September 2011 Archives

and i hear a song i've heard a million times before.

you've heard it too, i'll bet

where? i have no idea. but that's not new to me. it sure sounds nice, though.

... and it sounds pretty good! long time, no see...

so much for that. i tried. i've got an appointment with our substandard US medical system next monday so they can tell me again to just take antacids for the rest of my life and eat small meals 5 times a day.

somehow this most excellent of soundtracks in my collection earned itself the genre tag of "blues".

i'm not sure exactly how that happened. i haven't much use for the genre tag, and this shows why...

i highly recommend "up in smoke" over "american me".

after "american me", the "frisking the nuns" scene in "up in smoke" is perhaps a little less funny, but at least you can eat during "up in smoke" and not throw up.

i've lost 12lbs in 2 months.
i've got a saddle sore on my saddle sore.

i ate at el torito yesterday, for a work group lunch. i think you could fairly say it would not have been my first choice had i been tasked with choosing a lunch venue.

since the last time i've been, some 6 or 8 years ago, el fucking torito has updated their menu with calorie counts. i had not considered before that something may be simultaneously unsurprising and appalling, but i was both unsurprised and appalled to find out how calorically costly the "food" items are at el fucking torito.

that helped, actually. see, i'm a food optimist. i know that the food there will be awful. not just awful in it's own right. i sometimes enjoy bad food. i used to love the french toast sticks and deep dish pizza at my college cafetorium. that was bad food. i enjoyed it.

but el fucking torito is much more insidious than that. they start with platonically ideal delicious food, like, say, carnitas. they take the word, "carnitas", which evokes deliciousness in the reader's mind, and apply this word seemingly at random to various items in their kitchen. they take the good name of "carnitas" and tarnish it.

but i'm a food optimist. i figure, well, okay, i'd have to be a drooling moron to order the carnitas here, expecting it to be anything like the carnitas i can get at any of the 10 authentic mexican restaurants within walking distance of home, or any of the dozens of authentic mexican restaurants i enjoyed growing up in southern california, or the great mexican restaurants of the central coast. just recently, i found an answer to the question of "how bad could it be?" in regards to mexican food in missouri (answer: you don't want to know). i grew up on mexican food. if you are what you eat, i'm largely mexican.

but as a food optimist, i make dumb little assumptions. like, okay, the carnitas will be a disappointment. but how could anyone screw up nachos? (answer: "cheese sauce"). a quesadilla? (answer: a fucked up weird-ass missouri tortilla). grilled chicken? (answer: i'll get to that).

so sometimes my optimism gets the better of me, and i make a dumb choice, like ordering a burrito at a chevy's, or going to a chevy's in the first place. this is where the calorie counts saved the day.

the calorie counts for the non-salad items on the menu at el fucking torito put the "fucking insane" in "fucking insane calorie counts". 1800 calories for a taco and an enchilada? are you kidding me? and it won't even taste good? why would... i don't even... i can't -- words! they escape me!

anyhow, the ridiculous calorie debt that the non-salad items boasted steered me clear of them, overriding my food optimism and saving me from the deadly mistake of thinking that el fucking torito couldn't fuck up a lowly quesadilla. instead, it steered me right into the deadly mistake of thinking that el fucking torito couldn't fuck up a chicken salad. but at least that chicken salad didn't have 1800 calories.

so i ordered myself the "grilled chicken mexican caesar salad" (which, for some reason, was not called "césar salad" or "ensalada de césar", like the customers of el fucking torito couldn't cope with translating césar to caesar). after a ridiculously long wait, my alleged salad was delivered. the lettuce looked okay, and the dressing was applied with a surprisingly light touch. but it was the "grilled" "chicken" which really caught my attention. you see, i don't think it was real. it looked rubbery. like the fake chicken you might play with as a kid in some giant play kitchen thingy along with some fake rubber eggs and a rubber lettuce leaf.

it wasn't really warm, but it was above room temperature. well that explained it: cooked at the cisco distribution warehouse in soledad, shipped to el fucking torito, microwaved, plated, heat lamped, and finally delivered.

but you see, dear reader, the horror had not even yet begun. as appalling as the appearance of the chicken was, this was nothing on the taste. the first flavor i noticed upon biting into it was unmistakeable: lysol. yes, that's right, the eponymous grilled chicken of the grilled chicken mexican caesar salad at el fucking torito tasted like lysol. not hints of lysol or faint but cherished memories of a lysol infused summer, no, it tasted like licking a freshly cleaned toilet.

but by then i was starving, and what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, so i ate it anyways.

later, when describing my horrible ordeal to a coworker who shares my disdain of el fucking torito, my coworker made a good point: "you wouldn't want to eat chicken at el fucking torito that has not been disinfected, would you?"

good point.

well that was a friggin downer.

after biking past them many times, today i pulled over by the apparent gold-panners apparently panning gold by the side of the road on crystal springs, right across the street from a $4 million dollar house that hops and i toured a couple months ago. i axed them what they were doing.

they immediately clarified that they weren't panning for gold. they're archeologists, sifting through dirt excavated about a mile away on el cerrito, where a new sewer or something is being put in. apparently they're looking for human remains, and if they find any, woe unto the construction project.

so far they've found "projectile points", some pottery crap, and a buried sewer pipe to nowhere that nobody, not even the city, knew about.

they said they're really enjoying the view of the hill, across the street. it has, after all, a tree.

the key to success is to arrange initial conditions such that avoiding your goal takes more effort than reaching your goal.

then, let laziness take it's course, and succeed.

little known fact: during his lifetime, sun-tzu was 12 time all-china barbecue champion. the key to good barbecue is to apply your rub, build your fire, put on your meat. the initial conditions all established, you then let the fire take its course, and hours later, with no more effort from the cook, barbecue is ready.

like logs, rolling unstoppably down a hill, crushing stormtroopers while midgets in furry suits whoop.

well, color me surprised.

yesterday afternoon I was pretty convinced that the drug-free-ness was doomed and I'd be retching up bucketfulls of acid by this morning. as it happens, sipping my coffee and fighting off a slight hangover, I'm happy to be drug-free! ha ha ha.

anyhow, nothing. whatever hints of GERD tormented me yesterday afternoon have vanished. I may actually have won this time.

in my life, I have been heavily influenced, directly or indirectly, by sun-tzu's art of war. the master says:

22. When he utilizes combined energy, his fighting men become as it were like unto rolling logs or stones. For it is the nature of a log or stone to remain motionless on level ground, and to move when on a slope; if four-cornered, to come to a standstill, but if round-shaped, to go rolling down.

Here, he is speaking of the game of life. if the general sets his initial conditions just right, then the battle will naturally, inexorably, without challenge or further direction, unfold in his favor, as unstoppable and mindlessly as a log rolling down a hill.

and so it is in my own life. i strive to set up initial conditions such that even despite the weaknesses and resistance of my future self, my goals will be accomplished, often despite myself.

today, i can no more not-ride than i could not-breathe. and so, this weekend, my weight will decrease by another pound, and my acid reflux will fade further into dim memory. because of the way i have organized things, there is no other course for me, without significant effort.

starting this morning i no longer knowingly consume products manufactured by the world wide pharmaceutical industry. i am still a drug consumer, but those drugs are all supplied by criminal cartels or growing coops or small local distillers or farmers in Connecticut.

i hope none of my coffee beans come from criminal cartels, but it's hard to be sure, and there's no possibility of obtaining liquor in the USA without enriching a criminal cartel, whether it's a distributor or the US congress.

anyhow... for almost a year, i've been taking daily prilosec for acid reflux. my doctor confirmed what i'd read on the internets: nobody knows the long-term effects of taking prilosec daily. i've also been pretty much a lifelong daily consumer of allergy meds of one kind or another. i stopped those 2 months ago, and despite some tough days/weeks, i'm happier not taking them.

the last time i quit the prilosec i was back on it after three days. that may happen again, but this time, having lost nearly 30lbs since i began taking it, and having had my doctor tell me that losing weight would make it go away (and having experienced rapid weight gain right before it set in, lending credibility to his hypothesis), i will be engaging the world's greatest medical system to solve the problem instead of work around it with sketchy drugs.

which is not to say the prilosec doesn't work: it clearly does. but in my medical opinion, if a not-obese guy under 35 who eats no junk food and exercises near daily can't be medication free, said guy deserves a real medical explanation other than "dunno" (or the equally useless diagnosis of IBS, aka "I'm Basically Stumped", which brings the same recommendations as GERD).

so to all my pill popping readers, pop one for me today and wish me luck.

if you know any, please send this to them.

heh. heheheehehe.

or: why wasn't i told?!

oh well. just yet another thing i discovered late, better than never.

if the email you have received consists of pictures and large, colored text, it is either a ransom note, a letter from a 2 year old, or a hoax email (it can be hard to distinguish between the last two possibilities).

while calm, presentable, understated text is no indicator of seriousness, a lack thereof is a sure sign that something's far from the truth.