wedge blog

Fatty Food…                                                                      …Fossil Fuel

The planet, like our bodies, is a closed loop. Instead of leaving a foul-smelling trail, our bodies just bloat up.  With planetary or personal systems, we count on redundant purification to keep us from keeling over. So far, so good.

Sure, we might get diabetes or high blood pressure or just become morbidly obese, but there are pills, diet plans and even $urgeries for that.  We might have a planetary disaster or two, but that’s no reason to change our lifestyle, is it?  Plenty of fish in the ocean…uh, just not in the Gulf of Mexico for a generation or two.

Americans push enough fat, sugar, alcohol and chemicals down our collective gullet that it’s a wonder we function at all. We often shun exercise and relegate deep thinking to places called ‘tanks’.  We look at the world’s larger problems and ask why someone doesn’t “do something”.

Excuse me; pass those chips, will you? I don’t want to get up.

Bodies are amazing things, and often, we manage to plod along with minor aches and pains, despite a barrage of self abuse.  My fear? Catastrophic system failure on a personal and planetary level.

Yesterday I went to the Independence Day Parade in downtown Great Falls, Montana. The good news: patriotism appears to be in good supply. The bad news: I doubt we could waddle away from our enemies, let alone dig a foxhole for cover. For a moment I flashed forward six months: Santa’s Ho-Ho-Ho belly was strapped on everyone of every age and stature.

Great Falls had parades when I was a kid: people were not this big.

Remember Bonanza on TV? There was Hoss, played by Dan Blocker. Hoss was a big fella, and back in 1964 I’d blink twice looking at him beside fellow actors Michael Landon and Parnell Roberts. Flipping through the channels recently, I caught a re-run, and I wondered why everyone else looked puny. Hoss ain’t a big fella anymore. He’s an American.

All those generations fighting and dying for our freedom, and once we perceive that the threat is over, we sit down and we don’t want to get up. Slowly, quietly, the threat becomes insidious. It becomes ourselves.

Speaking of getting up, can you pull another Bud out of the cooler for me? Thanks.

Turns out that running from our enemies was good for us. It kept us on our toes, literally. If I didn’t get on the honor roll, if I didn’t get the President’s Physical Fitness Award, the Commie Menace might win.

Realizing that we are our own oily enemy–fatty food and fossil fuel–doesn’t motivate us: all this news coverage just causes stress eating, which leads to indigestion, which makes us ask for the prescription medication we saw on TV.  Line the medicine cabinet with enough of this stuff and it will cure you of your ultimate problem: Life.

I’m worried about more than our bodies. Are there any double-blind field studies being done on how obesity affects brain function? Catching people’s eyes in downtown Great Falls yesterday, I wondered if this layer of fatty glaze interferes with deductive reasoning skills, making facts and ideas too slippery to grasp and retain.

Obviously our oil addiction has interfered with our intellect: real, painful solutions would be in place if we were thinking straight.

Maybe I won’t have that deep fried Snickers Bar after all, but mmmm, it looks mighty good.

I’m a Great Falls native, a product of local public schools, and a lifelong resident. I ain’t no anemic eastern liberal…still, I found myself looking at the Chinese-made flags waving from distended lawn chairs and wondered how long our redundant filtration systems can persevere before our webbing gives way and our collective asses wind up in the gutter.

If we boil ourselves in our own oil…could I have fries with that?

A Man Selling His Ka'ak

I know this is off-color, and I’m sure there will be comments that require deletion. Read this: it’s G-rated…the entendre is up to you.

Everyone loved my husband’s grandmother Sito. With thinning blue-white curls and a faded cotton apron stretched over her small round belly, you might think Sito was a feeble old lady, but she rolled grape leaves so tight they popped…and she played cards like a riverboat shill.

Sito was the queen of a Lebanese pastry with an unfortunate name, ka’ak (pronounced ‘cock’). Every Christmas Sito would pinch off hundreds of ka’aks with her tiny hands, branding each soft mound with a nasty metal tool just before shoving a batch in the gas oven.

We’d tear open our annual Holiday shipment of cold ka’ak and let the packing fly, unzipping successively smaller plastic bags to devour the sweet booty inside. Sito packed her ka’ak so tight sometimes we’d need to bang it on a hard surface just to separate ka’ak from box.

It is a family tradition to gorge ourselves on ka’ak to celebrate the birth of the Christ child.

Now that Sito’s gone I don’t crave ka’ak as much as I used to, which is probably a good thing. Once I start it’s hard to stop. I tell my husband that I must have acquired an unfortunate sensitivity to eating ka’ak, and I often politely decline. These days I only eat ka’ak when I can no longer resist the aroma, once or twice a year.

If you don’t eat ka’ak right away it gets too tough to chew, and it loses that faint anise scent that fills the house, letting everyone know that someone is downstairs eating ka’ak. Sito’s ka’ak was pretty big, so it was perfectly acceptable if guests wanted to split a ka’ak with a firm jerk of the wrist. It’s a shame not to try a little, and it’s always interesting to see folks acquire a taste for the stuff. Guests who initially turn up their nose have been heard to politely inquire as they enter my kitchen, “Do I smell ka’ak?”

Our daughter’s friend Jason would down two or three ka’aks in a single sitting. When Jason went away to college, I even sent him a care package with “FRAGILE: Ka’ak” written on the box.

By New Year’s Eve though, we all get sick of stuffing our faces with ka’ak and toss what’s left into the freezer. Ka’ak freezes surprisingly well. It’s naturally kind of dry, and thawed ka’ak is even worse, so I always had something juicy around the house to wash it down, especially when the kids were little. It would have been awful to rush a child to the Emergency Room after he choked on ka’ak.

Everyone in my family is kinky about ka’ak. I prefer mine in the morning, served so hot I can barely touch it, lubed up with a little butter. I’ll look at it, bulging and steaming, and I’ll tell myself to take little savoring nibbles, but I’m embarrassed–and just a little boastful–to admit that I often devour an entire ka’ak in a few bites. My husband prefers his ka’ak straight up at night. For our daughter, ka’ak smeared with just about any condiment is a meal in itself.

For our some reason our son never cared much for ka’ak. He’d toast his ka’ak until you could hear it sizzle, and then scoop ice cream on top before wolfing it down, hoping to disguise the taste.

After my husband’s grandmother Sito passed away, her only daughter became the Keeper of Ka’ak. Auntie’s ka’ak tastes like Sito’s, but there’s something about the texture that will just never be the same.

I am afraid someday when Auntie passes away, no one in our family will eat ka’ak again. It’s sad to even contemplate the Holidays without embarrassing Lebanese pastry. Perhaps to defy that day, Auntie in her later years has done Sito proud: she’s become wildly prolific, giving away so much ka’ak that by summer I break up what’s left in the back of our freezer and scatter broken ka’ak on the back deck where it’s picked at by neighborhood felines.

Poor Auntie has become self-conscious about the lore that surrounds this delicacy, so she has invented a euphemism for ka’ak. She’s in her 80’s now, and she calls it “cookies”, but you can’t fool us: we all know ka’ak when we see it.

There are nine people looking at the house next door. I don’t like any of them.

With my luck, it’s the harried-looking woman, the one dressed in pastel polyester. It would be OK to have a neighbor with angst, but this lady appears overwhelmed with classic dust-bowl fatalism. Here she is, after church, with Ma and Pa and Grandma and three kids, plus two calm-looking older folks making sweeping gestures like models on The Price is Right. Those two look like realtors.

The back yard is so small that the lady with a little kid in the crook of one arm is now standing in my yard. Great. Where are the rowdy neighbors in the alley when I need them? I’d love for one of them to pitch an oversize can of ‘Natural’ over the eight foot fence. If I had known there was going to be an “open house” I would have bought the folks in the alley a case of hootch at the gas station, just to make things lively.

Maybe I should run out there waving plans for a two-story garage that would block any sunlight from ever reaching any room in that house, Amen.

The widow lady who lived behind us for twenty one years–now there was a good neighbor– despite her yippy rodent and the occasional north wind that sucked smoke from her chimney into our family room. God bless her, she was nearly blind, so I could romp in the yard in any state of disarray or undress, plus she never listened to any music, especially ‘country’ or ‘gospel’ or (gulp) ‘white country gospel’.

That house is just the right size for one, or maybe two quiet adults, not a young family of four or five. It sits only about ten feet from my back door, since at one time it was the ‘carriage house’ for the place I’ve called home for the last two decades.

I don’t want to deal with a thirty-something divorced mother yelling at her three kids while I’m trying to weed the herb garden and listen to NPR. I don’t want her being friendly at the back door. I don’t want her asking my husband to ‘loan her a tool’, and I don’t want her ex showing up at odd hours providing vocal counterpoint to the already operatic pathos that plays out in the alley.

I fervently hope she goes somewhere else…now the adults are huddled just outside my window, and the kids are climbing my 115-year old decorative wrought iron fence (except the one in the tired lady’s arms, and I think I smell that one).

God, I hope she doesn’t have a dog. Every time I look at a dog I see an asterisk of an asshole, and envision its center dilating and depositing organic waste like a pasta extruder.

I’m in no mood for neighbors.

1. It’s been said.
2. It’s been said better.
3. Need a Mac.
4. It’s more fulfilling to skip the writing and go straight to ‘having written’.
5. Someone might read it.
6. No one will read it.
7. Have not yet mastered artistic temperament.
8. Have mastered artistic temperament and no longer have the patience for creative endeavors.

It’s not exactly obvious.

I’ve been nurturing a psychic hairball for years. It rolls around my gut telling me that time is running out, and it may be too late to pursue my dreams. Instead of actually hucking up curdled delusions, I pass my tongue over old wounds and pull at my cuticles when I think no one is looking.
Customers don’t seem to pick up on it. My kids are fairly oblivious. My husband, though, sees the raw patches on my underbelly, and he catches me licking them. He knows better than to say much about it.

I lash out at him because he is close, and his well meaning comments raise static electricity, making me wild eyed. When I am miserable, he is miserable: I prefer it that way. I am convinced he prefers it, too. Just look at the poor bastard, cowering in the corner, chewing the flan I just made.
When I am distracted, I knead my claws into him and little tears form at the corners of his eyes. This, for me, passes for contentment. There are moments though, that he opens the back door and looks at me ominously…hopefully.
I sniff at adventure from inside the threshold, then I proudly turn tail and curl up with my laptop in a warm spot. After a nap, I’ll be ready to make us both slightly miserable again.