Sunday, December 14, 2003
When the Maximus Hits the Gluteus
You there? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Me neither. But man, the places I’ve been when I wasn’t here… You want to talk about exotic locales, exciting adventures, profound realms? Me neither. I just hurled myself down into the depths of the SarChasm, and I spent the last week pulling myself back out. Many things were accomplished. Vacuuming, laundry, reconciling the bank statement and cleaning up the flotsam of a confused life were not among them, but I can’t be critical of myself. That’s why you’re here. Those of you who are here, anyway. And welcome back.
Today started last night. Kel and I went out to one of our favorite old haunts, a charming little thai restaurant, for a celebratory supper after Kel finished a solid semester’s worth of schoolwork. It had been years since we’d been to the old Bangkok Cafe. So many, in fact, that they’d closed, reopening last week as Assab, an Eritrian refectory. I’d been watching the transformation from my perch on my daily bus ride to-n-from work. Kel and I do like our East African food, and we wanted to give the new player in the neighborhood cuisine-o-rama a try. I was delighted by my kitfo and veggies and my piles of cool, spongy injera wherewith we scooped up bits of food and et’em. We ate to satiation, and then some. The thing is, when you eat using highly absorbent bread as your means of getting food into your mouth, once you are done eating with that lovely feeling of having stopped stuffing yourself at the very moment when chickpeas and lentils are about to come squirting out your gills, the bread inside you keeps expanding and YOU KEEP GETTING FULLER until the sensation of gustatory satisfaction is replaced by one of desparate stretched bloat. It was hours before I no longer felt my supper enbiggening inside of me.
However, I was distracted in the interim by a quick jaunt down to the best bar near my office where I met Greg, Jules, the blogger who will remain nameless, and a small handful of associated riffraff, for beer and abuse. I am no longer sure my nickname is still “Space Cowboy” but that’s what it was as I was leaving the establishment shortly before midnight. At least I had the good fortune to order the fun beer with the big mug, earning me a place of some notoriety among my similarly-manually-impaired peers. Those poor suckers with their tall, slender beer flutes and literally transparent beverages didn’t stand a chance against my heavy cast-crystal mug foaming over with dark frothy winterbock. Foaming over is one of the things I do best anyway, and at least I got to drag a bunch of nice folk and gracious strangers down with me.
Home at midnight. Up at 7 with a howling cat and a hungry dog, and skies that were clear and cold with a few puffy clouds skirting the horizon like the dustbunnies skirting the baseboards of my apartment - alarming, but not dangerous. I had a date, were the morning to break clear, to take a bike ride - so I girded what was left of my Eritrian-food-eating, dark-beer-drinking loins and hopped on the GT for a thrilling jaunt of five blocks, where my cousin’s biking buddy lives. He poured a bit of excellent expresso down my gullet and, thus fortified, we pedaled over the GG bridge, up Hawk Hill, down to Point Bonita, out to the Coastal Trail, and fire-roaded it back up to the top of the headlands. As we rolled through the chilly, still morning, the air scintillated with energy and color. Winter light is so oblique (not unlike myself), casting itself through more of the atmosphere and thereby breaking up more into constituent colors; at the same time the delicate winter greenery - grasses, mosses, near-dormant bushes - all revealed their most subtle beauty in the dampness remaining after the previous night’s downpour. I was so busy admiring the patterns and colors that I almost didn’t even notice that we were riding past three fawns grazing in the horsepasture down at the bottom of the Rodeo Beach Road - only 15 or 20 feet away, calmly watching me puff and grunt my way up the mountain, secure in the knowledge that, were I to try to approach them, they’d be able to evaporate before I could even fully turn my bike toward them. The look in their eyes was like a mixture of amusement and pity. On our way back over the bridge we were hailed down by three soldiers carrying M1s or rocket-propelled grenades or Bradly Fighting Vehicles (if that’s not a toy for Milton Bradly to start marketing, I don’t know what is), which was a bit disconcerting. They wanted us to know there was a jogger on the bikers-only side of the bridge. National security has never been more personal. Perhaps next time I can have armed guardsmen accost me to let me know my boxers are peeking up over my waistband, which is so 2001. Appropriately forewarned, we passed the jogger blithely and blasted back out through the Presidio and into the neighborhood. As I dismounted once I got back home my trip odometer (that tells me how far I got when I was tripping) read 18 miles, and my taint, having been crushed flat and gently pounded like a veal fillet, clearly indicated that I’d gone farther than my body had been expecting. This is why I consider myself a masochist, but damn, that was a sweet ride. Even with the soldiers.
But sweetness was the order of the day, since the next step (after a vigorously relaxing shower) was my cousin’s house down in the Western Addition, where my two other cousins had already arrived to perform the annual schneckening. We’d started yesterday, just we cousins (well, second cousins, though Sam is double second cousins with Billy and me since our grandfathers are brothers and our grandmothers are sisters). Diane, Billy, Sam and I - with the eager if untutored assistance of Diane’s two daughters, aged 8 and 10 - had set up the dough and muffin tins on Saturday; the dough had risen in the fridge overnight. By the time Kel and I got there today, Billy and his wife and infant son were there, and so was Sam, and the girls arrived back from Sunday School shortly after we got there, establishing a truly full house for baking. When you get that much butter baking in a midsized condo, it becomes like a personality in the house, pervading every corner with its lipidinous presence. When I came up the stairs it hit me like a rolling pin of pure ghee. Then I got used to it, and then the fourth, fifth, sixth batches went into the oven and all our heads were spinning with the airborn butter and olfactory glucose. The dough was rolled out, sprinkled with brown and white sugar and cinnamon and nuts and raisins and chocolate and cranberries and dried cherries and all manner of culiniary delights and sweetmeats, rolled into a long tube (or “spliff,” to use the continental term), and cut into 12 pieces. These were then placed in the muffin tins, which were already larded with brown sugar, butter, pecans and karo syrup. They rose for 20 more minutes and then baked for 20 minutes, at which point they were turned out onto a masonite board that quickly turned into a broad, shallow sea of praline and congealed sugar, regularly interrupted by golden-brown whorls of pure teeth-gluing goodness. In the end we baked 16 dozen schnecken, including some with cherries and triple sec, which my uncle Simon (Diane’s dad, who stopped by to revel in the ongoing tradition, now touching its fifth generation) promised would have his mother - may her memory be a blessing - rotating merrily in her mausoleum. She didn’t mess with this fancy crap. But “Fancy Crap” might just be the nickname I truly earned.
Well, maybe not too fancy. On our way to the schneckening, I did get pulled over by a motorcycle cop who wanted to know why my registration was expired. See, we’d paid late, without the late fee (we had our reasons, they’re very reasonable), and the DMV took a few months to re-bill us for the final $39.00. That got paid last week but naturally we don’t have the tag yet so I stammered and fumbled my way through a low-key exchange with a uniformed officer for the second time today. I must have been freaking out pretty badly; he and Kel were both trying to keep me from breaking out in hives, a cold sweat, and the confrontational clumsies. I managed not to spill my powershake, only lost one pen, and maintained almost total control of my bladder functions. The cop took pity on me, recognizing that “if [he] gave me a ticket [he’d] probably only be compounding [my] problems.” Well that’s true, officer, but that’s never stopped any of you folk before. See, I know a lot of words but sometimes I’m smart enough not to same them all and this was one of those times - I didn’t say that last bit out loud, and therefore pity was taken and we were courteously instructed to get to the DMV and straighten things out. Net loss: five minutes and one pen. I’ve never been treated so gently by a man with a nightstick. Next time I expect to be lowered into a spiderhole and held incommunicado until someone pays my social debt. It sure isn’t going to be me. I’m burned out, baby. I’ve got enough energy to eat a little salmon and maybe watch some tube with some close friends and a bottle of beaujolais. It’s the wine for people who are eating too much sugar and butter, after all. That’s why it’s french.
Applications are now being accepted for people to go in to work for me tomorrow. America applauds your enthusiastic spirit of volunteerism. And more wine. Thanks for listening.
