Free Cheddar Nation

The thing I hate most about supermarkets are those free sample displays that are scattered all over those random corners of the store. They usually throw the samples into plastic containers where tiny bits of cheddar cheese are divided into dozens of even tinnier pieces of crud. Don’t get me wrong, those things taste pretty good and they are free, but what about that very fundamental issue of personal hygiene?

When you charge people for things, they show no shame in displaying just how truly anal they are. Did any of you pay any sort of attention to how people order their coffee drinks in any of those chain coffee shops? Maybe it is just a New York City thing. Maybe it just has to do with those characters who live on the upper east side. But I mean, come on, where do these people come from? Only this morning I saw one of those socialites order a cup of coffee. Actually it was not coffee the way she ordered it. It was more like a advanced placement science project.

I’ll have a skinny latte macchiato, half caf, half decaf with soy foam and please, make sure it is at 125 degrees, I don’t like it when my coffee is lukewarm, she explained.

That’s how she drinks her coffee this woman does. How the poor Puerto Rican kid behind the counter even figured that one out? God bless his soul.

So apparently, when we pay for things, we all allow ourselves to become complete pains in the ass, but when it comes to the free stuff, the rules adjust.

Just before I reached over for some of that old yellow fermented stuff, I noticed a corpulent woman who stuffed her overburdening fingers into the plastic container and took not one nor two but about six tiny squares and just scooped them out of the sample tray and straight into her hungry blowhole.

She was a foul one that woman was but not nearly as disgusting as that skinny awkward Minnesota type who stood over six feat tall and was wearing his torn Twins T-Shirts that he likely bought during their last playoff run more than two decades ago.

To say that this guy abused the very concept of a sampling display would be the understatement of the year. This guy was out for the kill. He seemed to believe with all of his Midwestern heart that there was such a thing as a free lunch and it took place right here on aisle 12 of the Megamart.

The guy had a system. He pretended to be sampling, not eating. Or at least, that was his apparent rational. But his system was as foolish as that red and yellow Gophers cap that he sported on his head. He took three pieces every time and then he would take a break and let the next person in line sample a piece for himself.

Pretty good cheese, he would say and then reach over for another sample. The way he saw it I suppose was not that he was a free cheese hog but rather a good neighbor and ambassador for the Cheddar cheese nation.

The sizeable woman and the tall Norwegian held conversation for several minutes while stuffing themselves on free yellow cheddar.

You realize of course, he told her, that not all cheese is actually made from cow’s milk. You have such varieties as Acapella and Humboldt Fog that are made out of goat milk. There is buffalo cheese, cheese made from the milk of camels, mare, yak and even lamas.

I never really knew that, she seemed to be embarrassed. To be perfectly honest, she confessed that she was somewhat lactose intolerant and was not a huge fan of the yellow stuff.

So why are you eating from this display of Cheddar? He was curious to know.

Well, you know, it is free so I just figured what the heck.

They continued to talk about cheese and milk and cows and camels and then walked over together to the meat department where they served free sampled of Bavarian sausages.

If those only knew, those people, I thought to myself that right before they came around, I stuck my hands into those piles of cheddar.

If they only realized how I stood there so compact and sweaty inside that downtown Nine train holding on to those very hand rails that so many thousands of other perspiring New Yorkers held on to every day in search of balance.

Ten minutes earlier I walked into the super store where I noticed free sample trays of Cheddar cheese. After throwing my hands all around the piles of food, I realized that I was likely carrying thousands of miniature colonies of Staphylococcus who were forming their troops in preparation of an imminent invasion of some poor man or woman’s large intestine.

So filthy were my hands that I decided to wash them both before and after urination. As I returned to the sample tray I noticed a large woman who stood besides a tall man. The two were devouring the free samples of cheese that were by now as polluted as the toxic waters of the Hudson river.

This is the main problem with people, I thought to myself, they could never resist anything if it was given to them for free.

Next time you walk into the whole food store, think about personal hygiene, think about tall Norwegian men and fat woman who chew away the free fat of life without knowledge of what came before.

The young woman who stood at the cash register had long streams of brunette hairs that were flowing down the path of her shoulder.

It has been more than a month since Sylvia and I last spoke on the phone.

God I miss that woman.

Hard Boiled Men

Podcast NYU Tales

LA comedian and actress Anna Becker reads a chapter from the award winning novel, Hard-Boiled Men.
This chapter deals with a young graduate student at NYU that is forced to choose between attending a class led by the great Herbert Schiller or making it with a young Asian girl, which will he choose?

http://digg.com/comedy/NYU_Tales_Podcast

God Just Laughs

There are people around this town who walk around wearing three-piece business suites. If we lived in New York City, it would all make sense. Maybe it would make some sense in Chicago or the nicer parts of Hollywood. But around this tiny town? I mean, come on man.

The August sun feels no remorse towards people who walk around in pinstripe Giorgio Armani suites. No business deal can be worth withstanding this crazy heat.

But some people around these parts do not mind and I am always one to say, “Live and let live”.

The August sun feels no remorse towards my shaved head. I had lost the majority of my hair back when I was in my mid thirties. Those were some rough days back then for this cowboy.

As my old kindergarten teacher always told us studs : “You can not take back stupid.”

Her name was Shelly and she was the woman that I loved.

Her name is still Shelly but now she is loved by another man.

Shelly and I met back in those days when my hair was full and I was still the smiling kind of a man. I was the kind of a man that was going places. I was the kind of a man who inspired other men to be the kind of men that they hoped to one day become.

But the years have gone by and nothing is the same any longer.

The last I heard, she was living with some rich Baptist banker in some stylish new-money suburb right on the outskirt of Austin, Texas.

Shelly had a clear agenda since she was a teenage girl. She wanted nothing to do with our parts. I could not really ever blame her for it.

Her Daddy was a drunk and her mother was not one to say no to any man who paid her any fraction of attention.

Shelly always knew that she would get out of town just as soon as she would meet the right man. She wanted to live the kind of life she always read about in those shiny magazines.

Shelly once thought that I was that kind of a right man. She hoped that I would be the one to get her out of this life that she was living. She did not enjoy working as a waitress down at Bill’s diner down on Irwin Street. A lady’s hands, she always said, should be gentle and soft.

Back in those days, I worked as the senior consultant to our district’s congressman. When I woke up in the mornings, I would put on my pressed kaki slacks and that old crimson tie. While I brewed up that fresh pot of coffee, she would carefully iron my white button down shirt with that old Suzy Home Maker smile.

Back in those days, people mistook me for an honorable man, the kind of a man that was going places. My hair was thick and well brushed to the side. I never missed Sunday service at the local Methodist church.

Walking out hand in hand, looking as clean cut as American bacon, we looked the part and for a while even fell for it ourselves.

Shelly had big plans for our future. For my future is what she really had in mind. I was to work hard and climb up the ladder. I was to keep a smile on my face and my mouth shut.

Just as soon as old man Johnson would finish out his fourth consecutive term, would serve as the perfect timing for us to take that next step, where she would be the perfect little wife for the honorable congressman from Odessa, Texas.

God Bless that woman’s heart.

But Shelly soon found out the hard way that that old eastern saying holds truth regardless of geography:

“God laughs while man makes plans”

Or at least that’s what Father Swanson told me on that Sunday afternoon after that whole fiasco blew up in my face.

The first thing that Shelly did when she found out was slap me across the face.

The second thing that Shelly did when she found out was to once again slap me across the face but only this time, in the opposite direction.

I did not even try to explain. The only thing she ever cared about was that long term agenda. She never really bothered to ask about my dreams. To her they served no utility. And were not, as she said “Something an adult should ever think about…”

The last I heard, Shelly was living in a large estate that was fully paid for in cash. She has two ladies from Honduras who chased after her rotten children whole she would waste her hours down at the old hair salon.

But was I really someone who could judge another?

When Congressman Johnson first found out about his eighteen year old daughter and I, he kicked me right in the ass with the promise that I would never find work around these parts just as long as he had a single breath in his lungs.

My political career over and my hair mostly gone, I found my happiness within the comforts of this small bar.

Serving bottles of Shiner beer to the locals and fancy Scotch over ice to men in three piece suites, I came to accept the way things turned out without wondering what could have been.

Once in a while, someone may recognize me and say “Hey, aren’t you that guy who I used to know back in the day….”

When that happens, I just smile and nod my head. After all, you know what they say:

“Man makes plans and God just laughs” Aint that always the way that things turn out in life?

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