Going to lunch is a fun activity for all of us humans. Personally, I just love to shove foodstuffs down my gaping maw in order to keep this meat balloon of a body inflated.

     I normally pack my lunch in an ascetic and threadbaren way in order to more completely emulate the Pennsylvania Dutch. Most specifically the Mennonites.
     It was during my time as a wealthy Assistant Night Manager’s Helper at Cabeza Del Taco that I hired a Mennonite cocktail waitress to refresh my crew of two acne infested Brutmore High students. My crew, Sam Thompson and Tristan Bakersman, were filthy minded little curs when they got a few martinis* in them, and continually attempted to convert the poor girl to Episcopalianism (Church of England for you limey bastards out there).
     It never worked, but we did eventually add Bangers and Mash and various boiled and dry baked things to the menu.
     Um…oh, yeah. Lunch. Anyway, occasionally I will be someplace or another at or around the noontime repast and someone will suggest that they may be willing to leave my presence and return with food.
     ”Hey, I’m running to Cabeza Del Taco!” they might carol out to me and anyone nearby, “Anyone want me to bring anything back?”
     ”Oh, YES,” I answer; breathlessly, more often than not.
     I have a list in my head of my favorite dishes at most of the popular restaurants in the Detroit area.

• RamsHorn: Turkey burger with honey-mustard and side salad
• Big Boy: vegetarial stir fry with Tobasco sauce
• Taco Bell:Tostada Fresco Style and Bean Burrito Fresco style with Cinnamon Twists and Extra Napkins
• Cabeza Del Taco: Extraordinario Especial de la Cabeza Grande del Queso sin el Pato**
• Thai Peppers: Egg Plant Special
• etc, etc, etc,

     Anyway, so then I give some moneys to the coworker/client/food courier and return to working. In a few moments it begins to hit me….food is on the way.
     Am I alone in getting an extra spring in my step knowing that the food is coming?
     Am I the only one who happily anticipates the arrival of lunch in an almost sexual way?
     Am I the only one worked into a rampantly salivating frenzy, barely able to contain my nervous movements and involuntary verbal outburts?
     Am I the only one who grabs their nearest office mate in a desperate hug, kisses them about the face and neck and urgently whispers in their ear***, “Food’s on it’s way, baby”?
     Could I possibly be the only one who offers to remove the elastic from their undergarments in a celebratory act and then proceeds to do so even if the offer is refused?

     I can’t be the only one.

* Mennonite martinis are actually comprised of a small part onion essence and some corn syrup. But not high-fructose corn syrup, because that would be sinful.
** Sometimes I get the Conquistador Special, but its a bit rough, what with the added risk of contracting Ghonorrea.
*** I like to brush their ear-lobe with my lower lip whilst whispering. Adds a little something to the whole experience that makes it worth remembering.

    I expose myself to the porcelain. To my satisfaction, it doesn’t spare me a second glance; and so it is with but a single awkward nod to the stranger I pass that I walk out, damp yet clean hands held away from my pants as is my wont. It would not do to show moisture in my fabrics, the child inside me advises, for otherwise you’ll have tacitly admitted to wetting yourself.

    A lobby stretches before me, colorful patterns of carpet tracing faux stratagems for me to do battle with the crowds already in play; only a few notice I’ve added my efforts to the struggle. Their gaze slips away quickly; they’ve dismissed me as the obvious amateur I am.
    A firm shrug settles my jacket around my shoulders more completely and I stride forth, head down, with apparent purpose.

    Later: Aimless I, casting about for ideas. Aimless eyes find none for the moment. The thin plastic straps suspend my few purchases above the floor in a hammock of polyvinyl and cut into my hand uncomfortably. Fingers, you still there? Good. Let’s make the most of this.

    I move to pass by a door, which opens to admit the arguing couple with their dirty faced child, who stomps the snow off her pretty little boots. The eyes of the child meet mine and I find kindred sentiment in our shared annoyance and low-level suffering. I nod, and her little eyes grow wide. She darts a glance up at mom, who notices neither me nor her child in favor of debating the father’s evident lack of parking prowess.

    At that moment I miss my wife and daughter; all together we make the mirror opposite of this bickering duo and this quiet, resigned waif.
At that moment I decide I am done Christmas shopping, done with the aggravation and stress and the world’s insistence on playing Nat King Cole decades after he lost all relevance. Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow? Shush, dead man.

    I brush rudely past the little family, ignoring the father’s startled protest, and I charge into the relative freedom of the cold, gray parkinglot. Relatively free except for the mandatory tip for the mandatory valet man. Get my car, I’m going home.

Look to the right, and scroll down if you must. There, see it? Good.

SafeTinterceptor SafeTenterprises Inc. Our top engineer, SafeTinspector, is shown here putting the finishing touches on the latest model* of the incredible SafeTinterceptor fighting craft. Now with Gravity Assist Descent Technology!**

* Some Components 1989 Atari.
** Will fall when dropped from ANY height!

    We all know from science fiction, movie and videogame culture that robots and computers, as soon as they get this whole thinking thing down, will inevitably decide to destroy all of mankind or possibly enslave it in some inefficient yet appropriately cruel manner.
    That’s a fact we’ve all come to live with as we await the inevitable coming of our robot overlords.
    I was driving betwixt bombed out winterscapes the other day, and my thoughts turned to all of the other things we surround ourselves with that are probably destined to rise up and destroy us. It’s inexcusably myopic to assume that, just because they are the sexiest and trendiest of our resentful creations, the computers are the only one of our children that seek our eventual destruction or servitude.
    One of the latter and less famous Planet of the Apes movies predicted that hyper-intelligent apes will be the ones to reject their enslavement and rise to dethrone our kind. (Although the very last Planet of the Apes movie indicated that “Marky” Mark Wahlberg would eventually seduce and engage in dirty butt sex with the majority of the ape ruling class, breeding a new branch of interspecies Chlamydia)
    In 1935, a science fictiony author kinda guy named Stephen Vincent Benét wrote a poem in which the decidedly non-computerized possessions of mankind become animated an a decidedly non-Max Fleischer sortof way.
    Benét: “They must have planned it for years. . . . I guess they got tired of us and the whole smell of human hands.“
    Harbingers of mankind’s doom, we’re constantly on the edge of pissing off something-or-other enough to provoke a labor action.
    In order to stave off this inevitable fate, I’ve written up a number of very generous labor contracts and have submitted them to various factions within my household, and I suggest you do the same. I’ve guaranteed steady electrical current and frequent polishing to all my kitchen appliances and, in exchange, have extracted from them guarantees that they will not electrocute me or my family nor will they attempt to visciously strangle any of us with their cords.
    Foodstuffs are a little trickier. We need to be able to consume them, which is usually the first prohibition they attempt to negotiate into any contract. How can I make a rump-roast happy when, at the end of the day, I’m intending to digest it? Until I’ve figured that out, I’ve padlocked the refridgerator and the downstairs pantry. Their haunted screaming howls of anger lull me to sleep each night as they throw themselves at the unyielding doors of their prisons. If I’m very lucky, the mustard will ‘accidentally’ coat some lunch meat, saving me the hassle later on.
    Contracts are not without risk in and of themselves, however. What assurance do I have that the paper won’t seek to slit my throat or rig an elaborate garrote using pipe cleaners and an apple-corer?
    Really, I get the feeling that no matter what I do to stave it off, I’ll probably end up in a garrote either way.

    There was a time when I anticipated a thrill from being the one who continued after the others fell by the wayside. Survival, right? Survival is the same experience your average testosterone addled adolescent seeks moth to a flame, from reckless driving, through aggressive sport, even silly roller coasters. From survival, I thought, I would forever extract one of only a handful of thrills I craved. Fantasized about.
    But to truly be thrilled by my own survival, I needed an event to throw it in relief. Roller coasters could trick my raw and stupid system into sensing peril that isn’t, but I knew the difference. I felt cheapened and dirty from the hardly visceral feel of such faux risk. I needed to see evidence that my survival was genuine, that there was a chance that this really wasn’t my story at all. That someone else might be the one walking away from….this.
    The pain I felt was…yes, my leg. Fog and sharp sparks, real or imagined, informed my world. My left arm, free of whatever soft, heavy, wet thing pinned my right, moved to explore what soon resolved itself as metal and wood, scraps of my pants and a wetness I almost hoped was my urine. I made time to think on my urine.
    Such a mundane concern, but it seems obvious to me now. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have satisfied such a basic need before what I knew was coming? Frustrated, I frittered away another moment pining for a rewind button to give me the opportunity to rectify my stupid oversight. The possibility that I would walk away soaked in piss was unacceptable. My own waters would be a humiliating distraction from my survival.
    But…walk…
    At first gently, but then more urgently, I shoved at the rigid tangle separating the world of my torso from the world of my feet. My toes were astronauts exploring a great unknown, while I was bound to the Earthly world of hot weight holding me down, and relegated my right hand to a similar void. It didn’t give! I… it won’t move. I stop, and shake my head gently. I hear some voices, murmuring and shouting, like the pussies in the choir can’t make up their mind what gay ballad they want to sing. There are other noises as well, some kind of creaking and a rushing sound like I’m falling. A drip on my ear, and another, and…I try to move my head to avoid the next drip as I feel the liquid running into my ear canal.
    A sensation approached, and I briefly anticipated that this would be the thrill I sought. It tasted wrong, but I reached for it and stoked its flames anyway. Decaying, the smoke of feel dispersed throughout my soul and revealed it for what it really was. Fear.
    It wasn’t working, it wasn’t. A twisted answer to my secret prayers, here was the evidence that this really wasn’t my story at all. That someone else might be the one to walk away and leave me as proof that they had dodged the gun. If you don’t have a body, how do you know there really was a bullet? You need flesh to catch it and show it to you; you dodge NONE of the bullets you can’t find. That didn’t make sense…..
    The sounds of voices grew a little louder, and I felt the wrecked wood, metal and hopefully-bepissed desk shift ever so slightly. I allowed myself to consider it a promising development, but sharp, searing pain jumped up and down my thigh and I was forced to concede that the desk had moved the wrong way, and my leg was unable to make room.
    The heavy, wet thing on my right arm rolled towards me, and resolved itself tactilely to my right cheek as being covered in a soft, damp fabric. It smelled of Old Spice, and was quite still despite its movement. Tears were welling in my eyes, and my heart raced. Wanted to push the thing off, but discovered my free hand had independently began scrabbling at the desk pushing pushing pushing into the meat of my thigh. I marshaled it, fingers shaking violently, balling them into a make-shift fist, and pushed at the fabric.
    Light! My hand felt the mass fall away and bright lights stabbed my corneas and the voices at once became an unbearable cacophony. My exhausted, searching hand collapsed atop my freed right, which began its inevitable cascade of pinpricks and heat as circulation reclaimed the momentarily abandoned flesh. Other hands clutched at mine, and pulled.
    I called out a wordless interjection as my legs resisted the movement my assailants were attempting to impart upon me. They noticed, thank God, and let me free while more hands worked at the desk pieces.
    Words…”Christ, look at his leg…”
    More words… “Better than Steve…shit…”
    Steve. A name. The Old Spice, the flannel, the still weight, resolved itself in my mind to the face of the smiling, big fellow who sat in front of me. We’d played….Euchre…or was it Wist?…yesterday. He’d given me a ride once, I thought he was nice. Hollow, echoes Steve.
    ”Dan!”
      My name.
    ”Dan, we’re getting you out, OK? You hear me?”
      I did.
    ”Dan, you hear me?”
      I did! Oh….I nodded.
    ”OK. Hold tight.”
    I lolled my head, oggling my surroundings as my eyes grew accustomed to the light. I could see out the windows, through their vacant frames and jagged teeth of glass, and the ceiling, rumpled slightly, bowed above me. I looked to my right and….Steve. No, I won’t look at him yet.
    I screamed, spitting and knocking my head onto the linoleum as the desk shifted a final time and a man’s voice called out
    ”Free! Get him out! Tie it off!”
More hands, snaking under my shoulders and into my damp arm-pits, pulled me past Steve and I looked down at my dangling foot.
    Foot. Not feet.
    My eye fell from the information I couldn’t accept to the information I thought I wanted.
    Steve was not smiling. I was not walking. This was my story, though.
    ”Steve…sorry.”

    Are you familiar with the term “man crush”? This gay-sounding phrase indicates a level of admiration for a fellow man which, if sexuality were introduced into the batter, would bake into a nice, moist homo-cake. In more civilized times, this sort of thing would be called “hero worship,” but the modern popular hero conceit throws that particular descriptive into the realm of the imprecise*. The man pictured here is no hero, but he is vastly entertaining.

    His name is Alton Brown, and I have a man-crush on him. For those of you in the U.K., or living a life sadly sans-Food Network, Alton Brown combines screw-ball humor, cooking prowess, and a geek factor that exceeds that of your average secondary school chemistry instructor to make for my single favorite television personality.

    Originally a drama student, Alton graduated from the University of Georgia and went on to direct photography for music videos, including R.E.M.’s “The One I Love.”
    He made a conscious decision in the 1990′s to develop a new kind of cooking show, but lacked the actual credentials to do so. He attended the very possibly prestigious (I… I’m not sure!) New England Culinary Institute and soon after conceived, piloted and sold his amazingly entertaining cooking show, “Good Eats.”

    You wanna learn cooking techniques? You wanna learn about kitchen hardware, the mechanics and theory thereof? You wanna learn the actual chemical science behind the magic of food preparation? You wanna learn the history of the dishes we all love/hate/tolerate? You wanna? Wanna wanna? Wanna, wanna-wanna? I do, and did, and Alton gives me the fix along with an infectious brand of uber-geek humor.
    As an example: in a recent Christmas Cookie episode, Santa Claus created a localized temporal disturbance field to quickly age a batch of cookie dough by rubbing his nose. The resulting cookies looked quite tasty.
    In a pudding episode he described factory pudding as “Auntie-Pudding’s Industrial Spooge,” and shortly thereafter explained how glutens and starches interact to thicken a good pudding.
    Even foods I hate, like sauerkraut, become vastly entertaining in his capably nerdy mitts.
    If I were gay, I’m sure I would crave the gentle touch of those dweeby mitts. But I’m not, and so I am satisfied annoying Heather with poorly recounted episode summaries.

    ”Right, and THEN he showed why Kosher salt is different from sea salt. Wait–but before that he was doing this thing with the souffle dish. And, hahahha, he had this disembodied hand steal his snifter of bourbon. No, I’m sorry, that was a different episode…in this episode he was using a remote control balloon with a face drawn on it to explain culinary…um…foam. Heather? Where are you going? I think I still have it recorded, want to watch it with me?”

* The Alternate Universe of the Fudge-Factor

    Many years ago, before I began dating my wife Heather, I once found myself engaging in an…interesting…phone conversation with a lady friend who lived far away. There’s a word for this practice, and while I’m normally no prude, I’m going to leave the oft hyphenated descriptive unsaid for reasons of arbitrary propriety*.
    The conversation was going as well as these sorts of affairs normally do; more-so, perhaps, due to my natural gift for gab and active imagination. My lady friend lived in California, so the conversation was quite late for me. Without realizing it, I grew drowsy.
    Mid-sentence, I lost consciousness. Under any circumstance, falling asleep while talking on the phone is embarrassing. When engaging in the kind of topical debate I was enjoying at the time, however, falling asleep is a faux pas nearly impossible to match. Bad. Very bad. But bad isn’t good enough for me.**

    Here comes a ridiculous yet metaphorical digression: your computer probably has a hard disk drive in it, right? When a modern hard drive loses power, such as when you turn it off or throw it onto a divided highway, it immediately moves the read/write head off of the surface of the disk so that it will not be resting directly on any data when the disk stops spinning. This process is called “parking the heads,” and is automatic. Very old computers (more than fifteen years old) didn’t know how to do this on their own, and you could easily cause damage to those clunkers by moving them after shutdown. This was one of the ways to produce what is still known as a “head crash.***” Got it? Good, because I’m done with the digression now.

    Head crash: from my lips issued, “look at all those pretty sailboats. I think they have ducks inside, with TVs to watch and you gave them all to me. What happened to that guy with the one more time to see it count water? Does he have one?“

    Apparently, I do not have an autopark feature. My mind drifted away and my speech center, left to its own devices, gamely attempted to continue the heretofore racy conversation without the benefit of any sort of intelligence. Incapable of coherence, and without any direct connection to the organs that had been giving the discussion its unique focus, it had just dumped the verbal equivalent of a bucket of ice-water into the warm lap of my phone partner.

    After the inevitable moment of shocked silence and a brief tirade which woke me enough to begin babbling nonsensical apologies, the phone call came to an ignominious end with the flaccid truth resting in my hands as my sole reward.

    This sort of nonsense has happened to me in many conversations since then; thankfully, never when my masculine pride is on the line. A repeat of that sort of verbal emasculation is something I have avoided since. Recently, however, a similar thing happened to me as I was typing. Truly a new level of stupidity has been achieved: I actually fell asleep while typing and my fingers continued pecking out a line of random baloney. Read the end of ‘My Ancient History’. The last paragraph, with the exception of “…wait, what?” has absolutely no meaning–2% less meaning than normal SafeTinspector posts!–and will probably be used as evidence against me in a civil suit. I choose to exercize my right to remain silent.

    I only hope I’m awake enough to make that choice!

* Yes, I’m being arbitrarily proprietous.
** You, too?
*** computers can still get head crashes, but not while they are turned off.

    In my basement, on a blue steel shelf near the grey concrete laundry basin, I have some ancient pottery urns with matching tops, and inside are what I believe to be original copies of the Tora.
    I honestly don’t know what to do with them. Every few days I stop, in passing, and stare at them. I peer at them over my laundry basket filled with towels, underpants and I think.

    My father works in Saudi Arabia, and he sent them to me as a Christmas gift several years back. Inappropriate on several levels though it was, I accepted them gratefully, as I did the gold, frankincense and myrrh he sent one year.

    Apparently authentic, with clearly legible liner notes scribbled from the unsteady hand of Moses himself, who apparently made many mistakes and had a fondness for figs, they were stored along with a souvenir slice of lamb in a small, efficiency cave near my father’s Aramco compound.

    I’m not close to my father. Our relationship is as weak as what one would expect of distant cousins, or perhaps pharmacists. So when he offered me these ancient texts, writ from the fatigued and drunken hand of Moses, I felt obligated to accept for fear of jeopardizing my ability to get prescriptions properly filled.

    I had no mantle at the time, as I was living in a tiny bungalow with nary a single fireplace. Now I have a fireplace, but I can’t bring myself to displace my ever growing collection of not putting stuff on my mantle to make room for it. (I have the most complete collection of not putting stuff on my mantle in the Midwest, you really should come and stare at what all it isn’t.)

    My biggest problem with them, and the spiritual path they reveal, is the complete package. If I could underpine its own restrictions and ruleset, and I know that there’s been less antagonistic topography displayed by its permutative Openheimer complex..wait, what?