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.

The Thrill of the Meatball

Yesterday I made spaghetti from leftovers, and rejoiced. I'll try to explain why.

The point is, when I was urban-homeless, making spaghetti from leftovers was almost impossible. Oh, yes, there were leftovers. I might have been able to eat at a free community meal, and they might have had something like what I fixed three days ago that "seeded" the spaghetti. In fact that had been just exactly the sort of food I've gotten at free community meals.

Being poor, I went to one of those stores [see their talking cartoon head] where they specialize in selling me packaged foods that haven't been fully unloaded from their boxes. Since I don't mind the clutter, I reap the savings! Such aesthetic neglect netted me 12-ounces of meatballs PLUS two red bell peppers for half what the meatballs alone would have cost me in a neater store. I already had an unmarked pound of white rice of undetermined extraction from a food bank. Pearls? Peewees? I had 49-cents worth of tomato sauce and a yellow onion.

The seed meal was that. A rice-meatball-tomato-sauce-onion event. I'm not a great cook. I collect ingredients to critical mass and combine with heat. Nevertheless, cooking is extremely important to me. Assembling my own food for my own consumption is a sacred act, even if I do it badly, whether the results are edible or not.


[Shown: The sacred cranking of chickens during the 15th Century]

Speaking of sacred acts, when I'm dead I want everyone to eat domestic Limburger in memory of me. You don't have to do it every year. Once would be sufficient.

Actually, I was cooking as usual for both myself and Anitra "On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept" Freeman. Cooking food for her own consumption is NOT so sacred an act for Anitra, so I get to do most of it and hog all the cooking sacredness to myself, while she does sacred emails.

Even with both of us eating it, the rice-meatball-etc. event would not disappear. The meatball-onion-sauce was half leftover. As I said, this could also have happened at a community meal. They use cheap ingredients too. If Anitra and I were still homeless we could have been at one of those meals and could have each had a half serving of meatball-onion-sauce left over, which we might have dumped into a container and saved.

Then, we could have done much of what I did later. Since more sauce was needed for spaghetti, we would have obtained a can of spaghetti sauce. I got mine this time at a food bank. When we were homeless we would have got the spaghetti sauce with food stamps. Since garlic was essential, we would have bought one bulb of that vegetable variety, peeled it, and stuck slices of it in our extra sauced leftovers, using a sharp knife. I always had a sharp knife when I was homeless.

Then what? The directions for making the spaghetti now call for the heating of the meatball-laden sauce so as to mellow the garlic and disseminate its flavor, and to cook up a pot of spaghetti to put the sauce on. This means boiling water.

Ouch. The army has heating pads for MREs that we could have used in theory to heat the sauce, but they wouldn't boil water. Well, we could have built a fire. But you'd be surprised how quick the police show up when you build an illegal fire anywhere in the city limits. They come the quickest when you're hungry or cold.

You'd think the military would hurry up and come up with a flameless heater that our soldiers can use to boil water, as opposed to just heat stuff up. I mean, we've got a war every minute, let's put our wars to good use, spurring the technology that will make being homeless bearable, since we will be draining our country's resources to make so much of it.

Then those of us in housing won't be the only ones who get to enjoy the thrill of making spaghetti from leftovers.

[Pictured at right: Life's goal achieved!]