the lesson

Two things I have done from two-story windows and both times these things were done at parties. The first thing is I peed on someones head from a second story window and the second is I fell out of a second story window. In the first instance I had to leave the party out the back door immediately. In the case of the fall, it was a Halloween costume party, and I was dressed as one of The Beatles. I was Ringo. Luckily I landed in some bushes, but it still knocked the wind out of me. I was ministered to by a bevy of lovely lasses. Actually, not.

What is with this phrase: "You learned your lesson." It is always spoken in a pejorative sense. People say it after you have inflicted some kind of misfortune on yourself. Misfortune is the lesson. The lesson is always that you can't do something. No one says: "Well son, you learned your lesson." if you have memorized all of the multiplication tables. They'd be well within their rights but they never would. A lesson is an instruction by which you gain some knowledge, but when someone whips out the "you learned your lesson" idiom you know that whatever the instruction was, it weren't no fun.

For a few months now I have been subscribing to the OED online and not really getting my money's worth. I didn't know the password for awhile. But today I am back in the hallowed virtual halls of the learned lexicon and I have poured over the entry for "lesson" and I am quite satisfied with myself. Not for having gained any forward knowledge or for having imparted some new information to you dear reader but just for the simple reason that I used my subscription!!! A lesson can also be a rebuke. A lesson can be a piece of scripture read to give moral compass to our actions. Above all a lesson is something to be studied on, to contemplate over, to assess with the compartments of the mind, that storming fatty honeycomb that rides behind our brow.

I never learned much from the scriptures. The "thous shalt nots" were more invitation to debauch than they were restrictive. The Church was an old noble ramshackled structure with many rooms and winding halls and sub basements. The deacons smoked cigarettes out the back door of the kitchen while the black ladies fried chicken and scooped heaping mounds of corn bread batter onto sheet pans. They were all good Baptists. On Sunday nights they came together and joined in hymn and celebration of the master, the celestial host of hosts. Crows rested on the church steeple, big black crows, big enough to carry a baby away in the clutches of their cobalt beaks. It was during Sunday service as I was playing hookey in the parking lot that I saw one of those crows snatch up a child and carry it away. It carried that child up into the clouds and then when it was done with its play, when it had grown bored with the manchild it had pinched, the crow released the baby and it fell from the sky.


I told the Pastor and the people what I had seen, but they didn't believe me. The deacons gathered around me and behind them the congregation stood. The child's broken body lay smashed and unmoving. The pastor pointed to a rock that he had seen me throw down as he approached. It was stained with sticky cherry colored blood. I described to them how I had wrestled with another crow that had lighted on the fallen body of the child and pecked at its eye and how I had grabbed up that rock and smashed the vermin crow with it and saved the child's other eye for verily indeed the terrible bird had succeeded in tearing out that one eye and swallowing it whole like a grape. But they told me there were no crows. No crows on the steeple. No crows anywhere. They told me what I had seen perched up there on the roof was demons, devils, hellions, the legion of God's enemies. I gnashed my teeth at the sun that day.

When they got me to the hospital they x-rayed my innards and sure enough there was an eyeball travelling down through the viaducts and tubes. When they tested the blood from the rock it was determined to be human and not of avian origin. I was a murderer, they said. No crow had stolen the child, the demons had tricked me. It was I who had lured the youngster away from the flock and in reward had bashed his brains out with a rock and gnawed his eyeball out of its socket and lunched on it. I was led to a cell.

The Pastor came to visit me. He sat across from me in my cell. He stared at me. I noticed the intensity of his stare, that his eyes had become sharp black beads. It was very quiet in the cell. As I sat there returning his stare not unfriendly I came to realize that he was a crow disguised as a Pastor. His breast was unusually plump and I caught a glimpse of the black mat of feather rustling beneath his vestments. It was so quiet. The Pastor's face began to crack. What seemed like the beginning of a smile became a jagged tear and the hard black bone of a beak crawled out. When the crow had torn his wings free of its human clothing, flesh and fabric, it sat solemnly facing me. It would tax me one of my eyeballs I was told and without further hesitation the bird pounced on me and latched onto my eyeball. We struggled, the bird and I. But just then a sheriff came into the cell to announce lunchtime and seeing the giant bird atop me pulled his revolver from its holster and fired a volley of shots at the beast. The crow toppled over me and to the floor dead with my severed eyeball gripped in its mouth. Half blind and in terrible pain I collapsed.





I was vindicated that day in the cell of child murder. It was never explained how I had managed to eat an eyeball but it was obvious that it had been the work of the devil. A gang of ruffians burned the church down saying that it was an outpost of Satan. Most of the deacons became avowed atheists. The Black ladies went on to open a successful southern themed restaurant called Miss Dilly's. And me? When I was released from the jail hospital some weeks of recuperation after the surgery that sewed shut my empty eye hole I was met by another angry mob like the one that had burned down the church. They lifted me up over their heads and carried me out to the highway on the limits of the city. I was forced to jump onto the back of the first truck that passed with a warning from the townfolk never to show my rotten face in that area again.



I went to live in what they came to call Crow Wood and from there many dark and strange things were said to take place so that no good christian ever ventured near.

wedge o lard

Have you ever noticed, and I'm sure you have, that some people like to drink their morning coffee in a gargantuan mug that requires two hands to lift and can later in the day double as a soup bowl or even a handy portable bidet? Not me, I drink my morning cup of java (usually Dunkin Donuts dark roast) in a dainty white porcelain cup engraved with a wonderful illustration of a hen. That's just how I roll.



And speaking of rolling, it's been a long gruelling recovery since I rolled my ankle outside of Specks a month and a half ago. Even at that moment as I laid on my back kicking my legs out like a upturned bug, looking up at the curious faces of passing pedestrians, I knew that I had done some serious damage. I groaned. Sparks, my drinking companion for the evening, who also happened to be imbibing on my dime that night, had a terror struck look on his face when he saw me go down. It was not so much that he was concerned about my health, methinks, as it was the dawning realization that his beer ticket had just taken a nose dive. I knew that I had very little time before I would be immobilized in pain. Calculating my chances, we dashed into the bar for a shot and a beer and then I limped out to a taxi and did the heroic thing: I went home. Forlorn and penniless, a dejected Sparks wandered back up to his flop house digs where he ate hormel chili cold from the can and watched the knife guy on the home shopping network. In the emergency room the next morning they x-rayed my foot, ascertained that it was not broken but badly sprained, outfitted me with a orthopedic boot, and sent me on my way with crutches...and twenty Vicodin. I had a physicians note that excused me from work for a week. From the hospital I made landfall on the couch about an hour later armed with my pills, my boot, my ice pack, and a cheeseburger, fries, and large fountain soda from the BurgerMeister. I had plans to write a historical novel during my down time on the couch, instead I managed to watch a lot of television, eat a lot of greasy Chinese delivery, drool a good bit, and lay in a drug induced stupor in my own filth surrounded by cast off takeout cartons and empty two liter soda bottles. I was like that dragon in The Hobbit, all laid out and bad ass on my pile of succor. It was a truly blissful time aside from the pain. The vicodin does strange things to the mind. Strange wonderful things.



Surprisingly there was intense pain and a month a half later there is still pain albeit not as alarming. I don't know if I am one of those persons who is more sensitive to pain or not. I believe the medical term is pussy. I'd like to think that I am a pretty tough customer. I can tell you this: I will not back down in the face of a serious life threatening hangover and if it looks like there is too much food on a plate I will still go for it. Pain is not something that you can share with someone. It is a private hell that others care not to hear about it or acknowledge for fear that they will get some themselves from somewhere. But as each day goes by it becomes less painful to stand on my feet in the kitchen for eight or nine hours and my ankle is not as swollen as it was before. I think my foot is a little bit crooked now but it may be my imagination. This is a lesson learned. Not really.

turkey leg the sequel

As he told it, when John-O worked in the kitchen at Rosa Linda's in Myrtle Beach the restaurant closed for a week so that the entire staff could go to The Dead shows in Virginia. They partied like monsters and after it was all over drove straight back and went immediately to work. That was one of the stories that I heard him tell often. John Hopkins was an ex-navy man. And like an old navy salt, he was a teller of stories. Unfortunately there were only about twelve of them. John Hopkins was something of an enigma. Originally from New York. Adopted. An obscure childhood. Details were vague as to how he had managed to end up at his sister's house in Greensboro. He had a history of drinking that may have contributed to this decamp from Myrtle Beach. He gave off the impression of being somewhat wounded, damaged. The last place you would expect to see him was at a dead show. But the idea of it was the kind of thing that made you curious about the guy.


I was the newbie at Bert's and a lowly dishwasher to boot. On my first day when John-O barked an order at me I assumed he had some authority in the kitchen and so I tasked myself to his demands. It took me about a day to realized that he was the goat of the kitchen. He was hunchbacked, tubby, stained, and not altogether fresh of scent. After that I ignored him when he told me to do something, it seemed like everyone else did. From my post in the dish room I would hear Mary, the chef, screaming at him in the kitchen about something he'd fucked up. Sometimes he would audibly groan as he was being lambasted. I remember one night he got it particularly bad for some slight of duty, later when I carried a load of dishes over to the hot line he was standing at his station red faced and muttering under his breath. He would bitch about Mary out loud often but as soon as she stepped into the kitchen he usually made himself scarce. She routinely swore that she was going to fire him. If a sauce could be broken, he broke it. If a recipe could be misread, he misread it. John-O dropped shit; spilled shit; slipped in his spills; fell on his ass; knocked over stacks of plates; and just basically earned the taunts of his fellow staffers on a daily basis.

I wish that I could claim that I took the noble path and befriended John-O while defending him from the insults and complaints of our comrades in industry. Befriend him I certainly did. But not even a St. Francis could have restrained from taking a shot at this guy now and then. He was a constant source of amusement. Despite all of his foibles and character flaws there was something lovable about John-O. He was a nice guy, he was just a goof ball. He wasn't an idiot, he just had really really bad luck. He was annoying, at times. He could be incredibly inept at his job which is probably why he never made it beyond the fry/steamer station. Yet, he manned that steamer with pride and there were times in the middle of a Friday night rush when we were buried in tickets and everything bordered on collapse and chaos that he would take wing and soar and save the line. Granted it was a rare night but I swear I recall soaring. The Fryer was his nemesis, his darling and yet his cruel master. At the end of a busy night, covered in hush puppy batter and reeking of steamed clams, standing at his station like a gunner rooted at his battery in the aftermath of a blitzkrieg, it was his responsibility to empty the oil from the cookers, scrape out all of the accumulated fried random matter, and filter the oil back into the fryer vats. It sometimes happened, more often than it ever should have, that he would forget to seal the release spigot at the base of the equipment. He would hoist up the heavy drum of filtered oil and begin to pour. Someone would scream his name in alarm. It was like the screaming of the damned. Wild-eyed, he would blunder forward realizing that he had done it again, blindly lamely fumbling for the salvation from himself that he so desperately needed. Gallons of oil would spill through the tank of the fryer and onto the floor before he could manage to seal the valve. It created a fucking mess and an extra hours worth of cleaning. Ok, maybe he was an idiot.

Yes, befriend him I did, but I also eventually took the lead in tormenting him. He made it so easy. And remember my philosophy on life: you'd better start making fun of someone else weaker and keep the people laughing or they may take a second look at you. It was natural to caricature him. Paul Durham, our bartender, and I took this to an art level. Perhaps this reveals our own sicknesses and faults but over drinks and the accoutrement's of drinks we would sit for hours and regale one another in full John-O character, weaving together all of the twelve stories that we heard him tell about his adventures in the navy and beyond. Rosa Linda's in Myrtle Beach was a recurring motif. The fabled road trip to the dead shows was canonical John-O. We developed a John-O voice that we fell into at any given moment. Whatever dialogue you were about to embark upon it had to be predicated by a long guttural groan. This was the groan that we so often heard John-O using in the kitchen. His groan was textural. His groan was layered. It spoke volumes.. When you captured the essence of that groan, you had the key to the John-O character. The groan could signal so many things. Usually pain and humiliation, of course. But there was so much more it could mean. He used it invariably before the retelling of any story and in this context the groan became authoritative and fraternal. Sometimes the groan was ruminative, philosophical. In mimicry we eventually interpreted the groan to mean "I am a complete moron and what I am about to tell you should be completely discounted as the ravings of a lunatic." Because that of course was the subtext to everything that John-O said and did.

I worked with John-O for years. I was promoted into the kitchen eventually and then progressed along the line until I was at the saute station. John-O and I worked side by side. I would have drinks with him at the end of our shift at the bar. He sometimes showed up at the after work parties and got drunk and made a fool of himself. Vomiting and falling were two of the tricks that he relied heavily on. Of course I have since added these to my own repertoire. I spent a lot of time around John-O. I knew a lot about him, but I also knew that there was a lot I didn't know. He was a Navy guy, that sort of wayward soul synonymous with the sea and its ports since the dawn of the maritime. He was Billy Budd with a beer gut and Halitosis. He'd run a ground in Greensboro. Sure sometimes I wanted to kill him, but other times I wanted to give him a hug and tell him to hang in there, he wasn't doing so bad. He was though, doing bad. He drank prodigious amounts of canned beer. He lived about two blocks from the restaurant. He didn't own a car. He had few social contacts and no chance with the ladies. He rode the bus if he had to get anywhere and if you have ever tried to catch or even ride a bus in Greensboro you know how truly bizarre and unsettling this experience can be. In truth he didn't go far from the little cluster of shops and bars where Bert's sat. On his days off as I was on my way into work I would see him strolling down the sidewalk somewhat lopsidedly, unshaven, toting a six pack in a brown bag. He was probably going home to sit in his bachelor's room, drink beer, and fantasize about bashing Mary's head in with a mallet.

One thing I will always remember about John-O was the time that he gave me a six pack of my favorite beer at the time for my birthday. Coors Lite. Not a big deal I suppose but I remember that he bought the six pack and walked all the way over to my house on Cedar Street to give it to me. Not the house on the corner that got condemned but further down the block where I lived later. It was August of course and a hot day. We sat out on my balcony and drank the beer and then he left and walked back to go to work at Bert's. John-O. That was a gesture of friendship that I really appreciated. I would like to be able to say that after that I became his protector but it wouldn't be true. It was a part of the dynamic of our relationship.

One day John-O came into work and asked to speak to Mary in the office. Later she came back in the kitchen looking worried. John-O came into the kitchen too and we all started prepping for dinner as usual. After work we found out that John-O had gone to the doctor for some reason and in the course of the exam it was discovered that he had cancer. The Bad kind. Lymphoma. He would have to immediately start chemotherapy. All of the cooks and kitchen guys were quiet. That was a quiet night, we all sat staring into our drinks. And we all drank hard that night.

The days passed. John-O had insisted that he still wanted to work as much as possible. We were a small restaurant. We were a family of a type and even though we treated John-O like shit, we cared about him. He kept coming to work though not as often and for not as long. He looked tired. All of the waitresses began to pour love and affection on him. It was funny. He loved it. Whereas at one time they would have been in the window of his station spewing spit and venom on him looking for a particular order now they were giving him hugs and back rubs. Even Brad, the lead line cook from Mississippi, who was constantly disgusted with John-O, would never again let him take up a broom or mop. I never heard him raise his voice to John-O again either. Eveyln, our expediter and baker, a notorious sour puss at times, brought him cookies.

One afternoon Mary came into the kitchen and you could tell that she had been in tears. She told us that John-O wouldn't be coming back to work anymore. I think some people started crying. Brad and Evelyn and I went out back to the cook's alley and smoked. Brad said something like "Damn. John-O." about a hundred times. After that Mary took up a crusade and she coordinated with John-O's sister so that he never wanted for anything. Everyone visited him. He was seldom alone. People took him to and from the hospital. I think during this time he also reconnected with his sister and her family and that they poured so much love into his life that he was happy. I confess it was hard for me to visit John-O. He was not going to win the fight. I only went over to his house a few times. I brought beer. I would like to think that he drank one but I can't remember, most likely I drank them all and just sat there and tried to think what to say. The day came that we got the news that John-O had died. It was sad, but it was over. John-O had fought and suffered with dignity. For all of his schleppings and shenanigans, in the end he had been brave in the face of death. In the end run, he took full advantage of all of the attention and affection being rained down on him as well he deserved to and surrounded by the people he loved and who loved him he gave up this mortal coil.

John-O passed away and things at Bert's were never quite the same again. Other cooks were hired to replace him and they came and went. Most of them were delinquents. The consistency on the line of the four of us: Brad, Evelyn, myself, and John-O was lost forever. Without John-O and his hijinks the kitchen was less fun. A few months later, running from my own demons, I left Greensboro for Topsail Island and after that to Oregon and then here to California. I talk with Paul Durham sporadically twenty years later but even now when I answer the phone if on the other end I hear the mimicry of a familiar groan I know exactly who is calling and I answer in kind with my own responding impression.

RIP John-O

turkey leg

Yeah, so people were like do your blog...we love your blog...
and cheers that you are doing your bullshit blog...

I need some meat though.

The business, the restaurant business, it is such a succulent bone.

I remember when I first got into it, where I was, what I was doing, and who got me into it.

I was working at Pace Warehouse, one of those Sam's type places, in Greensboro, at Guilford College road where it bisects market street, out by the church's chicken, stocking shelves at six in the morning. At times they had me driving a cherry picker even though I was not authorized to and I was high. On the weed. I ate my lunches with a rastafarian named Zebedia. We smoked more pot on our lunch break. One afternoon after lunch they tried to make him drive a cherry picker and he ran it into a dock. He just laughed, but they threatened me with either being at the top of the cherry picker or driving it...so I always drove. I devised a hiding place in the stock shelves where it was safe to smoke pot. They tried to make me put a stereo sound system shelf thing-a-ma-jig together but I couldn't do it. the instructions were ridiculous. I just fell asleep in the middle of the aisle but they didn't fire me, they told me to get some rest and report for duty the next morning...I'm telling you when they found me I was laying sprawled in the floor of the warehouse snoring. this is where America went wrong. They should have put their laundry money in socks and beat me to death.

I went home. At the time I was living with Jennifer Donahue and Steven Eigeman on Friendly Ave across the street from that fucking Hester's day care. It was a great house. There was a breeze. We had a back yard. Our backyard connected to all of the other back yards on the block by way of an old two track dirt lane that meandered behind the properties. I liked that back alley. that's what it was, an old alley. Dogs and cats would run around back there.

I was tired of that bullshit warehouse job. They were going to fire me anyway. I had served my purpose, the holidays were over. Zebedia had vanished. I was working with a bunch of redneck assholes. Jennifer was a line cook. When I could no longer afford to pay rent she forced me to get a job where she was working. She told me that there was a dishwashing job open at a new restaurant that she had started cooking at called Bert's Seafood Grille....yeah even at that point when she said it I knew it had an extra "e" on the end. I started working for Mary and Drew Lacklen scrubbing pots...as they say. I guess I was eighteen. Jennifer quit about a week after I started. It didn't have anything to do with me.

I was scrubbing pots, running the dish machine, eating scraps off of the plates, washing potatoes, and peeling carrots and I was blissfully happy. One day that asked me if I wanted to come over into the kitchen and work the fryer because the fry guy was on a bender and it didn't look like he was coming back...even though he was only down the block at a local bar...so I started doing it. Making French fries, hush puppies, and operating the steamer steaming shellfish. And then I started getting all of my miscreant friends jobs in the dishroom.

If you ever get to work on a restaurant line and you get into it, then you can probably understand how one gets hooked on it. Only a few losers fall for it. I did. I fought against it for a while, but it is the only thing I know....I think I love it.

The first team was Brad Hendrix, Evelyn Ruth, and Johnathan Hopkins. Brad was lead saute, Evelyn was grill and expeditor, and John-O rustled up the fries.

And so I lived my days.....

Mary was the chef. She was the driving force. The recipes were her's. If she was in the kitchen you really had to put your nose to the grindstone. We would come in at one or two in the afternoon and prep like motherfuckers up until the very last minute before five and then as soon as Mary left the kitchen to change the menu on the chalk board in the dining room we would bail out the back door and smoke a cigarette and take pinch hits. In the dining room at the stroke of the hour, Drew would unlock the door and the people would cascade in. Within fifeteen minutes we would be inundated with tickets, completely slammed, yelling, throwing shit on the grill, slamming steamer doors, dropping fry baskets into molten oil, lining up plates, garnishing plates, preparing the sauces, putting everything together so that it all came out at once, this with that, and that with this...tickets came in, tickets went out, everything just hummed, and you sweated and were drenched and your mind had to race to keep track of everything, and the slighest misstep would send the whole shebang into the crapper, but the rush coursed along and you would look up from having just walked in from your five o'clock smoke and it would be nine o'clock.....



that was the life...

And then John-o got cancer.....

and died.

For the love of oatmeal

Having a blog is a big responsibility. So is having kids. I don't have any kids. What makes you thing I will take care of a blog? When I had pets I either killed them or let them go. All of this information is in the public domain and yet recently as I was leaving my building on the Belvedere lane I was pelted with dried dog turds from a passing car. Moments later my cell phone rang and a electronically scrambled voice warned me to resume my blog or I would get worse than dog turds thrown at me in the coming days. Spurned readers.

It's easy to get up in the morning if you know that a steaming bowl of steel cut oatmeal is just around the corner. I have become addicted to this stuff. If you suffer from Chronic Shitting and Farting Syndrome (CSFS) like I do, start eating oatmeal everyday like a horse and you will soon reap the benefits of a solid stool mass that will exit from your crap chute like a duckling passing on gossamer wings. There's no mistaking the heart healthy bounty that is a churning pot of oats even if you do whisk in a half stick of butter before serving up that good stuff.

I was awoken by birdsong this morning. It was artificial but none the less I was reminded of this thing called nature which surrounds us. I have had a love affair and a fascination with birds since my youth. I was attacked by a black cloud of angry crows as I frolicked in a fallow field when I was six years old. The birds actually picked me up and carried me several miles before dropping me into a lake. A whiskered wise old catfish aided me to the shore. As he paused to give me a chance to catch my breath and thank him I found a rock in the underbrush and smashed his head in. We ate fried catfish for dinner that night. The next day the sun failed to rise. As it turned out the whiskered wise old catfish had been the manifestation of our lord come to the earth one last time to see if there were any kind and gentle people left. What he found was a psychotic pack of birds attacking a small human child and when he had gone to help the small child he had had his brains knocked out. So the next day from his throne, looking knackered, where he had managed to return after going through the uncomfortable transmogrification of being murdered, dragged across hill and dale, gutted, cooked and eaten as a fish and then having to make his way up through the spiritual zones, he shut the whole shit show down. He turned the sun off and shut down the heavens. He pulled a colossol sized rock from space and threw it at the earth. He nailed it. Needless to say this created pandemonium among the humans. Confused, they fell upon one another and in short time managed to wipe themselves out. Satisfied that the earth was in ruin he turned his attention to another dirt clod floating in the galactic muck.

I don't know who this guy is but I respect his ambition. Please note the neat pile of pickle spears piled atop the burger. Nice touch.

the trouble with soda pop

Soda pop is the most disgusting thing on the face of the planet. And I love it. Water is a pain in the ass to drink. Soda pop is a party that goes down your gullet gleefully at full throttle. Water is, I don't know, so, hmmm, so medieval. Modernity truly began when pop was created. Back in the good old days a bottle of pop was a treat to be enjoyed on a special occasion. A soda was something one had when they came to town on the weekend. I am old enough to have fond memories of my mother taking me to downtown Greensboro where a soda fountain still operated in an old drug store on Elm Street. I would climb up on one of the battered leather cushioned stools at the ancient gilded counter and watch as an elderly pharmacist in his drab pharmacist's smock mixed a spoonful of cola syrup with ice cubes in a tall chilled glass and then poured frothing soda from the elaborate brass fountain spigot over the top. I think it was the quaint antiquity of the process that captivated me even at that early age. I could have been no older than twenty or twenty-one. I would spin on my stool and in a flash suck down my soda, then mother and I would go shopping for bloomers.

But coca-cola would never have become king cola and all of the ensuing lesser aristocracy of the soda world would never have come into being if having a soda had remained relegated to the domain of the special treat. Soda set about conquering the globe. Today what was once an rare indulgence has become a daily ritual for soda addicts the world over. We just can't get enough. Soda pop is the number one consumed product in the United States. Perhaps this would not be such a bad thing if not for all of the sugar packed into pop. Soda pop is fast being identified as the one of the culprits of the exploding obesity epidemic sweepin the nation and reliable information points to the fact that if the average soda drinker were to cut the evil nectar from his or her diet within a year they would be ten pounds lighter. Fuck that, I'll take the ten. Actually no, I'll save my ten for fried chicken and burritos.



Bag it, give me twenty....twenty-five...thirty...

The advent of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the seventies and eighties has not helped matters. For a myriad of reasons soda bottlers flocked to it. I did a little reading up on our corn friend and suffice to say it's a pretty complicated business involving murky vats of chemicals, verdant spawning bacteria, and shadowy agri-empires like Archer Daniels Midland (these are the guys who usually underwrite conservative talk shows and have crowned themselves "supermarket to the world"). Despite a recent ad campaign to answer the negative backlash that shows young, healthy, and most importantly, skinny, couples frolicking about in bucolic settings casually chatting about High Fructose Corn Syrup, it just ain't so. Suffice to say this stuff might as well be milk from the devil's tit. Somewhere in the commandments or Leviticus, God should have forbidden its use. He didn't. He fucked up. What's its appeal? It's cheaper than sugar; it transports easier (tankers are criss-crossing the nation as I write); and it extends the shelf life of everything from twinkies to Heinz Ketchup into the next millenium. The shit even creeps up in Oro-wheat's line of "whole grain" breads (the bastards). It is ubiquitous. In 1980 America used three million small tons of HFCS (not sure what a small ton is, I think I will start using this terminology when referring to my own personal weight), but by 1995 that amount had increased to eight million small tons consumed a year. Today we eat more High Fructose Corn Syrup than good old fashioned sugar. Listen when scientist feed this shit to rats they explode into corpulent jackie gleasonesque rodents who expire prematurely from raging diabetes.

Where did this all begin??!!

Soda pop, known as a soft drink to differentiate itself from hard drinks which contain alcohol (let's give a big cheer to these also) is a relatively new invention, but humankind's collective taste for sweet flavorful beverage is as old as, well, pooping. Beverage scholars and soda historians point to the ancient near east as one possible origin of the soft drink where found documents show that early towel heads mixed dates with piss water to share with their nomadic ass buddies on the Afghan steppes. Interestingly enough there are also parallels in the early Christian world where some Coptic records of gnosticism seem to open the door to the possibility that Jesus could also turn water not only into wine but also into what today we call Mountain Dew.

The history of soda is actually quite fascinating and to the young scholars out there who I am sure read this journal let me say that it is a field of academics that offers uncharted vistas for intellectual exploration and an inviting niche of study that could last a lifetime burrowed away in some crap ass community college basement.

Check it: as early as the seventeenth century Parisian street vendors were hawking a drink flavored with lemonade and honey that they also marketed as perfume when the mid- summer stench of proto-euro trash hair pit and ass became unbearable, but it wasn't until the creation of carbonated water by Jason Priestly (yes, in fact distant ancestor of acclaimed brilliant television star of same name) in 1767 that the seeds of the pop revolution were sewn. Priestly, in his ground breaking treatise "I impregnated water with fixed air", was an overnight sensation not only with the scientific community but with the salon lounging libertine crowd as well for his racy passages of elemental intercourse. In the words of this long rambling philosophical and scientific rumination on life and romance he also described how he first discovered that mixing water with carbon dioxide produced a drink pleasing to the taste. Alas his scientific acumen did not triumph over his more sullied urges for fame, fortune, and cooze. Priestly never again published in the academic journals of his day. His lab was destroyed by a band of vicious children in route to a belated crusade that would see them all raped and dismembered (of course at the time they didn't know that evidenced by the fact that eyewitnesses recount them singing joyous hymns as they smashed Priestly's apparatus). After the ruin, he frequented the theatre, lived in a chamber pot above a cat house, and took opium with hollow eyed chinamen. He died prematurely from asphyxiation when he slipped off of the rim of a vat of beer with a belt around his neck attached to the ceiling and his pants down to his shanks. They say he screamed out a whore's name just before his neck snapped and his eyeballs exploded out of his head and sank into the churning gyre of suds.

But I digress. History is a fascinating subject. The first soda fountains in the United States began to appear in the early 1800's mostly in pharmacies where, much like the pharmacist of my experience in Greensboro, chemists would experiment with mixing herbs and flavors with carbonated waters to titillate the tastes of their customers. They used such varied components as birch bark and dandelions, even an occasional mouse turd made its way into their concoctions with no ill effect. Perhaps soda would have remained a fixture of the chemist or the ice cream shop had it not been for inventive capitalists who devised a way to bottle the gaseous liquid. At the dawn of the twentieth century the first patent was issued for a glass bottle producing factory and the soda industry took off: within a few years production rose from 1400 bottles a day to 58,000. By the 1920's Americans were taking home six packs of soda and availing themselves of vending machines that sold soft drinks. John Dillinger endorsed Coca-Cola. World War Two actually arose over a dispute about soda pop. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq: soda. The great Society was not so much about civil rights as it was about one particular weekend when Lyndon Johnson drove his pickup truck down to colored town and handed out free bottles of coca-cola and menthol cigarettes. Of course, they didn't appreciate it. Who? You know who. The Blacks.

But where does that leave us? With trouble. Plain and simple. Sure, we can dream of a Utopian society where everyone is fat as shit and keeling over by age thirty of heart disease and diabetes; where cruel social conventions are turned on their heads and skinny people are harassed and beaten in the streets and yoga studios and cardio-gyms are firebombed; where happy rotund couples and their lard ass offspring picnic beside lakes of Dr. Pepper sprawling on filthy mattresses littered with chicken bones and crumpled chip bags, eschewing all forms of physical activities including self sufficient breathing; but can we realistically hope for such a day? You know, I can't really answer that question right now. In fact I see from my window that the mexican cleaning girls have arrived at the neighbor's house across the courtyard and it is time for me to remove my clothing so I must be going.....

Swine dining and the flea market tradition: an appreciation of sorts.

I am more partial to swine dining than I am to fine dining. And what I mean by swine dining goes beyond the obvious love of pig to encompass a whole way of eating: out of a trough in a mud poke. In a manner of speaking, philosophically. Fine dining requires getting gussied up in your Sunday best. In contrast, swine dining doesn't even necessarily demand pants. Swine dining is a way of life. I first came to discover my love of swine dining many years ago in the dusty corridors of the old Sedgefield Flea Market where vendors hawked corn dogs and gravy fries, root beers and cherry colas, or "colers" as it was pronounced, amidst stalls of bric-a-brac and farm equipment. To me swine dining equates with easy living. Easy living is something I sorely miss these days.



The Sedgefield Flea Market was out High Point Road on the way to Jamestown. It consisted of a single hangar like ramshackle concrete building which housed permanent vendor's stalls and a snack bar surrounded by weedy gravel parking lots where on the weekends cars and trucks amassed in lanes of concentric circles to showcase their wares. During the week when the market was closed and the gravel lots were empty and the solitary structure sat weathered white, solemn, silent; the property seemed vaguely menacing, if not downright haunted. But when the flea market was in session the grounds became carnival like with eager crowds of redneck folk shuffling to and fro sifting through a profundity of junk and cast off shit: the dust stirring above their magpie babble; a million wobbly transistor radios playing Charlie Daniels Band; the sputters and roars of revving lawn mower engines and power tools; the sundry hawkers celebrating their potions and tinctures; buskers picking at old guitars and bangoes; and permeating everything, the scent of crap food being fried to living hell in the greasy pit of the snack bar.



I loved coming to the flea market with my dad on Sunday mornings. He would hand me some money and we would go off in different directions, he in search of the plates, cups, and saucers that to this day still obsess him and I would go off to plunder from stacks of old comic books and records. In those days I was also constantly on the lookout for skin mags or any printed journal in which I might cadge a glimpse of tit or snatch. As my mother knelt in church across town praying for the damned soul of her only prized son, I was browsing through copies of True Detective or old worn issues of Easy Rider soaking up grainy images of kidnapped co-eds and skanky topless biker chicks. Satan, oh my sweet Satan.



The snack bar which operated in the front portion of the old hangar was the kind of place that my mother would pray to God to destroy. It was a filthy place. Even from my young eyes it was obvious that the proprietors held little regard for silly matters like sanitation standards and other such bourgeois nonsense. The kitchen itself was enclosed in a greasy shell of corrugated tin, dry wall, and rusted chicken wire. There was a couple of fryers and a grill and not much else. Refrigeration was frowned upon. The counter, little more than a shelf crowded with jars of relish, bright yellow mustard, and ketchup, was constructed of scrap plywood. A heavy jowled bad tempered man sat at the small window by the cash register and begrudgingly took orders. The menu was scrawled on pieces of torn cardboard taped to the grease splattered glass above his head I was partial to the corn dogs. The corn dog is a marvelous creation. It supplies us with the prehistoric satisfaction of eating our food from a stick. Why don't people put slices of hot dogs in corn bread? Because you can't eat a wedge of cornbread on a stick. After I got my corn dog and my root beer I would visit the fixins counter and slather yellow mustard generously up and down my dog.





Armed with sustenance I would embark into the labyrinth of stalls that were owned and operated by the more serious professional collector of crap...what they nowadays call antiques. A lot of these sellers had been in the building for years. The cars and campers outside of itinerant huskers presenting their goods on blankets spread over the coarse ground came and went, but the folks who rented space in the weather beaten building had built up fantastic cluttered idiosyncratic nests in which they had roosted every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for years. The stalls were really little more than chain link pens but most of them were carpeted and outfitted with all of the comforts of home. You might just as easily come upon a family watching television and having lunch as you would a display case of estate jewelry. I remember that lighting in general in the building was poor, but for the single row of bare bulbs that cast a feeble glow down the center aisles each vendor was left to fend for himself. Most of the stalls were illuminated by desk lamps or crooked floor lamps that could also simultaneously be had for a price (which would sometimes without warning plunge the intrepid shopper into darkness) . A few stalls were always cloaked in darkness, their stall gates always padlocked, their merchandise mere hollow shapes lost in the shadows. As I meditatively consumed my corn dog I would stroll along the aisles from one oasis of light and knickknackery to another, passing the shuttered shops in funerary silence. There were entire stalls devoted to soda bottles and bottle caps; old farm equipment and railroad souvenirs; there were stalls that dealt exclusively in coca-cola memorabilia; there were stalls that sold only dolls and depression era toys; only chinaware; only silver and gold; there were stalls that were lined with shelves like libraries and offered every poorly penned science fiction novel or western or harlequin romance ever published; there were stalls crammed with figurines and curios and garish commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint; there was a stall for every imaginable object that man had ever created, coveted, and cast aside. But that was the secret joy of the flea market and a resolute reaffirmation of the fundamental laws of physics: once it had been created, the object was borne into existence to stay. It might be cast off by one, but another would eventually come along and pick it up.

Sadly enough the old Sedgefield flea Market is no longer in operation, but there are other places that still carry on the noble business of circulating humankind's detritus from one hand to another, from one generation to the next. It is odd to think of our belongings outlasting us, but a good portion of them are sure to still be laying around long after you've been laid in your box and most probably someone either familiar or foreign will get their hands on them. And perhaps they will say something like, "If only he hadn't eaten so many corn dogs he might still be around to enjoy all of these trinkets."