Yearly Archives: 2013

I still miss Dave Thomas

I’m still really upset that Dave Thomas is dead. I know he passed away like fifteen years ago, I don’t really know how many years, and I don’t feel like looking it up, but it feels like fifteen years. Actually, it doesn’t feel like fifteen years at all. It’s just that, as I get older, and I look back at things that have happened in the past, for some reason it feels like everything happened within the past year.

Maybe it’s because I love Wendy’s so much, but Dave’s absence from this world is sometimes too much to bear. I used to love watching TV, because Dave used to be like the Wendy’s mascot. He starred in pretty much every one of their commercials. Remember that one for Wendy’s at-the-time new spicy chicken sandwich? It was Dave sitting across from some mean looking southwestern guy. Each man hands the other his own spicy chicken sandwich. Dave takes a bite of the opponent’s, chews it, and doesn’t really give much in the way of any facial expressions. The other guy offers Dave a glass, “Water?” “No, thanks.”

And now it’s the other guy’s turn. He takes a bite of Wendy’s spicy chicken and his face immediately gets red. Now it’s Dave’s turn. “Water?” The other guy can’t even respond, he’s making a really pained facial expression, he just takes the glass and downs the whole thing.

It wasn’t just commercials. Dave had a vested interest in every one of his stores. He used to pop in at random locations across the country and start flipping burgers, taking orders. Naysayers would be like, “Oh big deal, he shows up and gets his photo taken holding a spatula every once in a while, that’s nothing more than a glorified photo-op.” But it was more, because after the photographers had left, the employees would be like, “OK, Mr. Thomas, we can take it from here.” But Dave wouldn’t leave. He’d insist on finishing his shift. Even afterwards, he’d get on his hands and knees and start scrubbing the floors, changing the fry oil, all of the hard, dirty work. And then he’d buy everyone a round of Frosties before he left.

He’d been a hard worker at an early age. When Dave was like twelve or thirteen, he got a job at a local diner, somewhere. I think he was from like Detroit or Cleveland or Chicago, one of those big cities somewhere in the middle of America. Legend has it that one night, every employee at this restaurant called out sick at the same time. Not one to back away from an honest night of hard work, Dave stepped up to the plate and waited on every single table. People in Akron, or Cincinnati – it was somewhere out there, I can’t remember exactly – they still talk about that night, saying he personally handled over two hundred tables through the course of dinner.

I got so inspired after I heard that story, I tried to replicate his feat of serving fortitude. But by halfway through my shift, I looked at my checks, I’d only gotten through six so far. Man, I’d have to really step it up if I even hoped at coming close to Dave’s record. I ran my ass off for the rest of the night, busing tables, taking orders anywhere I could. I think I turned some heads. It might have been in my imagination, but I thought I heard my boss say something like, “Wow, what’s gotten into Rob?” I was channeling Dave Thomas’s spirit. If only my boss accidentally called me Dave instead of Rob, my night would have been complete.

Well, also if I could have taken some more tables, that would have made my night even more complete. Because despite my best efforts, I still only came in at around eleven checks. The second half of the night wasn’t nearly as busy as the first. And then, I don’t know why I did it, but I took a fifteen-minute break right in the middle of the dinner rush. I was just so tired! I really needed to just sit down and have a glass of iced tea.

Still, even though I didn’t come close that night, I always have something to reach for. Thank you, Dave, wherever you are. You’re an inspiration to the service industry. I hope that in the afterlife, whichever god or goddess presides over heaven, I hope they like Big Bacon Classics. I love Big Bacon Classics. It’s definitely my go-to sandwich at Wendy’s. That and the spicy chicken. I get both. The fries … eh, honestly, McDonald’s fries are hard to beat. But nobody picks a fast-food place solely based on the fries. In terms of sandwiches, Wendy’s is king. Thanks Dave.

Movie Review: The Heat

The Heat is a buddy cop movie. But there’s a twist: the buddy cops are coppettes. Can you believe they made a woman police officer movie? With women? That’s kind of the gist we get from the opening sequence, Sandra Bullock leads a SWAT team into a house, nobody listens to her, and the all-male task force is almost happy when a thorough inspection of the scene turns up negative.

Not so fast. Sandra Bullock isn’t like most other cops. She’s a woman. She checks under the table for drugs. And behind that wall for guns. Bingo. If only all of the guy cops could stand to be around her for more than ten seconds. They hate her. She’s so annoying. “I wonder why she doesn’t have a boyfriend,” some dude sarcastically wonders out loud.

It’s the old try-twice-as-hard-to-get-half-as-far dilemma, as evidenced by this accomplished federal agent’s inability to convince her boss that she deserves a promotion. “It’s just that,” her boss tries to break it to her gently, “nobody likes you.” And yeah, it’s not a very subtle gender bias, but they’re laying it on thick on purpose.

After a sweeping seventies cop-movie intro sequence, filled with this huge sweeping camera shot tour of New York City, the plot of the movie picks up, leading Bullock to go after a drug smuggling ring … in Boston. Someone should have told her that the Queensboro Bridge heads toward Long Island, but whatever, I’m sure that, once off camera, she must have realized her mistake and asked for directions, because she makes it to Boston in no time.

That’s where we meet Melissa McCarthy. Whereas nothing Sandra Bullock achieves seems to earn her the respect that she desires, McCarthy has thrown all sense of professionalism in the garbage. She knows that the system sucks, that it’s inherently unfair for her as a woman. So she does whatever she wants. She doesn’t try to get her coworkers to like her or to respect her accomplishments. No, when she doesn’t get her way, she curses, she threatens to smash people’s heads in, she plays Russian roulette with a guy’s penis, she’s a real loose cannon.

And surprisingly, this dynamic works. It’s a really funny, entertaining movie. When I saw the trailer, I thought it looked lame, cliché. I was like, didn’t Sandra Bullock already do the whole FBI agent role? I didn’t get it. And then I saw clips of McCarthy cursing and acting like lunatic, I thought, OK, she’s really riding that Bridesmaids character all the way.

But it works. The jokes are funny. Everything is really over the top. The only time that I felt like the movie got a bit carried away was when they started blatantly saying stuff like, “It really is hard for us women.” The whole theme of women in the workplace, it’s obvious just by having these two women team up and try to take down a drug kingpin. You don’t necessarily have to have anybody shooting a bad guy in the penis – which actually happens – to drive home the message that our conception of law enforcement is that it’s still a very male dominated industry.

Another reason why I think this movie is a success is because we’re so familiar with the buddy cop genre. Two cops with wildly different dispositions and philosophies are forced to team up, in turn overcoming their mutual distrust while at the same time learning more about themselves. They get carried away, they get taken off the case, they decide to go forward with the investigation anyway, and everything pays off in the end. Normally, a movie like this would get me upset. How dare the movie studios make such a derivative film and expect me to pay money for it?

But it’s the perfect vehicle for two women to take the lead. Because the plot is all but laid out already, it allows the characters to focus on how and why it’s different for them as women. Why should we care about a cop’s gender? I can’t help but feel that it’s one of those movies that’s almost more worried about getting male viewers to buy tickets than it is for females. Based on personal experience, it’s much easier for a woman to go on a date with a guy to see an action movie or a blockbuster or a comedy than it is for them to go see a romance or a chick-flick. This is the kind of rare exception that would probably satisfy both audiences.

A lot of it has to do with the dialogue, with McCarthy’s comedic presence. I got the image of cameras just running on her constantly, taping long improvised rants of obscenities and violent fantasies, and then they’d take the best stuff and edit it down for the movie. And even the stuff that did seem written out was equally as funny. There’s an absurd scene involving a botched tracheotomy at a Denny’s. It’s one of the most insane yet original bits I’ve seen in a long time.

Am I gender biased by continually writing about how surprised I am that I enjoyed this movie? I have no idea. I’d like to think no, because I’m usually surprised when I enjoy any movie. But again, I’m always reluctant to see a girlie movie. Why? Because I’m a guy, I don’t know, and no offense, but a lot of girlie movies out there put me to sleep.

The initial summer blockbusters have come and gone, and now it’s hit-or-miss comedies and action flicks until August and September. The Heat definitely hits. Go check it out.

I was a victim of road rage

People think road rage is a big joke. Maybe. I don’t really know. I didn’t really ask anybody what they thought about road rage, or about anything else really. I just thought that it would be a good way to open up this discussion about road rage. And by discussion, I mean me, talking, discussing, kind of a one-sided thing, sure. But it doesn’t matter, like I said, it was just an opening, a way for me to say something like: people think it’s a big joke, but it’s not a joke. It’s serious.

I should know. I’ve been the victim of road rage several times. What I mean to say is, road rage has hijacked my mind on a number of occasions, leaving me completely vulnerable to wild mood swings while on the road. And to be slightly more literal, if it’s even possible to be more or less literal, one time for example, and I’m just going to get the punch line out of the way here early so you don’t think I’m wasting your time, it turned out that I was driving next to this giant truck, a giant polished steel truck, it was like cruising next to a huge mirror.

And so I had a big case of road rage against myself. I was both the perpetrator and the victim, which is really like double victimhood, because I happen to think that if you’re in the grips of a bad case of road rage, it’s out of your hands entirely, you’re just another victim of your own angry driving. But this time, with the mirrors, it was twice as bad. I looked to my right, again, it was me, my reflection, but I didn’t know this at the time, not yet, I was just minding my own and I just saw this joker staring back at me.

“Why don’t you keep your eyes on the road buddy!” I screamed out the window, but he (me) was screaming something back. You know where this is going to go right? Yeah, it was me. I was working myself up into a real frenzy. But somewhere in the middle of the rage, a rational part of my head kicked in, it said, Rob, what are you going to solve by screaming at this doofus? Why not try killing him with kindness?

I thought, yeah, I’ll smile and wave, give a really big exaggerated thumbs-up. That’ll show this asshole. So I did it, and I keep saying this over and over again, but it was my own reflection, so as I saw me try to kill myself with kindness, my fury came roaring back, I think I became more violent than ever. I started honking, I swerved a little closer to the right. No luck, because, seeing as how it was just me, it looked like this guy was trying the same trick.

Wow, I thought, this guy doesn’t fuck around. Maybe it was time to cool it off a little bit before something dangerous happened. I put my foot on the brakes and the mirror truck took off in front of me. I instantly realized what was going on, and I’d never felt more stupid. I looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror. My face was beet red, the veins by my temples bulging and pulsating.

I made a promise to myself right there that I’d turn my attitude around, for real this time, for good. Whatever it is that’s the opposite of road rage, I’d do that starting right that minute. It was time for a whole new outlook on motorized transportation. So I stopped at the light and turned my blinker on to make the next right. But I looked to the side and, to the right of me was another car, it wanted to go left. Huh, that was funny, we were in different lanes, he needed to make a left, I needed to make a right. We’d have to cross.

Normally something like this would have instantly caused me to start revving my engine, inching up closer to ensure that, the exact second that the light turns green, maybe even just before, that I’d be the one to turn first, me. But that was the old me. The new me wanted to be friendly, compassionate, so I waved the car on to go first.

Again, I don’t want to beat around the bush, but it wound up being another mirror truck. I’m not sure if it was the same one or if there was some sort of a mirror truck convoy going on, but you can imagine what happened next. No you go. No, you go. No, I insist. Seriously, I’m not moving. Well I’m not either. Well who the hell do you think you …

And then the mirror truck moved and I realized what was going on, again, I couldn’t believe it. So I started laughing. You’ve just got to let things go sometimes, right? You’ve just got to bow to the absurd and let it all roll off your shoulders.

But then the cop behind me hit his lights. “Pull over.” I pulled over. “What seems to be the problem officer?”

“Are you serious? I’ve been watching you for ten minutes, screaming, laughing, and now you’re just stopped here at this green light. What are you drunk?”

And I know I shouldn’t have resisted, but that cop just got me so pissed off, I got into a pulled-over rage, which, I’d like to make the distinction between road rage. If anything, it was curb rage, because, yeah, I pulled over. That dumb cop. I was the victim here! We were both victims! But he wouldn’t listen. He made me get out of the car and walk the line and blow into the breathalyzer, and when it came out clean, when I stood on one foot while counting backwards from fifty, he still wrote me a ticket, five hundred dollars and a four-point violation for road rage. It wasn’t road rage! I’m getting so angry just thinking about it! I’m a fucking victim here, goddamn it! And why the hell would a truck be covered by totally polished mirrors on the sides? What kind of a purpose does that serve?

Am I gender biased by assuming that whoever broke into my house was a guy?

I wrote about how our house got broken into and burglarized a couple of weeks ago. Whatever, by this point it’s old news. My wife and I are fine and, it’s cliché to say, but it was just stuff that got stolen. Everything is just material, it’s all replaceable. Everything except for about a month’s worth of writing. That kind of stung. Ever since then I’ve been struggling to reproduce all that I’ve lost.

But it’s like, I really don’t remember a lot of what I wrote. Or I might have an idea of where I was going, but individual paragraphs? Those subtopics that make up a whole piece? I have no idea. A lot of the stuff that I write, even if I have a plan as to where I’m headed, it just pops into my head as I go along. It’s like this cashew piece that I put up a little while ago. That was a rewrite. After the robbery I tried to make a list of all of the things I had written about. It’s much easier to get going if I at least have a direction.

And so I remembered, oh yeah, I wrote some over-the-top thing about cashews. And so I wrote another over-the-top piece about cashews. But what I wound up writing turned out to be much different than the original. I guess the overall feeling was the same, but those beats, they were all just kind of made up on the spot.

And whereas before I had that huge safety net, like I said, I was about a month ahead of myself, now I’m just trying to commit to building that surplus back up. It’s going to happen, I’ll get back eventually. But right now I’m like, OK, every day, get these things written, let’s do this, I have to do this. That’s a lot of unnecessary pressure. Especially like on days when I have to work, when I only have a fixed amount of time to get my writing done. I don’t have the luxury of staring off into space and daydreaming for an hour or two in hopes of finding something funny or interesting to write about.

That’s right now, I have like twenty minutes before I have to leave. I started thinking about what I’m doing, about that robbery. Specifically, my wife told me how she was telling people at work about the incident. By this point, we’ve both told so many people the details, we’ve covered it individually from countless different perspectives. The story is down. If you come up to me and start asking me about what happened, all of my answers are totally programmed into my head.

And so while my wife was answering some question, explaining how the guys must have jumped the fence, climbed up the gutter and balanced on the air conditioner while breaking in through the bathroom window, some guy interrupted her and said something to the effect of, “Don’t you think you’re being a little gender-biased in assuming that the robbers were male?”

My wife told this to me and I was like, “You’re kidding, right? Someone actually said that to you? Was he making a joke?” He did say it and, as far as my wife could tell, he wasn’t joking around.

Say what you want about gender equality, while I don’t have footage of the robbery, I’m almost positive that it wasn’t a couple of women that burglarized our house. I want to say that I’m one hundred percent positive, but yeah, I guess theoretically it could have been women. Although, come on, just think about it, I can’t exactly explain my certainty, but I am certain. I’m absolutely convinced that it was at least two men who committed the robbery.

Is it wrong of me to think so? Am I being gender biased? I don’t think so. You just don’t see women, or, you don’t see too many reports of women going around engaging in this type of criminal behavior. But that’s beside the point. Is that what gender equality is all about? Is that where we’re supposed to be headed as a species, that when something wrong goes down, we’ll all be able to say to ourselves, “Well, whoever did this, let’s be mindful of the fact that it could have been either a man or a woman.”

It doesn’t matter. I want something to identify with when I imagine these assholes. I don’t want a vague sense that possibly any human being could have been involved. Of course, I don’t want to go so far as to imagine an identity, an ethnicity or anything like that. I’d feel like a jerk, like a racist. But I don’t feel bad at all in my certainty that it was a couple of dudes.

Whatever, it’s over. I just hope that guy was joking around with my wife. Because who interrupts someone talking about how their house got broken into with such a ridiculous question? It just seems a little insensitive, like there might be a better time or place to talk about gender bias.

BonChon Chicken

Sometime last year my wife started talking about this chicken place that she found out about with her sister. “It’s so good! You have to come with us! We can’t get enough of this chicken!” over and over again she’d tell me, every time she’d go out with her sister it was the same deal, “This chicken is the greatest!”

And it was annoying, seeing my wife and my sister-in-law this happy, over chicken. Watching them talk about their experience at this restaurant, I’d think to myself, I don’t ever get to that level of joy about anything in life, let alone fried chicken, and so I sank my heels in deep, determined not to let myself try the chicken, lest I start to believe that maybe this type of happiness might be real.

I was afraid, deep down, that I’d buy into whatever hype they’d bought into, and then after trying the chicken, I’d be naturally disappointed. I’d come back home with a stomach full of grease and I’d wonder, am I fully here? Is there something wrong with me, preventing me from enjoying what everyone else seems to be genuinely in love with?

Just let them get it out of their system, I figured, they’ll eat it to the point where they get sick of it and then we can all get back to our miserable, regular lives as usual. But the chicken fever, it wasn’t running its course. If anything, their love for this chicken place was growing deeper, stronger in intensity.

And try as I might to make them keep their chicken business to themselves, it got to the point where their occasional, “Rob, you really should try this chicken place,” snowballed into a daily, “Rob! I order you to try this chicken! Rob! I’m serious!” But like I said, I had already made up my mind. For better or for worse, I’m a stubborn guy, a real asshole, and so this went on for weeks, me, just trying to go about my life, attempting ever more unsuccessfully to evade this fried chicken propaganda.

One day I was getting off from work and my wife was like, “I’m getting off from work too. Let’s meet up and grab a bite to eat.” In a lapse of judgment, I agreed. She told me where we’d meet, but failed to mention the place. I showed up a little earlier than she did only to find that I’d been duped.

There it was, BonChon Chicken. I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming. It’s like, I don’t think my wife had eaten anything else besides BonChon Chicken for the past month, and here I was being guided to a restaurant of her choosing. Of course it was going to be BonChon Chicken. Had I really missed such an obvious trap? Or had a part of me started to cave? Somewhere from behind my active consciousness, was my brain maybe starting to at least wonder if any part of this hysteria might not in fact be true?

Reluctantly, I went inside and sat down at a table. BonChon? What kind of a place is this, Korean? I like Korean food, but I’ve never really made any sort of connection between kimchi and fried chicken. And that’s what the menu was all about. Legs, thighs, kimchi, scallion pancakes. Whatever, I was hungry and this place actually seemed pretty cool, that aroma wafting through the air …

Snap out of it Rob, I tried to ground myself back into my skeptical mind, let’s have a bite first, at least. I ordered the scallion pancake, some kimchi, and some assorted legs and thighs, some of them spicy, some of them garlic and soy sauce. “Ha!” I said to my wife after placing the order, “That’s not a fried chicken flavor!” But I just sounded like an idiot.

And I can admit that now, because as soon as I took that first bite, everything changed. I did a complete mental one-eighty. This was the best fried chicken I had ever had in my life. I’m not like a fried chicken connoisseur or anything, but I’ve eaten it elsewhere, I’ve made it in my own kitchen with varying degrees of success. Whatever, it’s fried chicken.

But BonChon is fried fucking chicken. It’s like, I have no idea how they do what they do with legs and thighs. Somehow the chicken winds up coming out of their kitchen almost too perfect in appearance. If you asked a professional artist to render the ideal fried chicken leg, he wouldn’t even come close to what BonChon is able to achieve.

The chicken skin is somehow not only fried to crispy perfection, but it balloons out slightly, absorbing whatever flavor it’s seasoned with, becoming one with the skin, and expanding just enough past the meat to where your first bite, it’s like crunchy skin, pause, then juicy meat. You know what I’m saying? When you have your standard fried chicken, the skin always kind of slides around on top of the meat, so when you start to dig in, you wind up swallowing most of it during those first two or three bites. But BonChon skin, it’s like its own entity, it’s almost structurally apart from the rest of the meat, ensuring that eat bite of chicken has at least a little bit of delicious, chewy, almost candy-like skin.

I’m a total convert. I wound up polishing off eight pieces on my first time. And every time my wife brings home a box, or I wind up sneaking away for more, I can’t help but finish every last morsel of meat from each bone. It’s almost crazy how good this chicken is. I like to brag about how much I can eat and all of the different foods that I’ve had, but BonChon is levels ahead of anywhere near where I’ve been before. I see that plate of chicken and it’s like I black out, like I get possessed by something inside, something primal, and the next thing I know I’m staring in disbelief at all of the bones that I’ve made short work of.

Go to BonChon Chicken. It’s a chain. There are several locations in New York. It’s usually crowded, so be prepared to wait. I hope this thing takes off and puts all other fried chicken places out of business. I hope that someday there is a BonChon on every corner. Hey President of South Korea, maybe it almost seems like too easy of a solution, but if all else fails with the whole North Korea stalemate, you might as well try some BonChon diplomacy. Fly them some chicken. Watch the Kim regime dissolve as they beg for more. It could happen, I really think it might work.