Thus spake Preparathustra

Large white flakes descend upon the sumacs, the apples, across the cobalt sky, blanketing fields and houses. From North a wind-whipped mendicant breaks the horizon. The squirrels are fat.  Old country emigres finish the last round of preserves.  The insipid city-folk wander the market, shivering in mini-skirts, with three-inches of snow on the tables.  "Do you have any cucumbers?" they ask.

do you

have any

cucumbers?

The mendicant lifted his arms, hands wielding his mortar and his pestle, flanked by his serpent and his eagle, his voice rang out from the cusp of a storm cloud:

Behold, partakers of Campbells' horrible soup!  The frost has taken every last fruit.  Kale and brussel sprouts stand alone in the empty fields.  Yes, they are frozen.  Yes, they are fine with that.  You, who have wasted your spring, summer, and fall eating California microgreens, rotting California strawberries, Vidalia onions from the State of Georgia, corn the product of Ohio, potatoes from Iowa, melons and scallions from Mexico: yes, you, oblivious fool to the seasons, consuming death while your wealth spoiled in the fields!  How did you become this way?  

Idiots, content with the sub-par job others will do for you.  Afraid of work.  Worst of all creatures: when the sun idles about the sky in the peak of summer, and your neighbor picks plump, ripe tomatoes from the vine you say: "Someone in Italy will dry my tomatoes." Cucumbers writhing about, growing greater in size everyday, and you rush not to make your pickles.  What is left for you?  You, who with your own hands could simply craft what is good when it is good into a delicious preserve, will spend enormous amounts on a soft, factory dill pickle.

Can a judge condemn a person ignorant of their own crime?  Does the blood not speak from the knife?  What skills may have been mastered by your great grandparents, what may have been responsible for carrying forward your own pitiful line, appear to you like an ancient language, incomprehensible to the eye, unspeakable to the tongue.  You are spoiled by the supermarket, by the high-ceilings, the long aisles peopled by products from a colourful oligopoly.  You buy a stalk of brussel sprouts, now, in the dawn of December, for $6.99 imported from Salinas, California, and bat not an eye.  You are warped from your climate of falsehoods.    

Morons! Horribly lost, you panic that Sriracha may be in short supply, not knowing how simple it is to make a better sauce.You see nothing clearly. Can you identify a single tree?  Have you ever foraged in a spring-time bog? Eaten the mustard that lines the ditches?  

I caution, for the time is changing, and the ways of old will return on the heels of great catastrophe, not to treat the seasons as a vessel for your leisure.  They have existed before you, and by their hands, you could be smitten like a road-side possum.  Turn your back to the false gods of Kellogs, Post, Campbells, Nestle; turn your back to the importers of the fruits of your backyard, grow weary of fog of your consumerism.  Bait the yeast!  Befriend helpful bacteria of beneficent fermentation!  Read the seasons, wisely choose local fruits and vegetables, and most of all, be ready! The longest winter stretches forth from this moment.  Will it breed a Mensch stronger and wiser than the incumbent sleepwalkers? A Mensch unable to pass a field of thyme and mint in ignorance? A Mensch closer to nature and her dithyrambic chorus? Or will they answer only to Catastrophe and her redolent phalanx?

Thus spake Preparathustra.  

Duck

1.

My life is a black book. But don't rebuke a drinker

Like me too much. No human being can ever read

The words written on his own forehead. 

When Hafez's coffin comes by, it'll be all right

To follow behind.  Although he is

A captive of sin, he is on his way to the Garden.

- From Hafez (1315 or 1317 to 1389) ghazal 77, translated by Robert Bly

and Leonard Lewinsohn

2.

Reclined, with a glass of beer in hand.  I am astonished by the very degree of delight I feel.  My head is light, just like a suspended consciousness without body, the way a spirit would feel.  This is the most recent of many rounds of cheer: a glass of beer, a glass of brandy, a glass of wine, a glass of beer, a smoke on the balcony, a glass of beer. Rogues laying on the floor.  Rogues loafing on the futon.  We have jettison our reason here - we are floating aimless now for whatever whim takes us.

I've admired the physical beauty of churches, exploring many in different cities. I've spent hours with the old and modern cathedrals of Montreal, was stunned in St. Patrick's cathedral in New York, wandered for an afternoon through Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. The stained glass portraits are a door into another sphere. Once I wanted to be a Buddha, but never have I had the discipline to live a life following holy precepts. I don't even think I ever really wanted to: I just wanted to see the self made holy, or maybe to see the self dissolve into white light; a nothingness.

While I would describe my drive toward religion as having deeply affected my consciousness, it is only ever deeply personal.  The drive is subsumed in creativity, by long flights of imagination.  Any wish I've had for religious community has been pushed into secular community.  If I've ever longed for purity and asceticism I've crushed it with vulgarity and indulgence.  Even at my very worst behaved I somehow allow it to make sense in my own mytho-poetic psycho-narrative of spiritual ascendancy.  This, I conclude, is because I am truly, deeply stupid.

Drifting on my la-z-boy I remark out loud about how good I feel.  None of these thoughts have crossed my mind.  Only that I am drunk, at ease.  A contentedness, and a sincere happiness for having had the chance to enjoy the good food and good company that have come my way.

3.

On Sundays I've been known to get a little sloppy. While Rig chopped onions, I butchered a five pound duck.  In the way I was trained to break down a chicken I break down each side, removing the legs and wings, and then I cut off the breasts.   I'm working with two bowls: one for meat and guts, and another for bones and fat.  As I finish removing the collar bone and separating the rib cage from the breast plate, revealing the gizzard and other interior goodies, 2Krucial showed up with a friend she's wanted to introduce to us.  We've promised her a meal and a half and, wrist deep in duck, I am certain we can deliver.

Working from the canard sauvage recipe in the Les Halles cookbook, we started browning the broken down duck bones in butter, and then we added chopped leek and shallots.  After the veg caramelized we added half a cup of brandy to deglaze, reduced, added some chicken stock and a bouquet garni.  With company the action in the kitchen doesn't seem to low.  It's much harder to wait an hour for a stock to reduce without some talking and booze.  We idly season the legs and prepare the rest of the meeze and chat about whatever is felt to be pressing.  Glasses are refilled.  The whole apartment begins to smell like the beginnings of a rich sauce.

After an hour the stock is strained, and the duck legs and wings are browned in more butter and then removed and put aside.  Next comes the gizzard and various duck trimmings, more shallots, caramelized in butter - some flour gets added to form a roux, then some cider vinegar, and once reduced the duck stock. Another hour to pass while the legs and wings are tender.

Meanwhile, fat was rendering in the oven for use in roasting some potatoes.  Parsnips got boiled and mashed with loads of butter and cream.  Glasses are refilled.  For a cook few things are as gratifying as the anticipation of his guests for the meal.  The conversation now comes back to the sights and smells of the kitchen.  Everyone takes there rounds to stick their head over the pot and take a deep inhale, as if from a baggy.  The sauce keeps reducing to critical levels and needs to be topped up with more stock and eventually just straight booze from the bottle.  As the time nears, a sear is put on the two enormous duck breasts.

The breasts are sliced, revealing a beautiful combination of pink and red.  The time has come to plate the long preparation.  The finishing touches are put on the sauce, whisking a liquefied duck liver into it, and tossing a cube of cold butter in.

Glasses are refilled.  "Call in your plenary indulgences, have you any."

4.

Way's been ruins a thousand years.

People all hoard their hearts away:

so busy scrambling after esteemed

position, they'd never touch wine.

But whatever makes living precious

occurs in this one life, and this life

never lasts.  Its startling, sudden as

lightning, a hundred years offering

all abundance. Take it! What more

could you hope to make of yourself?

From T'ao Ch'ien (365 - 427) Drinking Wine, translated by

David Hinton

Salty oil-cured chilies

Most days I wake up between 4:45 and 5:30am for work, depending on whether I am going to the market or the kitchen.  Other days my partner gets up at one of those hours to go to the kitchen and I am left home to contemplate myself all morning until she comes home.  I do menial tasks, drink coffee, and ponder the grandeur of a man against the backdrop of infinity.

The early hours are mystical.  The light cuts through the clouds and the trees and garbage bins are illuminated with an eerie glow.  The autumn leaves shine golden, and its as if nature is aware of itself being contemplated so it puts on a show.

Enough bullshit.  8am rolls around and my apartment becomes lit with rock.

I feel a burning.  My knife hand begins to tingle, and the 4-quart basket of Portugal Fire peppers (50000 - 75000 scovilles) in my fridge call to me.  I don't know what it is, but whenever the morning is nice and I am comfortable in body and soul, I need to cover my kitchen in capsicum.

 I'd read a recipe in Zakary Pelaccio's fantastic goodtimes cook book Eat With Your Hands for salty oil-cured chilies.  I'd bought the book on a weird grocery store clearance rack.  It was beside some lame NYT bestseller bullshit, and some other books Oprah talked about.  The cover caught my attention and I opened it up to a whole smoked pig recipe with a mise en place that included: "2 cases of beer on ice - cans, not bottles; a couple joints; 2 bottles Pappy Van Winkle bourbon; plastic cups; an 8-ball; 1 carton smokes..." and I thought fuck yeah, I can spend 10 bucks for this.

Basically you thinly slice about a pound of chilies, just fucking pack them with an excessive amount of salt, let them degorge for about an hour, and then cover them with hot olive oil.

I think it was my Vietnamese friend, Dinh, that got me into hot foods.  When I came from Owen Sound I was a real wuss for heat.  Tobasco was a thrill I'd limit to one or two drops in a bowl of soup.  When I think about it, Dinh was probably also a sissy when it came to handling heat, but he was an instigator and would torment himself to torment you.  He might play it a little differently: he was willing to risk great physical discomfort in order to broaden my horizons.  Great wise sage. 

It started with urging me to attempt the sriracha in my pho.  Then add a little more.  Then eat this whole chili seeds and all, you fucking pansy.  And at the time, I didn't enjoy the experience.  I enjoyed the attention.  I got to experience the pleasure of doing what the guy next to me wouldn't do.  Perhaps an urge that's got me into trouble more often than not, but has consistently driven me forward.  Like all things, irony eventually turns to post-irony.  When you first played that Weezy record it was a joke, but now you kind of like it - next week you'll fight a dude at the bar about not including Lil' Wayne in his list of greatest rappers of all time.  And now, in my quiet moments, with nobody watching, I preserve hot peppers because I am afraid of the winter without thrills.

When I was a teenager, I went to bed at 6am almost every day.  I woke up between 3 and 5 pm.  Breakfast was dinner and then I finished my night with breakfast.  When I entered the work force I started by working night shifts, because they most naturally fit my schedule.  Realizing night work sucked ass, I switched to day work, and eventually morning work.  Part of me still doesn't think of the morning as a time.  Yet, this morning I woke up at 5:30 when I didn't have to, didn't go back to bed, and have had a very productive 5 and a half hours of doing.  

Name dropping for my nerd homies: Ilya Prigogine.

It seems the only foods I can eat these days that aren't spicy are sweet fruits like apples or grapes.  Everything, every thing, has to have some small amount of kick.  It doesn't sit well in my mouth otherwise.  I can enjoy some aspects of a dish, or even compliment a technical achievement in the meal, but without a spicy component I find myself not satisfied.  Well, perhaps an exaggeration, but the great majority of my meals are hot.  Very hot.  Sometimes millions of scoville units hot.

All of this sunrise preparation is with my face to the sunset.  Mark has ordered in extracted capsicum because he wants to destroy me.  I don't know what this means yet, but I feel that it may be the end.  The rock and roll draws to a close, and a calm descends upon me.  I return to contemplating how everything the morning sun touches is made golden.

   

Thoughts of you unending here in Waterloo

1.

My friend, I draw my strength from my most alone moments.  In the evenings at work people come close, and I embrace them to the most of my abilities.  At night, in stillness, another group comes toward me.  I think of the great figures in their solitude, the poets - my heroes of earthly loneliness: Jesus in the Judean desert, Mohammed alone in his cave, Nietzsche writing the few hours of each day that he could bare the pain of seeing and the nausea of his illness, Cold Mountain on Cold Mountain, Li Po in love with the moon in his cup... In the middle of a blank page, a little pencil sketch of the archetype of a wanderer, flask in hand, rucksack on his back, walking with his back to me into the depth of nothing.

On days of struggle, I recite to myself this little bit of the Hagakure I picked out of a movie about samurai:

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the way of the samurai.

Standing open in the wind and the sleet at last Saturday's market, soaked to the bone and freezing, I pushed myself into worse areas.  One woman commented to me that I "must keep going with thoughts of a nice warm place."  I told her it was the opposite, that I always think of something far worse.  In matters of small importance, like selling black radish to Eastern Europeans or cooking line on a Wednesday night, I orient myself in the Iliad, in a plain thick with the fog of men's last breaths, dancing always with death.  There is always the frontier of the void.  Bagging kale, unable to feel my fingers, my bones biting with dull cold, I still tell people that I am doing well or even that I am great.  How are you?

2.

Reclined, writing, the kitchen in shambles from last nights company.  Four bottles of whiskey filled with dregs.  A few thoughts after making myself a humble breakfast: a caramelized onion, mustard and hot sauce, wrapped in a steamed tortilla with a piece of salami.  

One must cook true.  I can cook a lot of things, school being the least of my qualifications: the practically-wife and I experiment endlessly in our spare time.  We both work in the restaurant cook our nights, and our days.  Friends come over and we entertain them with a little dinner.  The fare is simple, but we never cook the same things twice.  

I am in love with earthly cuisine. I mean I want to cook for your grandmother, wherever she is from.  My own repertoire has drawn from many sources.  I make ghormeh sabzi, daal chawal, red beans and rice, Irish stew, mole negro, I can cook a steak, many kinds of guts, and I have a bucket of sauerkraut on the go.  Many young cooks I have met dream of innovation.  It would be the highest ideal for them to recast the mold, to re-imagine the whole enterprise of cooking, delighting the wealthy dining class with little flutes of space textures that taste like the moon or whatever.  I tend to like them fine, and I wish them well with their pursuits.  

I cook with memories and I travel the world through cuisine.  Being poor and in debt to a number of institutions from my own negligence coupled with institutional-oppression, I hardly am allowed to travel far or wide.  For someone so broke I think its amazing I have seen as much of the world as I have, across Canada and the United States, into Central America.  Still, those opportunities are hardly regular.  I am forced to bring far away places to me, which is cheaper for sure.  

Its been my fortune to have spent so much time with the ESL crowd.  My closest friends have close ties to another country, or have left a homeland far behind to be here.  Even if people come to Canada escaping war, political crisis, or just seeking better opportunity the homeland weighs heavily on them.  The way things were back home, the way a kitchen smells, the way people greet each other or prepare things, are the palpable expressions of a place, and are tied to the memories that fundamentally comprise their being.  Asking someone from somewhere else to make you a meal, to give you a recipe for something they cook at home, often provokes a kind of spontaneous excitement in them.  It is also my hope that it gives them a real bridge between where they come from and where they are now.  

3.

I can't find the quote, or remember the specific work I read it in, but I often think of my literary hero, Nikos Kazantzakis, responding to criticisms of the sorts of language he used in his writing.  He used the demotic Greek when it was still popular to use Hellenic Greek in all forms of writing.  The academy responded harshly to his language, and his novels were not accepted by the Greek establishment.  Describing his love for the people and the way they speak, the expressions, and the strange words they use he said something to the effect of: "I feel like Noah trying to fill his ark with animals.  I don't want the memories of the people I have met and the things I have seen to die with me."

fat water or fat thing - and not your mom this time (tomatillo salsa)

Market is a funny thing.  One year dozens of people can ask for one item.  The farmers at market will believe that it could be a profitable idea, or in the very least not a loss, to grow the damn thing.  One year after being asked a hundred times for fennel, my friend grew a bunch of it the next year, only to compost all of it.  I'm not even sure he sold one.

A similar fiasco happened this year with another friend and a crop of tomatilloes.  I called up my friend, the sous-chef at a Mexican inspired restaurant and tried to relieve him of them, but the restaurant didn't have a use for them at the moment.  After dropping the price to dirt cheap and still struggling to sell them, I picked up his last half bushel from him for almost free, just to spare him the frustration of looking at them anymore.

'

The tomatillo is a funny fruit of Central American origin. It's a member of the delicious and poisonous nightshade family, same genus as the potato, eggplant, and pepper plants. The original name in Nahuatl was tomātl, or tomate in the Spanish.  The word means "fat water" or "fat thing" and the fruit itself the immediate precursor to the more internationally known Aztec cultivation jitomate (fat thing with navel): the tomato.  The Spanish internationally confused the two, as was the style at the time, and the tradition continues to this day. 

Tomatillos look like a green tomato with a husk around the outside.  The husk needs to be removed to work with the fruit itself, which is a dirty and sticky process. A sticky residue coats your hands, which then collects all the dirt on the husks.  Its moderately unpleasant.  Myself, being the chef, didn't do any of that shit and instead my girlfriend spent a good 20 minutes getting her hands dirty.  I will, however, take 100% of the credit for the whole affair.

I've only ever had tomatillo in the form of a salsa.  I'm not quite sure what else there is to do with them.  They have an acidic, not quite sweet but tangy taste.  After consulting a fistful of recipes I threw together one of my own for a salsa.  This is with a half bushel of tomatillos, and will generate about 2 gallons or 8 litres of salsa.  It'll take a bunch of hours in the afternoon to get all of it done.  We split the work into two days, one just making the salsa, refrigerating it over night and then canning it the next afternoon.

 Royal-Joe's rockin' tomatillo salsa, with extra rock n' roll

¡Ingrediente!

half a bushel of tomatillo, peeled and sliced in half.

3 medium Superstar Spanish onions (or other Spanish onions), small dice

3 medium bulbs of garlic, peeled

30 or so mild green Thai chilies or Jalapeno peppers*

1 large bunch of cilantro, washed

the juice of 2 limes

3 tbsp Kosher salt

2 tsp ground pepper

2 tsp nutmeg

1 tbsp all-spice

canola oil

*Jalapeno or Serrano peppers are probably more legit.  This whole thing wasn't terribly planned and the only chilies I could get on Thanksgiving Sunday were from the Indian grocery store, lest I used my own dried chilies and absolutely ruined everyone's mouth with heat. 

¡Equipo!

5 baking sheets

food processor or blender

couple of wooden spoons

cast iron pan or heavy bottom pan 

3 large stainless steel bowls

Large stock pot or 4 gallon bucket

sharp knives

canning pot

enough jars to jar 8 litres of shit, preferably in 250ml or 500ml sizes

I assume you're already with me and have the tomatillos peeled, washed, and sliced in half right down the axis mundi. Crank your oven to broil.  Lay out the tomatillos on your baking sheets, flat side down and drizzle with some oil.  Throw them into the oven for 3 to 5 minutes, or until liquid starts to accumulate in the bottom and the skins are beginning to char.  Remove from the oven and put on a cooling rack or oven top or somewhere that won't burn.

Once they started to cool enough to handle I moved them from the baking sheets into the stainless steel bowls.  Then I rinsed the baking sheets and used them again.

This'll take about 25 minutes to a half hour to do all of them, depending on how many girlfriends you have, how good they are at co-operating with each other, and how good your broiler is.  After that's done you're going to want to start charring your chilies in the cast-iron skillet on medium-high with a bit of oil.  We threw whole cloves of peeled garlic in with them.

Remove your chilies once they're getting some pleasing char spots.  Remove the stems.  Add in your small dice Superstars for only a minute.  Stir frequently, remove from heat with the garlic. 

Next or meanwhile is the food processor part.  What we did was while my girlfriend manned the skillet, I used the liquefy setting on our food processor and processed all of the tomatillos in batches.  Empty them into the large stock pot.  You'll be done around the same time as all of the skillet jazz, so take the chilies, the onions, and garlic, and the cilantro and pulse it a couple of times with a bit of the goopy liquid from the tomatillos.  Then stir all of the other stuff into the tomatillo mixture, and add the salt and pepper, nutmeg and allspice and stir until everything is thoroughly combined.  

Throw it into the refrigerator, drink beer, and then can it all the next day.

Do you even know how long it takes for that to come to a boil on an electric stove?

Sell your friends 250mL jars of salsa for $3, plus a 50 cent deposit on the jar.  Place a big bowl of tortilla chips on the table with a bowl of the tomatillo salsa.  After the first night of moderate drinking, you will have made more on your investment then the farmer that grew them probably did in total.

Royal-Joe's Ghost Pepper Revenge Sauce

Que music.

I harassed the public with it; held entire city's ransom with its wrath.  Children cried, parents helpless beside them, stupefied by the tremendous girth of their own suffering.  Colossal traffic upheavals caused by the blindness instilled by the simple rubbing of an eye.  For my hand in bringing fire to the humans I was punished by the gods, chained under a giant mountain of woe whilst a Wild Turkey pecked at my liver.  It was there my torment germinated into a new sauce.  A richer sauce.  One with bolder flavors and silky edges that caress idly while the horrified mind watches as the tongue burns down to embers.

When I emerged from that hell, the first thing I did was this:

- scorch three red bell peppers on open flame or under a broiler until skin is completely black, remove the seeds
- scorch half a quart of ghost peppers, stemmed, until skin is completely black, reserving the other half of the quart for later
- slice one large whole Spanish onion and mince 10 cloves of garlic
- combine blackened ghost peppers, onion and garlic in a sauce pot with two and 1/2 cups of apple cider vinegar, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer for 15 minutes
- add the blackened red peppers to the pot and the remaining half quart of ghost peppers, stemmed but not seeded
- puree with an immersion blender or food processor
- salt and pepper to taste

Nay! Not in the Classical age, nor in the books of Nietzsche, nor even on the date of my birth: this, this is the birth of tragedy!  The true magma that flows through my loins!  Revenge! Revenge!

Baked Beans: A Longing For Vengeance

I've a reputation among cooks and friends for the excitement I show toward strange foods and folk staples.  I don't typically have a problem with soft of jelly textures, obvious animal parts, offal, or things off the Scoville scale.  Fish eyes, chicken feet, livers, flans, ghost peppers, strong greens lionize me.

I am about to enjoy a sampling of chicken feet, fermented tofu, and pigs ear.

Yes, there are some items that I am not enthusiastic about.  I eat them, politely, or with moderate distaste.  I still eat them with one exception: baked beans.

There is some irony.  I work in authentic Southern barbecue. I prepare and serve baked beans for a living.  People frequently compliment the restaurant's baked beans.  Some go so far as to say they are the best.  I wouldn't know.  I taste them, when I make a batch, in order to be sure they taste correct - which is to say, to see if I still don't like them.  If for some reason I find myself somehow liking them then I know I have fucked the dog.

I have tried many times to enjoy them.  My partner, she loves them.  Considers them a breakfast item, the whole bag.  To my British friends they constitute a proper meal.  I have fought with myself, insisting its a childhood bias to get over.  I have tried to acquire their taste through repeated tastings to no avail.

When my mother talks about the poverty she endured in her upbringing she always mentions all of the hard times when the only thing that sustained her modest existence was a can of baked beans.  And this is what rings me out: baked beans are the quintessential poor food!  The food I have closest aligned myself with, the food that inspires my creativity, the food that flips the bird to the bougie shit coming out of fine dining kitchens - goddamnit, poor foods is my eats!

This isn't merely a story of a basic and uninteresting dislike of baked beans though.  It's a story of a deep, dark longing for vengeance, and a caveat for those who would tread the same path as the one who made me this way...

This tale begins long ago, at the end of the 1980's, with its waves nipping at the shores of the 1990's.  Radio played Michael Jackson and Michael Bolton, cars were still long and rectangular, and I had just begun day care at a loathsome facility in Owen Sound.  Back then I was the lord and defacto king of the picky eaters.  I would hardly eat anything.  Foreign dignitaries would line up bringing exotic items from far away lands to lay them at my feet and see if I would try it.  I never did.  There was a list of things I would not eat, and I can remember it vividly, but for the life of me I cannot remember anything that I would eat.  Apples, probably.

I am certain my fussy behavior concerned my childcare professionals.  One snack time we were given baked beans.  I closed my mouth tight and shook my head.  No.  Fuck you.  I am not eating that brown mushy shit, is probably what I thought.  I didn't want anything else but world peace.  I just didn't want to eat the baked beans.  I was getting good at this: the sealed lips, the slanted brows, the general look of defiance.  Nobody could feed me.

That's when it happened.  Some young 20-something blonde sadistic bitch, likely sent to my daycare straight from guarding maximum security correctional facilities, grabbed a spoon, scooped out a pile of the goopy mush, and forced it past my lips, smearing my face with brown, and all the way back into my throat.

It only took a second before I threw up all over myself.  Once I started, I couldn't stop: I threw up on her, on the floor, on my clothes, on the walls, on the other kids, on the ceiling, a torrent of sticky brown pebbles spewed out of me, the bean levels continued to rise, filling my pockets and the whole lunch room, spilling out of the windows into the playground.

As if my shame were not enough, once my reaction had been contained, the corporals stripped me completely naked.  I remember standing in the front of the daycare waiting for my mom to come pick me up, cold, sticky, without a covering.  I remember it like the photo of the detainee in Abu Ghraib, standing naked on a chair with a bag on his head, soldiers posing around him.  Except I could see the dull eyes of the children around me, inspecting me, judging, repulsed and already filled with the fickle Proddy wrath they would adopt later in life.

These years later, sitting at my window staring out in melancholy, I know these were the moments that made me the person I am.  A lifetime of truancy, casual misanthropy, and anti-authority explained in these brief childhood moments. If fate were kind, I would discover the identity of the childhood tormentor, and this time it would be me force feeding her.

Yes, I would spoon a babyfood of pureed Trinidad Scorpions right into her eyes.