After an astonishing talk to Hurley about speed and the migration back to campus activity, it is by amazing chance that today's re-run would include her thoughts. Enjoy.

(con'd from 22 Feb 04 - yup still lazy)
So I dump my whites on the bed, noting the smell of bleach and thinking that I’m weird for actually liking it. But it is a clean, nice feeling, I guess. I slip on the snow again and grab my clothes, which someone has left responsibly on the top of the dryers. I don’t blame them at all, and my stuff is actually warm for the dryer use.
People confuse me. I mean the nature of humans is the confusing thing. Because I worry about my stuff being gone, on the floor, disrespected. I would never do that to someone, but I have a rational, and entirely possible, fear of other people being that way. Which doesn’t really make sense. The only reason I think that way is because I have a natural tendency to think up things like that to do to people. I wouldn’t, ever, but because it pops into my head, I automatically assume that others would act on their whims.
It’s sort of a perspective, thing, probably. We can dissociate ourselves from the minds of others because we don’t understand them. “I know how I think, but because I don’t know how they think, I assume it’s different.” Interesting. I get some looks from people on Wisconsin Ave as I round the slippery slope, but I don’t fall this time.

I come back in and I’m hungry. Grab another piece of salami, noticing how much more salami is missing than yesterday. I wonder, apprehensively, if Novot ate that much or if it was me. But I only remember taking two slices, three including the one in my hand. I shouldn’t let Mikey make fun of Novot for the meat and cheese thing, even though I agree with him on a lot of it. It’s definitely funny, but some things are better left unsaid, and Novot has been really sensitive about money recently. I think chicken wings would be nice and greasy.


Experiment 14732:

Jerk Chicken Wing Confit(ti)

7 chicken wings, frozen
¼ cup lard, used once for pork shoulder
2 Tbs butter
4 Tbs flour
¼ cup Jerk sauce
Garlic Powder
Dad’s Crushed Pepper

Preheat oven to Broil, then 400°. Defrost the chicken wings by clearing the sink into the other one. Don’t bother to do the dishes because there is no dish soap. Put them onto a plate and run water over them, creating a small lake of frozen chicken and whatever else was in the sink. Hopefully, your roommate has dumped a lot of burger fat into the sink the day before and you can successfully mix the fattiness of three animals.

Melt the butter over low heat in a small saucepan. Add pepper, garlic powder and sauce. [This is Area Number 1 for improvement. The flour should’ve been put in here, before the sauce. It would’ve made for a nice roux. This would’ve eliminated the need for the lard. Damn.] Realize your mistake and pour contents into a bowl. Set aside.
Melt lard over high heat in same saucepan. Slowly mix flour in, trying to create roux. [Note: lard does not make roux.] When lard has reached smoke point, pour sauce mixture from bowl into saucepan. This will steam and explode much more than expected, but stir quickly. Reduce heat to low and stir continuously until mixture thickens to JELLO consistency, about 30 seconds.

Put defrosted chicken wings into a metal pie tin and spread sauce mix over meat. Cook for 30 minutes or until wings secrete clear liquid when poked with Ginsu 2000. The lard will separate out of mix and essentially fry the chicken. Serve hot with paper towel.

Experiment: Failure.
But overall success noted, with exceptional quantity and quality of knowledge base gained.


I add another working title to list: Recipes, Experiments, and Disasters: One man’s journey into greatness. Sounds very non-fiction, I think. Sell it to old people like that guy with the one word titles so they can give it to their grandkids to build character. But I think I’m going to stick with the cookbookish feel, because that’s a hook, for sure. So now I’m bored and sick to my stomach, because even failures need to be eaten. Usually.
Later on I was checking away messages and Egwene32 suddenly loves Sarah Vowell. So I check out her letter and it’s on patriotism. Meanwhile I’ve insulted Novot back into submission by bringing up Greenspan’s article on the front page of yesterday’s paper (submission meaning he’s plugged in again. reminds me of the Todd McFarlane Pearl Jam video with the guy at the computer screen, with wires out of his eyes and nose. Novot the Robot). Protectionism is a crutch for the middle class irrational mass, a mere blip on the radar of our historically stupid voters. A Thomas Jefferson comment really keys me off into a spin about the Electoral College and why he couldn’t place his confidence in the yeomen farmer. But damn it Vowell’s right about one thing. I am also and always will be a “despite” patriarch, but I’m too cynical to forgive Bush and Cheney for flagrant and useless idiocracy – a word I’ve learned from stupidity and for stupidity. But the country, whatever its flaws and faults, is based upon such a sound and incredible idea, the suffrage and agency of its masses over all else. The historical context of it is overwhelming. Makes me want to veg out and watch Trainspotting. Too bad I don’t smoke or do heroin.

A quick note on confitti…
Word of the day: confit (pronounced con-fee)[n.]French culinary term, meaning meat that has been salted and then cooked, finally cooled and preserved in it’s own fat.
Josh's Word of the Day which may or may not be an actual word: confitti (pronounced con-feet-y) [n.] A culinary term describing a meat stored in fat of an animal other than its own species. When he put the chicken wings in pork lard, he made confitti.

Summer Reruns

So I've been doing very poorly with this blog. I'm willing to admit it. But I think it's all due to a weird sort of thinkers block. I haven't been self-analyzing like usual. So, instead of new posts, I've decided to run never before seen episodes of previous lives of mine. This first one is a classic from about a year and a half ago. I was low on funds and decided to write a novel . . .


22 Feb 04


Possible titles to the book that will make me rich:

Better Living Through Culinary Experimentation

Josh Woodburn’s Adventures in Chefland
Maybe just Adventures in Chef Land. Kind of like a fairytale. Plus Josh Woodburn’s anything would be kind of megalomaniacal.

What My Away Message Doesn’t Tell you
I like this one, but AOL doesn’t deserve the kind of recognition that my extraordinary tale will give it. Plus Ted Turner is probably an asshole. But I don’t even know.

More coming, I guess. But those are pretty good. All it needs now is a really nice graphic on the front, and good font, because people don’t read books for content anymore, they just do it for style and prestige. Especially the Border’s gang, who know but don’t know, ya know?

I also thought about calling it

Rules for Experimental Cooking

but that sounded way to cookbookish. This chicken is making me sick. I think. I’m also extremely hungover. But cookbookish may be want I want. That way I can throw recipes into the mix, adding an exciting twist. Not really funny though. I guess I’m not looking for funny, just looking to express myself. But it’d be nice if I could sell this stuff to Bandai or something as science fiction and. No.

So let’s recount the events of last night? Nah. Nothing too exciting. But this morning is funny. So I wake up at 9 am to the sound of Novot plugged in again. I realize he’s not trying to be rude, but he yells into his microphone. Wakes me up every damn time. So I took my glasses off and went back to sleep. (I ended the night last night with a plate of food and goodness, using Tank Girl to put me to sleep. This works really well, but I always end up with my glasses broken. Not this time. Nice.) So I roll over, go back to sleep until high noon. Which in Wisconsin, in February, is a deep grayish brown, with flecks of cold as hell and dirty fuckin snow.


Drunken Stale Hotdogs While Watching Tank Girl at 4am


2 bun length hotdogs, preferably old
1¾ buns, stale
1 pickle
¼ cup Ketchup
Mustard

This is a very exciting dish. Start by finding the right hotdog buns behind the new ones. Novot claims the food Diane gave wasn’t picked out for him, but there are definitely a dozen buns in the front of the ones left over from the superbowl. Not to mention the six pounds of sliced meat and three pounds of cheese. When retrieving the hotdogs from the slime at the bottom of the meat bin, make sure to grab a slice of cheese and a couple of pieces of salami. The bags are already open for easy access.

Using a medium saucepan, bring some water to a boil over a high heat. Put the hotdogs in the water, careful to splash the boiling water onto your feet. This creates an unpleasant sensation. Steam the buns by setting a large, thin pizza pan with holes over the saucepan. This serves a double purpose. First, it steams the buns in the hotdog steam, giving them a full-bodied flavor. It also sets up a nasty burnt thumb for later on.

The next step is slicing the pickle. It obviously needs to be sliced long ways, so get the biggest knife you own. Carefully cleave the pickle down the center, creating a hotdog-esque presentation. Do not cut your fingers. Pull the hotdogs from the water using a small spoon, and drop them, one at a time, onto the floor. When you pick them up, knock the buns and hot pizza pan onto yourself and yell. Finally, burn your thumb badly on the pizza pan, and throw the hotdogs into the sink.

Plate the mixture of buns, hotdog, and pickle onto the plate so that the ketchup will not stay inside. Drop the ketchup bottle. Make sure to put a little extra ketchup on the side of the plate and the counter. Use the mustard bottle a chance to get yellow crusty goo on your burnt thumb, and then drop the bottle into your hot dog. Lick it clean and put everything away. Serves 1.

Copious amounts of water compliment this meal nicely.



So I wake up at twelve and immediately step in my plate of ketchup. I wipe my foot off and watch an hour of the history channel special on Angels with Novot. I fondly remember that Mikey has rented Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for PS2, and play that for about an hour. Now I’m starting to get hungry. Which reminds me that I have laundry in the dryers from yesterday.

Away Message for laundry retrieval:

Laundry, Day 2.

So you might remember the message yesterday about me being a weird urban laundry cowboy junkie duck hunter. Still true.

But also true is the fact that I fell yesterday in the snow and cracked my ass. So then I got drunk again. Which means when I picked my laundry up today from the dryers where they stayed overnight, I was yet again a weird hungovernope still drunk junkie cowboy hobo tramp, who needs to brush his teeth.

Young Shakespeare

So I'm digging through old school stuff today to try and find some semblance of a transcript I can copy over to my medical school application. ( Which seems sort of like a double irony, doesn't it? Trying to copy grades? ) So I have my dresser taken apart, which is to say that I have a chair propped up underneath the long flat piece of wood with piles of laundry on it that used to be the back of my desk before I dropped it off the truck, in order to get at the original primary support ( which is my beat up filing drawer, turned on end, held together with duct tape and pictures of beautiful women cut from fashion magazines ). So I'm rummaging through all the classes that I don't remember shit from, and I find a poetry book I wrote in during middle school.

Turns out I was depressed from about birth to 2001.

THE MUTE BROTHER
The sweetness of the cherry tart
grows weary with the spiders art
Begining's finish, and ends the start
the hunters problems are those of smart
The friskiness of the daylight bear
impatient with the midnight hare
grows barren and to not the scare
of the land it seeks with cordial ware.
And yet, if not, the bear should say
"But what of this, the passing day?"
Rabbit's reply to the frank cliche,
"Yes, but friend, I'm on my way."
Hibernation did have its fun
business is not everyone
Still bears and bees seek not the sun
but honey from the hunters gun.
So rabbits kill without remorse
and rivers tend to change their course
when bears talk loud with their voice
of bark and bite and words of choice.
So today, young pupils, what has been learned
Besides the fact of a bare bear burned?
the animals and quite such yearned,
men themselves have death earned.
Hunt not thy friends of forest seat
Spare your brothers fancy treat
Cook the ones without the feet
Drop the gun, and spare the meat.



-Josh, who even at 11 was such a little veggie lefty radical. Or maybe its social commentary about American colonialism. Or its a broken hearted love poem. I can't tell.