Breakfast Yet?

How is it acceptable to crack open a chicken egg, shake out the snot inside, whip it up and fry it? What historical accident led to this? I could understand if someone decided that an egg on its own was something to be squished and swallowed raw. It's practically a liquid. Lord knows I've swallowed worse. But to whip it up, cook it, flip it? Seriously?

Don't get me wrong: A cooked egg is a step in the right direction. But I just don't see what possessed someone to try so hard.

And why chicken eggs? I find the thought of caviar revolting, let alone the odor. Let alone the texture. And what makes a chicken egg any better? You go to the store to buy eggs. Chicken eggs. You order a three-egg omelette. Three chicken eggs. Why not turkey eggs? Pheasant eggs? Turtle eggs?

Ugh. Egg. Even the word sort of oozes. Buy they are sort of marvelous, aren't they? Butter. Tarragon. Cream cheese. Chives. Salt and pepper. On toast.

With bacon.

Mmmmm...

Emphasis on the "Crack"

The best cheese-flavored cracker by far is Cheez-it. For having such a silly name, they sure are irresistible.

Goldfish crackers are fun, but only fun. You put them in lunch boxes. You push them with your spoon and make them swim through your tomato soup. Kids' stuff. Plus, they've been ruined by the recent addition of little smiley faces.

Some swear by Better Cheddar, but I don't think they can hold a candle to the salty, zippy goodness of Cheez-it, with an aftertaste in the back of the throat just slightly acidic enough to reinforce that you are not eating something good for you — and you do not care.

You always feel the temptation to put something on a big round cracker like Better Cheddar (because they're not good enough on their own!), but a Cheez-it is perfect in its simple square singularity.

And I'm talking the original little glowing orange numbers, not that high-falutin' "white cheddar" nonsense. The further we get from pretending this has anything to do with real cheese, the better.

You want to put something on a cracker? For my money, I will always choose a Triscuit. Those things are like sand-paper through your bowels, but they are so satisfying and grainy and salty and sturdy. Simplicity and utility. One feels virtuous with a plate full of Triscuits. Again, rosemary and olive oil flavoring? Get thee behind me. Original only, please. You want rosemary, go hack down some from your neighbor's flower box yourself.

Of course for the truest experience in cracker addiction, go for a box of Chicken in a Biskit. They sure are weird. But, oh man, are they tasty!

Feed Me. Now. OK... Now. (No, really. Now!)

The fat one is ruled by that weird little beeping box. It's perfectly ridiculous. Any sensible cat knows when she is hungry from the emptiness inside. But this one waits until that box bleeps every morning before rising to feed me. Despite the plainly stated reminders I gently whisper from across the room in my softly melodious voice.

Sometimes he'll get my hopes up when he stirs. But as I dash toward the door, fervently calling out my thanks over my shoulder, I am often met with a pillow he has sent sailing across the room instead of the reverberating thuds of his footsteps.

The thin one doesn't even move, unless it's to pack his pillow more tightly around his head.

It's enough to drive a self-respecting housecat to hunt. Right. Hunt what, exactly? Dust bunnies? In this dismal prison I have been reduced to such desperate acts as shredding whole rolls of toilet paper, or climbing atop dressers and tables and nudging artfully selected items to the floor.

To add insult to injury, they are also giving me less food these days. If they are not careful, I could lose weight, and we can't have that. I mean, would they dare? Is it possible? In this place they have removed all exercise from my otherwise active and vigorous lifestyle. Sometimes I need to gallop from one wall to another just to produce a heart beat, just to prove I still can. Now I need to take 20 naps a day instead of my customary 18. I am all but forced to sit at the window, looking out into open air — where is the grass, by the way? the trees? — at those pesky, those dirty, those delicious pigeons.

If they don't begin to treat me better, I think I will kill a mouse or a large insect and leave it on their bed.

I could do it, too.

The Little Things That Count

Opening up a box of Triscuits to discover that not a single one of them has been broken never fails to fill me with triumphant satisfaction.

Bad Dye Job

The cleaning woman who comes through our office every day found a damp pair of boxer shorts in my wastebasket yesterday. I put them there. They were mine.

Underpants can end up in all kinds of strange places. I once saw a pair of baby blue shorts dangling from a black wrought-iron fence at my bus stop one morning. Who can imagine the hurry their owner must have been in to have abandoned them so.

My excuse is really very simple. Despite being in a tightly sealed container, which was inside of a sealed Ziploc freezer bag, the beets in my lunch leaked all over the inside of my gym bag. Luckily, my boxers took the brunt of the staining. My brand-new white gym shoes got a dab here and there, but nothing too bad.

I didn't mind tossing out the shorts. They were dark blue but way beyond saving. They were old. And I was not about to wash my shorts in the sink at the office!

I shudder to think what fictions those wet, stained shorts must have ignited in the cleaning lady's imagination when she fished them out of my garbage — with me sitting right there. (No wonder she didn't say hello yesterday!)

East Meets West

Today, the best-looking ground beef we could find at our local supermarket was halal. Reminds me of one of my earliest memories of the neighborhood. Standing outside a Rite Aid while Jeff was buying a pack of smokes, I saw a white-robed man wheeling a metal shopping basket heaped with goat carcasses across 37th Avenue. He disappeared into a restaurant. I knew I was in New York.

Dinner tonight was Swedish meat balls. Swedish meatballs with halal meat. Why is this funny to me?

Packaging Majors of the World, Unite!

	These red-headed stepchildren of the Hershey family are not festooned in playful holiday colors.

Rite Aid is trying very hard to be a toy store or a carnival side show. It's Eastertime apparently. I might not have known but for the enormous duckies and bunnies hanging in the doorway, threatening to take my head off the moment I pass through the automatic doors. For the entirety of January and February, we had oversized frogs holding fluffy hearts that read: I LOVE YOU! In December, we got "Plush Bear Figurines" dressed as toy soldiers, and statues of bears leaning on snowshovels or something.

When I walk in with freshly sharpened darts looking for a wall of balloons to pop, hoping I can win one of those anthropomorphic monstrosities, all I get is a dirty, yet slightly worried, look from the manager.

I get the Camel Lights and leave quietly.

These days, Rite Aid is selling the hell out of its Easter candy. Which is to say it's selling the hell out of the same candy it was selling the hell out of for Valentine's Day. But in different wrappers. The chocolate's been done over in pastels, distasteful even at the best of times, instead of the reds and whites and purples of the festival of love. I think it's hilarious that the same stuff on super-discount-clearance, everything-must-go sale last week is now in another package and going for the regular price.

What is the difference, I ask, between a miniature Reese's Peanut Butter Cup in a red foil and one in a robin's egg blue foil? Packaging is an exact science — to be sure. And what a bizarre science it is. My alma mater, Michigan State University — to which I still give money as a sappy, gullible alumnus — had one of the premier packaging major programs in the country. Apparently. Someone would introduce himself to me in front of a keg as a packaging major, and after I sized him up as someone I would or would not like to sleep with (usually not), I would sort of admire him as one of those people who figured out how to fit an IKEA kitchen table into a box the size of an index card. But now I know he's really just spending his days flipping through a palette of colored swatches and dressing confections. He and his peers could be a Bravo reality show.

Or maybe he's making a mint as an investment banker, like everyone else (but me), regardless of his major.

Whatever. Personally, I'm holding out for the yellow and orange and brown ones that come out in October. Far superior.

(You know, I saw a Fear Factor-themed Easter basket today. What... does it contain raw bull testicles that we are Triple Dog Dared to eat? Instead of Easter grass, is the basket filled with mealworms or maggots or nightcrawlers? Bravo. What better way is there to celebrate the Resurrection of our Savior?)

Better than the Reese's are the Hershey's Miniatures. Well, except for Krackel. Krackel sucks. Everyone knows it. (So watch out for the pink ones.) When you were selling candy bars to pay for your seventh grade trip to Chicago or Washington, D.C., or ... oh, I don't know ... Stratford, Ontario, no one ever bought the chocolate with crisped rice. It was all about the Caramello knock-offs or the Hershey's with Almond.

Krackel. Feh! Fie upon it! I just eat the Special Darks and the Mr. Goodbars. Nothing else even matters. Not even the ridiculous, waxy, stomach-turning regular Hershey bars.

Only in America could we make something out of chocolate that no one likes.

Heaven with White and Red Sauce

If you're looking for a quick chicken fix without the side of rat droppings, run, don't walk, to the 7, E, F, G, R or V train (but for the love of Mike, don't run in the station) and head east into Queens. I can sum up gastronomic bliss in two words: Sammy's Halal. This food cart on 73rd and Queens Boulevard in Jackson Heights is the winner of the 2006 Vendy Award. There is some discussion on Chowhound.com as to whether it is part of a group of Sammy's Halal carts also found in Midtown and Astoria, and no one has offered a precise analysis as to how one compares with another, but for my money, after having visited the one in Jackson Heights, I have no reason to stray. He'll have a small crowd gathered at his window. But it's well worth a 10-minute wait. For five bucks you get a big polystyrene container with heaps of basmati rice, grilled seasoned chicken and a little bit of side salad. Get the white sauce and the spicy sauce. Mix it all up: Heaven.

Jackson Heights, long known for the amazing variety and quality of its cuisine, is lucky to have this guy.

Listen for yourself:


Incidentally, another of the five 2006 Vendy finalists, the Arepa Lady, is also in Jackson Heights, a bit further down Roosevelt Avenue. I haven't found an arepa yet that blows my hair back, but maybe I'll give her a go.

Mmm, Jurors...

The most valuable thing I learned today at jury duty is to never throw away my lunch voluntarily.

It's my first time ever on jury duty. I reported this morning at 8:30 in Jamaica Center and noticed immediately signs posted all over the entrance to the courthouse: "NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THIS BUILDING."

I took a quick few gulps of the bottle of water I was carrying and tossed it in a nearby trashcan.

Now, I had packed a lunch this morning. In fact, doing so, coupled with the disorienting break in my routine, had nearly made me late to the courthouse. I briefly considered stashing certain pieces of it in my coat pockets, but I thought better of it, in view of the x-ray machines. They'd find it anyway. Rather than be the dummy who didn't read the signs in the eyes of the security guards, I thought it better to dispose of it altogether. So I dropped my perfect, neatly packed brown bag into the can. Thunk! A bagel with cream cheese, celery sticks, four Oreo cookies, a banana and an orange — wasted.

For much of the day afterward, I was completely distracted, you might say "obsessed," in retrospect by this decision.

1. I hate throwing away food on principle. For me, it's a question of morality. I eat all leftovers. I clean my plate.


2. I was almost late to court for making the damn thing in the first place.


3. The kicker: On the other side of the security checkpoint, people blithely strolled around with McDonalds and bagels and coffee and bags of this and that as if there had been no signs.
   

So, not only did I feel totally morally compromised, I also felt stupid for throwing money away and being duped by a completely fake rule. To boot, rather than scold these rampant food-carryers, the officer who gave us all our instructions told us that we could leave to get food at any time — and bring it back to the juror lounge! We just couldn't bring glass bottles in. Whoop-ti-do.

So, what were those signs for?

I hate them.

Apparently the security guards don't take them seriously, either: One such sign had been amended with a piece of paper, a Sharpie and some scotch tape to read: "NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THIS BUILDING — EXCEPT JURORS."

So, I bought myself a lunch across the street later on. And rather than bring it inside the building, I sat outside on a slab of granite and ate it there. It was 20 degrees outside, but it was actually rather pleasant in the sun when the wind died down.

Getting Culture

I'm breaking my rule. This is about me. Or, rather, a very specific part of me.

The human mouth is a teeming cesspool of shit.

Bacteria, fungi, protozoa, viruses: It's a real party in there. A constantly moist 95° F. A rainforest of microorganisms, if you like. And what we eat, they eat.

The more than 100 species of bacteria, and hundreds of species of fungi, protozoa, and viruses that have taken up residence in our mouths is difficult to fathom. Microbiologists estimate that, in addition to these known species, there are up to 500 other living, breathing organisms inhabiting our mouths, although only 50 have been identified and named. The sheer number of these creatures is astronomical, considering the fact that our mouths contain more bacteria than the entire world's population, and the fact that our bodies house approximately one trillion bacteria.

And this is the beginning of my problem. April was not a good month. For two full weeks, I had a heinous bacterial infection in my mouth.

It started with a chancre sore. Not a huge deal. I've had them all my life. I even survived the heart-stopping shock of learning in 8th grade sex ed that chancre sores, like cold sores, are a form of herpes. Now I just deal with them.

But this one, for the first time, was on the tip of my tongue. Creepy. Ugly. Then, a couple days later, I started to get more. Two on my cheek where I bit myself on accident. One in the back of the mouth where my gums meet my cheek. One in the same place on the other side of the mouth. One on the soft palate. One that arrived on the inside of my cheek, as if left by the sadistic evil twin of the Tooth Fairy, overnight. Then — because, as we optimists believe, "it can always be worse" — a second, third, fourth and fifth on my tongue.

I was raging.

Eating, drinking, talking, sleeping — all were miniature excursions into hell. Constant, sharp pain in my mouth all day long put me in a foul mood and gave me a headache. Plus it made me salivate like a dog — some natural, annoying response from the body, I'm sure, like a fever or vomiting — which made me need to move my mouth, which inflicted more pain.

Then the worst of it struck. Some kind of gum infection on the roof of my mouth. Imagine taking a hook, digging it into the flesh around your upper teeth, and stretching it back toward the throat. It would open a pretty angry-looking, sensitive sore. Then fill that sore with dead, gray, decaying tissue. Then add an unpleasant odor. Now multiply it by two, one for each side of the mouth.

I lost almost 10 pounds eating nothing but oatmeal, boxed mashed potatoes, and macaroni with butter. (I couldn't eat, but I looked fabulous!) I found myself eyeing baby food at the drug store while I was waiting for my prescriptions. Eventually the oatmeal had to go, because it was hard to dig it out of the sores with my tongue. Mashed potatoes I could roll into a ball and carefully pass back to my throat on my tongue. The macaroni was the best, because it just kind of slid down. No tongue. No chewing. Bliss.

I saw three doctors in a week and a half. The third one brought a bunch of his colleagues into the exam room so they could each peer into my mouth with their pen lights. I felt like a circus side show freak. "What can it be?" Whatever it was kept me out of work for a full week.

I assumed it was something bacterial. I thought it might be trench mouth, which I had seen before on someone else. The doctor laughed at me. "Trench mouth? What's that?"

He only knew it by the more scientific-sounding stomatitis or acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis. Pretty, huh? Only the older doctors in the office knew what trench mouth is.

Trench mouth — a severe gum infection — earned its name because of its prevalence among soldiers on the front lines during World War I. Although it's less common today, trench mouth still affects thousands of young adults between the ages of 15 and 35. The disease is also known by other names, including Vincent's stomatitis and acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis.

Trench mouth begins as a bacterial infection that causes inflamed, bleeding gums, but eventually, large ulcers may form on your gums and between your teeth. These are often extremely painful and can cause bad breath and a foul taste in your mouth.

Although the exact cause isn't well understood, trench mouth seems to develop when factors such as poor oral hygiene, tobacco use and stress disrupt the balance between "good" and "bad" bacteria in your mouth.

They treated me for something viral with a big fat injection in the butt — one of a possible three, I was promised. Rock and roll. They also gave me antibiotics because, after four doctor's office visits, no one was able to diagnose the problem. Every test came back negative. Every culture came back normal.

I don't smoke. I had good oral hygiene. The cultures the doctor extracted and grew showed that there was nothing in my mouth that didn't belong there. There was just too much of something and not enough of another, I guess. Makes sense, but what the heck could have been so stressful to so upset the balance of good and bad bugs in my mouth?

The antibiotics took effect. No more shots, thank God. The infection cleared in a day or so. Then I just had two craters of raw tissue on the roof of my mouth to heal, hyper-sensitive teeth, and no prospects of using toothpaste in the near future.

My biggest problem, actually, is that I can't play rugby, because I can't wear my mouth guard.

At least I'm back to solid food again.