Chapter 25

Home Again.
(And again.)

Do you want it well done?

The next day I returned home to the every, every

and give it to me one more time, every day routine.
It didn’t take more than another long dull morning
with no set plans to reduce my newly found
confidence to that of a third grader who has lost his
milk money.

It is amazing how corrosive having nothing to do is to

my well-being and to my confidence. And that is the
point isn’t it? Doing nothing or even doing less is
seen as a defeat both by society and by myself.

Men, and certainly those of us that have a burning

drive to succeed, are taught over and over to go for
the gusto, the gold, the big prize. To win what’s
behind the third door. Anything less is a considered
to be failure. There are no awards for those who
came in 10th out of 10,000 runners even though they
are in the top .01% of whatever they are doing.

Yes, us guys aren’t trained, or perhaps just not aware

enough to enjoy the simple day-to-day victories in
our lives. The place where real satisfaction is found.
Worse yet, we are not rewarded for accomplishing
them. So we keep trying to hit the ball out of the
park.
Men tend to run in packs. As such, it is not surprising
that our behavior patterns have turned out this way.
Look at the messages we receive in the ads we see.
Have you ever seen a beer ad (remember that beer
is one of the big rewards guys are presumed to look
forward to in order to enjoy themselves) that
features a solitary man dealing with the broken drive
belt on a washing machine, a leaking faucet or a
faulty gas valve on the backyard bbq? You don’t see
him finding that missing password on the email
account or fixing the router that is down before he
gets a cold one. Yet these are the everyday tasks of
the modern man. While this is the realm where we
do most of our work we receive no rewards for these
tasks except our own personal satisfaction.
Unfortunately, we come to believe that this alone is
never enough.

How many of us spend our days driving through the

wide-open countryside, working on large construction
projects with concrete and mud in the beds of our
sweetly tuned pick up trucks? Not as many as the ad
companies would have us believe I suspect.

We are more likely to be painting a wall then building

a new one (or hiring someone to do both).

Why is it that the daily work that men do is simply

expected of us? Is it because we are taught not to
ask for praise or a thank you? Have our spouses and
partners become immune or oblivious?

Maybe there is another reason.

Men are expected to hit the shot, the target, the
bulls- eye. When we succeed, it is assumed instead
of appreciated. Women, on the other hand, do a
much better job of letting us know when they want to
be recognized for success. And when they don’t
succeed, they are more accepting of their failures.
We just get ‘er done and if we don’t, say fuck it, if we
say anything at all.

And that isn’t all. To make matters more

complicated the she’s have left for work permanently
and once that door swung upon it stayed that way.
Our wives (and/or partners) aren’t coming home to
polish the floors and many of them are out-earning
their husbands and boyfriends. (As a quick aside, if
you can’t handle that fact, check your pride at the
door and grow up. You are a couple. Period.) The
rules of engagement have changed.

The downside of their mass departure from the casa

is that now you can add a crying child that refuses to
be calmed, a sink full of dishes and, in my case, a
sweetie pie that doesn’t want or care to cook to the
male taskbar.

Now in all fairness that last aspect of the current

state of affairs is just fine with me. I am not sure
how I would have handled a competitive voice in the
kitchen. Frankly, I don’t think it would have been
easy for me to have a collaborator jousting for
position on the cutting board.

I bring this up to illustrate that the list of required

guy tasks has broadened beyond firing the back yard
grill on Sundays. It now includes cooking a mean
beef stew (if not a boeuf bourginon), knowing which
red to serve with it and how to make a passable
dessert. Ah but once again thoughts of food
overwhelm me and I immediately digress from the
moment at hand.

It is a complicated set of tasks that we all face.

These feelings are brought home when we don’t
have careers to rely upon and the days are no longer
structured.

But hold the phone there was good news on the line
that particular morning. Instead of wandering back
into the double-edged sword of wandering the
Internet as I did so often, I chose another route. I
took action. The day witnessed a change in
behavior. The morning would turn out different. I
had a battle plan and now it was time to launch it, an
alternative to the continuous mild discomfort and
excess down time of the unemployed male. No more
talk about starting my meditation plan or outlining
what to do. It was time to start the mental engines.

So I fired up the 6-pound Dell and threw my little

meditation plan on a flash-drive. I quickly transferred
it to the Mac. Then I opened Ical and created a new
calendar group titled ‘Manful Meditation’. Ignoring
for the moment how blank the week was, I blocked
out 30 minutes every morning to walk and thus
exercise big foot white dog and myself, 30 minutes
for yoga and 15 minutes for manful meditation.
Every day, 3 blocks of time to focus on and hopefully
provide a structure for the day.
Yet, looking at those isolated bright blue squares
spread out across the days of week, I felt kind of sad.
Did I really need to do this? Putting order to my life
had as much appeal to me as the taste of castor oil
to a 7-year old, or at least how I imagine that taste to
be. We never had it in the house. On the other hand,
we had other flavor tortures way back then like
tongue and bone marrow, now both hip but that is
another story completely.

The screen was doubly depressing as there were no

other entries for the entire week. But I had to try to
get some discipline into this process or nothing
would ever change. And this was that moment.

It was early enough in the day put my plan into

action. To hear the white dog cry out with happiness
when the magic world ‘walk’ was uttered and head
up the hill together for a strenuous hike before the
rains started later that early winter afternoon.

I threw on some old sweats and left the house with

the ipod blaring. The music kept my pace strong as
my furry companion pulled me up the path to Indian
Rock and onwards. It was a cold but clear day and
the bay shimmered out in the distance as I climbed
the North Berkeley hills. As I did, the ipod shuffle
program uncannily scored a 10 of 10, tossing out a
variety of music and styles that made me smile.
Here is what it played:

Today’s real life shuffle 10 (courtesy of the ipod)

-Bumpin on Sunset. Wes Montgomery. Just as funky
50(could it be?) years later. A guitar sound of his
own.
-Gone Baby Gone. Violent Femmes. Filthy.
Depraved. Love your dress.
-Angel Eyes Ella Fitzgerald w/ Frank Sinatra (live).
Two masters.
-Should I Stay Or Should I Go? The Clash (live). No
comment needed.
-Secrets. Eliane Elias. Smooth as a 25 year old Flor
De Cana Nicaraguan rum.
-What I See (Family guy) Randy Newman. Very
funny. Where did this come from?
-Breakdown (bootleg live) Tom Petty. Yes, everyone
sings along with Tom in California.
-Blame It on Yourself. Ivy. This breathy French girl is
just such a bitch? Yet he still can’t help himself from
wanting her.
-Superlungs. Donavan. The ultimate hippy singing a
b--track. about a 14 year old pot smoking girl.
-Rahde Krishna. DJ Chebb I Sabbah. Om meets hip in
trancelike grooves.

A set no radio station will ever approach. What a

game changing device it is.

The walk flew by and I picked up some fresh Kaiser

rolls. After returning home and putting my stuff
away, I threw down the yoga mat and began a light
work out with the traditional ashtanga sun salute
poses, stretching and calming. A little tree, a little
spine stretching. It felt good. Then I walked
downstairs and found the cushion, white dog wisely
staying upstairs to absorb the last of the morning sun
on the beige wool carpet. After shutting the door to
the mancave (why I thought, no one is here…)I sat
down, moved into a lotus (without thinking about
pain or worrying!), closed my eyes and began to
breathe. Time to implement the burger meditations.
So I started looking for them. Nothing happened.
Where were they? When would they come? What
was going to happen? My brain flooded with doubt.

Would this work I began to wonder? Was my theory

of self-directed male oriented meditation just plain
vanilla bullshit? Was I kidding myself trying to find an
excuse not to follow the rules where none was truly
needed?

Why couldn’t I just settle for thousands of years of

proven relaxation techniques? Not good enough for
the big man? Why did I have to rebel against these
well-known and successful schools of thought?

Perhaps it was the effect of growing up in the 60’s

and 70’s where we rebelled against everything and
tore so much down, always believing that there
would be something better around the corner, that
we could improve on whatever was out there no
matter what we started with. Or maybe it was my
early exposures to mediation. In high school I met
people who were chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo for
a new car, a television or a million dollars. What
material nonsense. Other practitioners appeared to
be lobotomized, the Hare Krishna dancing blissfully
and mindlessly down the street. Still other forms of
meditation focused on a phrase, a mantra repeated
as nauseum. All of that sounded horrible and
contributed to my instinctive distrust of those
practices and thus Eastern thought.

Now I hoped that I had a much better route to finding

some kind of peace. I had to know if I could make it
by thinking and meditating about those things that
make me happy. So I closed my eyes again and this
time I let go of all thought. Without further effort the
second hamburger meditation commenced after a
few minutes of emptiness. And what a beauty it
turned out to be.

At first the meditation resembled that of the previous

day in the airplane. That part was great. I thought
about the burger itself, a humble yet exalted food
capable of infinite variety. I continued my personal
search for a perfect burger, exploring the relative
virtues of cooking temperatures and the results, rare
vs. medium, well done to steak tartare. I visualized
charcoal and gas, frying pan and oven broiler.
Everything was going great but as the meditation
continued on without warning the burgers began to
change and not in a good way.

It stared innocently enough. I started to think about

ground meat. Why was meat that you purchased at
the store red on the outside and grey on the inside?
Rookie mistake. The mental banana peel to a host of
horrors.

I saw visions of frozen meat packed into cardboard

boxes marked not fit for human consumption. The
boxes contained countless pre-formed 3-ounce
patties made from beef blended with ammonia
processed fat remnants that could barely be called
meat. Burgers full of saturated fat and sodium.
Others laced with e-coli that I couldn’t see but felt.
Frisbees made of fat and slat that destroyed societal
health in the name of providing cheap food at
unrealistically inexpensive prices subsidized by
government.

Things got darker and darker. I pulled myself out the

meditation when the maggots started to appear a bit
shaken by the power of the visual imagery. All this in
the image of burger. Yes yes yes and more.

I looked at the clock in the mancave. 30 minutes had

gone by. Despite the negative ending, I felt
strangely calm and rested and some of the anxiety of
the early morning was gone.

The rest of the day passed easily with a quick lunch

of teriyaki chicken with udon and mixed vegetables
and some overdue work in the garden. I was
peaceful throughout.

I continued this pattern for the rest the week. A

walk in the morning followed by yoga and then a
focused burger mediation. I wanted to see if I could
spend a week on one subject.

The third meditation of the burger sequence on

Wednesday was really sweet. It began with a
reflection on the many different kinds. Ground turkey
started it off followed by chicken and then lamb. The
lamb took me briefly into a sort of Greek theme and
my mind watched a shimmering ground meat
shwarma spit turning and turning in front of a fire for
what seemed like a very very long time.

Thursday’s fourth burger meditation started

innocently enough before I went all Sinclair on it. I
spend a lot of time looking at the structure of the
burger itself. Some were so simple and elegant
focused on the quality of the meat, the way it should
crumble in your mouth. Others were huge
productions with a host of additional ingredients from
onion rings to blue cheese to half sour pickles.

But most of the meditation looked at the role of the

bun. It is the foundation of this house. It must be
thick enough to support the meat but thin enough
not to get in the way of the main feature. As the
burger is eaten it becomes something new, part of
the evolution of the meal itself. The juices drip into
the structure of the bread creating something akin to
a miniature Yorkshire pudding or a French toast with
gravy as the lubricant.

If only the dark side of my brain would have left well

enough alone. At some point I got lost on the meat
itself again and this time that led right back to
Bessie. Oh you can guess where it went from there.
Do not pass go, head directly to holocaust like
images of slaughterhouses and feeding pens full of
terrorized bovines. Suddenly I smelled the awful
stench of the feeding pens on I-5 driving from SF to
LA. It was all spinning out of mental control when I
heard the voice (of all damn people) of Anthony
Bourdain and his speech about animals and why
even though we don’t enjoy it, we love to eat them
too much to stop.

To quote:

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the

vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.
To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ
meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth
living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and
decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for,
the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads
imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal
protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian
waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a
cold.”

Truth that.

Eventually I calmed down. I finished the meditation

in a field of fat well-fed beer drinking Kobe cows
grazing the hills of Japan with an imaginary Mt. Fuji
looming in the background.

As the end of the week was upon me it was time for

the fifth burger and final burger meditation. This
time I had a goal, I decided to think about my
favorite burgers over the years. Eyes closed,
breathing normally and deeply and comfortable on
the cushion indeed, I went right into this historical
jaunt. The first dish to come to mind was from my
childhood. We never had burgers at home so I spent
time in an image of my mom’s meat loaf, always
served in the same oval blue baking pan and covered
with a sauce that a later learned was ketchup that
she applied during the last minutes of cooking. For
our house, a gastronomic event.
I moved from there to days spent with a junior high
friend at a long gone burger stand that his parents
owned on Crenshaw Blvd. south of Santa Barbara
(now King) in LA. There, in a burger stand owned by
Jews no less, w we broke the Kosher rules with their
boring but passable cheeseburgers and fries. From
there to a chili size (a burger in chili covered with
cheese and reheated in the oven) at the Hamburger
Hamlet on Sepulveda Blvd. on the west side that we
loved in high school and where I saw my first leather
booth. I can’t forget the first taste of an In and Out
burger on Arrow Highway, our escape from the dorm
food at Claremont Men’s College. Then on to Clown
Alley and Grubstake and 3 in the morning when I first
moved to the City and what about Barney’s with the
kids.

Then the era of fancy pants burgers arrived and they

suddenly appeared at fine restaurants throughout
the city, somewhat out-of-place at dinner, the
country bumpkin invited to a fancy dinner with fine
china and real silverware. But they held their own
and now I can enjoy a good burger just about
everywhere.

As my mediation ended and eyes opened I realized

how burgers had followed me throughout life. They
were always there. whether I was rich or poor. What
amazing dishes whether eaten simple or
complicated, true food chameleons in our lives.

All this in a burger indeed.

Only the noodle has more variations. Noodles…
hmmm,, maybe that would be the them for next
week.

I had to leave the mancave at that point. We had

company coming over for dinner that night, sweets
was working late (surprise that), the house was a
mess and the shopping wasn’t done.

I handled the tasks easily that day and enjoyed

them. The resentment I so often felt about my life
situation was missing for a change. I hope it enjoyed
the vacation from my life. I was curiously calm.

The weather was actually pretty nice that evening, so

much so that I uncovered the bbq. I grilled
swordfish.

Chili Size

Grilled hamburger patties

Chili. Any recipe is fine.
Cheddar Cheese shredded.
Chopped fine raw onions.
Portions to taste and to size of crowd

Grill your burgers to medium rare. Have your chili ready and
hot. In a baking dish arrange the patties. Cover with chili
and top with grated cheddar cheese. Cook in hot oven until
cheese has melted and is bubbling. Top with chopped raw
onions.

Buns are completely optional, historically served open-faced.