Do you remember the days when the milkman stopped at your house regularly to deliver fresh milk? If you’re reading this blog, your answer is likely, “no.” But that doesn’t mean that you can’t appreciate the idea of home delivered milk and what a wonderfully simple and heartening system it was.

A company in Des Moines has taken this idea one step further, one step more wholesome, one step more delicious. Instead of milk, they deliver bread to your door. Yes, bread, sustainer of life and motivator of souls.

The Daily Loaf offers a wide variety of breads, and they deliver the loafs directly to your door. The catch? You must live in Des Moines. I admit that I have weighed the pros and cons of living in Iowa many times. This realization that I could have fresh bread delivered to my house falls neatly into the pro category.

If I do indeed move to Iowa, I await excitedly the moment when an apparition of  ”Shoeless” Joe Jackson walks up to me in a corn field and asks if he is in heaven. I will break off a piece of herb batard, hand it to him, and say, “This is Iowa. But yes, Joe. It is also heaven.”

Meet Gyro Man. Gyro Man grew up in Budapest but fell in love with a Tibetan girl raised in India. After many years together, they birthed the most delicious gyro I have ever tasted, combining meat-grilling techniques of Hungary with an assortment of Indian spices. However, the set of ingredients only begins to explain why this gyro rises above all similar gyros in the mean streets of Hungary. The secret ingredient is love–love that Gyro Man puts into every painstaking layer of his gyro, which is neatly wrapped in a lightly toasted pita bread. Each bite contains hints of a mixture of flavors which tantalize every organ in your body and soul, leaving you craving a second stomach just so you can consume one more. Friends, I did not have a second stomach, but I ate a second one anyway. And it was delicious. Hat tip to you, Gyro Man. You are my gyro hero.

While walking to my seat at the back of the plane, I’m pretty sure I was personally greeted by all 22 flight attendants. On my seat I found a pillow and a blanket. And an hour into the flight, I found on my tray table a meal fit for a flying king.

Beef with white rice and steamed vegetables, a side of ham salad, a roll with butter, rice pudding, spring water and Coke light. Yum. The last flight I was on I got a Sprite. Only a Sprite. On my last international flight I got a Sprite and a yogurt. Oh, happy day.

But on Singapore Air, I was fed handsomely and treated like a person, not a bacteria culture. It was refreshing to fly with an airline where the crew were taking pride in their work instead of taking shelter in the galley.

I have never been to Singapore. But for eight hours, Singapore came to me.

Pre-heating an oven after will give you cold lasagna. Pre-recording a television show after will give you a half-hour of blank air time. Pre-boarding an airplane after will give you small children and people in wheelchairs gripping desperately onto the wings as the plane takes off. Pre-paying the cashier (or the bank for that matter) after will give you a consumer credit crisis. Voila! That’s what we have.

It is to signs like this one– that tell us it’s OK to spend after we consume– that we owe our current standing. The trickle down theory is hard at work. Sometimes economic prosperity trickles down. But sometimes irresponsibility trickles down as well. When banks tell you’ll be fine if you buy a house you can’t afford, when they tell you to “pre-pay after” by giving you a teaser interest rate, they do irreparable damage to society.

It could be said that this sign is incomplete, that it should read something like, “Please Pre-Pay Cashier After 9pm.” Yet it doesn’t. If it was meant to give a specific time, no one filled it in, creating an image of total apathy, an apathy which is compounded by the sign’s new meaning. Why do today what you can do tomorrow?

Because we can. Because we should. Because we must. That’s why.

It’s time to take our cues from our own sense of decency and feasibility. It’s time to ignore those who try to tempt us into our own doom by seducing us with the option of disregarding our responsibilities. It’s time to take back our economy from the morons who think it’s OK to screw over thousands of people if it means getting a 7-figure bonus at the end of the year.

We are so over that.

Answer: they eat boatloads of pork. So that’s what I did as well.

Pictured above is a plate with a pork chop, ham, bacon, and wiener sausage. In case that’s not enough, they added a breadball (breaded, as per rice’s observation about Austrian cuisine), a mountain of sauerkraut, and two small potatoes.

The other white meat? I think not. Here pork is the meat. Period. End of discussion. After countless sausages, much ham, several pork chops, and bacon, I can say confidently that when in Wien, I did as the Wieners do. And it was delicious.

chicken and rice, using basic induction, so declares that Austria can bread anything, thus unambiguously answering the question above with a simple yet thorough ‘yes’. Tune in next time. Not sure why. Just trust me.

In times of crisis, some people also turn to food. Cheap, easy, comfort-food. For some Americans, this means fast food of the take-out/drive-thru sort. So in trying times, many people head to the local franchise of an enormous fast food chain, then stop by the liquor store for some good, old fashioned denial to wash down their chicken nuggets. Friends, the innovation of entrepreneurship never ceases to amaze me, as nothing could have prepared me for a sign I saw in Virginia, a sign that I later realized was simply the next logical step.

Breakfast shots? Someone at Burger King deserves a raise. Not only did they combine comfort food with comfort drink, but they start selling this concoction at 6am! Get ‘em from the get go. Don’t make them wait until five o’clock. Hell, it’s five o’clock in Bangkok, right? Start pumping these suckers full of apathy as soon as they wake up! Ingenious.

Alas, I was disappointed when I discovered that there is no liquor in these breakfast shots. But there is something to be said about their spirit. The mere marketing ploy of referring to these micro-meals as shots plays to people’s reliance on all things inebriating. How miserable do we have to be before the idea of a shot in the morning starts to sound appealing? According to Burger King’s market research, we’re already there.

But this infatuation with relieving our stress and succumbing to a certain despair we so vaguely like to call hope will only make our problems worse. The American spirit is alive and well, and it is not the kind of spirit you can purchase by the handle. It is reinvigorated by facing down– not chugging down– the harsh reality. It is reinvigorated by a sense of ownership over our obstacles. It is reinvigorated by a hardy meal and a momentary rush of ambition.

Breakfast shots? No, thank you. I’ll take a hamburger with a side of whoop-ass. And then I’ll go and expose breakfast shots for the societal crutches they are. How’s that for spirit?

There is no substitute for the invisible hand of the market economy. True, this hand may not be as gentle in prodding us as we once thought. Sometimes it hits us, knocks the wind out of us, or smacks us senseless. Occasionally, it will seem to disappear entirely, only to return a few years later as a fist full of foreclosures. And every once in a while, it will drop a few million barrels of crude oil into our oceans.

But I like to think that this invisible hand plays a more passive role in a global economy. It opens doors for us by providing incentives. Yet we, the consumers, must ultimately decide which doorway to walk through. During trying economic times, our options may be dismal, say, if we must choose between defaulting on a loan or robbing a bank. At junctures such as these, the invisible hand steps aside and says, “take your pick, my good and faithful capitalist.”

It was in one of these lose/lose situations that I found myself while traveling through North Carolina recently. I happened upon a diner with a large sign outside that read: “sizzlin’ steak or eggs”.  But beef, you might inquire, how can someone go wrong with either steak or eggs? Simply put, “steak or eggs” is not “steak AND eggs”.

To borrow an argument from stand-up economist Yoram Bauman, the phrase “steak AND eggs” is clearly better than the phrase “steak OR eggs,” especially for marketing purposes. So why does the diner use OR instead of AND? “Steak AND eggs” must not be true.

This discordant disjunction leaves me wondering how far we can split up our staples of excess. Soon menus will read, “surf or turf” while parents fix for their children “peanut butter or jelly” sandwiches. The new norm might be meat or potatoes, spaghetti or meatballs, fish or chips, bangers or mash, ham or cheese, even–dare I say it–chicken or rice.

Friends, this is the duplicitous future we face if we cannot find a way back to the good old American excess that ironically brought us to this level of financial desperation in the first place. We must perpetuate the cycle, regardless of signs that try to dismay us. What kind of country do we live in if a diner cannot offer its patrons both steak and eggs? Everywhere, there are signs of despair, signs with misspellings and logical fallacies, signs that try to dissuade us from our American ways. Well I take issue with these signs, as they are signs of the times, no longer!

Step 1 of our experiment was to carefully slice the eggplant into cylindrical sections and then pan-fry them until brown. Though both eggs and eggplant can be fried in a pan, we still considered this result inconclusive. Step 2 was to layer the eggplant with in between tiers of a mixture of ground beef, tomato, onion, and various spices. This step taught us even less. Step 3 was to top the concoction with gouda cheese and let it bake in the oven for 30 minutes. Though this step again was meaningless, we seemed to have randomly stumbled upon a version of moussaka, which itself is derived from the arabic word musaqqaʿa, meaning chilled. Since moussaka is normally served warm, again the term assigned to it centuries past makes no sense. However, we were able to conclude with a t-stat greater than 5.0 that moussaka is delicious.

Friends, what is in a name? That which we call an eggplant by any other name would be just as nonsensical, but just as delicious. That which we call a moussaka by any other name would be served just as warm. Not just English, but all tongues of this world are meaningless. It is our job, our goal, our sacred responsibility at chicken and rice to see the dear perfection which is owed despite the title. Instead, we shall call you by your true name. We shall call you delicious.

My beard has finally decided to eat my face. It hungers for more.

Life is a beard grown by an idiot, full of mud and bread crumbs, signifying nothing.

And so we grow on, beards against the current, shorn ceaselessly into the past.

My Beard (May 28 2010-June 19 2010)
Goodbye, old friend.