Chili Cookoff at work

For operation feed. I’m going to enter this one. It is a sophisticated blend of flavors and textures that can be easily transformed via the judicious addition of hot stuff, high octane jet fuel, and cleaning products commonly found under your kitchen sink, into an oozing LaBrea tar pit that requires an insurance waiver and a titanium spoon. I’m not going to take it there, this time:
1 lb lean ground beef
1 package spicy Bob Evans sausage
2 medium or 1 large onion, finely diced
1 large green pepper, finely diced
1 jalapeno pepper, finely diced
3 sticks celery, finely diced
1 large can diced tomatos
1 medium can tomato sauce
1 15 oz can light kidney beans, drained
3 T vegetabe oil
2 t cumin seed
2 t salt
1 t black pepper
2 t sugar
2 t Worcestershire sauce
2 t chili powder
1 c water and 1 beef boullion cube (optional)

Heat vegetable oil in large skill on medium-high heat.
Sautee cumin seed for about 1 min.
Place beef, sausage, onion and celery in skillet; brown and drain.
Stir in green pepper and jalapeno.
Add salt, pepper, chili powder, sugar and worcestershire sauce, stir well.
Add tomatoes and tomato sauce, bring to a boil.
Reduce heat and simmer 1 hour.
Add kidney beans.
If liquid has reduced too much, add boullion cube and water and simmer until mixed well.

But I live there…

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions.  Having the axis of the earth tilted at the exact same angle relative to the sun as it was 365 days (and one second!) ago, is a poor reason for me to get off my figurative ass and change something about myself.  But even if it was sufficient reason, why not just pick the anniversary of some other angle?  Any one is as good as the next.  Or better yet, drop the correlation of self-improvement with our home planet’s location in space.  But anyway, there is one thing I want to try to change.  I want to migrate from here….  (I am pointing at my head) to … here.  (now I am sort of patting my belly).

Here is why:  I always have thought that to understand something, I have to be able to describe it.  Such as with words.  Lots and lots of words, if needed, or at least with obsessively thorough and detailed mental pictures, each of which is apparently worth a thousand of those sons of bitches, ceteris paribus.  What this leads to, if you’re me, is a tendency to not just be able to grok some shit on the quantum, accept it and then move on with mental grace and emotional serenity; but instead to succomb to the paralysis of analysis.  This can lead to getting so bogged down in thinking about something or someone or some event or some memory, that the object of such thought can move on and do whatever the fuck it wants while I am still mentally chewing over some fossilized remembered remnant of the thing or person or event.

I have a feeling that this doesn’t make sense yet, so now I am going to describe it some more.  (Haha, that is called irony).  One way to do that is to remember how one of my religion professors in college described religion as an act of metaphor.  There are two parts to a metaphor, the vehicle and the tenor.  The vehicle is the mechanism by which meaning is expressed, and the tenor is the meaning itself, or I guess you could say the thing that is being meant.  Most religions are rooted in references to things or beings well beyond the grasp of human comprehension, making their God by definition something that cannot be defined, but only believed in.  That leaves religion, when considered by me anyway, bogged down in symbolism, chock full of stuff that stands for what is holy, but is not holy in itself.  I am not really educated in this kind of thing, but I do see people regard objects–man-made ones, at that! And food and drink, in some cases–and hold them in reverence and awe, as if “stuff” in a room, right in front of you, were actually something divine.  Let me veer off the rails here to say that this is a very simplistic recap of a series of conversations I had with a deacon (and a couple of shorter conversations with a priest, who by the way is as deeply spiritual and honest a person as I have ever had the privilege of talking to) during the course of RCIA instruction a few years ago.  Yes, I joined the Catholic church, right before I got remarried, and also a little bit before I learned about that church’s arcane thoughts on annulments and whatnot (“Wait…on your say-so, 10 years of my life and 16 years of someone else’s, along with our respective former spouses’ lives, did not actually happen??  Except mine is different because I came to this party really late, but those years just kind of got squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed or some shit?  OK, so then what the fuck are all these kids doing here, and where did I get that scar??”)  I actually did give it an honest try, and have many times since then, but I can’t fully grok the notion that a wafer and a cup of wine are anything more than symbolic representations.  Once my literal mind gets beyond the shuddering thoughts of cannibalism (and the inner smart-aleck stops thinking shit like “Yum! Krist Krispies, again!”) I still can’t help thinking (see?) that actual human flesh should be chewy and that real blood would not taste so…grapy.

I didn’t mean for this to be about religion.  As you can see I am quite retarded on the subject.  Agnostic in the precise sense as defined by Thomas Huxley, but once or twice in my life an actual believer (not at this moment), would about sum it up.

Try again: many of my life experiences turn into what I would call chewing gum for the mind.  No nutritional value whatsoever, but man does that fucker ever keep busy with memories and conjecture and attempts to define and understand what I have experienced:  replaying, speculating, scripting possible do-overs and alternative responses or behaviors or actions for events that took place way off in the distant past; analyzing the shit out of what I should or shouldn’t have said or did, agonizing over what-ifs and how it could/should have gone differently or better.  Unchecked, this kind of shit could lead to a life that is a tooth-grinding, paralytic waking nightmare.  Good thing for me that this is only a tendency, and not a full time hobby.  Although sometimes at night I wake up with my jaws clenched.

One good thing that has come out of this sort of obsessive tendency is a lifelong love and respect for language; English in particular but also for all the cool shit English has inherited and mostly stolen from other languages.  My prevailing need is to describe shit in order to understand it, to make some order out of it, and what better means to describe shit than via language, hmm?.  I know, there are other ways.  Anyone who is an artist or musician or writer or dancer or athlete, or for that matter anyone who has ever found themselves deeply moved by what artists and musicians and writers and dancers and athletes have produced; knows this on some level.

Anyway, the thing I want to do is not have that analytic tendency so much, the one that gets my mind so bogged down in the artifice of life that it overlooks the beauty in just experiencing it. Analysis paralysis…it interferes with the present, and that is really all we have. It is like this:  if you have one foot in yesterday, and one foot in tomorrow, you are in a perfect position to take a giant dump on today.

If I were not such a retard I could have just summed this all up with some pithy little ditty, like the bumper sticker that says “Be here now”.  I usually fail at that simple instruction, instead concocting some thousand word mental essay going deep in to what that could really possibly mean.  In fairness to me, most of the time that bumper sticker is surrounded by several dozen other ones of equal or greater (by which I mean lesser) pith and depth.  And bumper sticker-plastered cars like that usually just end up pissing me off.  Pithing me off, too.  Take your god damn ontological salience and get the fuck out of my way, I think at them, really loud, in my head.

I do not usually make New Year’s resolutions, but this time I am going to think about it.

Rent-a-git

Sometimes I see things wrong on first glance, and the original misinterpretation is what sticks in my mind, forever.  And sometimes I prefer my first impression of an event or person, regardless of subsequent evidence that the original thought is just stupid or crazy.

First example: On the way to work I pass this place that sells things on eBay for you.  Its name suggests that it should be pronounced “Re-Tag it”, but its logo looks like: reTAGit, with a very stylized font for the TAG part of the name.  For the life of me, I can’t look at that sign without seeing what I saw the first time I read the sign: “rent-a-git”.  I think “Git” is a British synonym for what we over here in the colonies might call a “dumbass” or a “fucktard”, so this makes me laugh inside my head a little each time, and try to imagine scenarios in which I might want to rent one.  Maybe to fill in for me at meetings at work, or to do stuff around the house:  “Oy, come ter order, then…this ‘ere is when we ‘ave a meetin’ ter discuss ther bleedin’ archivin’ rules fer the ‘lectronic communications then, innit?” or “Watcher ffink ’bout some bloomin’ Navajo wite fer the bleedin’ wainscotin’ an’ crown moldin’, then?”  I like the idea of a bunch of obnoxious cockney dumbfucks milling around a holding pen, waiting for the dispatcher to call them up, day-laborer style, for their daily git gig. Giggety git.

Another example is from a misreading of the sign outside the Gordon Food Service outlet store.  The sort-of bolded comic-sans font of their logo makes the sign look like it says “Goddamn Food Service”.  At least it does if you first see it through misty car windows on an overcast day in heavy traffic so you only get a cursory glance at the sign, and you’re retarded like me.  So ever since then, that is what I see every time I pass their store or one of their trucks on the highway.  There goes the goddamn food service truck again.

“Where is that Goddamn Food Service delivery order?”
“I don’t know; maybe we should rent a git to track it down.”

A third, and really stupid example, is from one of the shampoo bottles in the shower at home.  Without my reading glasses, I swear the name of the product on the container looks like “damn clean”.  Closer inspection shows that it is really called “drama clean”, all in lower case like that.  That is stupid enough on its face; in this case I think my version, while stupid in an entirely different way, is actually preferable to reality.