Knows it all; Eats flora

I didn’t do it on purpose.

One day, I decided to buy a grocery basket full of produce to eat for dinner. If a basket holds six roma tomatoes, three red potatoes, curly red kale, twenty-six crimini, two zucchini, a pepper in each color, eight carrots, two parsnips and a rutabaga, there is no room for bacon. 

That was my first day as a planteater. I fully expected to start feeling weak or anemic within a week, but that hasn’t happened even after many months. What I have been feeling is vibrant, aware and, okay, a little self-righteous. Because, the thing is, animals aren’t all they’re purported to be, nutritively speaking. 

I know the propaganda tells you otherwise, but here’s the thing: all those “got milk?” ads and “Beef! It’s what’s for dinner!” commercials are put out by the USDA, an organization of farmers set up to protect farmers’ interests (their financial ones, obviously). It ought never have been put in charge of rating our food quality, but there you have it. I’m not talking about Old MacDonald’s cute little farm, either; Financially, the big players run factory farms for beef and dairy cattle, or they grow thousands of acres of corn as food for said cattle (which, if it were up to them, they wouldn’t eat, even if it weren’t genetically altered. Cows eat grass, which grows all over the ground free of charge and can sustain a reasonable cattle population on its own without much intervention from us) Basically, what the USDA tells you about your food has one primary goal: Profit. 

Now let’s get down to it. Milk is bad for you. How do I know this? Because you’re not a baby. Milk is for babies. Allow me to specify: Human milk is for human babies. Goat’s milk is for goat kids, and cow’s milk is for calves (not yours, theirs). At least one third of American adults are dairy intolerant to some degree; 3/4, if you don’t happen to be white; 9/10 if you’re an Asian American (stats from USA Today via the Web). White people are less likely to be made ill by cheese, simply because white people come from Europe, and in Europe, they’ve been eating cheese and drinking milk for centuries; perhaps our baseline level for acceptable intestinal discomfort is higher. Despite growing up in America, I am baffled by milk and revolted by cheese. How can there be entire ad campaigns around the glory of dairy when it’s likely to make at least 1/3 of the population ill?  If measured intolerance to any other food were that broad in scope, it would tend to acquire the label, “poisonous,” or, at best, “Not intended for human consumption.” Instead, milk is right, and we are wrong. We’re lactose intolerant. We have to take a pill to be normal. This ‘disease’ was invented by the pharmaceutical industry to do two things: 1. Make profits by selling drugs that lessen the symptoms without addressing the cause, and 2. Put the focus on lactose, which only makes 1/3 of us sick, so we wouldn’t be too worried about casein making all of us sick. 

Milk is not good for your bones, no matter what that milk-lipped celebrity says. 

Furthermore, anyone who tells you that milk is a good source of muscle-building protein is twisting words to fit their ends, or else they are ignorant of the truth, which is that milk is an excellent source of one protein, which happens to be the only protein scientifically linked to rapid fat cell growth. Casein is the protein that transforms healthy rats into fat rats for obesity studies. It’s making us all fat for one colossal obesity study: How fat can they get before they’ll stop putting cheese all over everything? 

Beef. It’s tasty. I’m much more likely to eat beef than cheese, but I still don’t eat beef, and here’s why: Growing up, we had a cow. Or, I should say, we had a series of cattle, all with the same name, and all of whom we fed and sheltered and nurtured, and eventually butchered for beef. Then we had beef for the whole year– a chest freezer full of the freshest, leanest, pasture-fed beef flesh obtained from an animal I’d looked in the eye. This was okay. We fed each heifer for a year, and in exchange, she fed us for a year, and in the interim, we made her life safe, with food ensured, and the company of other animals, and plenty of space to roam and graze. There is a reciprocity there. This reciprocity exists in hunting as well, and fishing. On a small scale, all these things are fine. In some climates, Until refrigeration happened, if a family hadn’t squirreled enough nuts and grains away for the winter, hunting and fishing might have been the sole source of food for months. We are true omnivores– just look at our teeth. I don’t think meat is inherently damaging to our bodies; I think it’s damaging to our psyche. It is ‘good’ in this context only: We obtain it for ourselves and bear the responsibility of its death. There is no reciprocity in six chops from six different lambs wrapped up in Styrofoam and plastic, all stacked up in neat rows and dated from their deaths for our convenience. 

Please wait …

Sometimes I wish our ‘please wait to be seated’ sign could be updated for the digital age. Maybe show a hostess ETA loading bar, or perhaps a rotating hourglass/pinwheel of death. It could have a motion sensor, so that if you walk past the sign, a robot with a British accent says, “Welcome, visually impaired guest! Our hostess will be right over with a Braille menu for you.”

I guess the sign is pretty confusing. Like, it says please, so it’s optional, right? Kind of like if someone told you, “Please don’t climb that barbed-wire fence,” or “Please keep your dick out of the mayonnaise.” It’s just, like, a suggestion.

There’s absolutely no reason why you should have to wait for the hostess to seat you, because you already know exactly where you want to sit. And nothing so unimportant as a hostess’ seating chart, or fair table rotation, or reservation signs, or people already fucking sitting there, is going to get in the way of that. Kudos; I commend your unyielding nature in this regard. After all, the food is totally going to taste way better at the one dirty table in the restaurant. The only trouble is, no one seems to know you’re sitting there. Maybe it’s because the hostess has a list of all the tables in the restaurant and which server is serving them, and you’re not on it because you couldn’t stand up for three minutes and wait at the front; you had to sit down right now.

But where is that server, anyway? You’ve seen her walk back and forth at least five times carrying armfuls of plates and handfulls of dirty napkins and bottles of ketchup and booster chairs and tea-light candles and a broom and butler and five frothy cosmopolitans. Why hasn’t she come over to get your drink order? If you stand up and go find her in the server station, where she’s pushing stupid little buttons on a computer screen looking like she’s concentrating or something, and you tap her on the shoulder and say, “Can I, like, get some service over there?” maybe she’ll respond really well and come give you the best service ever. As soon as she clears this table, which is, like, totally disgusting because she hasn’t even bothered to take away the dirty napkins or soda glasses, and there’s definitely something sticky all over it.

And that other server looks like she’s not busy at all, I bet she would have had time to clean off this table and get your order in before you starve to death. It looks like she’s only got like two tables over on that side of the dining room. Weird that they don’t try to keep it even, right? 

If you could, would you?

If you could pull of the ultimate hero’s quest and succeed, would you? If you had the ability, the opportunity, and the necessary information to achieve what only the likes of Superman and the Power Puff Girls can achieve– To Save the World– Would go for it?

If I stand in the middle of the street and burn my life savings in cash, I’m a crazy woman. If I consciously work toward truly sustaining myself on my own mettle– rely on no other for sustenance or shelter–yet retain the human urge for companionship– I I am an abnormality. To whom or what do we owe our continued existence?

To the guy who pays the guy who writes

the budget that allocates vast sums of money

to the guy who figures out how to make money

by extracting the vitamins out of our food

and selling them back to us in neat little capsules.

To the man who bought plans from the man

who invented refrigeration

So we could eat meat without getting typhus.

To the companies that sell heat, water and light.

Imagine that: commodified: Heat, Water and Light.

Three great elements of this Earth:

Fire; Water; Air; while the fourth, the Land,

we buy and sell and steal from.

The Earth is a dynamic organism. We are but lice on its head. It can dispense with us as easily. We are as irritating and intolerable and, in the end, expendable, to it. We wonder why it begins to reject us with increasing frequency. We sit about and speculate about global warming; The Globe is heat. We’re on a whirling, boiling, sphere of impossible heat, protected dubiously by a cracked little crust like film on tomato soup. We worry about the economy collapsing; The Economy doesn’t exist. What is money for? If one were truly an Adult, capable of survival on one’s own, one could procure food, shelter, water, and companionship from one’s natural environment, without the need to purchase anything. These things, the only things humans need to thrive, can be found in abundance in nature. There is no need to barter for them. They are for who finds them first. They are to be borrowed from the Land and returned upon our deaths. We need not pay for them except with our waste, which, by the way, smells for a reason– It’s so that we bury it, giving all its gross little microorganisms back to the dirt so that plants can grow in it.

This is how we Save the World.

Or rather, this is how we save ourselves, for the world needs no saving except from us.

Selfish reasons for altruism

Have you ever met one of those people who says that all good deeds are selfish at heart?

There was a whole Friends episode about it once, the one where Phoebe and Joey make a bet that Phoebe can’t do anything nice without feeling good about it, so she goes and gets stung by a bee so that the bee can look cool in front of all his bee friends because she doesn’t know that bees die after they sting you (damn, I feel stupid just typing that).

Well those people are right. Altruism is, at its core, selfish. This is because you are the center of your own reality. Even though we’re all connected, and the ‘butterfly effect’ and causality and all that, we don’t notice the connective web aside from the strands that link to us. Whatever is happening to other people only effects your consciousness if you’re there to witness it. 

So why is this seen as a bad thing? It’s okay to feel good about doing good things; why wouldn’t it be? That’s why the mechanism of warm fuzzy feelings evolved. Altruism is supposed to make you feel good, physiologically and psychologically, because if it didn’t, we’d have killed each other off as a species millennia ago. 

So here are a few nice things you could do this week, and a few purely selfish, 100% egocentric reasons to do them:

• Tip when you order takeout from a sit-down restaurant. The altruistic reason for this is because takeout is a way bigger pain in the ass for your server/bartender than serving the same meal in-house. But even if you don’t give a shit about that, you should tip on takeout anyway, because whoever takes care of you will tell everyone what a nice tip you left on a takeout, and everyone in the restaurant will take note of your face, and next time you come in, someone will actually be eager to help you. They’ll be eager to help you, then they’ll give you a free soda while you wait, then they’ll ask if you want plastic cutlery, napkins and condiments, then they’ll make sure your order actually comes out right, and quickly. They might tell the kitchen to hook you up with extra cheese or whatever. They’ll definitely make you a priority among their other tables instead of tossing you on the back burner. When you get your food, they’ll cash you out with a smile and thank you for your generosity, and genuinely express their desire to see you return. This will happen every time you get takeout from this restaurant. All for an extra four bucks on your $30 check. Or you could save four bucks and get mediocre service and lukewarm food every time.
• Take your dog for a long-ass walk. Not a long walk, around a couple of blocks with a stop at the bodega for a deuce. A long-ass walk, with a faraway destination such as a park across the city, on a mild (not hot) day, with a little backpack with some water, and a snack for each of you, and maybe a Frisbee. And, okay, a deuce. The altruistic reason is: Your dog deserves a long-ass walk, damnit. You wonder why he doesn’t want to poo when you take him out; he knows as soon as he does, you’re gonna turn him around and make him heel the half-block back to your house. But even if don’t care about any of that/you don’t even have a dog, you should take that long-ass walk anyway, because it’s good for you. Not in a 30-minutes-on-the-elliptical, cardio-protects-your-heart kind of way, but in a more basic, vitamin D and ground-beneath-your-feet kind of way. When you get to the park, take of your shoes and run around (with or without dog). Climb a tree. Break out that deuce so you have the confidence to invite the sunbathing co-eds to play Ultimate Frisbee. It’ll be an awesome day, even if it rains. Remember when rain was fun?
• Just buy the round. Obviously, this is a really nice thing to do; your friends don’t have to pay for their first beer. This frees up funds for the third beer, which they hadn’t brought cash for. But this will come right back to you, I promise. There’s about a 50/50 chance you’ll end up saving money. Here’s how: You say those blessed words, “I’ll get this round,” implying that someone else should get the next one. Your friends, not wanting to appear to be douchebags, now have to follow this pattern of buying an entire round. Your bartender’s demeanor immediately softens, because this means that she will not have to open up six separate tabs for one party, or worse, get six drink orders from six guys holding six fistfulls of ones. The next time one of ’em orders, just chime right in. It’s cool; you got the first round. Same goes for the rest of ’em. Seriously, it’s perfectly acceptable; it’s even encouraged. Your bartender might even throw in a free drink for you. Plus it just feels like good camaraderie  you know? “I got this round, guys.”
• You know when you’re in the checkout line with a huge cart of stuff and someone comes up behind you clutching a bottle of pain reliever and some tampons/a can of formula and a screaming baby/a lint roller and a subpoena? Let ’em check out first. Her migraine/its screams/his lawsuit will run its course more smoothly and transition into blessed relief more quickly if you do. Plus, then you don’t have to stand there for eleven minutes getting glared and/or bawled at while the cashier rings in $118.40 of fresh produce and bulk nuts.
• You know that guy who walks in off the street looking really alarmed, asking if you have a public bathroom? Let him use the employee one. If he’s about to explode, for his sake and yours, it’s better if he does it in there, where everything’s covered in tile and nobody has to watch. Plus, for all you know, he’s the new guy at your auto shop, and he never forgets a face.
• Volunteer for something. It doesn’t have to be anything smelly (soup kitchen; nursing home) or messy (disaster relief; daycare). Get involved in something you’re already interested in: Help build sets for a production at your local theater; hand out water and bagels at an athletic meet; referee for a beach volleyball league; dress up all weird and sell wine at an art event; sign up with an organization you’ve never heard of to go somewhere you’ve never been to help people you’ve never met; get out on the open ocean and save you some whales. I don’t even think I have to name the selfish reason; all that stuff sounds fun as shit.  

Everything’s free.

Starting tomorrow, everything’s free.

But what will happen to all the money? Nothing. It’s worthless, and it always has been. Money, in paper form or otherwise, is actually worth less than nothing; its very existence constitutes a debt of the U.S. to the Fed. So let’s stop using it. Everything’s free. 

But what will happen to all the jobs? Will people just stop working because their money is useless because everything’s free? Maybe. The lazy will avoid work, as the lazy tend to. But worthwhile vocations– teaching, medicine, engineering, philosophy, environmental enhancement– along with equally worthwhile “pastimes”– music, visual and dramatic art, writing, games, athletics– would occupy people’s time. Laziness is a social construct, not a natural state. The more you do, the more you want to do.

But won’t people just acquire tons of junk if everything’s free? Maybe some people will, but I doubt it would change anybody’s true nature. I think for most of us, everything being free would almost eliminate the desire to acquire a bunch of stuff in the first place, let alone place enough value in it to fight over it. If we didn’t associate our stuff with the labor through which we obtained the money to buy it, we would place no value in non-practical consumer items. 

Imagine that you’re an employee of a high-end cosmetics company. Your job is to chemically engineer facial moisturizer. This product must look, feel and smell utterly luxurious so that the consumer will believe the moisturizer is worth every penny. The product line you’re in charge of is now free. The product loses its elite standing among facial moisturizers and demand plummets, due to the products inferiority to, say, half a smashed avocado. You lose your job. Yet, everything is free, so you’re not exactly panicking so much as set adrift on a sea of opportunity. To what do you apply your degree in chemical engineering? Turns out your degree in chemical engineering, while no doubt painstaking to obtain, has very little real-world relevance outside of a monetary social system. The question then becomes, to what do you apply your considerable brain power? The answer is: anything you want to. Researching geothermal energy; practicing internal medicine; developing sustainable agriculture; teaching middle-school science; growing avocados to smash up for (free) face cream. Whatever you want. Think outside your college major. It’s all bullshit anyway, designed to keep your worldview small so you’ll willingly submit to a life of servitude to pay off the debt you acquired along with your degree. 

For food, we’ll eat stuff that sprouts up out of the ground. If you get desperate, and you’re into that sort of thing, you can eat the stuff that eats the stuff that sprouts up out of the ground. This is what we’re free to take as heads of the food chain. All we’re supposed to give in return is our waste, that stuff that grosses you out, and which you didn’t want anyway, and which we deny the Earth by flushing it out of sight, collecting it into vast, fetid tanks, and spraying it with antimicrobial chemicals before dumping it into the ocean or sterilizing it for human consumption. 

I’m not saying that every family should have its own sustainable farm. That’s ideal, but not practical, at least not until the Earth gets some serious R&R from all the abuse we’re doling out. But there is still enough farmland on this continent to feed its people, and if you’re among those who don’t know how to cultivate it, then you obtain your food, for free, from the people who do. And in exchange, you can clean their house, or give them massages, or sing them songs, or build their back deck, or teach them how to play pinochle. It doesn’t matter how you pay, because you’re not really paying, because everything’s free. Trade, or the exchange of goods for goods, services for goods, or goods for services, will become what it ought to have remained: an exercise in free will and goodwill. like the exchange of favors among friends. 

What happens to the corporations? They die, because one buys their mass-produced shit anymore. Everyone just gets the good shit for free from their neighbors.

What happens to the mass media? They become irrelevant because no one buys into their mass-produced bullshit anymore. The only reason the mass media even exist is to sell fear to the public. Name one reason why the average Joe Schmo from Buffalo needs to know about literally anything on the national news.

What happens to the banks? They go bankrupt, if we can call it that; the capital in them never existed in the first place, so semantically speaking, I guess they become defunct.

Only the best doctors would be doctors; All the best teachers would want to be teachers; Every truly talented artist and musician and writer would paint or sing or novelize; The brightest minds would be freed; There would be no purpose for war.

Even the richest of the rich have nothing to fear. You do not need your money. Everything’s free.

Don’t do it.

Don’t buy the glasses.

They’re not available to the public yet, but they will be soon. You can sign up to be on a list of people who are allowed to buy one if you want. You’ll be among the first to get them, and you’ll pay only $1,500 or so for the privilege.

 I’m talking about an impending revolution in human communication. It manages the flow of information within your reality. It links into the brain, forcing it to rely on an external computer, a manufactured entity, in order to digitize our perceptions, monitor the daily lives of humans, and to record our actions, reactions and interactions. It turns experiences into data. It equates the two. It suggests, by its very existence, a societal reliance so profound that only a few will notice or comment on the nature of the device or its implications at all.

We’re all responsible for the exponential advance of the digital age. We’ve been pouring data into this vast, invisible network for years. We’ve willingly submitted every detail of our lives. We’ve taken genuine human interaction and reduced it to something auxiliary while we stare into bright little squares and stroke each other’s egos. Soon, we won’t even have to stare down into our hands anymore. Can you imagine? You’ll get to look right at people while totally ignoring them. 

Here’s a list of things you could do if you buy it:

• Never actually learn the name of your street or any of the streets you take to get there.
• Go into a nail salon without a translator and know for sure that they’re making fun of you, instead of just suspecting it.
• Videotape all of your sexual encounters.
• ‘Watch’ that Ryan Gosling movie with your girlfriend while actually watching porn. (She’s getting the same vibe from the movie that you’re getting from the porno, so it’s totally cool.)
• Make a documentary photography series about your life, which is uninteresting from every perspective.
• Compare your food at a restaurant with the photograph on the online menu in order to have grounds for complaint (I was supposed to get a sprig of fresh mint with this, look).
• Watch football during your actual wedding ceremony.
• Go for a run. Sure, you could do that before, but soon you’ll be able to monitor your heart rate, strides per minute, calories burned and total distance all at once, without ever looking down at your wrist, plus you can motivate yourself by throwing on some Muse and chasing a virtual antelope.

It may take a few years, but a time will come when everyone’s got the glasses. Not that I hope for this, but I’m a realist. They’re just neat. I anticipate this time with a kind of muted foreboding; real dread will come later, the first time I come face-to-face with one of these spectacle pioneers and am expected to communicate through a computer to someone who is standing right in front of me. But soon everyone will have them but me. Y’all already have bright little squares grafted to your fingers and robots to keep you from getting lost in the big, bad city, so I find it hard to believe there’ll be all that many holdouts, but I’m hoping for at least a few so I have someone to hang out with who doesn’t have a digital recorder for a face. 

The city in spring and other smells

So I tried this new breathing technique on one of my longer runs the other day.

I picked up this particular tip on nomeatathlete.com. In essence, the post touts the benefits of closed-mouth breathing. This, as I discovered, should not be confused with nose-breathing. As it turns out, nose-breathing while running in the cold, in a polluted-ass city, hurts. It makes your sinuses burn. It also makes your nose hairs pick up mucous at an alarming rate, probably because they’re trying to keep a zillion little pollutants out of your lungs, but I digress. I stuck it out for a little over half of the run, but after the turnaround, when the wind picked up and clouds shrouded the sun, and I had resorted to continual snot-rockets in order to keep up the nose breathing, I thought “bag it,” and started mouth-breathing like a normal person. Two things happened: My rate of exertion instantly increased; and my form began to erode. The burning in my sinuses actually didn’t go away at first. It slowly faded over about two days.

I learned a couple of things from this. Primarily, I learned that the breath technique I need to practice isn’t nose-breathing; it’s neutral breathing, otherwise known as deep or diaphragm breathing. It’s the process of drawing air into the lungs by means of exercising the diaphragm, which sits directly below them. Cheetahs and other felines use this technique when they run, too. Air is drawn in and out by expanding and compressing this muscle, which acts like a bellows. Squeeze it to force air out, expand it to draw air in. This is how good singers sing well. It’s how saxophone players hold enough air for all that jazz. It’s apparently what I should have been doing instead of sucking air in through my nostrils and giving myself a headache.

I also learned a no-brainer: The city in the spring smells bad. Like stale beer and a hint of fresh cat urine were poured into a glass vase half full of gasoline and left to decant in the sun, in a greenhouse, next to a feedlot. No wonder it felt like I snorted alka-seltzer laced with wasp venom. A stank that strong can only mean some nasty particles in the air.

Turns out, the gym isn’t any better. The smell is better, at first, though acrid and faintly yeasty, how most gyms tend to smell. Alas, the minor olfactory improvement is shortlived: Polly Pilates has decided that today is the day to start that treadmill routine, and gosh darn it, she was gonna do it smelling like Abercrombie & Fitch barfed on her tights, or else what’s the point, right?

Just shave your head already

You might as well cut your losses and go for that Bruce Willis look, because your hair looks stupid. It looks like Captain Picard rolled around in a pile of lint and ashes. Just shave your head already. I know you’re too  young to be going bald, but it’s happening anyway, trust me. Every time  you take a shower, about six dozen of those struggling little hairs decide, “fuck it,” and jump ship. Most of them wash down the drain to slowly amalgamate into a hairball roughly the size and weight of a large ferret. The rest of the hairs end up sitting at the bottom of the tub, where they will remain, because they’re so thin and frail that even the finest of tweezers cannot grasp them.

I don’t know why you’re so attached to it anyway. Plenty of cool guys are bald. There are, however, absolutely no cool guys with colorless monk hair/bowl cuts gone topless. It’s not for your sake that I’m suggesting this radical solution, though; I’ve got a self-serving motive. I don’t want to take shaths anymore. What’s a shath? It’s what I end up getting every time I try to take a shower, because your amalgamated drain ferret is slurping up water like a fiend, engorging himself, and creating an insurmountable blockage in the drain pipe with his fat ferret ass. This results in a murk puddle, which I stand in, submerged to mid-calf, for the duration of my shower. That shower, since you won’t just shave your head already, has now become, paradoxically, the dirtiest task of the day, after which I must suspend myself in a pull-up position on the shower bar in order to wash soap scum and two-inch hairs off my feet.

Just shave your  head already. And while you’re at it, do some general body grooming with that razor, because you’re molting. Great patches of your body hair seem to be falling out while you urinate. I’m a little alarmed for you, actually. Is it on purpose, or does it just happen? Do you stand there pulling out pubes while you pee and sprinkling them over the bowl like confetti? Does all that just fall out when you unbutton your shorts? Is it static-charged to stick to the rim, or do you have to pee first, then sprinkle, so as not to let any go to waste? 

I don’t know why it even bothers growing back; it’s obvious your follicles are not ideal living environments for hair. Maybe eat an avocado or something. Just saying. 

That which you masticate, masticates twice

This one’s from my sister, who used to wait tables in the cocktail section of a boobs-and-burgers type place in the mall. A guest receives her fried Buffalo wings and digs in eagerly, chins wobbling. Halfway through the first wing, she stops and draws the tender niblet back from her maw in horror as one bulging eye catches sight of a minuscule feather poking out of the inedible cartilage wingtip. 

“WHAT. Is this.” She plucks the feather from its gristly pore with two violet talons and holds it before my sister’s face, shaking it to and fro with agitation.

“That? That’s a feather, ma’m.”

“And WHAT. Is it doing. In my food.” 

“Well, Ma’m, it did used to be a bird.”

It takes about three seconds for this lady to bark for the manager, but in the intervening three seconds, I imagine the look of astonishment and revulsion on her face as her brain tries to comprehend that chicken, whose tender flesh and scrumptious, slimy skin she’d fed on since she was but a wee tot, was the dead version of a live animal which has wings and feathers. 

You’d think this type of thinking regarding food as a rarity, reserved only for batty ladies who sit alone eating 18 chicken wings at the mall, but it’s not. Plenty of people have no real concept of where their food comes from. Just this week, I’ve tried to explain grass-fed beef to three different people who could not seem to grasp that beef comes from cows, who are live creatures who have diets. 

Bro: “What’s good here?”

Know-it-All, wishing this guy wasn’t forcing her to stereotype his diet preferences based on looks: “We have a delicious Mediterranean pasta dish, and any of our flatbread pizzas are great, but you know what I love? The grass-fed burger.”

Bro: “Yeah, right, do I look like I eat anything made out of grass?”

Know-it-All: “Well, sir, it’s grass-fed. It’s a regular cheeseburger; ours is made with grass-fed beef, which means that the cow was fed a diet of grass, as opposed to corn. It’s a higher-grade of meat, much leaner, and ours is organic, too.”

His enlightened response: ” … The cow?”

Yeah, guy, the cow. The animal that was slaughtered so that you could enjoy a delicious cheeseburger in this establishment. That cow.

One time, 12 seconds after I’d walked in the door, before I’d even clocked in, I got stuck answering the phone.

Lady: “Yeah, I ordered takeout from you guys earlier today?”

Know-it-All, trying hard not so sound like she’s chewing up a bit of Clif bar: “Uh-huh?”

Lady: “Uh, well, I just gotta complain, because our order was all wrong, like we got this veggie burger special, and it was all red in the middle. We couldn’t eat it.”

Know-it-All, thinking maybe Chef was getting weird with beets again: “Well, I’m not sure what the lunch specials were today, let me check …There wasn’t a veggie burger on the specials today; are you sure you ordered from here? Sometimes people confuse our name with another restaurant that starts with the same letter because it’s on the same street.” (Seriously, that happens all the time.)

“Yeah, it was a grass-feed burger? And it seemed like meat, and it was all red inside. We was like, what is this? This is gross.”

“Ma’m, the grass-fed burger?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“That’s made out of cow. You ordered something you thought was a burger patty made out of grass? What’s wrong with you?” Okay, that last part I didn’t say out loud, but seriously? The best part was that she wanted her money back, but she lived out of town, and she wanted to know if we could just “mail a check or something.” Yeah, all right lady, good luck with that. I’ll see if the manager’s available.

 

This last one’s my favorite, because not only did this guy not understand the concept of his food having previously eaten food, but he refused to admit this in front of his date, who was smirking behind her hand the whole time.

Macho Man: Do you have just a regular burger?

Know-It-All, pointing at Macho Man’s menu: “Sure. The grass-fed cheeseburger? You can get that however you want, it doesn’t have to have cheese or bacon.” 

Macho: “But, like, a regular burger though.”

Know-it-All: “You mean, like, with conventional beef?”

Macho, looking really confused now: “Never mind, I’ll just get these sliders.”

“Okay … I mean, those are made with grass-fed beef too, though.”

Macho gives me a blank stare.

“It tastes like regular meat, it’s just that it’s better– beef raised on corn is fattier and–“

Macho, cutting me off mid-sentence: “Yeah, I know what it is.” Laughs. “I’ll get the regular burger.” Spreads his chest and looks over at his date, who nods encouragingly and pats him on the shoulder.

Look, Macho, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with asking questions to educate yourself, but if you’re going to interrupt my answer with your own bluster, then good luck with that. Sorry you get grossed out thinking about your dinner as a live animal, but you asked. You can only keep your distance from your food for so long. 

Sorry, but we’re fresh out of alcohol

Allow me to begin with a cliche: There’s a time and a place for everything. 

For you, the time for walking around by yourself shit-ass wasted is 4 p.m., and the place for parking your shit-wasted ass is at my four-seater corner table by the window (i.e. the best one). Whereas, for me, 4 p.m. is the time for enjoying a coffee and a Clif bar in the twelve seconds of pre-dinner-rush peace, which I typically have, which you have now shattered; and, for me, my four-top by the window is the place to make money, not the place to babysit you. Unfortunately for both of us, when you and I disagree about what’s appropriate to do at 4 p.m. at my four-top by the window, we’re forced to reach a set of mutually disagreeable compromises: I will bring you a drink menu when you bark for it across the restaurant, but I absolutely do not have to serve you anything from it. I have to answer your asinine, context-less queries– be it “What’s brunch?” or “What’s an option?” but I do not have to, nor could I hope to, decipher the slurred, nasal, incomprehensible murmurings that exist betwixt. And sadly yes, I do have to bring you food with which to stuff your drunken face if you ask for it. I’m even known to go above and beyond: for instance, I’ll pretend not to see you lurching off to the bathroom three times mid-meal, and I’ll even pretend not to notice the puke in your hair after the third time.

But you really crossed the line the fourth time, when you locked yourself in our only bathroom for more than a half-hour, in order to empty the contents of your impossibly voluminous stomach into the sink and splatter your bile across the mirror, floor and toilet seat (but none in the toilet or trash can, the two things that might as well have “puke here” stamped on them). You crossed the line because you roped my dish guy into this mess. Now he has to bail your puke out of our sink with a little bucket, plunge the sink drain, and literally mop the walls, all the while smelling your stomach acid chemically reacting with whatever foamy pink crap you were getting drunk on. Furthermore, you compromised several dozen ladies who did not spend the morning downing vodka and sherbet. These ladies were forced to ‘hold it’ like schoolchildren for 40 minutes while they waited for the most ladylike of all the ladies, your drunk ass, to get out of the ladies room, only to realize that you’d doused the entire place with booze vomit.

The only good thing that results from you getting drunk enough in the middle of the day to fill a restaurant sink with your puke and not clean it up is this: I finally get to say, without preamble or apology, “Get out.”