Elements Of Repose

SO THIS IS TODAY's lunch, just for the sheer hell of it. The weather has turned, highs in the sixties and blue skies up to the weekend, and around here that means-- or at least could mean-- the end of stew weather for the year. The sandwich is grilled cheddar on multi grain. Lemme amplify that: cheddar cheese and Plochman's Premium Stone-Ground Mustard on Arnold Healthy Multi-Grain bread, grilled to a brilliant crispy finish. Frankly, it was kinda weird, but it went really well with the stew, which I had while watching last years's Formula One race at Interlagos, the road course in Brazil.

And let's call THAT the movie of the day. The movie of the day is most certainly not the current foul, lousy, half-assed "debate" that's going on over whether our children are in imminent danger of being brainwashed by their incompetent, overpaid Marxist overlord teachers.

Now, I had more than my share of bad teachers during my school years-- including one who tried to teach me that a "sentence" is what you read, while a "sentance" is what a prisoner gets, "a lot" is a real estate while "alot" is an amount, and "Tuesday" is spelled "Teusday." And that was in just one year. The ultimate irony came about every third year when I, an eager student always hungry for knowledge, would butt up against a teacher who would declare me lazy, unintelligent, or borderline uneducable. I also have only a passing tolerance for teacher's unions, based solely on my brief interactions with North Carolina's specimen, who, when I knew them, maintained that a teacher's competence was never EVER to be a factor in his or her compensation. But, and I know this to be a fact, teachers in America are not only a soft and easy target for the ignorant and angry, they have been used as scapegoats for everything that might be wrong in our society since the early days of Lee Atwater's assendancy. (Typo. Keeping it.) (Actually, quite like it.) Also, I am lead to believe, by casual example and observation, that my experience was the anomoly, that most teachers are not just competent, but also energetic, intelligent, inspiring, and selfless. How true that is I know not, but really, for crying out loud, people, you gotta know that there are always, ALWAYS going to be more sensible ways of cutting budgets than getting rid of the teachers and/or crippling their unions. But the jack-wagons keep insisting that firing all the teachers is the only way to stop the world from sliding off the edge of the universe and plunging headlong into Hell, which is why the teachers desperately require the assistance of their trade unions.

Just thinking about the whole thing sickens me. It's like they're proud of being lazy, unitelligent, and borderline uneducable. So, instead, I bought new shoes.



These popped up from a tailored e-mail I get from time to time from Zappos.com, where I think I placed an order for shoes that turned out not to be in stock once. (I am fairly certain that this is the first time I have ever bought shoes from them.) I was actually looking for something with a blue body and bright trim, but the colourway (as they say in England) just jumped out at me and knocked me down. Also, oddly enough, it's virtually the same as the color scheme as a pair of Nike Elite Waffle Racers I found at a British shoe selling site, which I would have bought if they had been available in any size above men's 10. Yay shoes.


So the next step was to find someplace for them to live. Not a problem. (This cabinet, on the arrival of my new Onitsuka Tiger Ultimate 81's, will officially be full.)

Uncommonalities

SO TO CONTINUE the trend of unrelent-ingly eating stuff people have warned us about for years, today's lunch eventually became chili dogs.

"You know how you feel when you've been out all weekend, drinking cheap whiskey and eating chili dogs?" one considerably ill character asks another in one of the more dire later episodes of the series M*A*S*H; "I wish I felt that good."

The weird thing about that statement always seemed, to me, that if you felt bad from drinking whiskey and eating chili dogs all weekend long, at least you could do so remembering how good you felt while you were drinking whiskey and eating chili dogs. It's the sort of thing a writer thinks up in the confines of the writers' room which, in that specific vacuum, sounds not only witty, but wise.

But I digress.

These were awesome.

The chili is plain, flat, out-of-a-can Patterson's Hot Dog Chili Sauce. I had never had it before, and I highly recommend it. It is a pretty basic down-the-middle chili sauce, mildly spicy and nice and sloppy, the way it has to be for the chili dog application. Beneath it, if you can't make out by the picture, is a layer of cole slaw. I don't get why people don't put cole slaw on hot dogs. Underneath that is a generous caulk of yellow mustard-- Plochman's, of course-- and under the dogs themselves is a layer of cheese, because, really, why not? The Saras are part of what's left from a mixed 12 pack, but chosen pretty deliberately, and they went along well. The lager came across as a natural companion to this kind of fare, while the brown ale brought out some extra spiciness and exotic notes in the chili and mustard. Excellent. (Also, I didn't really want to leap off the ledge and go to having chili dogs with an IPA, although that is something which, in retrospect, I am anxious to try. )


The film of the day is soemthing I completely stumbled onto right around lunch time. I had been out provisioning for the better part of the mid-morning, and when I got back and settled in, shortly after noon, this was playing on the station that I had been tuned into previously. I saw this on DVD shortly after it was released in that format, and I have been able to catch it once or twice a year on cable since then. American Splendor is like a chili dog . . .

No. I don't mean that at all.

American Splendor is a movie that I find both easily watchable and maddeningly frustrating by turns, depending on what kind of mood I am in. Today it was both. On the one hand, it's easy to watch Paul Giamatti dig into the role, which he does with vigor and, I think, pretty obvious glee. (It would be just as easy, if not more than a little crass and tasteless, to suggest that the character he is playing in this film is not a far cry from the one he played in John Adams, or to suggest that Pekar is the kind of guy Adams would have been had he been born and grown up in middle century Cleveland, but that is a muddle for another time.) Also, there's enough of Pekar himself (as well as other characters in the living drama) in the flick to lend it a strong air of authenticity.

On the other hand, speaking as one who has only once or twice surveyed (found, not bought) any volume of American Splendor, and didn't find it to be terribly enlightening. Or even very interesting. Indeed, I can only imagine that the world is filled with legions of people who watched this movie but were not strongly moved to seek out and read the works that supposedly inspired it. So does that make me a hypocrite? Should I, on some level, feel a little cowed, a little guilty about enjoying this depiction of a man whose works I have not given a fair hearing and judged as wanting anyways? (It is at this juncture that the Wifey would declare "He's got his money." To which I would probably add "He's dead." Pekar passed away just shy of three weeks ago. A cause of death still has not been announced, so far as I know.) Or can I just watch and enjoy this attempt to portray and, to some degree, sum up what was, apparently, a quirky, interesting, and, eventually, relatively satisfying life?

Do I recommend it? I think you should always question life. Interrogate it, challenge it, examine it from any and every angle you can catch. Ask yourself how much you know about it, wonder what you might be missing. When presented with the facts of someone else's life, why shouldn't you do the same? Try and figure what's the case and what's been made up, painted in, tacked on with epoxy, buffed clean, blended along the edges. As for the chili dogs,* just eat them. Never question a chili dog or a Chinese dumpling. It's better for your sanity.

*I am very tempted to change the title to "Ceci N'est Pas Un Chiene de Chile," for my pal Doc Nagel, who's a big fan of the Matisse gag, but this'll do just as well.

Smart Dog

That was going to be the entire post, but as the hours ticked by I found I had more to say.

Fall is here, which in my part of North Carolina typically happens in a stuttered gathering of days, alternately unseasonably warm and gray and cold and wet and thoroughly unpredictable. The weather reports have an almost Kafkaesque, nay, Beckettian sense of irony to them. This year I let myself go and cheerfully bemoan our meteorologists' missed guesses as out and out cruelty, evil dissembling to no end save my individual suffering. One result of Fall's arrival is the annual decanting of the bed covering known in our house as The Chocolate Mousse (or Chocolate Moose, depending on mood and inflection), a synthetic down comforter I bought my wife for Christmas one year. It is so known for it's color and texture, which are respectively deep brown and marvelously, to use my wife's terminology for lack of a more wonderful descriptive, "squishy." The Dog has used her innate genius to find the best place in the house to spend the earlier portions of a cold Fall morning: my side of the bed, beneath the Chocolate Moose, shortly after my own willing evacuation from the spot.

Smart dog.

Fall also means I have brought out my beloved leather bomber jacket. I bought it many years ago, on sale, when I found it, and I have yet to see it's equal since. Everything about it-- color, texture, utility-- I love, to the extent that I usually put it away long after the season has called for it and pull it out much before it's required use. This season the mixture of rain and cold snap upon cold snap has proven my jacket's utility to a great degree, and so far it has only spent a small part of a single day in the trunk of a car, the day's warmth having robbed it of it's usefulness.

The leather jacket does not have a name, which is a bit odd for my household. It's The Leather Jacket. What else would there be to say?

Today the weather is bright and crisp and cold and clear, the low temperature for the morning setting a record at two degrees below freezing, predicted high of sixty-four, and we're nearly there already. Shortly I will be lunching, and then heading out to have my eyes examined, which, with any luck, means I will have a new pair of glasses for the trip we have planned for New York City next month. (Or if not, that will be just fine too.) My point is: my world is beautiful today, and I am grateful for it.