Feb 25 2014
23 Comments
Food, Posts about Breakfast, San Francisco, Writing

Why I Ate 78 Breakfasts at 78 Different Places Last Year

A coffee cup I drew

A coffee cup I drew

I hereby declare that I have done it. For one year (from 1.11.2013 – 1.17.2014), I ate breakfast at a different Bay Area restaurant every Friday before work and on some weekends. I achieved both my written goal of eating breakfast at a different place every Friday and my actual goal of simply eating tons and tons of breakfast.

I went to the furthest reaches of San Francisco and the Bay Area, from the Marina to Glen Park, from Santa Rosa to Santa Clara. I traveled 441.7 miles by bus, car and train to 78 different places of breakfast-eating, consuming $1258 dollars worth of food, 131 eggs, 90 slices of bacon, 98 pancakes, and 234 cups of coffee. I also drew one coffee cup.

This is all well and good. I managed to spend a lot of money and eat many hash browns with my butt in many different styles of chairs and booths, but so what? Why did I do this? Why did I wake up so early and go so far, not even searching for the best food or service? Why did I spend so many hours and dollars on this project and persevere even towards the end when I’d eaten my breakfast passion into the dust (for the time being) and felt I’d seen everything and that I just wanted to sleep in for once.

It wasn’t just a meal, or just a restaurant. Breakfast for me was outer space. It was my Sahara and my Antarctica and the Wild West, the region I was destined to explore and chronicle. 

Pork Store Cafe BiscuitsAnd I wanted to find breakfast, to seek it in its natural habitat, to consume and know it inside and out and to know its people. From the crust of a sourdough loaf to the tenderness of a scrambled egg and the crisp release of grease that comes from biting into a perfectly cooked hash brown.

I wanted to make a portrait of a ritual and to examine it until I knew its every detail and their meanings, to paint a complete picture of breakfast, to tell its entire story and not miss a thing, to climb hills and descend into valleys, to walk on darkened doorsteps and to step into empty places, to look into the faces of strangers and try to place them, to ask of them to serve me food in exchange for money and some of my time and for some of my thoughts and skin cells and saliva left on the used silverware.

But most of all, I set out to eat, to consume mountains of hashbrowns and toast and eggs, stacks of pancakes, whole sticks of butter and gallons of syrup. I wanted to explore using my senses and let my brain take a back seat and just shut up for a second.

Friday morning was mine and it was special. Every morning that I got to work with my stomach full of breakfast and another journey under my belt, I’d squeezed a little extra life into my day. It was my secret, that before I started doing work for anyone else, I’d done something for me and my goals. I wanted adventure, and that’s why I did it and have lived to tell the tale. What’s next? I don’t know. But it’s gonna be epic.

By the way, this is not the last you’ve heard of this. There is much, much more breakfast to be served.

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Jan 22 2014
8 Comments
Best blog posts, Fiction, Food, Writing

When the World Ends, There Will Be No More Brunch

end_of_the_world_brunchWhen the world ends, there will be no more brunch. Dirty mimosa glasses will lie shattered on the sidewalks, cloudy with bits of orange pulp and the rubble dust that comes from the inside of walls. Uneaten bits of orange glazed brioche french toast will grow stale underneath piles of dry wall and brick, the hollandaise sauce splattered across the concrete pillars and grown crusty on exposed rebar.

The walk-in freezer full of organic and free-range meats will be cracked open, exposed to radioactive air and the never ending orange glow of fire. The wait list – a plastic dry-erase board with “Kelly – 3; George – 4; Emily – 3, etc. etc.” will be melted to a rock, no names to be crossed off again, no one to be relieved from their waiting ever again, never to sit down and get hot cups of organic locally-roasted coffee while looking over the freshly-printed paper menu, chatting excitedly about who will order what and can we split and swap and shouldn’t we have something sweet and something savory.

All of the coffee cups are broken, the wooden tables burnt up, the lighting fixtures exploded and the windows blown in, the electronics equipment completely melted into a more original, more natural form.

Vapors and ash gust through the empty streets of the city, no thing moving, no dogs barking, bits of charred paper taking wing and landing in charcoal squares that used to be parks, little mounds of dog poop turned into lumps of coal.

The sun rises red and sets red – like the homemade berry syrup the sous chef had drizzled over buckwheat pancakes. And then the endless poison clouds come, no longer rich and white like the home-made whipped cream that came on the belgian waffles but smeary and rust colored – like the milk that’s gone sour and molded in millions of fridges across the entire earth.

Aside from the fires, the only sounds are the settling of buildings as they move inevitably closer to the earth, something snapping and then falling, a creak and then a crash, and then more silence. Fire is the only living thing, except for the swarms of insects that breed in the burnt waste of mankind and thrive off the radioactive decay of the earth, relishing the noxious winds.

They grow strong, scorning the brunch remains of humankind, the arugula, the oats, the goat cheese. They bite into the concrete itself, into the tempered glass and the computer chips, devouring and digesting all physical things humans created, the monuments to themselves and their achievements, their books and park benches and bar stools, until nothing remains.

And then they turn to the earth itself and start digging down, down and down, with insatiable appetite they slurp up the mantle of the earth and bite into its tectonic plates, savoring the magnetic buzz they get as they get closer to the core of the earth. Millions of them, trillions of them all tunneling deeper until they reach the very center and, upon seeing their destination, they lick their lips and dig in until it is all gone.

And the earth, having lost its heart, is conscious that it is very sad about that and wishes it had it back, but now there’s nothing left to do, nothing left to feel, and so it sighs and then falls back into orbit, staring out into the endless universe and wondering what comes next.

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Jan 16 2014
7 Comments
Humorous

Why You Should Laugh at Yourself

broccoli_in_teethBecause sometimes you notice that you have broccoli caught in your teeth from dinner a couple of hours ago and it’s now 8:30 and you’ve been making eyes with someone all night.

Sometimes your shirt is stained and you’re already at the networking event.

Your pit stains, though not smelly, are formidable but you don’t want to live your life with your arms down.

Sometimes a food object flies out of your mouth while you’re having a meeting with someone and then lands on your neck and you have no idea where it went but both parties try to ignore what just happened while you silently search for it without saying anything and the other person can see it shining on your neck.

You were completely wrong about something that you were adamant about being correct about. Turns out, Conan O’Brien stayed in a different hall before living in Mather Hall at Harvard.

Your body made a strange sound at a meeting.

You called her Michele. Her name was Rachel. You’ve known her for 3 months.

You said hello and they had no idea who you were.

You sent an email to Clara and George. You meant to send it to Claire and George. Clara is from a different company.

The ball you were playing with fell under someone’s desk and you have to get on all fours and crawl under to get it, and you’re conscious that you look like an animal.

You’re painstakingly trying to put a piece of gum on your mug and the CEO walks by. You feel less than intelligent.

You were horseback riding and your pants ripped.

You were caught “accidentally” using the men’s bathroom when the line for the women’s was too long.

People who take themselves too seriously are a drag and will never get their hands dirty.

Life isn’t so serious, after all – didn’t we just make all this up?

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Jan 14 2014
5 Comments
Best blog posts, Blogging, Modern Life, Serious-ish, Writing

The Best Thing I Have Ever Written*


open_mouth_breathing

*This is how I felt immediately after writing this blog post. Upon reading it through a couple of times, I’m not so sure this is true. Nevertheless, the title remains.

You can feel it when you meet someone, when they let you in on their jokes or if you find they prefer to be the one making all the jokes or if they want you to entertain them, or if they expect something of you that you’re not going to give them.

Social interaction is a drug. It’s hard. It’s something most people have to do. It’s why humans are animals and animals are some of humans’ favorite things, because somewhere in there we’re laughing because what if we were the ones sniffing each other’s butts and isn’t that pretty much what’s happening at bars on Friday night anyways?

It can be wanting to be loved and cherished by everyone and wanting to get invited to their birthday parties, even the ones where you have to dress up and wear pearls and pretend that you like shaving your armpits because it’s better to have parties to refuse than no parties to go to at all.

It’s pretending to like people that you don’t like and pretending to hate people that you’re in love with and finding those people that you don’t have to pretend for, ever, and those are the best people of all. Because they’ll see you say something incredibly stupid in a crowd of people and know that that one statement isn’t who you are, because none of us are just one thing or just one sentence. And we have the lizard part of our brain and the dog part of our brain and the robot part of our brain and the iPhone and the troll and we’re all living together under one roof and sometimes it gets really crowded in here and a little smelly because – let’s be honest – we’re smelly people and the sheets have that human scent to them, but it’s kind of nice in the way that it’s a smell that reminds you where you are and signals to your body that it’s okay here, you can sleep with your mouth open.

And social interaction is everyone being the person that sleeps with their mouth open but only some people are allowed to know about that part of their lives even though if you took it one level beneath the surface you would see – and you would really see – that everyone has these embarrassing secrets that they only reveal to true friends and that we’re more alike than different even though we don’t know everyone’s names or their whole stories but that’s okay because sometimes words just get in the way of things and besides in 1,000-10,000 years all the words we use will be obsolete anyways and our Facebook pictures will have decomposed into virtual fossils that scientists will have to try to understand because our cultural customs – why are we always grinning at the camera – don’t make any sense anymore.

Photo credit: Subharnab, flickr

Photo credit: Subharnab, flickr

And the only thing that will be left after all is said and done is the feeling in the air and in the soul of every living thing that there were other living things here on this earth that felt things towards one another and created things together and despite their very thick skulls that kept them apart, managed to communicate something of who they were to another and were able to be heard. And it will be nothing more than an electromagnetic exhaust in the breeze, nothing more than a lurching in the belly of some kind of future-human with three heads and a heart bigger than the foot or in the aliens that have colonized us, but it will be there as sure as the sun is going to explode and as sure as the universe will continue expanding until all of us are asleep and no one can watch it anymore like a television left on after everyone’s gone to bed.

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Dec 24 2013
6 Comments
Guides to San Francisco, Humorous, San Francisco, Travelling, Writing

20 Pieces of Advice for My Sister’s Trip to San Francisco

We're going to paint the town.

We’re going to paint the town.

Dear Sister,

I’m so excited that you’re coming to visit me in San Francisco for Christmas, that you’re leaving parents and home far behind in Oklahoma and venturing out to the West Coast, a journey our ancestors and great-uncle made and one that it is now your turn to make. Welcome to this state. There are some things you should know to make the most out of your time here.

1. You will always feel like you’re doing something wrong as you ride public transportation. It’s as unavoidable as congealed gravy after a holiday meal.

2. Bring every kind of clothing you have. Because of witchcraft or something similar, the temperature varies wildly from day to night and from shade to sun. I use the handy phrase “sun-hot; shade-cool” to remember which one is which.

3. Bring cash; some places will not accept your plastic. These places will often have tasty pastries.

4. Most born and raised Californians know nothing about Oklahoma aside from either the bombing or the musical. Because of their ignorance, they will lash out and make fun of your native state. Don’t let it get to you.

5. Half shirts are a thing, as are sheer wispy shirts, all manner of hats and anything with a mustache on it.

6. Strangers might talk to you, and it’s not always a bad thing. Feel it out, and respond if it seems appropriate. If someone says “Good morning” to you, they’re probably being friendly. If they say, “Damn girl, you healthy. Them organic goods?” while you’re carrying groceries, you’re probably in Oakland.*

7. Green bins are for compost, black are for trash, and blue are for recycling. Don’t let anyone see you throw away something that can be recycled.

8. Leave your Styrofoam at home and bring a bag to the grocery store.

9. That weird smell is either dog urine or marijuana. It could also be people urine, if we’re downtown.

10. That delicious meaty smell is either coming from Hahn’s Hibachi or Yellow Sub. I’m never sure which one.

11. This city is full of stores selling things no one should ever purchase, like $40 bowls and many whimsical variations on the salt and pepper shaker. That being said, it’s all beautiful and you will want to purchase something. Don’t spend all your money at the first place.

12. No one knows what to do about the homeless people, so mostly we just ignore them. I’d like to find a better way to handle this but I’m not sure what it is.

13. This place is mind-numbingly beautiful and everyone who gets to live here is lucky. Don’t forget that where you come from is also lovely.

14. Avoid the Tenderloin and Upper Market area – no reason for you to dabble in those neighborhoods yet. You can tell you’re in the T-Loin from the missing teeth to broken glass to face tattoo ratio.

15. Don’t waste your time on bad food.

16. Climb every hill you see. You won’t regret it.

17. Buy me a present while I’m working. I’ve earned it.

18. Don’t be ashamed of being a tourist. It’s what you are and you don’t have to hide from any one.

19. Everyone does and doesn’t look the same. You’ll see what I mean. Most people are attractive in a “I’m going places” or “I’m unique” or “I took time to dress myself this morning” or “my clothes are expensive” kind of way.

20. Have fun! (and buy me a present)

*This was said to me once in Oakland.

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