two mcdonald's recipes

as they were done back in my day.

Hamburgers:
(usually made in groups of 6 or 12)

Place frozen patties on grill and bun crowns in toaster. Sear patties when timer goes off. Flip patties at timer. Put a bit of rehydrated onions on the top of each patty. Remove crowns from toaster when buzzer sounds and put bun heels into warmer. Dress crowns. FIND OUT IF THERE ARE ANY 'GRILLS' (special orders) and dress these appropriately. Otherwise each crown gets one press of ketchup and two pickles. Find out what proportion of cheeseburgers they need up front and add one slice of cheese to the correct amount of crowns. Remove burgers from grill directly on to crowns and remove and place heels. Send tray to front.

Gravity Hits:
(usually made in groups of 2 or 3)

Take one plastic jug and slice off very bottom. Fill one of the dishwashing sinks with water. Cover mouth of jug with a bit of foil and secure with rubber band. Poke tiny holes in foil. Immerse jug in water to just below the mouth. Place nice amount of marijuana on top of foil. While holding flame to marijuana pull jug up but be sure NOT TO PULL ALL THE WAY OUT OF WATER! Holding jug with just the bottom still in the water, remove foil and place your mouth over mouth of jug. Press jug firmly into water.

©McDonald's Corporation, 1986

bad karma blues

I am going to use this space to say publicly what I have not said privately. I once had a job killing birds. It was an ecological sort of thing run by a local research group and other environmentalists. The brown-headed cowbird was overtaking the area with its parasitic ways at the expense of some other, dwindling species. To save these species, a brown-headed cowbird eradication program was started. It had been going on for a few years before I came along and for all I know is still in effect. I will not pass judgment on the goal here, but at that time, the numbers showed that the program was working.

I have told many people that I did once have a job killing birds. I have described the large, caged structures that are used to lure and hold the birds. But when asked about method, I could never bring myself to say.

...and now I am about to type the method and i find myself balking.

the method i was taught was to put them into a plastic bag and hold the end tight to the exhaust of a running automobile until the flapping stopped. sometimes there were many birds in the bag.

halfway through the season or so, i could no longer bring myself to do this. i know i could not handle the impersonal, factory aspect, though i don't think it was a conscious knowledge. after that, i killed each bird individually by suffocating them with a firm grasp over their chests...about 10-15 seconds.

It causes me much more pain now then it did then, which in some sense is good and in others, very bad.

mother of twelve bastards

There are very few people who have made me say, "I want to be him." There is one other I can think of, and he was hit by a train long before I was born.

Years ago I wore sunglasses and walked through the streets of Berkeley and Oakland always carrying a small tape recorder. Years ago I stopped wanting to be him, but I never stopped wishing that I wanted to be Hunter Thompson.

So now that he's taken one of his many guns and fired one last shot into the deep dark night, I ask myself the question. The answer is yes. I do still wish I wanted to be him.

last plea from the depths

Yes, I am addicted to coffee. No, I hadn't any coffee in the past 35 years other than a sip of Turkish coffee served by a woman named Mama Sefarian in the Armenian Convent at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

I set out to become a coffee drinker and all my friends and loved ones supported and encouraged me and I succeeded.

But did they mention the stench-strewn, black, underbelly where men's souls are raped and discarded and ridiculed? No.

Now I hear deranged laughter as I am taken in by sweet coffee's deformed, bastard-child, temptress and I become anathema to all that is good and pure and holy.

Curse thee, Kahlúa! Curse thee and all others of your fabrica de licor de cafe hideous lineage!

God have mercy on my soul.

we like the idea of fresh nutmeg, but we are lazy

We have redone our entire kitchen. Last night we made mushroom quesadillas, and I couldn't find the pizza cutter to slice them. I was told to look in the other utensil drawer. It seems we have two utensil drawers and they are grouped according to necessity. The drawer which is more central to the room contains the utensils more often needed and the drawer closer to the wall has the less needed ones. The pizza cutter had been designated as 'less needed.' Which is true. We rarely ever use it. We are having spinach quesedillas this evening and we will need the cutter again. So this morning when I was emptying the dishwasher, I decided to reassign the cutter to a higher status. I then wondered if the less used utensils would wonder what happened to the cutter. Actually, the thought manifested itself through my saying out loud, "Hey! Where's Stan?"
So then I found a utensil in the more needed drawer that wasn't really all that needed and put it in the other drawer so it could explain to the others where the cutter was. While I downgraded the nutmeg grater's status I said, "Ho ho! Even the mighty must fall."

Honestly, before this morning, I had no idea that kitchen utensils led such interesting lives.

the book is much better than the review

I am rereading Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, which I last read when I took a class on Hesse in college. My good friend Jeremy had taken the class the previous semester and recommended it. I think Jeremy was the one to dub it 'Hermann Hesse's Home For Happy Hippies,' which is what it was every semester. Thirty longhairs looking to bridge that West-East Gap. I was particularly stressed during that semester's mid-terms. I really was a terrible student. In one class, History of the Middle East, I had decided to attend only the first lecture, the mid-term and the final exam...which was something I did for quite a few classes. The night before the mid-term, I was looking over the handouts from the first day and one of them gave the structure of the mid-term exam. It seemed that one section involved knowing the definitions of fifteen key terms that had been handed out sometime at a later lecture. I went straight to the library and walked all around each of the eight floors searching for someone with one of our History of the Middle East textbooks. After going up to the eighth floor, back down to the first and back up again, I found someone on the fourth floor. I am not sure what I said to this poor girl, but I ended up with a copy of the key terms handout complete with her definitions. I attended the beginning of every subsequent lecture to see what the handouts were, and then walked out. Finally, the professor gave out the fifteen key terms for the final exam, and I never attended another lecture. The night before the final, I discovered that there were actually thirty key terms needed for the exam. They had been broken down into two handouts. So, back to the library I went... Perhaps it was that very semester when I was particularly stressed during mid-terms. Jeremy noticed and told me, referencing the Ferryman in Hesse's Steppenwolf, to 'listen to the river.' I promptly, and honestly, told him to fuck the river, which is about as Western a response as possible and it made me laugh then and it makes me laugh now. Another good friend, Geoff, was in the Home for Happy Hippies along with me. He read nothing. Maybe he read Steppenwolf. Geoff kept all his important documents and papers in a shoe box. Jeremy once asked him if he had that shoebox in one hand and shoebox full of pot in the other and he had to toss one of them which would it be? Jeremy and I both had a deep reverence for shoeboxes full of pot, but we both also understood the extreme hassle of replacing important documents and papers and knew this had to be carefully weighed. But Geoff didn't have to weigh anything. He was holding his shoebox when the question was posed and he just tossed it over his shoulder as if the other would magically appear. Once I heard him let out a girlish scream when a dog named Clifford stole his sandwich. At the Hesse final, Geoff brought every Hesse book that Jeremy owned...about twenty of them. Half weren't books we read for the class and it wasn't an open-book exam, so there wasn't any reason to bring even one book which would have been one more than the rest of us brought. He was just sitting there at his desk waiting for the professor to come with the exam surrounded by a fortress of Hesse books as if the presence of obscure works like Knulp would intimidate the rest of the class into doing worse than he was about to do. I remember enjoying Narcissus and Goldmund back then. It is a little disturbing to me how I recollect basically none of it. But then I think about what I do recollect from that time and I feel much better.

"Hesse lifts the contrapuntal play of conflicting forces into a plane as close to music as words will come. What lingers in the reader's mind is a melancholy melody, a romatic "lied" full of wanderlust for a trip into the id." --Saturday Review

i am not sure what it is that i have lost

It was very early on that I first felt it. I can't remember the very first time, but it was there during my entire childhood. It is a feeling, an experience. I remember thinking it felt as if it was descending from the four corners of my ceiling. It is invisible. It is tiny but can become engulfing. There was something about it that always made me think of a bubble.

It descended upon me often. At first, it elicited only terror, and then it would be gone. I began to realize that I could force the experience to be gone and with this realization I began to allow it to stay longer and descend lower.

It has weight. It threatened to be suffocating weight, but I could balance it at a point just above suffocation that was comforting. The temptation to let it drop was always there, but I lacked the courage.

It is gone from me now. It came to me less frequently after I moved from the house where I grew up. Now it has been years, maybe a decade, since it has been with me, and I miss it.

jackpot winner

I learned how to play "How Deep is Your Love" on guitar this week. There is a version of this on the new album by Davey Ray Moor and it is very nice, so I decided to learn it. Recently there was an observation (complaint?) that I don't sing enough love songs.

Right now, I have to drop my voice down for the "and it's me you need to show...how deep is your love?" part, but I was practicing singing it in different keys on the way to work this morning and there may be a key were I can reach those notes and still sing the rest of the song. Probably not. I am not a strong singer.

The lady who wants more love songs...she thinks I am great singer. This is funny and sweet but sometimes not helpful. We recently saw a neighbor outside who we hadn't seen in a while and he had obviously put on weight. My wife said, "Man, Doug has got a belly goin'." I asked what would happen if I had a gut like that. She honestly said it would look good on me. She means it, too.

So, when you see a fat, balding guy singing off-pitch love songs to a woman looking dreamily at him...well, just do what I do. Let it happen.

for the record

Sometimes when there is an activity I would rather not do, to express my opinion I say, "I'd rather eat glass," or "I'd rather drink gasoline."

I have done both of these things, so I know what I am talking about.

kind of a downer

I remember reading that Michael Landon did fifty pushups after learning he was riddled with cancer. I am pretty sure I can't do fifty pushups. Does that mean I won't be dead in a few weeks?

I was recently in an airport. Sometimes when I am around that many people, I have to will myself to keep moving, keep upright.

The Rulebook is completely out of my sphere now and, just sometimes, that is no longer funny. Awe-inspiring, always. But as far as I am concerned, awe without amusement ain't worth shit.