Mmm, Fried Chicken

Every week I check the news to see if it will write this column for me. Usually it does. So far, the best example of that came with a report from New Zealand that a chicken there was suspected of being a suicide bomber. You can't NOT write a column when you're handed news like that!

Generally if the news fails me it's because it just isn't that interesting. Let's say it's a week where the only thing that happened was Jeff Renner said "Doppler" a record number of times. That would be a good week to write abstractly about the environmental cost of puppies, or efforts to legalize medicinal insane laughter, or the role of education, or the lack of it, in the employment of ceiling fans during winter.

This week, however, there is no shortage of interesting news. The problem is it's all too interesting. Six months ago I didn't think the Dow Jones could fascinate. Now it fascinates to the bone. It fascinates like a wild Bengal Tiger pawing through my innards, looking for the tasty bits.

Six months ago I thought the biggest danger we faced, economically, was that a lot more people would become homeless in America who have never been homeless before. Now I'm afraid the biggest danger we face is that plus riots, plus mass starvation, plus the people who have been homeless will get to be homeless again, plus our babies will all be two-headed, and the only thing on TV will be Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice, on all channels, in high def.

An indication of how bad things are: no one you know wants to take Mayor Nickels' job away from him. His current approval rating (33%) is lower than the approval rating of Single Parenthood (37%), but everyone who has a passing reputation as a leader wants to stick Nickels with the mayorship just one more term.

In 1997, I even offered my own self up as a write-in candidate for mayor of Seattle on the Pizza Party ticket. This time around, forget it. The salary would be great, and I'm sure the office has a fantastic view, but I don't want to be there when the villagers surround City Hall with the pitchforks and the torches, blaming me for their 20-cent grocery bags, their increasing pestilence and poverty, their consolation trolleys to nowhere they want to go, their two-headed babies.

So, anyway, what I'm trying to get at is, all I want to talk about this week is how much I like to cook my own food, and what I want people to understand about that.

When I tell folks I like to cook my own food, they invariably say, "Oh, so you're a good cook, huh?" That proves that their values are shot to hell. As long as human beings have crappy values like that, it will be necessary for people like me to set them straight. NO, I am not a particularly good cook, and that is NOT a proper reason to want to cook one's own food.

A proper reason to cook my own food (my reason) is that I get to be in control. My biscuits may end up tasting like burned sawdust and have the texture of modeling clay, but they will be MY biscuits.

It was precisely being homeless, too often and too long, which led to my need to be in control in matters of food. When you're homeless in the city you're eating other people's cooking day after day, meal after meal, because you don't have a kitchen and you can't set up a hibachi on the sidewalk. It's all part of the general powerlessness of the condition, going hand in hand with not being able to sleep under a roof or shower when you need to.

When I was homeless the burgers were always too salty, and you could never scrape off enough. Now, I want to enjoy my country, but it's been over-Bushed.