The Strange Alluring Opiate of Freedom and The Nature of Elephants

Last night I fell asleep watching videos of longboarding in warm climes. My hope was that I would then have beautiful dreams of carving down sunlit streets with a warm breeze barely sufficient to vaporize the sweat on my skin. That didn't happen. All I remember about my dreams is that a taxi company was opening a new dispatch on Idylwyld. Hardly the escapist alternate reality I was going for.

Today I woke up to a sick boy, and girls that needed to be at school for 8:30.
I stepped outside to start the car and my breath came in crystalline incandescent blue clouds, and ice cracked like a whip cracking as I opened the door to my vehicle in the crisp quiet of cold winter morning. I spent my first hour of the day shivering, much as I have done for the last 4 months.

5 days a week, sometimes more, I go to work. As far as work goes, I've got it pretty good. Decent pay, a high degree of personal autonomy. Yet I am dissatisfied. Discontent. I have no higher ambition in life than to longboard MOST of the time. It's getting to be an obsession. I'm considering a flight to Vancouver or Vegas or Phoenix or Albuquerque maybe even Juarez just to get it out of my system.

It's a sickness right now people. I can feel it 24/7. I KNOW that living in the snow and ice and darkness is not normal. I've been to places where winter consists of 1 or 2 snowfalls a year and a little rain now and again. I've been to places where it never snows, where it rains for half an hour at night, and half an hour in the morning, and within half an hour more the tropic sun has dried the streets. I know that there are beaches, where in the words of a good friend, all you need to survive is a guitar and a sad song.

I've worked at home before. Less money, but no schedule.
I read a thing lately, a metaphor for the bondage we all find ourselves in as we're consumed by work and responsibilities and 'life' in the 'real world'. The jist of it was this:
A traveller in South East Asia noticed that the massive elephants people used for work, elephants that transported entire forests with their trunks, capable of destroying homes and bridges,were secured against any attempts at escape by a frail little rope tied around one foot. Any one of them could easily have snapped said ropes in an instant.
The traveller asked a trainer why they didn't break the ropes.
"We tie them with that size of rope when they are babies. The nature of an elephant is to roam free. Throughout their childhood they are too weak to break the ties. They try and they fail, they try and they fail until eventually they give up. When they become adults, they have come to accept that they're bound, and they don't bother trying to free themselves."
The problem with me, is that I know this whole way of life is a fabrication, and it chafes at me more than any rope ever could.

Wormholes on Broadway

I finished work last night, called home for the usual "Do I need to pick anything up?" call and received instructions to get milk.
20 minutes later I pulled into the parking lot of the OK Economy on Broadway and headed inside.
There's a certain headspace that arises when you've had a long day and a quiet drive and the night is dark and snow is falling quiet and slow like it does in Christmas movies. I came out of the sparkling deep blue night into the blinding flourescents of a grocery store that hasn't changed in 25 years. A muddy trail across the tile started thick at the door where people had knocked the snow off of their shoes and melted away to gradually disappear deeper inside the store.
Something about that triggered a memory somewhere. Not a deja vu, but an actual image locked in some neuron. OK Economy, circa 1984, going to pick up powdered donuts with Ryan Townsend so that he could try to chat up the check out girl that was in her 20s. I got to thinking about places and time, and places in time and it occurred to me that somewhere in this universe there is a vantage point from which I could see 1984 me and 2009 me walking around OK Economy simultaneously. It occurred to me that just because that moment has slipped into the past doesn't mean it's not here anymore. Walking around the store I had the distinct feeling of walking through an ethereal wake of time, that all the events and moments those walls had seen were still there, rippling in tiny waves, collecting in corners in extra-dimensional eddies and swirls.
Anyway, it was one of those weird, surreal little moments I wanted to write down.

Repo Man

So I'm sitting up at the bar with Dan, and Dan is ebullient and jovial and glad to be alive because it's his day off and he came into $200 he wasn't expecting or needing and was exercising his option to be frivolous with it.
It was a slow night for me so I checked out early and sat with him for a bit, swapping work woes and future hopes and what-not, in a generally jovial mood myself. Somehow we got on to the topic of career choices and the options we had if we were to wish a change.
"My buddy is a repo man." Dan said.
"I'd love to be a repo man!" I said. "It's up in the top 5 of jobs I'd like to try."
"Really?" Dan was taken aback. "I wouldn't think you'd enjoy dispensing misery to people."
"I'm pretty good at staying detached and reasoning my conscience away." I answered. "As a Repo guy, you aren't God taking things away from people with your power, you're simply the hand of God. I just think it wouldn't be dull."
Dan shrugged then raised a thoughtful eyebrow. "Well, my friend has a lot of stories about it, that's for sure."
"Like what?" I asked.
So Dan told me a story.
"One day he got this call from one of these rent to own furniture places. He had to go out to a reserve and pick up a big screen tv, a sound system, and some video game stuff. So off he goes, in the middle of winter, and he gets to the house, where this disshevelled woman in her 40s answers. Behind her, there are at LEAST ten kids, all ages, from 2 to 12, and not one of them has even a stitch of clothing on. After some initial arguing and debate the woman finally realizes that resistance is futile and lets him in, directing him through the house to a room at the back. There's nothing in the house. An old couch and chair and that's about it. Finally he gets to the room, and there's a big hole in the wall filled with snow, and snow pouring into the house. In that room is this altar of electronics from the rent to own place. Once the kids start to understand that he's there to take it all away from them and leave them with nothing but the snow for entertainment they start crying and yelling and arguing and begging him. He just dismantles it all, a component at a time, taking it out of the house piece by piece while they all cry and sob. And that was one day on the job for him."
"Wow." I said.
"Can you believe some people live like that?"
"Well if the pay is good and he likes it..." I said.

Social Networking, Neuro-linguistic Programming, Molecular Gastronomy.

Quitting Facebook has been tough. So tough that as of yet I'm unsuccessful. I've been checking it daily still, just not posting. Every time I do check it I try to do a little neuro-linguistic programming with myself, build some negative associations with the site etc. But I'm still interested. It's tough for me not to post info about everything. For example.
One of my cooks at work has taken an interest in molecular gastronomy. It's debatably a new form of cuisine that relies on chemical profiles of food to blend tastes, textures etc. It uses techniques, ingredients and equipment that are more at home in a laboratory than a kitchen; liquid nitrogen, syringes, calcium chloride, sodium alginate. The results are curious, beautiful, often tasty. It's nouvelle cuisine on LSD. My cook's facebook feed shows that he's joined a Facebook group for Molecular Gastronomy. A quick perusal of their wall shows comments from young aspiring chefs, many claiming to be great and talented professing an interest in this new cuisine. Most of them look too young to have even begun to understand classical cuisine, a grounding that is crucial to success especially in this path. There were a lot of arrogant statements on their site and it was damn tempting to break my facebook vows and berate them. Fortunately I have some self discipline, so I'll just air my thoughts here.
A lot of classical chefs don't think too highly of molecular gastronomy. They feel it's pretentious, serves a chef's ego more than the cuisine, is about showboating technique over the dish. I find to my surprise, that after an initial interest in molecular gastronomy, I subscribe to this school of thought. In my opinion, food should be simple, regional and magnificent, emphasis on the simple. I think on this, even Ferran Adria would agree.
To me simplicity is the corner stone of great cuisine. Fresh ingredients complementing one another in taste, color and texture, prepared with passion. I don't have any desire to see the word 'chloride' anywhere in my food. Molecular gastronomy is a neat novelty idea, a high end cousin to deep-fried cola or cotton candy, but it's little else other than a passing fancy. Students of molecular gastronomy would do well to pay attention to Adria's words in this video Ultimately, his work is first and foremost about the cuisine of Catalan, and it came about after 10 years of studying nouvelle cuisine, followed by another 10 years specializing in Mediterranean cuisine. Before you can make a lobster gazpacho, you need to be able to make a gazpacho.

Working Class Anti-Hero Introduction.

Keep Britney and Megan Fox and all your pop hotties. I'll take Order of Canada winner (and undeniable seductress) Valerie Pringle.



It's Dec 31st. As part of my New Year's Resolution I'm dropping out of the social networking set. I've found over the past year that I'm straight up junkie hooked on social networking, my drug of choice being Facebook, and I can't moderate it in the least. I check it like 20 times each day, eager to catch up on the activities of hundreds of people that I've had only the most minor interaction with over the years. I feel somehow compelled to tell all of them the micro-minutiae of my life. "Andy is cooking Spaghetti". "Andy is eating spaghetti". "Andy had too much spaghetti". Blurting out all of these insignificant little details somehow soothes that creative monster that drives me to write however, with the unexpected and unwanted result that I just plain don't write anymore.
So no more Facebook. Instead I'm going to channel that creative energy and typeractiveness back into actual writing. Paragraphs and trains of thoughts rather than status updates and the like. And today's train of thought goes like this.
I'm currently reading another one of Anthony Bourdain's books. "A Cook's Tour". I love Bourdain's writing. He started out being my favorite celebrity chef, quickly became my favorite celebrity tourist (knocking out long time top spot Valerie Pringle) to become one of my favorite all around writers. This guy has skillz peeps.
It was while reading his sometimes sentimental sometimes cynical gonzo-esque memoirs that it occurred to me that I have probably had more jobs in my life than most families have in several generations. It also occurred to me, that with few exceptions, I've loathed and despised every one of those jobs. Where there is loathing, there is passion, and where there is passion there is the potential for some good writing. Sitting in the tub, feet wiggling in the water with Bourdain in the Bay of Biscayne, I decided that I would start to chronicle my work history. I'm going to call the series "Working Class Anti-Hero", which is intended to be a nod to John Lennon's "Working Class Hero", a satirical, Sartre-erical lament for the working man, as well as a nod to Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, and Henry Miller, the absolute kings of anti-heroism.
And, as this is already starting to feel a little bit too much like work, I'm going to knock off for now, and think about what there is that I can tell you about working in a nightclub at 15 years old.

That's Right, DR. Andy Tait.

I picked my own Christmas present this year. As many of you may know, I like writers, and my favorite writers have always been the dangerous variety. I'm talking about Kerouac, Henry Miller, Hemingway, Steinbeck at times, and of course the immortal Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
The first time I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I was hooked. From there I read everthing HST I could find. Eventually I came across the circumstances of his doctorate. He was a 'Doctor of Divinity'. For some reason I'd always thought he was a Dr. of Journalism or Letters or something like that. But nope. Divinity. He'd ordered his doctorate from a mail order church in Modesto California.
So this year, my Christmas present is my own doctorate (legal and legitimate by the way) from the very same church. I join the ranks of quite a few famous ministers. HST of course. But also Milton Berle, Sammy Davis Jr, Mel Blanc, Ray Bolger (who played the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz), Richard Branson, Tony Danza, Hugh Hefner, Abby Hoffman, to name but a few. I'm in some damn fine company!

I Don't Get Loneliness.

I remember it like a sickness. When I was in my teens I was terrified of loneliness. The idea of sitting alone had a horror and a sadness to it that's difficult to define.
Around the age of 22 I realized that this fear was crippling me. It made me needy, and there is little in this world more pitiful than a person that literally needs another for sanity. I chose to become comfortable with myself.
It started with reading all kinds of philosophy texts, the classics mainly, like Nietzche and Kant. From there I discovered the existentialists; Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus. Somehow that led me to Henry Miller, who in turn led me to Eastern philosophy.
I came to embrace solitude. So much so that I actually began to prefer it over company. Still do as a matter of fact. I think that I have felt lonesome perhaps 3 times in the past 10 years, mainly when I'm away from my family for more than a week at a time. And then it's not loneliness so much as homesickness.
Being a complete neurotic as well as a hermit however makes me wonder if this preference for alone time is healthy or not. It's not that I'm anti-social. More that I'm pro-solitude if that makes any sense. Is that such a bad thing?