Egg Salad of the Damned

WHEN I WAS in college, the ladies at the sandwich grill in the RDH (Residents' Dining Hall) would make me this wonderfully strange thing on occasion, a grilled egg salad sandwich. To this day, I do not know how they did it, but they would take a couple of pieces of Wonder bread, slap a slice of plastic cheeze on each slice, lump a scoop of egg salad in the middle of one slice, mush the other slice down on top, and grill it with a generous splurge of "butter" (which they always called butter, but which had to be some kind of institutional-grade oil emulsion). What came out was a miracle, this perfectly grilled, somewhat floppy but perfectly self-contained sandwich that held together admirably unless you unconscionably abused it, which I occasionally did. What I ended up with, when I tried to make it at home, was superior in one way: the egg salad was akin to the concoction I refer to as bedeviled eggs. But, due to a slightly kerfuluffled flip, the structural integrity of the sandwich was comprimised. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.


This is the item immediately after the kerfluffled flip. It actually turned out fine, only I had to eat it with a fork rather than picking it up like a real sandwich. Just think of it as the equivalent of an omlette with toast and hash browns. Which it is nothing like and identical to. Maybe that's what I like so much about eggs. You can do so many things with them, many of which make no sense, but make perfect sense. In fact, the filling here can be construed as something one of my fellow bloggers objected to long ago: eggs with egg sauce.

I don't care. I just love it. Oh, and also, while I am in the neighborhood, recently eggs were removed from the bad food list: no evidence that eggs cause anything bad to happen to your body, after what? 40 years? 50 years of false accusations? (Mayonnaise-- that would be the egg sauce-- my wife points out, is not off the bad foods list yet. One old theory-- old, and probably pretty bad-- would suggest that the consumption of beer alongside mitigates whatever fatty evil the mayo might bring to the death party. Eh. What the hell. They can saw me open when I'm dead.)


The movie of the day is NOT Wise Blood. It was Wednesday's movie, due to the fact that the Onion AV Club reviewed it, and I opened the file about ten minutes before the flick came on the Flix channel. I had been putting it off on a coule of different grounds, not the least of which is that Brad Dourif has been in some really insubstantially creepy stuff, and also that, in the improper mood, I am fully capable of accusing Flannery O'Connor of libeling and slandering the South on the least grounds.

AND the results were strange enough. The shooting took place in and around contemporary (1979) Macon, GA. Which was a strange time for Macon, but to be completely fair, the place has hardly changed since. Macon is a strange place. Dirt poor, pissed off, and proud of it. Then there's the costumes, which go a long way to forging the characters, so as anachronistic as the costumes are, so anachronistic are the characters. Which is admirable in it's strange, strange way, but . . . Well, in the final analysis, this jigsaw puzzle just don't fit together.

Although it did grow on me. Everyone is so completely commited to their part that the thing kind of flows along, and by about a third of the way in I was excusing the major flaws. Which, in addition to the anachronisms, there are flaws in the source material, up to and including the decades-long arguments as to whether Flannery O'Connor's 1952 novel cribbed from Faulkner, made hommage to Faulkner, updated Faulkner, or ripped Faulkner off, and THEN, if, like me, you beginning point, your opinion of Faulkner, is, well FUCK Faulkner, then after a certain point you are inclined not to care much. What I ended up seeing was an auteur (director John Huston) so enamoured of his vision that he was able to convince an entire ensemble of actors that all kinds of things that were absurd on their faces would contribute to the creation of a seamless and socially significant work of celuloid art.

So do I recommend it? Dunno. It left me bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, and not in the good way, as if I had had a sultry, sexy dance with a stranger under Autumn moonlight to the mumurrings of a nearby jazz ensemble, but more like I had just endured an IRS audit adminstered by a crew of clowns in full costume and white face. Like something very important, and not altogether pleasant had just happened, but there wasn't any real reason to take it seriously.

So I enjoyed it. But, then again, I'm a weirdo who like eggs in egg sauce.

PS: At one point I was moved to observe that Dourif was essentially playing the same character as he did in the film Ragtime, although I don't know how true that is or what, if anything, it would mean. So I didn't make that observation.