Tuesday Tidbits: Quite Possibly a Post So Crappy It Should Be Deleted

What you are about to read can only be summarized as a terrible blog post. It's whiny, disjointed, the antithesis of concise, and above all, void of anything remotely entertaining unless you've ever been in charge of a kitchen. So go ahead and read it if you feel the need (read: are that incredibly bored), but know that I haven't had much time to write in the past three months, so I'm publishing it based on the simple fact that I finished, at best case, the initial thought of an idea for a post.

Three years ago I took a position not in the restaurant business. It was the first job of the sort I’d accepted in over a decade. It was a family-oriented decision that centered on hours and procreation. I didn’t know how it would all go down, if I’d be able to function outside of a kitchen, and the result was a pleasant surprise.

My wife and I had an amazing baby girl over a year ago and for the duration of the two years prior, I was able to participate in social functions for the first time since early high school. I made my own schedule, enjoyed nights, weekends, and holidays off like most of the working world.

I didn’t work too terribly hard. I developed some quality relationships with both colleagues and clients, and I learned a considerable amount about a part of the Kansas City area (read: the Dotte) that had previously been an unknown. I didn’t really think I’d be there for three years, though, and what’s more: I imagined –- in some dark corner of my mind –- that when my time came to an end there, I’d have landed a writing gig.

A year before I took that job, I existed within the confines of one of the worst pieces of employment in my 32 years in the work force. It was a soul sucker, a wallowing in a swamp of mind-numbing misery that seemed perpetual and dangerous. It created internal animosity both in my heart and in my home, and though my stay was short there, it seemed to last –- both in terms of time spent on the payroll and in the time it would take to get out of that job –- for five years.

In short, I gave, and I gave, and I gave. And when there was no more left to give, I found an ounce more to give.

And then a peculiar thing happened: I got fired.

Nobody’s ever fired me before. Nobody’s ever even sat me down for the this-is-the-last-warning kind of a chat. I’ve (more or less) always been a rock star, and frankly, I’ve almost always been either promoted or eligible for rehire, or both.

It was quite a shock to the system, and in more ways than I can remember, I didn’t know how to operate with that label being stamped to my forehead. The irony of it all was that it was –- and I speak with a heavy dose of certainty here -– the best thing that has ever (occupationally) happened to me. I was, while collecting paychecks from this proprietor, an eternal slave of little consequence, and my physical and emotional investments in the establishment went unnoticed.

I haven’t thought about it before now, but it’s difficult to place a time frame around the number of months it took me to accept the heartbreak of giving my all for something, night after night, day after day, disagreement with the wife after disagreement with the wife, only to be booted out the door by a snarly lipped operations director that didn’t know any better.

Nevertheless, people in the business know about the absolute slug-like nature of this particular company, and a friend in the business quickly offered me employment, and as a result I participated in a restaurant opening that was a joy. When I took that non-industry job three years ago, I bowed out (in my mind, anyway) of the business like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show. I was done with the 70-hour work weeks, the late arrivals to weekend night gatherings, the missing out on holiday and happy-hour functions, the spending one day off sleeping, the other doing laundry. It was like I’d graduated from this institution I’d been in for longer than it took to get through all of my primary education.

The point is that it took a minute to realize that getting fired from that chef position was a blessing in disguise, and more specifically, it’s taken even longer to recognize that more than one gift came from that experience.

One of those gifts is the knowledge that I gained from having had the position. The other is the people I met, namely the person I most recently began calling my boss.

In early November, that person bought a restaurant and hired me as his chef. During the first 10 weeks I resented him once or twice, but that’s because it was an absolute whirlwind of insanity, and in actuality, it’s possible I’ve resented myself for knowing with relative precision just how nuts it would be, yet I dove in anyway.

Things, however, shaped up, my restaurant-opening to-do list is complete. I’ve had some days off, and on top of both of those things, I’m actually composing a blog post. Above it all, however, has surfaced the subtle reminder that it's not all stress and blazin' guns. I do have some things for which I feel thankful: the job itself, my experience, and of course, my wife and daughter.

My wife and I reached a crossroads this fall, one wherein she would be making a change in employment. It was a change that would immediately affect our household income in the negative, but bore the potential for an eventual swing in the positive direction down the road. The immediate, however, had to be addressed; we couldn’t make it on the non-restaurant position I’d held for three years. At the same time, my former assistant general manager from the aforementioned crummy company was looking for a chef.

I met with him three times, and to be honest, I struggled big time with the decision, and it was in our third conversation that we shook hands on the deal. The moment I got in my car, I regretted it. I told the wife as much when I got home.

She knew I didn’t really want to do it, but she wanted me to give it a shot, to see how things looked in six months.

“I don’t think you understand how much I’m going to be gone,” I said.

“Maybe I don’t,” she said. “But we’ll see.”

So I dove in.

I asked for a week to get my feet wet, to play around with the menu before we started soft openings. My boss and his wife, however, were anxious to get revenue coming in the door, so that request was silently denied. I knew none of the staff they had hired, and I knew that there was this catering endeavor he’d been working on for the past three years, that would occasionally trickle in to the restaurant.

My first day was nothing shy of awful. I wanted to leave no less than three times before noon, to say that this simply was not for me. My boss sensed my overwhelmed, scrambled brain, and promised that if we could get through this first week, we’d not see another one like it for some time. For the first couple of months he was right about that. That first week –- full of the chaos of meeting staff, training staff, hammering out batch recipes, configuring grocery orders off the top of my head, dealing with backed-up floor drains, and more than half a dozen caterings –- nearly crushed me.

But we got through it, we had a few soft opens –- the first of which we got killed on –- and officially opened. With the help of the staff, we eventually got some semblance of line specs in place, and began to prepare for service day and night.

It was three weeks before I had a day off, and that one came via Thanksgiving, a day on which we really weren’t even open. Three weeks later, I had another day –- actually two in the same week –- off, and things, as it were, smoothed out. Or at least they gave the illusion of doing so.

Five weeks ago, I chiseled away at the only remaining item –- inventory -– left on my opening to-do list. Having completely ironed it out now, I feel like we are officially operational and open, regardless of the fact that we’ve been the latter for three months.

What’s been fascinating about the experience is that this technically wasn’t my first open, but it was my first on-an-island open, if you will, and by that I mean no other facility to lean on, no other chefs to help me out. Just me, my staff, and their warehouse of questions.

I’ve always stood by the mantra that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, and this is mostly because I’ve never considered myself among the elite intelligent. Things, especially of the science and math nature, don’t come easily to me, and so I’ve got to ask 80 questions to make sure I’m understanding what’s supposedly being learned. So I’m sympathetic for those that ask questions when learning on the fly. It gets tricky, however, when you’re asked no fewer than six dozen questions a day, and those questions include things like the following:

“This recipe says I should bring this sauce ‘to a slow boil,’ so how long should I leave it on the stove?”

“This recipe says to ‘allow sauce to cool,’ so how long should I let it hang out?”

“When you say you want me to ‘caramelize two diced yellow onions,’ am I getting these purple onions or these yellow ones?”

“How should I dice them?”

The list goes on.

Like I said, I don’t particularly have a problem with questions, or even an abundance of them. I never anticipated receiving so many of them, though, on topics I thought were, to an extent, understood. And to this I attribute the demographics of my staff. They, for the most part, are young, inexperienced, of a generation with which I’m not familiar, and above all, white. More on this last attribute in a bit, but first let’s get the old-and-stuck-in-your-ways portion out of the way.

I imagine a healthy portion of kids in their late teens and early 20s party. I know I did. Few were the nights that I wasn’t guzzling 12-packs of cheap beer purchased with a fake ID and burning spliffs of crappy weed. I get that. I do.

What I don’t get are the pills and the other chemical-based drugs in which folks of this generation appear well-versed. It’s not important to get into the specifics of consumption, but the nuts and bolts of the thing are this: These chemical drugs that kids are doing at a young age really warps their brains. They eat “cottons” and “bars” while getting housed on their liquor of choice –- what ever happened to some good ol’ trunk-chilled 3.2 grocery-store beer? –- and although I’m certain they’d refuse to acknowledge it, it hinders the way the sober mind is supposed to work. Inevitably, this leads to excess questions. Questions like, “What the fuck does ‘reserve’ mean?” or the general demand to have answers to anything and everything right here and now, as if the chef is a walking, breathing version of Google.

And then there’s the white thing.

I could list dozens of stories of Hispanic employees I’ve had in the nine kitchens I’ve worked in, but a guy like Oscar –- pronounced oh-SCAR –- is perhaps most suitable. This guy was never late and never missed a shift. He would arrive each day to a pile of filth already created by the likes of myself and the overlooked dishes from the previous evening’s close; right out of the gate, he had to play catch up to be prepared for the lunch volume.

In addition, he always had a monster prep list, sundry cleaning tasks, and whatever crap I’d throw on him last minute, like, “Hey I need these 90 shrimp peeled and deveined in the next six minutes.” He always did it with a smile, whistled while he worked, and was friendly to the service staff that shit on him more regularly than they did their toilets.

Why? Well, let’s not slip too far down the political slope here, but because he was living the dream in America, making what was a white-collar salary compared to what it was like in his country, and perhaps more importantly, no one was ever trying to screw him out of his earnings every time he turned around.

These kids that work for me now, though, come in the door with some sense of entitlement. And that’s not even the right word. It’s a self-sculpted set of expectations that includes some of the following assumptions:

1) For every six minutes of hard -– and I do use that term loosely –- work I put in, I should get four minutes of on-the-clock leisure.

2) If I get housed the night before work, roll in 15 minutes late on two hours of sleep and am crabby all day, you should understand that I’m living my 19-year-old life this way and be cool with it. I mean, after all, you get the privilege of standing next to me all day. I. Am. Awesome.

3) Closely related: Any and all objects in my possession or loosely associated with me must look righteous or else I will deem them material fit for the dumpster. So, you drive a beater? Be thankful it runs, and that you have one. Then take that philosophy and apply it to your clothing, technological devices, and any other property you probably didn’t pay for, and get over yourself.

4) Speaking of technology, count on me getting upset when I am told not to tweet, text, or take phone calls on my cell while on the clock/line.

5) Lastly, if I observe –- and trust me, I’ll be looking –- any deviation of policy enforcement from one employee to the next, I’ll call you out on it in the most disrespectful manner available to me at the time.

Two things to take away from all of this: At the core of these individuals is, for the most part, some element of quality human being. It just takes some time to chisel down to it. And second, working with Spanish-speakers really spoiled me. Big time.

But back to the more global picture of this endeavor: If number 24 of the New York Jets can coin his own nickname, I deem myself entitled to poach it: Banky Island.

In case it’s not obvious, I have (next to) no one to bounce ideas off of, share the workload, and above all, shoulder the stress. My two exceptions would be the owner, who’s done the catering work for the last three years, and mostly, he's done it solo. He’s got some BOH experience, but now he’s got a bigger fish to fry: melding his catering clientele into a restaurant, that he’s running with a skeleton-management crew. The other is this cat that’s the chef at a country club. He’s been in the business for a long time, and he can come in a couple times a week, hammer some shit out for me, and be the most efficient person in the building in doing so. But this is his side gig; he’s full-time and salaried at the club.

Therefore, the bulk of everything food –- catering stuff aside –- falls on me. It’s a tremendous amount of pressure and stress, and precisely zero percent of the people I call my co-workers get that. Meaning, it’s not that they struggle to comprehend everything I’m trying to accomplish, execute, and manage. Rather, the thought simply never occurs to them. I don’t mention that to illustrate a fault them. I really don’t.

Here’s the ironic part: I’ve felt precisely that 1,000 times over in the past. It’s not a foreign feeling. The difference is that I’ve always had chefs with whom I commiserated. Not this time. Not on this island. I’m alone, and it’s all on me as to whether or not the kitchen portion of this establishment will succeed or fail.

We got open, though, had some rough patches, and came out on top. Well, by “on top,” I mean I felt like it was successful. I managed to complete everything on my opening checklist, figure out the strengths and weaknesses of each member of my staff, and felt confident putting my head on the pillow at night.

There are always wrinkles, though, and if there aren’t, you could argue that your operation will go stale. I personally like my wrinkles spread out over time, but you can’t always control the smoothness, or lack thereof, headed your way.

On a macro level, the beast is myself, making sure that I’m keeping things fresh, challenging myself, teaching my staff, maintaining organization, and above all, not spreading myself too thin. On a micro level, it’s making sure that all of those things are being done right, especially when I’m not there.

On both levels, it’s about happiness. Am I happy about particular situations? The big picture? Do I feel supported in my endeavors, or am I being taken advantage of?

The tough part about answering those questions is that it’s impossible to gauge any of them when ownership is panicking day and night about sales and revenue, which they are, which one should (at least partially) expect when you open a restaurant in November in a destinationless locale in the midst of an suffocating economy. And it’s even worse when 95 percent of the hope of reducing that which makes you panic has been pinned to a thing called Facebook.

It’s been a fascinating experience, though, being back in the culinary saddle. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to get back in the ring and challenge success to a 12-round bout. I know I’ve been able to teach a few folks a few things. I know I’ve made small steps in the direction of managing my stress levels, and above all, I’ve learned –- cheesy as it sounds -– to appreciate my family a lot more than I previously had.

As my wife said, “At the end of the day, we’re the ones that are going to be here for you.”

And to her I say, "We're halfway to six months. Here's to hoping you're still saying that in May."
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Just Because I've Always Dug the Dude...

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Thinking Out Loud: 'Arrowhead Anxiety' Piece Confuses

Sam Mellinger of The Kansas City Star writes, in addition to solid columns for the newspaper, a blog for the paper's Web site. You should check it out, and participate in his Twitter Tuesday feature, but don't do what I'm doing in this post. That's not the point of the feature.

I put this together as a post, not because I want to make Mellinger work harder by clicking a link, or because I’m interested in page views; the only traffic this blog gets comes from random Google image searches from a silly feature we used to do a few years ago, and why change that now? The thought is that it’s easier for him to read all of it in one place, rather than trying to piece together @mentions –- no way I can keep this to 140 characters or less -- from my Twitter handle. That said…

I thought Kent Babb’s Arrowhead Anxiety piece was a great example of journalism and reporting. I told him so, and asked him how he felt about it, but got no response.

The reason I wanted to know how he felt about it is similar to why I’m asking you about it today: What does this story do for the Kansas City community and the Chiefs fan base? Is it designed to show Clark Hunt and Scott Pioli that there are ways around their efforts toward secrecy and accountability?

Does it aim to show Chiefs fans that the organization’s brass is, perhaps, focusing on the wrong things? Is it a quiet vote for Todd Haley’s on-an-island methods of madness? Does it suggest that Romeo Crennel (and really any head coach Pioli hires) is, in a sense, being set up for failure?

I mean, I just don’t get it. So the Chiefs general manager keeps tabs on a candy wrapper in a stair well, and pores over phone logs, and makes staff-department members feel as though they’re not allowed to comingle, or that their moves are monitored. If the organization is committed to winning championships, and we know fans of the team want the same, how does exposing the regime’s heavy-handedness advance anything beyond the essence of one particular piece of journalism?

I feel like the media members in this community are either admitted fans of the teams they cover, or they’re adept enough to maintain the expected role of an impartial reporter, but they’re quietly rooting for the success of the clubs they cover. It’s no secret that Babb does a fantastic job as a Chiefs beat writer, and he appears to wish well for the club and its personnel on the field. I’m just having a hard time understanding the point of the piece.

My guess is that Babb is proud of the piece, or he wouldn’t have submitted it, but my confusion centers on how it advances discussion. Are we supposed to be mad at the Chiefs? Are we supposed to think that a lot of those employees are thin-skinned, or that people, for the most part, don’t like change?

The Kansas City Chiefs kept a lot of their front-office administrators in place until the Carl Peterson era came in, and when they made changes, the club went from a joke to a serious, annual, post-season contender. It wasn’t enough, and change was necessary again. This time, the change included the owner, and perhaps Lamar Hunt’s son is going to be less loyal than his father was, all at the expense of winning a Super Bowl.

Maybe Scott Pioli is a little nutty, and maybe the point of the piece was to show that. Or maybe it was just to get readers to think, regardless of direction.
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Queue the "Dukes of Hazzard" Theme Song

Alright. Got a day off, and I've got plenty to say about my re-entrance into the realm of industry hospitality, and I'm certain that will entertain a grand total of nobody. In the interim, however, I've got to sort out a few things about the good ol' Kansas City Chiefs, the good ol' Denver Broncos, and the good-ol'-boy-network known as the National Football League.

If you're unfamiliar with my ramblings on this blog, it may be news to you that I am not a fan of Colorado's professional football club. I'm not going to bash them today, though. They stunned everyone -- most notably Mike Tomlin's Pittsburgh Steelers -- yesterday by advancing to the divisional round of the NFL's post-season. Yes, the Steelers were badly hobbled, and no, nobody thought Tim Tebow and company would orchestrate a 300-yard-passing afternoon. Here's the long and short of the contest, though: You're the number-one passing defense in the league. You lose the coin toss to start overtime, and you therefore, are perhaps thinking of coming up with some huge defensive schemes and plays in order to gain possession of the football.

Yes, that was the debut of new post-season overtime rules, so yes -- you might want to come out prepared for the first play from scrimmage. And, by "prepared," I mean send someone into pass coverage. Someone. Anyone. I mean, you don't wanna get torched on an 80-yard touchdown pass and get sent packing before the first overtime commercial break, do you?

Nevertheless, a Denver win. Congratulations to John Fox and his squad.

That brings me to today, though, and if you are familiar with my tiresome drawl on this site, you know that I think the incestuous nature of this league is filthy and disgusting. Every regular season concludes with some head-coaching vacancies, and inevitably, the same old retreads get drug out from behind the last wood shed to which they were cast, and we see the same has-beens give it a go in a new city.

It's annoying, yes, but for the most part, tolerable.

There appears, though, to be some sort of leap-year cycle in football, wherein the whole concept of good ol' boys giving their good, old pals new jobs in different regimes, finds new ceilings, and right now we're in the midst of one of those unprecedented -- at least in my football-viewing liftime -- heights.

I'm not documenting all of this to educate anyone. Rather, it's an exercise for myself, one in which I can attempt to make some sense of it all.

Several seasons ago, Mike Shanahan was fired by Pat Bowlen, and shortly thereafter, Clark Hunt and newly appointed Scott Pioli opted to not retain the services of Herman Edwards. As you may know, Pioli -- then dubbed the top G.M. candidate in football -- is betrothed to a young woman whose father goes by the name of Bill Parcells.

Now, us fans (and lowly bloggers) never know what really goes on inside the NFL's inner circles, so we're left to speculate, and this is what I'm doing here, so keep that in mind.

Pioli gets the job in Kansas City, and it was reported that he wanted to -- shocker -- go to the New England Patriots staff and pick his coach from that crew of knuckleheads, his choice being none other than then-Patriots-offensive-coordinator Josh McDaniels. Denver Bronco G.M. Brian Xander, however, beat him to the punch and hired McDaniels first. This left Pioli to go all Galactic and call up his father-in-law for some advice.

Parcells, having worked with Todd Haley in both New York and Dallas, recommended the then-Arizona-Cardinals offensive coordinator, who happened to have just been one Santonio Holmes touchdown catch away from winning a Super Bowl, so it made sense.

Next, Pioli needed a quarterback for his Chiefs, so he -- shocker -- went to the New England well again, and pulled a trade to get the then-franchise-tagged Matt Cassel, which was who McDaniels also wanted to get to call signals for his Broncos. Somehow, word of this Denver-based desire leaked out, and pissed off then-incumbent-starter Jay Cutler, who threw a tantrum and demanded a trade, which he got.

The swap of Cutler for Kyle Orton, if I remember correctly, netted the Broncos a nice bundle of draft picks, which McDaniels then, quite literally, blew the following season, so he could obtain the services of Tebow. Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Pioli went -- yes, a third shocker -- back to his Foxboro roots once more and obtained the services of Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel to coordinate both sides of the non-special-teams football.

In the midst of McDaniels' and Haley's second seasons in charge of their respective clubs, the former's squad crushed the latter's and an infamous post-game display of unaffection ensued:



Later in the campaign, Haley's Chiefs (barely) defeated McDaniels' Broncos and the latter was relieved of his duties, courtesy of both a late-season collapse and some hidden-camera shenanigans that McDaniels likely -- shocker number four -- learned from watching his boss Bill Belichick in New England.

That brings us to this year, which featured McDaniels leading an inept St. Louis Rams offense to a two-win effort, and Haley getting fired with three games to go in the regular season. Mind you, the future of the Denver franchise that McDaniels rolled the dice on (read: #15) took over the starting job for Orton, and the former Bear was cut. Kansas City, being without the services of Matt Cassel, claimed Orton off of the waiver wire, and promptly defeated the lossless, defending-Super Bowl-champion Green Bay Packers.

The Chiefs then lose an overtime contest to the Oakland Raiders, courtesy of not one, but two, field-goal attempts blocked by former Patriot Richard Seymour. Kansas City then travelled to Denver, and won a snooze fest over the Broncos, 7-3. It should be noted that said snooze fest featured Orton returning to Denver to defeat his former backup. Tebow and crew, however, eked into the playoffs thanks to a San Diego Chargers victory over the Raiders.

As the buzz of the regular season was still fizzling, New England sent the NFL TPS reports to obtain the services of the now-fired-from-St. Louis McDaniels, who, rumor had it, Pioli had been eyeballing for some position or other in Kansas City.

Following the conclusion of yesterday's wildcard weekend, McDaniels is now on the Patriot staff as an offensive assistant, and will be the club's coordinator next season, meaning that his first assignment is to help guide New England to victory over the franchise that fired him, a franchise led by the quarterback for whom he mortgaged the club's draft picks obtained in the Cutler-Orton trade.

And, back in the midwest, the Chiefs have named Crennel the new head coach, while the Rams appear ready to ink a deal with Jeff Fisher. Reports from Twitter over the weekend indicated that the recently fired Haley and Tony Sparano will be involved in hedging the new offensive plan for St. Louis. Sparano is coming off a once-impressive, mostly disappointing tenure as main man in Miami, and was put there by Parcells. Parcells, no longer employed by the Dolphins, is suspected to be replaced by Carl Peterson, who Scott Pioli replaced in Kansas City.

Basically, the only fresh face in the mix is John Fox in Denver. He has McDaniels' old job and McDaniels' old quarterback. Kansas City has Denver's old quarterback, New England's old quarterback (both of whom are also McDaniels' old quarterbacks), New England's old defensive coordinator, and if you want to add another layer to the mix: the third quarterback on the Chiefs roster is a kid out of Iowa, one of Pioli's favorite places to draft since he's chums with coach Kirk Ferentz.

Haley's in line to take (some form of) McDaniels' old job, along with Sparano, who came from Parcells, who will likely be replaced by Peterson. And McDaniels, in case you didn't catch it, is charged with attempting to defeat the signal caller he so coveted two drafts ago.

In other NFL playoff news, the Saints -- semi-loaded with former Chargers A.J. Smith decided not to keep -- will attempt to knock off Jim Harbaugh (former Bear QB) and the San Francisco 49ers, while the Packers will take on Eli Manning -- who refused to play for the team (San Diego) that drafted him and the New York Giants. Tom Coughlin's Giants made a mockery of the Thomas Dimitroff (another branch of the Pioli tree)'s Atlanta Falcons yesterday, leaving Tony Gonzalez -- who didn't want to stick around for yet another Kansas City rebuild -- with one less playoff win than Tim Tebow (Editor's Note: I'm still kicking myself for not tweeting that first yesterday.).

The other AFC matchup will feature Harbaugh's brother John and the Baltimore Ravens versus the Houston Texans, led by former Shanahan assistant Gary Kubiak.

So, there. None of that's news, really. I just had to suss it out for myself, and decide, after doing so, if I really felt as coated in six layers of Arkansas-truck-bed sibling lust as I thought I did.

Verdict: I do.

Gross.

Go Broncos! (Note: No, not really.)
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This Time. I'm Losin' My Mind, This Time: Sixy

My boy Adam Best once wrote that bloggers should never waste post space to mention that they've been out of the loop or on the sidelines, etc. I'm going against his advice right now to report that I've been out of commission for the entire month of November because I decided to get back in the restaurant business, which has been an adventure that is reaching upwards of 300 hours and one day off for November. It's apropos of something, though, that on this, the last day of the month, I'm squeezing some time out of my day to share with you a few of the songs that recently clogged my brain like a backed-up dish drain.

If this is your first time checking out this feature, note the following: I have no idea how these songs wind up in my head, and I do not allow myself to include tunes I've heard or been reminded about in any way. I also am lucky enough to have at least one song a week stuck in my head that doesn't suck. We'll start with it.

5. "Love Potion Number 9" by The Searchers



I was raised on oldies, so I love this tune. In fact, I don't think I've ever gotten tired of it. Also, I like to envision myself as one that would kiss "everything in sight," meaning hot ladies and not cops.

4. "Almost Paradise" by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson



I don't really have an opinion on this undying trend of remaking movies, and that's because I haven't seen a single one of them. I feel like I heard they remade Footloose, but I'm not for sure. What I do know is this: This song freaking blows. It's not nails on a chalkboard; it's meat tenderizer to the nose. Kill me. Now.

3. Queensryche's "Jet City Woman"



I can't say for sure that I've ever had any use whatsoever for Queensryche. I mean, I adored "Silent Lucidity," but before that song's release, I don't think I'd ever heard of them. I wound up buying a copy of Empire, because that's the kind of wasting-money-on-mediocre-music retard I was in high school, and so now that I mention it, I do have a use for Queensryche: You guys owe me 10 bucks. "Jet City Woman" is flippin' terrible, though. Just terrible.

2. "Daisy Bell" by Harry Dacre



Dude, I got no idea...

1. "Cool Night" by Paul Davis



Again. No idea. They just get there. But, if you're into big pimpin', you should totally use this song to get in good with the ladies. Like, text snippets of it as voice notes to all the gals in your top five list. It's guaranteed to work. It's universally understood that Paul Davis is synonymous with dripping-hot sex.

Anyway, I have no idea what week it was that I was tortured by these cuts, but there they are. Come back again soon for some more self-inflicted torture.
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Untimely Reviews: Demetri Martin's "This is a Book"

I'm pretty excited for this particular review since the subject actually came out this year. Granted, it was in April, but that beats the untimeliness of my Dylan review. It's all in the feature's title, though, right?

Anyway, once I was done reading the Bob Dylan biography, I moved on to a book with a pretty awesome title: This is a Book by Demetri Martin. Now, before I tell you about how awesome I think Demetri Martin is, and how I enjoyed the shit out of his book, allow me to drop two non-noteworthy tidbits: I’d guess that less than 10 percent of my library is hard-bound. Maybe less than five. I just don’t ever not wait for paperback. Chronicles, however, was a gift, and given to me new, so it was in its original pressing, and obviously hard-bound. Second, the fam’ and I were in Durango in June, and there are two stores I can almost never not spend any money in: Southwest Sound and my favorite tome slinger of all time: Maria’s Book Shop.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk Martin.

Just under three years ago, I was in Wellington, KS for a job training and this was right around the time that Martin’s show, “Important Things with Demetri Martin” had aired on Comedy Central. I was sitting in my hotel room with this beefcake and he was driving the channel changer.



“This show sucks,” he said.

For the record, I'm not sure if that clip is from an actual episode of "Important Things" or if it's from an evening of standup; I just found it on the 'Tubes. Either way, my work-training partner (Editor's Note: Yes, all three of those breadfasts were his, and yes he ate every last bite.) might as well have insulted my cooking. I happened to think Martin’s show was stellar, even though I knew it wouldn’t last, as it was too off-the-beaten-path and not raunchy enough (Note: I’m looking at you, Daniel Tosh, Nick Swardson.) for today’s C.C. viewing audience. If you cut all that away, though, it was pretty darn funny at its core.

When I first heard about his book, it came courtesy of this episode of the Sklarbro Country podcast on which Martin was the guest, and as a side note, if you’re not following the Sklar brothers on Twitter you’re missing out on some quality humor. Regardless, a month later, scouring the shelves of Maria’s with that urge to buy something, I came across This is a Book.

Naturally, I didn’t get moving on it until I’d finished Chronicles, but I mowed through it in three shifts. For the record, an interesting approach to book writing makes it a fast read on its own, but the content of each page is so damn funny that it’s hard to put it down. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I grabbed my wife half a dozen times to read passages to her. It was that enjoyable, and at its root, not that different from the show, which is probably why I liked it so much.

Some highlights:

There’s a chapter called “Hotline” early in the book, and it plays out a scenario in which you need to get out of a public situation, but need the assistance of a phone call to do so. You’ve seen this: Girls will have a best friend call their cell phone at a precise time on a blind-date evening, a parachute if you will that allows them to bail if things aren’t going well. Heck, I’ve been on a date and done it myself, but for a different reason: the restaurant we’d selected was just really not going to cut it. Our appetizer was terrible, the server was a jerk, and nothing entrée-wise appealed. The simple solution was to shoot a friend a text and ask for a phony emergency call, so as to avoid the awkwardness of having an everything-about-our-17-minutes-in-here-has-totally-blown conversation.

The “Hotline” chapter is only two pages long, but it’s freaking hilarious, as is the book’s eighth section, “How I Felt,” which does a remarkable job of using the color-as-a-metaphor tool that writers often employ, i.e. “green with envy.” Martin has, shall we say, a more colorful approach to the technique.

“I quickly became purple with punches to the face and, on and off, even more purple with DJ lights that were still rotating. Things got worse when Violet’s boyfriend pushed me into a candle. I turned orange with fire and then gray with smoke. Thankfully, I quickly became pink with fruit punch after Carl threw some on me to put out the fire.”

There’s a chapter called “Statistics” in which we get such gems as “99.99% of all castles in America are located in fish tanks.” Or, “America is the leading exporter of the phrase ‘Oh no he didn’t.’” Or, “Per capita, just about everyone has no idea what a ‘capita’ is.”

A chapter titled “Who I Am” cracked me up from start to finish.

“I am a man…I am also a former baby and a future skeleton…I am ‘brother’ and I am ‘son’ and I am ‘father’ (but just according to one person, who does not have any proof but still won’t seem to let it go)…People have known me by many titles. In high school, I was ‘Student’ and ‘Key Club Vice President’ and ‘Queer Bait.’ In college I was ‘Pledge’ and then ‘Disappointed’ and then ‘Transfer Student’ after that…I have been called many things, like ‘Hey You’ and ‘Get out of the Way!’ and ‘Look Out!’ And then, some time later, ‘Plaintiff.’”

There are awesome chapters like “Some Drawings” and “Palindromes for Specific Occasions” and “Honors & Awards (for Which I Would Qualify).” There’s the hilarious “Charts & Graphs” and the clever “Frustrating Uses of Etc.,” and those are only some highlights of the first two parts of the book.

Part three starts off with one of my favorite stories about a guy who buys a fruit stand only to see it smashed by a car. There’s a witty chapter about the power of personalized checks, one called “Epigrams, Fragments & Light Verse,” and another collection of drawings. In the final part, Martin gives us the epic “Confessions of a White Guy with Dreadlocks,” the gut-busting “Zing!” that features this example:

Airplane

Woman Sitting Next to Me on Airplane: So, what do you do?

Me: Oh, I get paid to make boring small talk with strangers on airplanes.

Zing!
--And then sat in hostile silence for next 5 hours of flight.

Finally, we get another chapter with statistics in it, and one called “The Word Awards,” featuring hits like, “The Ensemble Award for the Least Frequently Used Combination of Words went to I was wrong, which was presented by last year’s winner I have a drinking problem.”

I seriously cannot remember the last time a book made me laugh that hard. I was even embarrassed at times because I was beginning to think guests at the bar were suspicious of the state of my mental health. For real, though, I had the same laughs all over again reviewing it for this post. And if you don’t believe me, peep the quotes on the back cover. They include Conan O’Brien, Will Ferrell, Malcolm Gladwell, and Chuck Klosterman, who said, “This book is so funny I forgot to laugh. I know that sounds like a childish criticism, but I mean it literally: This book is so funny, I forgot a whole bunch of things -– who I am, what I stand for, large chunks of my childhood, my sense of equilibrium, how to fall asleep, and when I’m supposed to laugh at things.”

So get yourself a copy, or if you know me, borrow mine, and if you like that Klosterman quote, check in next week for a review of one of his books. (Hint: No, it’s not the new one.) And if you're still unsure, follow Martin on Twitter. You know: baby steps.
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This Time. I'm Losin' My Mind, This Time: Sink-Oh

Welcome back for another installment of the feature that makes you want to stick your head in a blender.

If you're new to the action, what follows are (mostly) terrible tracks that, for reasons unexplained, got stuck in my head last week. I'm kind enough to pass the deliciousness on to you, so enjoy.

One day you'll thank (read: stab) me.

We get things underway this week with an obviously unterrible track. I suppose it's nearly never a bad thing to have one of these guys' songs in your head.

5. "Don't Let Me Down" by The Beatles



This just in: The Beatles were awesome.

Our next ditty is a number by another band I really like. This track, however, drives me insane:

4. Groove Collective "Nature of a Freak"



Declassified is a really fun album, but in my opinion, "Nature of a Freak" should've been omitted. It's obnoxious, repetitive, and frankly, it's stupid. Fortunately for this feature, it's got all of the prerequisites checked for a splitting headache if and when it embeds itself in your cranium. See what I did there? Moving on...

3. "Gone Gone Gone" by Bad Company



I'm a little ashamed to admit that I used to be a pretty huge Bad Company fan. I liked the old stuff, and even the Brian Howe-era nonsense that produced hits like "No Smoke Without a Fire" and the title track from their second release, Holy Water. Matter of fact, I saw them live for the tour in support of the latter, which featured Damn Yankees as the opener, which is a little ironic considering that Howe used to sing for the Nuge', who was the axman for the Yankees, which was an outfit featuring a dude from Styx and a dude from Night Ranger.

And if you think that was a bad idea, consider that former Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers was busy doing The Firm for this Bad Co. era. Well, at least until they replaced Howe with Robert Hart, and ultimately ditched him to bring Rodgers back into the fold for another go. While all of that is more information than you ever wanted to know about Bad Company and bad, mildly incestual classic-rock side projects, it does tickle the all-too-common curiosity of musicians who never seem to be able to grasp that their heyday has passed.

Anyway, old-school Bad Company was pretty cool when I was new to classic-rock radio. The notion of recording a song called "Feel Like Makin' Love" was ballsy for the first 40 times I heard it, and nothing shy of gut-wrenching every time after. I'm not going to sit here and knock the library of original-outfit Bad Co., but I will say that many of their hits are pretty freaking awful. "Gone Gone Gone" is right up there with the rest of them.

2. The Steve Miller Band with (not to mention the most original band name ever) "Rock'n Me"



The CRR arsenal of Steve Miller Band cuts should be lit on fire. Really. I mean, we've all giggled about stoner implications in "The Joker." We've tripped out on the eerie synth work in "Fly Like an Eagle." We've clapped, like fools, along with "Take the Money and Run," and we've air drummed to "Swingtown." I say burn 'em all except for "Abracadabra." That's right. I said it.

1. New Edition's "Cool It Now"



God, the '80s were atrocious. I don't know why bands groups like New Edition, Bell Biv Devoe, et al, rose to such fame, but they did, and songs like this one are left rustling in the leaf pile, only to blow around every now and again and afix themselves to the screen door of your brain on a fall day.

If I could borrow a line from that David Spade show, just shoot me.

Those're the hits for this week. Come back again in seven or so days for another installment of rancid.
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