A Gross Physical Salute to Everything Good about the American Way of Life

Ahh, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Delicious book, delicious movie (as far as filmmakers go, Terry Gilliam is the absolute tits, I tell you).

(listening to "Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream," performed live, by King Crimson)

I'm drinking Fransiskaner Hefe-Weisse. Slightly different from the Dunkel version. I am always astounded how Germans and Belgians can coax such complexity out of the four ingredients permitted by the 1516 Purity Law. I'm getting banana overtones here, in addition to the lemon cream aspect usually found in a good Weisse. A good German beer like this is splendid on a hot day. The Belgians excel, however, at contemplative fireside beers. If I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never stop vividly remembering drinking Delerium Tremens out of a snifter. I was sitting on a low, velvet settee in a Belgian bar in NYC. Greenwich Village, I believe. I drank some Leffe, too, among much else. They had a special glass for every beer, I think. I got pretty fuckered up, actually.

I worked my annoying little shift at Big Green this morning, and then I decided to be productive. I drove around and finally found the DMV office (the streets and shopping centers in Cary were planned by acid fiends, evidently). I needed to transfer my registration from California to North Carolina. I had all the necessary documents with me. I had hours of free time. To my astonishment, it was easy and fast. The woman at the counter was pleasant. It took me four hours to get my driver's license. Go figure. Too bad I had to use Plastic Pretend Money to pay for it.

("One O'Clock Jump," Benny Goodman live at Carnegie Hall)

Next door was an Asian grocery store. One of my favorite pastimes is perusing the shelves of Asian grocery stores. My wife grows impatient and annoyed as I fondle bottles of Nuoc Mam and plates with dragons on them. She does not share my lust for Kim Chee. I was, however, alone.

It is a slightly humbling experience to enter an Asian store, even more so to enter Chinatown in San Francisco. I suppose I know a thing or two about food, and I've learned a bit about Asian cuisine as a result of my eight years in California, but I've barely scratched the surface. When one goes into one of these stores, one sees Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and often Philippino things. These are the cuisines enjoyed by well over a billion people. Some of it has roots going back millennia. A clueless Caucasian is very much an outsider. I still marvel at the strange pickled things, the panoply of tofu, and the vast array of sauces, pastes, and oozes in bottles. I wish I knew how to make full use of all of it. Dried fish. Mysterious powders. Alien candies. Mesmerizing beverages with things floating in them. Unfamiliar produce: Durian is a challenge. It's also called stinkfruit, and it smells like rotting flesh. It tastes good, though.

("Building a Mystery," live, Sarah McLachlan)

Asian grocery stores are a very invigorating change from American ones. Not so much marketing. I have to be on guard when I go to an American MegaMart; who knows what new crap they've invented since yesterday. And they'll try and sell it to me because they assume I'm stupid and lazy. Precooked bacon? Low-carb wine? Prechewed gum? NASCAR potato chips? Get the fuck out of my face. None of this happens at Grand Asia Market or Ranch 99. There's plenty of stuff to buy, but you've got to find it yourself. If you're stupid, you starve to death, I suppose. It's generally more crowded, too. Asians don't seem to feel entitled to 45 square yards of personal space apiece. That's the way it should be, instead of the American style store:

1)The sun shines out your ass just because you're a customer
2)If you're too stupid to find the cake mix or iceberg lettuce, someone will hold your hand.
3)If you're reasonably intelligent and blessed with good taste, we'll be sure to only carry processed crap. Surely you can't make food from scratch! Ha! The very idea.
4)We'll upsell you until you're exhausted, and then usher your fat ass out of there.
5)We need to be this obnoxious because there's a Food Lion or Harris Teeter or Vons on every corner. Can't let that $1.49 slip away with this much rent to pay. All this high-powered signage costs, too. You'll pay one way or the other.

Anyway, I walked out of the Asian store with a nifty serving bowl, some shiitake bouillon cubes, a bottle of peanut oil, some Chinkiang vinegar (total blind pick; it was only 99 cents, and I like it), some firm tofu, and a package of fruit flavored beef jerky for the drive home. I decided against getting the honeydew filled cookies.

("Achilles Last Stand", Led Zeppelin)