Two in one day! Now with sprinkles!

Did Yoda really mean to mix up his words? Maybe he was just a little green dyslexic animal who regurgitated what he saw on his Dagobah soap operas. There. I’ve just dated myself. Personally, I think I put the sexy in dyslexic. Going to have a t-shirt made with that line, I am. Patent pending. I’ll sell it to Urban Outfitters. I’ll be rich! Have you ever watched one part of a VHS so many times that you wear out the tape? How long can you manage to suck on a hard candy before you just have to bite into it? I can always judge how well I’ve slept by how big the drool puddle is when I wake up.

There’s a wee digression for you. Shall we take a break? I can wait…..no I can’t. I found out during my week in Crete that perhaps, just maybe, redheads don’t have quite the patience I had hoped for. I mean, I didn’t wrench off a tree limb and start pounding someone into a bloody pulp, but I definitely needed a few “Serenity now” moments. Ah, the idea of beating someone senseless with an olive branch makes me laugh funny ha-ha. It’s almost depressing how excited I got at the sight of fava beans and spring peas growing in the wild. After all my years as a chef, the fact that I get so worked up by seeing these things exist naturally; It’s a sad reflection on the state of the world and how detached we are from our food. We spent a day with one chef, foraging in the hills for wild greens and herbs that we ate that night. Another day found us watching the chef of a seaside restaurant diving for sea urchins and octopus that we would eat, fresh, moments later. It makes me start to realize that I became a chef not just to learn how to cook, but to be closer to my food. We’re spoiled: we get to see fruits, vegetables, meat and fish in their entirety. Or at least in larger wax-treated boxes. I have spent hours trying to convert small groups into bone-in chicken-ites, but there will always be those who love that boneless, skinless chicken breast. You know, the one that you individually wrap in aluminum, and throw in your freezer, so you have a tasteless brick of frozen wannabe poultry to help fend off intruders? Or maybe you live in a safe neighborhood, and just use it when you power-walk in the morning? The possibilities are endless!

But I’m getting off topic. As a chef, I get to see things as they should be, more or less. So when even I become so taken by wild almonds and beans growing in the hills of Crete, I get scared for the rest of the world. Crete has a deep-rooted connection to their land, but you can already see this beginning to wear away at the edges, namely the scattered cities along its coast. “From dust to dust” is more than a line in Sunday church….we are part of the earth, and when we begin to lose that connection, we begin to lose part of ourselves.

And just so I can make this a more traditional random sandwich (Mmmm….randwich) rather than an awesome open-face sandwich that you proceed to drop on the floor, fun-side down, I shall end with this: I wish my pen caps were flavored. And had some whitening power as well. It would make my chewing habits so much more rewarding. BicFresh pens? C’mon!

The anti-iTunes rant.

*This appeared first in an e-mail to my friend Roger, and I most graciously accept his permission to reproduce it here. But then again, it was my rant, so I mean to say that I most graciously accept his willingness to share the words he inspires me to write with the rest of the world.

Here it is: A well-scripted piece o' brain gunk that the general contractor of inter-personal relationships then mixes and uses as mortar for the brick wall that forms the foundation for our friendship. And...I'm drunk.
But seriously, I'm coming to realize that my own quams with the iTunes are, well, just a couple. First, it's still difficult to start a word with a lower-case letter, and then switch to a capital one, and then finish the word as normal. It's just not right man! It's like a sequel to Aliens Vs. Predator. The knowledge that you screwed up the first one SO ROYALLY makes you think that you can go out and make another that will not only be better, but will leave people wondering what they were smoking on the first one, or worse, make them go back and see the first one, and then come out crying that they now have another movie to add to the long list of "Name a movie where the sequel was better than the original," or some crappy ice-breaker small talk thing that they use at parties when people are tired of playing Spoons, or when keg stands lose their fun because some frat idiot thinks it's cool to try and get the wheelchair kid to do one, and he ends up getting his head caught in wheelchair kid's spokes on the way down, and he's wearing one of those stupid neck braces after, and can't turn his head, and so eating peas at dinner is just gonna piss him off more, and...well you get the picture.
Seconds. and I'm being serial. I like the physical having-ness of the CD. I understand you usually save a couple bucks from buying on that service that begins with a lower-case letter that now refuse to spell, but then my friend comes to me wanting some Chris Cornell, and I can't give it to them without the CD or authorizing them, and I'm down to my last authorization. So what to do. And to make matters worse, I'm stuck in Italy without my CD's, well I just have this growing list of artists I want. This kind of jammy, but trippy Soundtribe Sector 9, Leroy, there's some good stuff out there that I want. But if I hear that damn Rihanna song about music that stops, and she doesn't want it to stop, and so there's some complaints about who is actually stopping the music, and so they try to figure out who is trying to stop the music, and these people, they are hoping that whoever it is does not actually stop the music? I want that song to end. To just freaking disappear. I would ask that of Rihanna, but she's got this forehead you can probably land small planes on, so if her music career falters, they'll probably just fly her down to the Amazon, and sink her in the river so her head can be used as a small dam to help fight soil erosion. Because that's a big problem down there.