperinos such as myself. I'm pretty happy with what I wrote, which was an essay about my parents' house and Thanksgiving -- still and probably always my favorite holiday -- wrapped around my second grade teacher's recipe for cranberry-orange relish.

Kate revealed to me, after the essay went up, that she has always found the recipe a little too tart. We made a half-recipe this year, and made it a little sweeter -- the guest list was smaller, and 20 percent of said guest list bashfully/finally went on record with her it's-just-too-cranny sentiments. I complain about my parents' house and weirdness because I worry about them getting old, I guess, and because I'm noticing myself getting older. But, as the Awl essay points out, it's a hopeful and happy thing that all this weirdness has proven so enduring, and so adaptable.

Spice Network/Stay Hungry: My Non-Sports Wall Street Journal Debut Is About Curry

You don't have to be a freelance writer to be the sort of person who moves personal goalposts to ensure a sort of Zeno's Paradoxical state of permanent unfulfillment -- plenty of people I know do this, and I assume it's one of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective But Permanently Scowling People. But man, does freelancing ever make it easy for those of us who choose to make things hard for ourselves. This post is going to get really Emo LiveJournal and squirmy, I should warn. All you really need to know is in the next paragraph; everything after that is blurt.

I'm not really able to detect the pitch of my own writing in this post thus far, but if it's coming off as a high whine, I apologize for it. I'm aware of how lucky I am to get as much work as I do, and of how fortunate I am to have been in the venues in which I've been (this would be a great place for a hilarious link to Dermatology Business Management Magazine, one of my first steady gigs, but that magazine has been out of business since like 2003 and the website was pretty Jukt Micronics when it actually existed). And, more to the point, a happy thing occasioned the writing of this post in the first place -- my piece about the nightmarish and inexplicably popular phaal curry at Brick Lane Curry House, and how that dish and its appearance on (nightmarish and inexplicably popular) Man Vs. Food helped rescue the restaurant, was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal's Greater New York Section on Thursday. (And was even in Gawker, which I'm sure my WSJ editors appreciated) It's a good thing! Not the curry, though: that tastes like scalding-hot sand, with bits of meat and a sad little devil's peen of dried chile floating in it.

I'm very proud of all those good things I just mentioned, of course, and I had a great time writing and reporting the piece; I'm excited to do another one for the GNY section, and to work with my editor there again, and all the rest. And yet here I am, knowing all this stuff a lot more than I'm actually feeling it, and thus missing the point of what is -- despite being a silly-ish and resolutely minor piece -- inarguably something of a career highlight. Or not that: I'm missing the point emotionally, which is made that much more poignant and unpleasant because I am fully aware of and pleased by the thing that is the point itself. That really cleared it up, didn't it.

The question, then, is what the true point here is -- the work or the pay for the work; the pride and the achievement or the reification and objectification of same. And this is where the self-defeating shittiness of the goalpost-moving tendency makes itself felt -- a couple of darlings got killed in edits, but by just about every metric the curry piece is a success, and so is this one and this one and this one and so on. And yet in terms of actually feeling accomplishment or pride or happiness about any of that, I'm honestly going to have to take your word for it.

Because... well, because my wife's getting ready to go to graduate school, which is going to double my financial responsibility, and because I can't possibly make enough money for the two of us to live writing fun articles I'm proud of as a freelancer. That's mostly it. It doesn't diminish my (abstract) pride in them, but stack all these lovely successes atop one another and you barely have a year's rent and utilities and Metrocards and periodic meals out. Unless we start going to one of those harbingers-of-The-Fall all-you-can-eat chains that I've seen advertising with ever greater frequency on TV. And I know Kate don't trust the sushi at CiCi's, you know? It's like, how long as that hamachi been under the heat lamps? And why is it even under the heat lamps in the first place? Sometimes I honestly think CiCi's doesn't even know what a tartare trio is.


Anyway, by the time I reached the old one, the goal line is in a different place. It was once my ambition to write a novel -- and I finally did that, and it's in the hands of my very awesome and very qualified agent, and I'm waiting to see what happens. But then it was my ambition to write pieces I want to write for magazines and websites that I respect and read myself -- and that's happening now, and has been happening for a couple years. But both those accomplishments have been superseded by another thing I haven't managed to accomplish yet -- which is making ends meet in a way that allows for something other than constant financial anxiety. And that last bit colors everything else I do. There is a way that this has always worked for me -- anxiety before a piece comes out, excitement immediately after, and then a crash of sorts accompanied by a taunting internal voice saying something like, "Don't spend all $250 of those dollars in one place, Diddy." And for whatever reason, the first stage is more intense, the second is briefer, and the voice is louder in the third.

This isn't all on me and my neuroses, of course -- living in New York City is both difficult and expensive, and circumstances in my life have changed and are changing still. But man would it ever be nice to be able to feel as proud of these things as I ought. For all the thrills of being a figure in the Elite Liberal Media apparatus that controls our nation (and keeps the bile ducts on pump in your more loathsome/paranoid monsterfaces) -- and I'm joking about the "thrills" part, there, but I'm also not -- sometimes all I really want is to relax. Someday, I suppose, I'll be able to rejoice in the coming-true of minorish but actual-not-making-fun dreams. That's my hope, at least. For now it's still kind of abstract. Being in the Wall Street Journal does seem pretty cool, when I think about it. I would love to better know what it feels like.

(And this is where I had a low-quality video of The Talking Heads play "Stay Hungry," because this much better video can't be embedded. But go here and watch it instead, please)

That Guy, Or Human Southwestern Eggrollipede

This weekend, I'll be eating at TGI Friday's. Or at the very least drinking there. I made a reservation and am very excited! Because it's one of maybe two restaurants near where my friends are getting married, the pre-wedding pre-party -- after which, as you know: hotel lobby -- will be held there. And I'm totally fine with that, because I love whimsical meat appetizers my friends and they do in fact serve beer there.

And in all honesty, I actually have always really loved potato skins -- even though I don't really know if I've ever actually enjoyed eating more than one of them -- and as far as I know TGI Friday's still serves those. They might be filling them with fettucine alfredo now or something, but I believe they're still on the menu. No, the only real issue here is that I could, in some fashion, be seen as supporting Juggalo-ish human photo negative/"food dude" Guy Fieri by patronizing the restaurant chain for which he does commercials. At least, I assume this was intended to be an advertisement for TGI Friday's.



Kind of wound up being an advertisement against hairstyling products and tanning beds and humanity in general, though, no?

Fieri has always been a tough case for me, because the idea of his Food Network show, "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives," is actually pretty cool. Or I should write, the idea of his first Food Network show, since he's now bringing his burnt sienna magnetism to his own cooking show on the network (I should really start another blog just to detail what that show's set looks like, but in the interest of time: imagine a taxidermied crocodile wearing Oakleys that is also somehow a hubcap with a clock on it? Then fill a whole set with shit like that and proceed to make, like, "Guac Caipirinhas" there) and to a network game show so guilelessly cleavage-leering and sub-retarded that it would stand out for its dumbness on contemporary Italian television. And while there are periodically interesting places featured on "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives," Fieri is always there to ruin it -- barging onscreen dressed like a fucking hot rod, sunglasses at the ready on the back of his head, taking some gigantic ketchupy bite of something and robustly high-fiving the startled-looking Greek guy who runs the diner, drive-in or dive in question. The whole weird '90s-fetishizing-the-'50s/"Cruising Night In Upland, CA" aesthetic of the thing is a turn-off, too: the show's general vibe, despite all the interesting restaurants (and, to his credit, Fieri will go to some interesting places and mash some interesting food between his ghastly orange jaws), is that of a nostalgic Route 66-themed commercial for McDonald's. It takes a lot to make me not want to eat a sliced-meat sandwich, but dude does it weekly and still finds time for extra work.

Extra work like designing the menu at his own restaurant, the currently closed-for-remodeling Tex Wasabi's Rock-N-Roll Sushi BBQ in Sacramento, CA. (In re: the website, you should beware of sound effects, nauseating cowboy-on-carp animated .gif, everything else) Beneath the exhausting good-timey tone of the menu -- those aren't really koi fish tacos, j/k! -- and the misspellings and the weirdnesses is a really baffling food sensibility. It's one thing to grill some chicken and dump it on some salad -- call it "Hidden Chicken, Crouching Salad" if you want (he wants), but it's been done and it can only get so bad. But... okay, I'm just going to cut and paste this:

NEW! Screaming Gobbler $7.95
Roasted turkey, jalapenos, pepper jack, avocados, green onions, mayonnaise and sriracha mayonnaise wrapped in sushi rice and tapioca paper. First you’ll gobble, then you’ll scream.

That is just a different thing entirely. And while it's nice that Fieri's innovating (it's not really nice that Fieri's innovating), there's definitely a point at which one should look at oneself in the mirror -- one's automotive-themed, flame-motif, rock-n-roll mirror -- and just be like, "Dude, just because TGI Friday's pays you does not mean that you are obligated to make TGI Friday's look like Le Fucking Bernardin." One would think that one would do that. One would hope.

Also: Tex Wasabi's drink menu is amazing. It's like a Mad Lib. I mean, this particular drink is like a 15-year-old girl's liquid nightmare:

County Fair
This one will bring out the animal in you. 99 apples, vodka, midori, sweet & sour and sierra mist.

But for the most part the drink menu is like a Mad Lib. As I learned during my stay at a friend's place in Los Angeles, it's easy to play this game at home. Name a food item or two, two liquors/liquers and an ill-advised garnish, then put it in a 64oz. glass and jam a twisty straw into it. To wit:

The Hole Ninety Nine Yards
This one will make you regret that humans evolved opposable thumbs! Real Dunkin Donut donut holes floating on a raft of Sweet Tarts set rock-n-rollingly adrift on 64 ounces of 99 Bananas, Triple Sec, Welch's Grape Soda and Georgi Vodka. Cowabunga!

Try it yourself! I plan to order it on at TGI Friday's and see how it works. I wonder how much Apple Pucker a potato skin can hold.

ALSO: No, still not as much as I hate Papa John.

Real Rampy Up In Here

It is frankly pretty late for a mundane bit of THIS blogging, but seeing Endless Boogie (in space, as ever) and Dead Meadow (terrifyingly amazing; I may want to write more about this later) has left my ears ringing and my brain a lot less tired than it should be. And anyway, this isn't the usual this-bloggy link out to some Dahlia Lithwick column or long New York Review of Books disquisition. It's a link to a recipe. And a link to a recipe so easy that even I was able to nail it pretty well tonight, before a bunch of really high dudes blew my mind. You could do this, too. The thing you need to know: you will need oniony weeds in order to make this work.

The oniony weeds in question are known, for the few weeks a year that they go from being a rural nuisance to being a bafflingly expensive luxury greenmarket food, as ramps. I am not afraid to jump on a greenmarket trend and jam the fuck on it, as any number of breath-destroyingly crappy garlic scape adventures can attest, but ramps have always been a bit more rewarding in my experience, even before I figured out how to cook them. They look a lot like especially robust versions of what I knew as "onion grass" when I was a kid -- like to the point where I wonder if I was actually and idly pulling up delicious North Jersey ramps out of my parents' lawn during Reagan's first term, without even knowing how tasty they could be if sauteed/blanched properly -- and do not, by any reasonable standard, look like something that should be going for $3 a bunch. Or, just to hazard an extrapolation out from that, probably something like $15 a pound. If you live out of New York City and are lucky, these wide-leafed wild leeks might well be growing somewhere in your yard, for free. Like a million other waste products turned gourmet products -- from lobster on up -- they're kind of objectively fucked in an aesthetic sense, but also potentially very awesome when administered orally. Ramps are in season for maybe another couple of weeks, and after having cooked them tonight I've got half a mind to go to the Union Square Greenmarket tomorrow and do it again.

The recipe I linked to above is the best I've yet seen on this topic, edging all the fraudulent and too-oniony pestos I've attempted with ramps in the past. Done wrong, as I ordinarily do things, ramps are basically tiny medicinal onions with a strong big-bite-of-dirt downside. Done right -- sauteed in good olive oil until almost toasty, then blessed with some garlic and red pepper flakes and kosher salt and, eventually, tossed with the chopped up fibrous greens and pasta -- they're ridiculous in the best possible way. Your apartment/home will smell like The Good Lord's oniony breath for 24 hours and there is nothing you'll be able to do about that and still you'll be all "oh great, it smells like awesome in here." Let Babbo get its traffic -- anything to help Mario Batali get some real grown-up shoes -- but cook this if you can. Then mouthwash/floss/brush/fluoride rinse. Then cook it again the next day.

If I were the sort of person who photographed his food -- and I am, luckily, not that kind of person -- I would've taken a picture of the way it all turned out. As it is, my 15-minute dinner would easily have qualified as the most transcendent experience of my Sunday, had three dudes on acid not rocked my brain with maximum kaleidoscopic guitar activities. Which is probably not going to happen on Monday, unless this ear-ringing thing becomes a lot more distinct and transforms into Dead Meadow's extra-drummy set-closer. Which I guess would be okay, too. I am wondering now if ramps have hallucinogenic properties? Hold on, this unicorn is telling me to go to bed.