born into this mess
just some random thoughts going through my head
what about flourless cinnamon chocolate cake, with a very rich zucchini vanilla ice cream? my mom used to make this bomb-ass zucchini chocolate cake. sorta like that. i wish i had some money so i could go buy groceries.
he said the sweetest things to me and then.
i'd forgotten how good chinese food is.
i can't sleep in a bed with someone who snores.
i don't know what to do with my second day off. i tried to go to work but no-one answered the phone.
if i think about this too much it will end up sucking.
i miss work.
scary, isn't it.
waiting on jenn to call back.
reading harry potter 5 again.
modest mouse is still pretty damn good, especialy on a sunny day, with a clean room and a fuzzy white kitty.
my stomach hurts from too much meat.
last night i roasted tomatoes, onions & beef with some miso.
watched Kill Bill.
i can't get the kitchen funk out from under my nails.
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I heart you, Vietnamese grocery
here's a nice little salad I made, waiting for it to storm:
shaved jicama
edamame
watermelon and mango cubes
thai basil chiffonade
key lime sesame vinaigrette
hell yeah
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dreaming of oyster, pearls and tomato sorbet
I've been sleeping with Thomas Keller...
ok, really just the
French Laundry Cookbook under my pillow, but, you know.
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Poem for Monday, May 24, 2004
from "Sylvia's Death"
by Anne Sexton
And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place
what is your death
but an old belonging,
a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?
(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to sing!)
O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blond thing!
Burke's Book Store
1719 Poplar Avenue
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
http://www.burkesbooks.com
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also, I have no hair, seeing as I found the clippers under the sink
I would just like to say that I just saved a spider from drowning in Niki's sink.
This is probably the nicest thing I have done in weeks.
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looking at the ol IP address log
who are you, cyberdsl.adsl.spfdma.crocker.net? you are my most dedicatedest reader and all i know is that you are somewhere in like boston or some other yankee place.
nora?
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under my towel
when it's 4 AM and I am lying in bed wondering if I can buy lamb bones at the Jewish Kroger out on Mendenhall to make demi, then I know I need to get up and have some egg drop ramen noodles.
and spill them all over myself.
and blog in my towel.
good times.
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Poem for Monday May 17, 2004
Watching the Stolen Rose
by Michael McClure
The Rose is a Pink-Yellow Universe Unfolding
layer upon
luminous layer
petal to petal
spreading
unsteady yet
perfectly balanced
as the curling
of smoke
from a mind
on fire.
Burke's Book Store
1719 Poplar Memphis TN 38104
Winner Best of the Best Memphis Flyer
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003
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and I can barely keep the blood beneath my skin...
last night
i was driving down jefferson in the rain
looked over down a cross street
and i saw six men in confederate uniforms
riding horses in the dark
the words just keep coming out
even when there's nothing left
for us
to say
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i heart melange
tonight, amazingly enough, we actually closed at 10, and so I met the lovely ms gray at melange for drinks, and joy of joys, the kitchen was still open.
i ordered their duck breast with raspberry veal demiglace, and goddamn me it was so good i ordered
another one. while waiting i licked the fucking plate clean.
why was i ever a vegetarian? i love to eat and drinking good wine. (private joke about mixing gerunds and infinitives).
spending 40 dollars on dinner for myself, esp after a week of watching cokesick motherfuckers stagger around bitching about their lost mise-en-place, is so reawrding. (where's my balsamic reduction? i dunno, but here's your hemorrhoid cream, asswad...) i have much better things on which to spend my money.
and fuck me it was worth it.
this duck-the cripiness of the skin and the fat beneath it, it was like hot buttered popcorn combined with an amazing medium filet, rich and fruity and utterly, VISCERALLY, completely satisfying. just incredible. sour and sweet and fruit and meat and god if i werent just a wee bit drunk i'd have pages to write.
uf.
then i got this caramelized (pan seared?) brie with macerated strawberries and a cabernet earl grey reduction for dessert.
i mean really. it sounds incredibly pretentious but my god it was for real better than any sex i've ever had. and i've had plenty.
i would just kill to work in melange's kitchen. maybe in a year or so when i am sick of stella?
god. earl grey cab reduction with strawberries.
chef scott, if you weren't gay i'd beg you to meet me in the walk-in.
s'all i gots to say.
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one lone barge pushing wooden crates upstream
there's a tremendously desolate feeling to a dead night in the kitchen Downtown. lone figures wander the street looking like zombies in the shadows under the awnings of the banks and hotels and high-end restaurants
I reach a point at which I have done all the prep work I can possibly do without pulling the Mixmaster or the Robocoup out to take up half my
mise table. I've scrubbed down the walk-in doors and cleaned the floor gunge out from of the corners with a toothbrush, all away around the kitchen.
So what else is there to do besides make nasty jokes about gag reflexes and asparagus?
I have started to push the limits of what I can get away with, being the only girl in the kitchen. Bending over cleaning and wearing tight pants more often and leaning one of the line guys over a table and humping him and such. Why the hell not. It's the only place except at my girlfriends's houses that I can get away with making such ribald comments and not create sexual tension.
Which helps break things up, in between waiting for tickets and listening to the bears screaming at each other about looking at each other's tips. Certain people in the front need medication worse than I do, I guess.
Me, I have somehow learned, maybe as a result of a year and a half of solitary cleaning, the ability to leave my shit at home. Sure, I get depressed and may need to go smoke alone in the alley blinking hard, and there's no doubt that I am a razor blade wielding-bathroom mirror breaking-ugly scar sporting-big tattoos will mend my broken heart-verified manic depressive insane person, but if I do lose my compusre and scream at someone, I sure as hell apologize afterwards.
I dunno.
If I weren't So broke and So about to start tomorrow I'd go out looking to get laid.
instead I'll go to bed and dream about being at work.
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Poem for Monday May 10, 2004
The Swerve
by William Stafford
Halfway across a bridge one night
my father's car went blind. He guided
it on by no star but a light he kept in mind.
Halfway to here, my father died.
He looked at me. He closed his eyes.
The world stayed still. Today I hold in mind
The things he said, my children's lives--
any light. Oh, any light.
--
--
Burke's Book Store
1719 Poplar Memphis TN 38104
Winner Best of the Best Memphis Flyer
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003
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do they pay you to fuck the bears?
It's been a hell of a week.
I've completely surrendered my life to my job, and having done so, have started to really enjoy work. The other garde manger bitch was out sick/on a drug holiday for three days so I was scrambling like mad to get my shit done in time for the nightly pop at 9.
Somewhere in the middle of Thursday night, I don't know if it was the chewing gum or the new mantra, but I acquired this sort of easy grace, a conservation of movement, twirling from the reach-in to the oven to the fryer back to the reach in tossing three salads putting them up saucing and plating three crabcakes then a lobster salad two bread puddings and a brownie then a crawfish cheesecake a parsley salad and an artichoke flan, yelling get this shit the fuck out of here at the food runners, an amazing sensation of omnipotence, of
competence, that I hadn't really ever felt before. I saw the approving smiles of the chef and sous. I made loud and lewd comments about the size of my balls and was met with agreement.
I am good at my job. Somewhere in this past week I have justified my seed, and I am part of the crew. This is it, what I think I want to do, and goddamn it I'm not letting the fact that I fucked one of the damn waiters and got a little bit disappointed get to me.
They're all just bears, anyway.
Bears will eat anything. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the most smoothly professional of waiters standing over in dishland eating the remnants of some rich lady's seared tuna.
So tonight I'll hole up with the hum of the box fan, a Portuguese cookbook, my biographies of food critics, and a copy of
Kitchen Confidential, reading til the Xanax coursing through my system takes me somewhere quiet and hopefully free of crabcakes and Caesar salad.
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show us your tits
Memphis in May Music Fest is this weekend, which means swarms of zombie-like fat rednecks and hippies roaming the streets of downtown, wasted.
At work we made scorecards.
Long legs and hair and a short skirt gets you a 6.7 from me, an 8 from Nick, and a 2 from Duncan (who puts out).
good times.
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