Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 8

Lucky Supreme eBook is 1.99 on Amazon in July

[image error][image error]“The bastard lovechild of Charles Bukowski and Raymond Chandler, Lucky Supreme is a novel so good you’ll want to ink it into your skin.”—Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries

“Lucky Supreme is one hell of a book. I didn’t know anyone could do noir like this. Now I know Jeff Johnson can.” —Joe R. Lansdale, ten time Bram Stoker Award winner and Edgar Award winning author of The Bottoms

“As hip and cool as the neon rain-slicked streets of Portland. Darby Holland is a modern hero in the mold of Sam Spade and Marlowe only with more tattoos and in steel-toed boots. A funny and very gritty book with cool folks, cool music, and wonderful sense of place.” –Ace Atkins, New York Times Bestselling author of The Innocents and Robert B. Parker’s Slow Burn

“What wonderful Northwest noir. LUCKY SUPREME cruises through Portland’s underworld with a raunchy grace and an unfailing sense of black humor. I loved it.” —New York Times bestselling & 3-time Edgar Award-winning author T. Jefferson Parker

 “Jeff Johnson is the real deal. His work is fast and funny, down and dirty—one moment as smooth as 18-year-old bourbon and the next as rough as a country road. A great talent, a pleasure to read.”–Brad Smith, Dashiell Hammett Prize-nominee

“Johnson launches the first of a noir trilogy with this highly original caper novel. Darby Holland is the proprietor of the Lucky Supreme, a tattoo parlor in the Old Town neighborhood of Portland, Ore., where he and his artists, a gang of societal misfits, have created their own niche within this gentrifying community. Johnson, a veteran tattoo artist, captures the conflict between the two cultures perfectly without any false sentiment . . . The inventive, unorthodox Darby effectively marshals his forces against thugs, officials, and even federal agents in this amusing crime tale.” —PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY Starred Review

“Lucky Supreme by Jeff Johnson. Don’t be surprised if you pull an all-nighter to finish Lucky Supreme which starts off with a theft in a tattoo parlor in Portland, Oregon and launches the protagonist on a dark, thrilling adventure full of deception, freaks, and surreal situations.” Top 25 novels of 2017 —MEDIUM

“Johnson wields the lurid pen of twentieth century crime novelists like Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane and stands with contemporaries like Michael Connelly and Walter Mosley to grace the grit of dark streets.”—THE EUGENE WEEKLY  

“Quick, thrilling, this is a novel filled with many crimes and is just the beginning of what looks to be a very interesting trilogy.”—SUSPENSE MAGAZINE

“More please.” – MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE

A hopeful note on Father’s Day

I defeated my father, something I enjoy thinking about on Father’s Day. I beat him like a busted garage sale bongo. I became a happy human being. That’s right! For 35 years all I’ve done is make cool shit for money and along the way I’ve seen Mt. Fuji appear out of the mist, walked the Rift Mountains in Africa, swam in the Bay of Thailand at sunset, mugged a mugger under the Eiffel Tower at dawn, seen the swirling Northern Lights far north where the roads end, eaten fine things and drank confusingly expensive wines. I once married a radiant Italian actress that I kinda sorta met on an airplane to where we got married- the next day. We’re still friends! A whole bunch more shit, too, but also truly important things he aspired to but was unable to achieve- a broad circle of bright, goodnatured people, love, peace, and dreams I can touch because they became real. In fact I’m having fun right now and I had a reasonably good time yesterday. I expect tomorrow will be alright, too. I wish my brothers had been as fortunate, but at least one of us made it. A life well lived isn’t revenge, dear reader. It’s your right AND your responsibility. Be better than your father and beat his ass at life. Be better at being alive. Improve on what you were shown to be. If he was a good one, he’ll be proud. If he was bad, well, you gloat.

The Three Greatest Pizzas I’ve Ever Eaten and How To Replicate Them

Pizza may be one of the most tortured and debased food items in America. There’s a place here in Portland called Pizzicato where I saw black beans on one of their artless bastard pies. So you understand. But there is room here for transcendence. The high bloom of pizza craft is still on the horizon, but on the gentle slopes leading up to it are some important milestones. Here are three, each with a pointless missive on how I discovered them. At the very end of this article you’ll find the recipes for the dough and sauce you can use for my versions of these.

#3 THE KING OF CASINOS JOHN KOPECKE

John was a hard drinking mamma’s boy and sous chef at Cascades, a Portland restaurant I worked at in the late 80’s. I was a dishwasher. The menu was knock off French jazz fusion, and by that I mean French as interpreted by rich people who bought a restaurant for their wayward yacht kid and then hired a Ramada Inn head chef to get the kitchen up when he showed no interest. John would have been a better head chef but nobody liked him, so number two it was. Famously, John was fired and then rehired in the same night, in fact in the same hour, due to my actions. John played the lottery on every shift he worked and told anyone who would listen that if he won he wasn’t even going to change back into his street clothes. He was walking and none of us would ever see him again unless he ran us down in his Rolls. On a rainy Wednesday or Thursday night after the dinner rush he sent me down the street to the convenience store to get the winning numbers. He did this every time it rained so I knew it was coming. Before I left I wrote his numbers down on a slip of paper and when I returned I told him there wasn’t any print out so the clerk had written down the winning numbers on a piece of paper. I gave him the slip with his numbers and he compared, his eyes growing wider and wider. It was like he’d been hit by lightning when he got to the final number. He wheeled on the chef. “FUCK YOU LOSER!” Then he frisbeed a dinner plate through the window into the waiters. He threw back his head and howled like a baboon. Then he advanced on me screaming and I punched him in the stomach. Unphased, he stormed up to the lockers upstairs where the staff changed and snorted a line of coke, screaming down the stairs as he did. “And now I’m smoking a joint! Fuck this place!” He wanted his pant after all, I guess. The head chef looked at me, sadly, and I winced. “He didn’t win,” I said. “I was pissed about having to walk down there in the rain again.” The big old chef sighed and lumbered up the stairs and gave poor John the bad news. His howls of anguish echo in my dreams to this day. Before this event, John would occasionally make me the third best pizza I’ve ever had.

The Blue Cheese, Blackened Oyster, Toasted Pine Nut and Arugula Pizza.

This isn’t especially tedious. The oysters I’ve modified, but this part is easy. Typical blackening involves a powder mix, i.e. cayenne powder, white pepper, onion powder, garlic powder and more, but all of these powders have either an aluminum or tricalcium phosphate as an anti-caking agent. Both of them irritate my stomach and maybe yours too. Opinions will differ and that’s mine.

Steam 1 ancho chili and 3 cloves garlic, blend with 1 tbsp. olive oil, salt, fresh ground black pepper

Shuck a dozen oysters, drop in ancho chili blend

Heat cast iron skillet to very hot

Drop the oysters in, leaving bulk of sauce in bowl

Turn once or twice, set aside when slightly crispy

NEXT, the toasted pine nuts and steam the arugula thus-

Heat sauté pan, sprinkle in ¼ cup pine nuts, dash of salt

Toast, moving gently

Pour pine nuts into side bowl and put the pan back on burner unwashed (pine nut oil resin) and sprinkle in ½ teaspoon fennel seeds. Toast, then add dash of balsamic and dash of water, big handful of arugula and cover immediately, then turn off heat. This is to steam the arugula so it won’t curl and burn on the pizza.

You can guess the rest. Roll out your dough, big ladle of sauce, then add the blue cheese, oysters (they should look like sun dried tomatoes) the arugula and the pine nuts. If you’re crazy cool, hit the top with a random splash of olive oil. Bake at 450 until done, usually 8-10 min. Thanks John.

The Second Best Pizza I Ever Ate

#2 The Aspen Arnold

One night years ago I got home from work, took a shower and then just lay there on the couch with the TV on, too tired to read and my eyes were fried from doing art crap all day anyway. The Food Network was on. It was late. I was half asleep, in between dreamland and oblivion when something intruded on my rest in a pleasant way. The TV. It was a special on pizza. I give less than any shit at all about the so called debate between deep dish and flat, New York and Chicago. The real fight in the pizza arena is beyond that Jurassic squabble. But this show host seemed to agree with me. I listened with my eyes closed until they got to their number two, coincidentally my number two here as well. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s favorite pizza. Made at a little place in Aspen. This made me smile, but when they interviewed the chef I open my eyes. Seconds later I was writing down notes, wide awake. I’ve modified it a tad in the last few years. As Arnold has grown more introspective, the recipe has become more thoughtful (doh!).

The Tomato Base-

This is different from to go to catch all. Take two baskets of cherry tomatoes, preferably mixed as in gold, red and purple heirloom, half them and toss in a bowl with olive oil, garlic, and real garden oregano, maybe four sprigs. Bake at 375 until skins detach. Let cool and then pluck the skins off, place in bowl, add pinch of salt. Done.

The Three Cheeses.

This calls for marinated mozzarella, smoked swiss, and comte. The smoked swiss is soft but you can grate it if its really cold. The mozzarella will just be sliced in disks.

The prosciutto. Get a good one. Order from Di Bruno Bros.

Roll out your dough. Brush with olive oil. Then a scattering of mozzarella disks, don’t go crazy. Then some smoked swiss in the bare patches. THEN the tomatoes. Then the comte. Last your curls of prosciutto. Here’s the best part. Bake at 450, 8-10 min. When it’s done, take it out and slice it and THEN drop an egg yolk in the center. Break the yolk so it runs gently between the slices. Holy fuck this is good.

#1 The Home Happy Hour Badass

Cibo here in sunny Portland Oregon makes a fine version of this. One rainy night Sylvia and I went in during happy hour and I got it. She got the mussels and I found that rolling up a slice of this and dipping it in her sauce was not only fantastic, but so good that for a moment the rain went away and I was a sun bronzed surfer dude with a righteous boner on a beach in the Mediterranean, preparing to commune with naked Old testament warrior babes and speaking the language of birds. This pizza gets first place because it’s the easiest. It relies on two key ingredients, homemade mozzarella that you marinade in olive oil and fennel fronds and anchovies. Much of the time the anchovies we’re exposed to are easily mistaken for cat food because they are, essentially, cat food. A good anchovy is not like good cat food. It comes in on the high end of excellent human fare. The heretics at Bon Appetit would have you believe the jarred Ortiz brand of anchovy is best, and if you believe in bigfoot and Santa Clause, you just might believe it. Agostino Recca in the tin is the way to go. They’re large, meaty and salty. Don’t overdo it.

The HHOB is supremely easy. Roll out your dough, ladle out the sauce, put a few basil leaves down, add mozzarella disks, then use six or seven anchovies. Bake at 450, usually 8-10 min.

The All Purpose Pizza Sauce

I start with a big can of whole tomatoes, preferably fire roasted. Why whole? In tomato processing, the finest tomatoes find their way into these cans. The tomatoes that fall apart go into the ‘chunk’ cans, the ones that disintegrate into ‘sauce’ and ‘paste’. Open that can and blend. Leave in blender for the moment.

In a soup pot-

Dash of olive oil

4 cloves diced garlic

1 diced shallot

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

Cook this until garlic and shallot begin to brown, add pureed whole tomatoes, two chopped sprigs of oregano, salt to taste, and lower heat. Thicken at low heat until ¼ of the volume has evaporated away. Some people add a dash of red wine just before the tomatoes and that isn’t bad. Others add cracked black pepper to the first step. The idea here is that its basic. You can monkey with this on your own forever. Consider rosemary. Roasted garlic. A puree of Turkish figs rehydrated in brandy. Pomegranate molasses. A carrot juice reduction. Go for it!

Pizza Dough

At this point I don’t measure anything and just go by sight, making different volumes for different occasions, but this is a good place to start-

4 cups flour

1 teaspoon sugar

1 packet instant dry yeast

2 teaspoons sea salt

1 ½ cups lukewarm water

Dash of olive oil

Put the water, yeast and sugar in a bowl and gently mix. Let sit. Half an hour later (give or take) the yeast will be active a bubbly. Add the flour and salt and olive oil, kneed into a big ball and cover with a moist cloth. Let it rise, kneed again a couple times and you’re basically ready in a couple hours. Double these amounts and separate into 4 or five balls, use one today and saran wrap the rest individually for use later in the next few days.

LAST NOTE- the pizza stone vs the cookie sheet. A pizza stone is a fine thing but I don’t have one and I likely never will. It’s even possible that I do have one, somewhere in all of my cooking ephemera, but its way in the back with the backup spice grinder and the festive holiday Ethiopian coffee pot. I use a cookie sheet, lightly oiled (olive).

Replicating Kazah’s Frito Pie

Earlier today I was picking strawberries in a farm field and I realized once again that I’m a wet bag of equations. The strawberries convinced me. They are, too. Sauvie’s Island is the largest island in the Columbia River and it was the ancestral home of the Multnomah Indians of the Chinook. The ‘Sauvie’ in the name came from Laurent Sauvé dit Laplante, a French-Canadian dairy farmer. Before that it was called Wapato Island and before that something else. Thinking about history and nature in the bright sun and occasionally glancing over to admire Sylvia’s sunhat, I thought about Kazah and the magnificent frito pies he served out of his food cart years ago now across the street from City Liquidators. It was a natural progression as thinking in a field goes. I was just getting hungry and I could suddenly remember eating those spicy bowls of soul food goodness every day for lunch one long summer as clearly as I could remember the business about the dairy farmer. Kazah was Trinidadian by way Houston so he had a unique way about him. One of the happiest dudes I’ve ever known, too.

BEGIN

Begin with 5 garlic cloves

2 ancho chilis

3 New Mexico chilis

Skin the cloves and deseed the chilis and put them in a pot with a cup of water, bring it to a boil, turn the heat off and cover. Steam for five minutes and then blend with 1 cup whole canned tomatoes, fire roasted is best.

Heat pot, add one tablespoon olive oil and 1 teaspoon cumin seeds. Briefly fry seeds and then add the garlic-chili-tomato sauce. Smells great! Lower heat and add the beans, one quart. Here they are below. In brief, I make a big pot of pinto beans now and then and then freeze them by the quart. Pretty versatile bean base and they’re always more tender when treated this way. Skip this step if you’re using canned beans (hmm, a canned bean is shit just so you know), but you’re looking at 5 drained cans. This below is better.

BEANS

In large pot-

2 quarts chicken stock

½ cup sherry

2 tsp salt

4 gloves minced garlic

1 tsp oregano

4 sage leaves

Add dry pinto beans to fluid level and then add about an inch of water. Bring to low boil and add water as needed until cooked. Cool and decant for freezing.

NEXT-

Once the beans are thawed on LOW with the lid on, add one cup of shredded beef. I usually make a big batch of this as well and you’re on your own here as there are many good and super easy way to accomplish this step. I freeze it in one cup freezer bags.

The beef will thaw, stir it in, then add 1 tbl cumin. Cumin has a short life so it goes in close to the end. I grind in some black pepper at this time as well and salt to taste. After the second phase cumin cook ten minutes on low, then ladle over the god damned processed corn chip called Fritos, an absolute necessity unfortunately, and then if you like add cheese. I usually don’t unless I’m going the extra mile with a little chopped white onion and sliced pepper garnish. Tapatio the hell out of that either way and then, the important last step…

Imagine you’re sitting outside on a sunny day. A dripping, disgusting industrial bridge is off to your right for atmosphere and color, plus it reflects the reggae music blasting from cheerful Kazah’s bright yellow food cart. People are happy. Somewhere, ribs are cooking. Paper plate, plastic spoon, and all is right with the world.

Why I Still Have Hope For Republicans

This is it. There’s no room at all for the gray area between right and wrong, good and bad. You’re either on the noble side of mercy, justice, compassion and equality or you aren’t. Simple as that. Or is it? Here are a few reasons I still hold out hope for the delusional MAGA crazies of our day. They might not be compelling to everyone but they’re just enough to convince me that with a little of that all-important mercy, justice, compassion and equality they might see the light.

My late father is an example of hope. He was a bloodthirsty republican, but once, long ago, he was an earnest young democrat and a volunteer for JFK. Total turn around. Toward the end of his life we talked a great deal and I’ll be honest, up until then I’d had little patience for the man, but somehow that changed. He was an abusive father but I was not going to be an abusive son. The cycle was going to end with me. He came from a long line of hate filled racist Missouri ape men but somehow, at some point, he’d been different from them. His life went to shit and he went with it, but he was beginning to come full circle once again when he died. He could see back through the haze of bad luck and bad decisions all the way to his younger self, an abused young man, the son of another abused man, who wanted to do something positive. I still think that if was alive today he might still be a conservative but there’s absolutely no way he’d be a Trump supporter. He’d be something like my friend Thomas Deaton.

My first book Tattoo Machine went far and wide in the tattoo world and Thomas is one of the southern conservatives who appreciated it. Somehow this sparked a dialogue that’s still alive today. He went from MAGA to wait, what the fuck is this shit, to conservative with no voice but his own and I’ve seen it happen. With no choice Thomas became a free thinker. The pressure, the suffocating message of hate and ignorance, pushed him into uncharted waters and he sails those waters today. A loud mouthed bully is a difficult leader to follow for too long, so I bet he’ll have company soon enough. All that hate can burn a human soul down to a small, dim nub. I’ve seen it close to home in the other Johnson males. They wake up in the morning with their hearts sweating poison and it gets every last one of those blind men the very same thing, generation after generation- a meaningless life that made people uncomfortable, one quickly forgotten, a simple, squandered almost-existence. People like that stand out as examples and we all know more than one of them. A common human being has no desire to be like that or to end that way and the wealth of positive information, the access to a world filled with different ways of being, is so wide now that people can find new roads, just like Thomas. As a species, we are cooperators. It’s a reflex. That instinct runs deep and its especially appealing now when there are more alternative ways to approach it than ever. There’s one dirt road to perpetual unhealthy rage but a thousand tree lined avenues to balance and peace. The odds are increasingly in favor of better times. Maybe it’s a character flaw, but I actually believe that.

Which brings us to me. I was raised to be a MAGA lunatic. Short of that, I was raised to hate them because hatred is the Johnson family energy source. I turned away from all that at an early age and the older I get, the more ‘modestly artful’ my life becomes, the more hopeful I feel for everyone who came from where I did. What made the critical difference? Imagination. Which brings me to my closing point. A goodly percentage of your MAGA crazies aren’t bad people. Most of the time what we think of as ‘bad’ boils down to the same thing. A lack of imagination. I can imagine a better world so I walk the road that leads to it. Now that I know what I’m doing I walk faster. The view is magnificent. But can we really shit right in the mouth of people who can only imagine believing FOX news, watery 2% milk mini white power and Oil War Big Money Corporate Jesus blasphemy? Maybe you can. I’m not inviting any of them to dinner, don’t get me wrong, but I will, on my creative journey, continue to make things built around the spirit of goodnatured disobedience. The money is fine and I like it, plus, you never know. It might stir the imagination.

The Art & Soul of Baking- a cookbook review

With glorious pictures, all glossy, and weighing in at more than five pounds, The Art & Soul of Baking by Cindy Mushet is perhaps the all time champion of craptacularity in food porn. Mrs. Mushet, you deserve to be kicked in the gut on sight. Thou art a failure of a culinarian and rather than grade you as a baker, I offer you a tin foil hat and a clown nose.

This meaty tome achieves the lowest marks for one simple reason. The grace, the elegance of all cookbooks, stems from the fluid interplay of the ingredient list and the treatment description of said ingredients. With the ingredient list, you know what to assemble before you begin. Then you move on to the step by step, which should these days be concise, ala James Beard, but also full of helpful hints and sometimes even colorful anecdotes, ala Mario Batalli. If you do things correctly, you wind up with something that looks like the picture opposite this. In The Art & Soul of Baking, these don’t match up! Its amazing! And if you know anything about cooking and food in general, which I do, you can quickly divine that the error is in the step by step section. Mrs. Mushet, The Queen of Cretins, does not know how to bake. She does not know how to write a cookbook either. She evidently does know how to hustle a publisher, and for this I give her a single salute. Cudos on that baby.

If you see this at a rummage sale, as I did, pick it up. The pictures are worth it. But don’t spent more than fifty cents. And consider suspect all of the Sur La Table books by the gnarly hacks at Andrew McMeel Publishing. This book was edited by Kathi Saage, now undoubtedly an out of work car park attendant. These are the times when we need this kind of information, and behold, its right there in front of you, right where you’re reading this in fact. On the internet. And there are so many great places to read about food. Cooking at home is art of life business and it adds a little joy to every day. It all adds up to a good week and that’s an important part of a good month, which is part of a good year and thus a good life. So enjoy! I certainly do. I even enjoyed writing this review. Why? I made apple pie from scratch last night among other things. So its pie for breakfast, and that, dear reader, is good news.

It Happened In L.A. – a movie review

This movie made me want to stick a screwdriver in my ear. I watched it in a state of fixed homicidal horror, trembling in disgust, unable to reconcile that these were in fact members of my species. Sharing taxonomic nomenclature with these simpering hipster rubes is an affront to my dignity. Desperately, desperately I wanted these feckless cretins to kill each other and towards the end, shivering and nauseous, I decided that a single thumb would do. The credits rolled and I decided it would be acceptable to just beat one of them if our paths ever crossed. I could maybe get away with it, maybe not, but this level of brain damage deserves retribution.

In this saccharine, anthrax dusted love-hate Millennial romp, toothy Gummo skank Annette (nighthog Michelle Morgan) lives with her finger sniffing creampuff doorknob husband Elliot (Jorma Taccone) and boo hoo, their lives as pitiful suckdogs are lame, stale, empty- whatever, who cares. They snark their way through it with the sort of Fruity Bootie University-Woody Allen- baby smartsie poo banter that makes you want to step on their necks and grind, and in a horror twist, Annette constantly compares herself to her Hollywood jizz toilet pal Baker (Dree Hemingway). Ever lick fly paper? No? Me neither, but I’m sure this is what you taste after watching this.  

This is the worst movie I have ever seen. BUT, dear reader, I came away from the viewing experience as if with an illness, and when the aftertaste of this wretched flick passed (about an hour) I felt good. Then… Great. I don’t know anyone like these human shaped hole characters. My life seems full to overflowing. Sometimes it’s worth watching a movie like this. It can make you feel good if you’re in prison in Juarez, like you’ve made solid moves and positive life choices. It can make you feel GREAT if you’re in your comfortable living room.

Available now on Amazon.

Cooties, THE FEAR, The Roads To Peace

I went to the small high end grocery store by my house today and had a flashback. Somewhere in the produce area, a yuppie lady checked out my ass and boom, just like that, I was back in the trenches, getting down with an old dance partner of mine, The Fear. For years, I worked at a tattoo shop where artists came and went, each one of them with their bizarre problems and strange virtues, but the place was a pit, with the sanitation standards of a third world prison infirmary, and the daily battle was to try to keep them from killing each other and their customers, but just like any battle, there was a secret, higher agenda- saving myself. I did. Astonishingly, I made it out of there without ever catching anything. I did get seriously injured a few times, but my daily, keenly paranoid war against the viral world was a success. But just like with the yuppie gal, and thanks lady but six feet, the real source of The Fear is not the cooties themselves, it’s the people who carry them. Right now, you all have The Fear for the first time, and its probably going to get worse, dear reader, so here’s some unsolicited advice.

Booze drove The Fear away for me. I suspected this, but I’m embarrassed to say that this was professionally confirmed. Alcohol is a strange tool, and it can work for a little while and work well. But if this goes on much longer, and there is every chance it will, that wine is going to become a bad thing. So what else? Lifecleaning. That’s right, a New Age word. Clean. Your. Life. The freakish bummer of an aunt or uncle, brother or cousin? Get that shit gone. Don’t be mean but it’s time to roll, that’s Fear fuel. You could never fix them before, you will not have any luck now. You deserve better. You do. Say it to yourself and repeat it until you believe it. ‘I deserve to be better than okay.’ Replace that negative energy with positive mojo. Let good friendships grow. Do something constructive and fun (but remotely) with the people you enjoyed working with. Your former coworkers? Some of them you really liked, right? Give ‘em a ring! And talk about food or where you’re from instead of your job. It all adds up to one thing in the end. Right now, next week is really, really blurry. But today? You can make today pretty okay. Just today. Tomorrow when you wake up, yesterday will seem like a pleasant memory. Then you make that day as good as you can. Pretty soon you’re in the middle of a good week.

The Fear has many forms of relief, but no real cure, just the acts of working toward The Peace. Walking slow so you can see clearly is restful. Reading. Music with guts and soul and life. Cooking. Those are just a few, but you know what? I bet it will be as unique as a fingerprint, the ways we find ourselves through these dark woods. If we all make it, the stories we will tell of that trip will be worth more than gold.

Three Groups In The Great Freak Out- Mama’s Boys, Lebowski For All, and Makers

The Mama’s Boys are going down first, just as expected. In the last two days in my own world, people completely lost their shit in strange ways, some of them comical, some of the ominous. One of them is a TV world associate, ‘Dave’. Nice guy for a Republican, but Dave now believes we should attack China immediately, as in WW3, full on nukes galore, and bring them Big Money Jesus and corrective Republicanism. I nervously laughed when he said this and the screaming started. He wasn’t even drunk. Dave is in his late 50’s and you guessed it, he lived with his mom until she passed away last year. I burned this bridge when I suggested he remove his late mother’s dildo from his ass when he’s on the phone, that everyone can tell. Good manners are free. Temperance isn’t a balancing act. I can’t snap at Republican weirdos just because there’s a global pandemic, but I did. Absolutely ridiculous. Farther afield I see some other, larger signs of crazy. There’s a dude living inside one of the tattoo shops by my house, too poor to afford boards for the windows and no doubt holed up in there with a gun, two ancient bullets and some Dollar General sardines, crouched in the cold darkness going stone cold big crazy. That isn’t good, but that also has to be a mama’s boy. That’s a finger sniffing move. It should be noted here that the average tattoo guy or gal is at home drawing and watching TV or reading, shops boarded up, riding this out in relative style. Everything valuable has been taken home. The giant guy at the convenience store at the end of the street has his forearms wrapped in Saran wrap (???). And last but not least, the two waitresses living in the garage/studio behind the house across the street had another small party, the third one in three days, and I could hear them as they got louder (booze) and how terrified they are of getting sick. They can barely afford potatoes and a shared plastic bottle already. And yet they congregate, maybe six to twelve people, I think because it’s better than being alone. I hope they got laid. I hope the laughter helps them. There’s absolutely no way I’m going over there. I thought about that Republican guy this morning and I totally forgive myself. Even Jeff Lebowski would have shot him down.

Lebowski is mainstreaming, the wide center as We The People begin to stratify. I’m one. Nice house, couple bucks in the bank, though now that the economy is collapsing it may have been a mistake to put so much time into writing screenplays and the new novel (future money) instead of doing art (present money). My gal Sylvia is sweet, kind, and gentle, a perfect joy to be in quarantine with. She knits and she loves books and she’s the most consistently positive person I’ve ever known. We’re happy. She makes people happy, really goes out of her way to, so what can I say. But this isn’t the strata I’d like to be in. Raged out bottom feeder is the low end, living room Lebowski is the middle, but the top?

Makers of all kinds of things are seeing their stars rise. I’m just getting a grip on it. People are offering food. This is, I’m sad to say, a poor country in reality. The ‘Wealthiest Nation On Earth’ does not describe 65% of us, and very soon it will be more like 80%. That means we are actually ‘A Struggling Nation With Some Rich People Who Pay As Little As Possible’. I’ve already loaned out some money I know I’ll never see again, and I absolutely do not regret this in any way, I’m happy to do it, but this does not take me to the top. I’m still in the Lebowski zone. What do I have that I can offer my fellow citizens? What do I make, here at home, that can round out a pantry? I’m in luck! I can make rye bread AND a few months ago we made 20 jars of the spicy ginger fenugreek pickles. This, this I can do. I’m not rich. I’m comfortable, and I see many futures where that will change for the worse. But right now I’m good. Is this stupid? Not if other people start doing the same, and they are. A good sandwich has many ingredients. So does an omelette. So does a day. And you know what? If enough of us start doing this, these times will be just that much easier to bear. Hang in there, dear reader, and try to make it to the top if you can. Everything will be more appetizing if you do. Good luck.

American Suckdog- We Are All Homer Simpson

You stare at the screen of your phone with no comprehension. The gray matter behind your eyes is a roulette wheel rendered in shitty Dollar General watercolors and bouncing around in it is the severed head of a Bird of Paradise. The news you’re looking at is beyond alarming. Somewhere in your basic ape instructions, deep in the cognitive tool kit we share with Chimps, a bubble is forming. It pops and the first thought emerges- I have to get the fuck out of here.

Carnival Cruise Lines is the glaring analogy to American life, you realize. The theme song to 2001: A Space Odyssey almost disrupts your next thought, but the ape train powers through the confusion. We are meat in an emerging mega corporation. This isn’t a country anymore. Then revulsion seizes you and you look past the phone. The country you live in isn’t trying to kill you. It just doesn’t care if you keep living if you aren’t on the job. You are a number in something your Homer Simpson mind understands as an investment app.

Donuts. You might, you reason, make a mad dash through the triage tents set up across the otherwise abandoned city and find a donut. A dog barks in the distance. The future is blurry, but red. Starvation riots will begin in major American cities in two weeks, maybe less, maybe more. The broke people will at last be broken. There will be fire. We The People will become the world’s scariest television show.

Keep going, dear reader. These are the dark morning thought. It’s all true, but it has been for some time. But the latest crisis has revealed the cracks in the Matrix. A game show host is the president! The Biden mannequin is barely even convincing! And all across this nation, the other Homer Simpsons are, like you, thinking about something other than donuts. Possibly for the first time. I wish I’d bagged an elk this year, but sadly I did not. BUT, next week I’m going to start giving out my own home baked rye bread and jars of spicy pickles to my poorer friends. Maybe you can do something like this, too. In the meantime I offer you this song. I think it will help.