I Love to Eat: Part Deux

September 16, 2023December 2, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

“You don’t know how to eat,” a friend of mine said. She wasn’t talking about health and nutrition, or the staples necessary for informed eating. She was talking about the method I used to eat food. I chopped up my spaghetti strands, and this offended her Sicilian spaghetti sensibilities.

“You’re supposed to fork twirl the strands on a spoon! Like so,” she said, showing me. “It’s so much more elegant.”

When I said, “Nah!” she hit me with another:

“You don’t know how to eat.”

“Have you heard this line? People love it. It’s sweeping the country. They have this method of eating that if you just followed it, or tried it out, it would unlock the floodgates to the glory of eating. My dad used to tell me to combine roast beef and mashed potatoes on the same fork. He considered it divine. I disagreed.

“You don’t know how to eat.”

When a friend told me about his ingenious method of combining marshmallow and chocolate on a graham cracker, that we would all later call a s’more, I said, “Nah!” Boom:

“You don’t know how to eat.”

“I don’t know if they say this to humiliate us or just break us down, but I rebelled against the whole notion of it. I kept eating the way I enjoyed eating my whole life. My dad was the exception. He was so constant, and so insistent, that it’s basically his fault that I eat the way I do,” Barry said, “and it’s his fault that I place such value on food and eating too. My mom shares some of the blame. She was a pretty decent cook, and she made some decent choices for our meals, but she decided to die, so we were stuck with my dad’s definition of a meal.

My dad was an old man when he took the reins. He lived through The Depression, he was a military man, and he spent the next twenty years a hard-working bachelor. My dad spent the majority of his life eating whatever was placed before him, and he was grateful, so grateful that he’d eat just about anything.

“Dad didn’t understand this notion of preferences. Finicky was the ‘F’ word to him. We displayed some preferences, but in the grand scheme I’d argue that we weren’t finicky. We just preferred to avoid eating crap whenever we could. “You’d eat that,” he’d say over his schlop, “if you were starving in The Depression, or all you had to eat were C-Rations.”

“So, if you were to put two plates before us, one with this piece of crap on it, another plate of worse crap, and nothing at all, we’d choose your plate?” we would ask. “You’re right, we’d probably choose yours, but that’s not what I’d call a brilliant marketing strategy.”

“This isn’t to say that my dad didn’t enjoy a well-prepared and flavorful meal. He enjoyed it as much as the next guy, but in his mind, any man could eat a meal that tastes delicious. What separated the men from the boys, in my dad’s worldview, was what that man did to a meal that was less than flavorful. Based upon his internal sliding scale of characterization, eating a foul-tasting, poorly prepared meal was a tribute to his ancestors.

“You ever see those Old West movies with characters eating pork and beans on a slice of buttered bread? That was my dad’s definition of nirvana. We all know this image of a bunch of carriages surrounding a cook, usually named Schmitty, who cooked up some beans and put it on bread. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I have to believe the traveling cowboys would’ve loved it if Schmitty dropped some fried chicken in their lap.

“The pièce de résistance of my dad’s personal campaign to pay homage to those who came before him, arrived in the form of a flavorless, bare bones sandwich. This hallowed sandwich consisted of one slice of the cheapest bologna mankind has been able to produce, between two slices of bread so flavorless that I doubt any competitors in the bread industry even knew this manufacturer’s name. Did he enjoy a condiment or two, well sure, but he didn’t need one. The notion of needing condiments was my dad’s definition of inherent privilege. “You mean to tell me that you can’t eat a roast beef sandwich without barbecue sauce?”

“No, dad, but we prefer to eat it with a little barbecue sauce on it,” we said. “That makes the sandwich taste better.” He tried to break us down on the differences between need and want, and we conceded that it was all about want. He backed off a little, but he was disgusted by our preferences, because we never could’ve survived on World War II’s battlefields with our preferences.

“Even with all that, though, it was obvious that if he had his choice, he wouldn’t eat his own schlop, and he made that apparent when an aunt informed him that she wanted to come over to our house to prepare a meal for us.

“Your aunt has agreed to prepare a meal for us,” he mentioned to prepare us for the moment of her arrival. Nothing wrong with that, right? Like just everything else my dad did, he overdid it, “and it might just be the last decent meal we ever eat.” His intention was not to scare us, of course, but to instill in us a sense of gratitude for all of her efforts. He scared the hell out of us. I considered it possible that I might never eat another quality meal for the rest of my life after we finished The Last Supper of any quality.

“Comparing this meal to The Last Supper might sound like hyperbole, but that was my dad. He had us so amped up for the arrival of that meal that when it was placed before us, my brother leaned over to whisper something to me, I shushed him. “Shh, for God’s sake, eat. This could be the last decent meal we ever eat.” And, boy, did we laugh. My aunt laughed, my dad laughed, and we all had a whale of a time analyzing my admonition. I wasn’t laughing. I didn’t even smile. I didn’t get it. I thought it was almost a guarantee that I would end up eating schlop for the rest of my life after this meal, and I wanted to silently enjoy every last bite, as if it might be my last.

I didn’t care about the quality of the food but what kid does? If we drill a kid down to their basics, it’s all about Burger King, McDonald’s and Taco Bell for them. They’re forced to eat just about everything else. A nice, home-cooked meal is little more than a mandatory break from playtime. “Kids, it is now time to eat!” Aw, crap. You have to eat when you’re a kid. You have to take a break when it’s time to eat. You don’t care about quality. You just eat to shut your parents up, unless those who know the definition of quality food insinuate that it’s possible you never will.

“My dad’s war on food, namely eating, and the proper procedures therein, might lead one to believe that he was a strict father. He was anything but. In every other area of life, my brother and I had total freedom, perhaps too much. By the definition of our friends, we lived an almost parent-free existence, but they didn’t have to abide by my dad’s near-militaristic meal time rules that would’ve been welcome in most penitentiaries throughout the world.

“Much later in life, decades later, I found out my dad was actually quite proud of my eating habits. He didn’t say anything about the emotional or financial stability I achieved as an adult, and he never mentioned my ability to attain consistent employment through the years. For him, it was all about eating. “You’d eat anything,” he said to begin the greatest compliment he ever gave me. “I never had a problem with you, but I had to constantly be on your brother at the dinner table, or he’d drift off into la-la land.” My brother would chat at the table, he’d pause for a brief period of time that drove my dad crazy, and he’d drift off, or space out, as we called. My dad called it going off into la-la land. My brother didn’t do this to rebel, or to be naughty. He’d just forget to eat in the systematic keep-your-utensils-locked-and-loaded procedures my dad required. If he slipped into la-la-land, my dad would pounce, “Eat Arnie!” My brother would shake out of whatever daydream he was in and resume eating. My dad tried everything to keep my brother on task. He tried patient reminders, and he tried heavy-handed scolding. Nothing worked. His frustrations eventually drove him to develop a little ditty that we now call the Eat Arnie Eat song, and it went a little something like a this,” Barry said clearing his throat and humming out a couple chords, until he could find the right one. “Eat Arnie eat, eat Arnie eat. Eat Arnie eat, Oh, eat Arnie eat.”

“Anyone eavesdropping on this one-off performance might have mistaken my dad’s brilliant “Oh” crescendo with a pleasing and creative bridge to the fourth stanza, but aesthetics did not motivate this tool man. Creating tools was his profession, and it defined him, outside-in and inside-out. He created tools to fill a need. His whole world was about need, not want, need, and he created that song to fulfill a need. He composed no other lyrics for the song, and once it served its purpose and my brother began eating, dad had no further use of it. He never sang the song again. He didn’t create this brilliantly simplistic song to be humorous. If you laughed, or thought it was funny in any way, that was your preference, but that wasn’t why he created his incredible Eat Arnie Eat single. If humor, or the looming threat of it, got my brother to eat then his brief foray into the world of art was worth it. Once that tool fulfilled its utilitarian purpose, my favorite single of all time could whither on the vine for all he cared. When we called for an encore at get-togethers and company functions, he shot them all down. He was not one to perform on demand, even with a couple of beers in him.

“I wish that I could look you all in the eye tonight and say that all these exaggerated concepts and rules of food appreciation are complete nonsense. I wish I could say that I considered them such nonsense, and the minute I became an adult I laughed them all off as so over-the-top foolish that is nothing more than halfway decent material for a joke.

“I mean, who cares if we chit-chat when a meal is before us? Who cares if we look around the room when we should be eating? The big difference between my dad and I is I don’t talk about this nonsense, because I know it’s nonsense, but that super-secret part of me that no one will ever see or hear is absolutely disgusted by signs of a lack of appreciation for the food before you. I cannot stand it when you chit-chat with a perfectly good meal before you. When you take a break, I have to swallow my disgust if I want to have friends, or I want to avoid having others consider me a special freak. “Your entrée is getting cold!” I want to scream. The idea that you can’t, or won’t eat food without condiments absolutely disgusts me. I’ll talk about the need, need, that you have for mayonnaise on a ham sandwich for years. Want is fine, but need? C’mon, isn’t mayonnaise a first-world preference? Then if you dare to commit the cardinal violation of food appreciation, according to my dad, of leaving a restaurant with some food on your plate, and you don’t ask for a doggie bag? I will secretly decide, without noting it for you in any way, that I might never be able to dine with you again. Seeing it once will forever affect our relationship, but putting myself in a position to view it twice is a shame on me, in my book.”

“I still don’t understand why my dad was willing to go to war over food appreciation and eating, and I’m sure if some psychiatrist asked him why he did all that, he’d say, “Hey, I don’t get them all either.” The question I have for myself now, standing before you tonight, is why did I start doing it, why do I still do it? Why, after I spent my teens and twenties trying to do everything 180 degrees different from my dad for the expressed purpose of doing it different from him, do I now mimic all of his quirks and eccentricities? The only thing I can come up with is his great-granddad probably did it to his dad, and his dad did it to him, and he did it to us, and I now do it to you. I would love to be that fella who broke the chain and allow my friends and family to eat normally without some form of internal, critical analysis, but it’s too late for me now. It’s ingrained the way propaganda ministers once taught us that if you repeat the same line often enough, it becomes true to you. And if you insist on eating the way rational, well-adjusted people eat, I’m eventually going to implode in such a way that a “You don’t know how to eat” comment is going to rain down on you in the fallout.

[Standup comedian Barry Becker is The Unfunny comedian, and this is one of his sets. If you enjoy this style of comedy, there’s more available at The Unfunny.]

Esoteric Man

June 20, 2012December 31, 2024 Rilaly1 Comment

It was difficult for me to evaluate the advertising executive trying to sell my wife on radio ad space in a fair way, because he dressed like every guy I hated in high school. I knew I was being unfair, but as Anaïs Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Certain things are the way they are, but they’re complicated by the way things were, and we cannot escape their influence.

The guy’s checkered pants reminded me of one of my many arch rivals in high school. The checkers were multi-colored, of course, but some of those colors were pink, and my arch rivals wore pink. Most of the guys I detested in high school wore pink. The ad exec wore sensible shoes, John Lennon spectacles, and he wore his hair in a messy coif. He was also a people person that knew how to relate to us, the folks, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him before he said twenty words.

“I don’t even have cable!” was the most memorable thing this nouveau hipster said to punctuate the fact that he didn’t watch TV. “I only have Netflix, because my kid enjoys some show, but that’s the only reason.”

“Wow!” is what we were supposed to say in the space he provided. “You’re so esoteric, and philosophical! You’re what they call ‘a with’ it dude!” The hipster mentioned the name of the show his kid enjoyed, but it was as irrelevant to him as it was us. But talking about his kid helped us relate to him, right? Even though he was, of course, divorced, and he only saw his kid on weekends. Yet, he only dropped some info on his kid. He didn’t want us to know much about his kid, because he probably didn’t. He wanted our focus on him and his preferences.

He was a flood of useless information about himself. He was on the edge of his seat wondering what he was going to say next. He was a serious man who didn’t take himself too seriously, but he could get out of control at times too, and he knew that I knew that’s just the way he was, even though I never met him before.

“I don’t drink soda! It’s gross!” he said to initiate another preferences portion of our conversation, so that our sales meeting could be delightfully informal. He found his preferences so esoteric and philosophical, and he found that if he added a personal touch to his conversation it would culminate in a sale. This portion of the conversation gave schlubs like us a point where we could relate to this salesman. He was being real for us to sell himself in the manner all salesmen know is fundamental to obligating customers to fork over a dollar.

As the two of us listened to this man, he presumably decided he was losing me at one point in our conversation, so he decided to focus his energy on me. He directed his energy at talking more often, when his focus should’ve been on talking less. This esoteric ad exec struck me as the type who has always been able to talk himself out of a pickle. His modus operandi (M.O.), I can only assume, was focused on creating more chaos in the minds of his clients, so that they didn’t have time to consider if a sale would be beneficial to them or not. I think he watched the tactics that law enforcement officials use in a drug bust. Break in, crash things, smash things, and scream a bunch of things at high volume to dismantle the central nervous system of the alleged perpetrators, so they don’t know what is going on, until the scene is secure. I think he saw that method as a way to sell ad space.

I’m not sure, if this ad exec decided to disregard transitions in his stories, or if he wasn’t a fella who employed transitions, but his stories began to arrive in such a flurry that I lost my place in his stories a number of times, and I ended up forgetting almost everything he said. He was turning red at various points, and he began yawning in others. This suggested to me that his brain wasn’t receiving enough oxygen, but it was obvious that he preferred an oxygen depleted brain to a lost sale.

“Wow! You must really be smart,” those without control of their sardonic nature would say to the list of this man’s preferences. This is the type of response that an esoteric man expects from a TV watching, soda drinking, Neanderthal. He didn’t get it, this time. This time, he got a guy who stared at him with silent ambivalence, waiting for him to get back to the whole reason we came to him for in the first place.

“You know?” was the only transition that this man didn’t completely abdicate. It was the only form of punctuation this man had left to let his listener know that a sentence was complete. He mixed in a couple “You know what I’m saying?” questions to prevent losing me with redundancies, but that was the extent of his variation.

“Yes!” I replied to put a verbal foot on the floor and keep his transitions from spinning out of control. I almost screamed it once, but the parental, patience practice of counting to ten was all that prevented the outburst.

He engaged in an “aren’t we guys stupid?” chat that everyone considers harmless fun. When that didn’t achieve the desired result from me, he flipped to the “we’re all really stupid anyway” pop psychology, gender neutral nuggets, and the two of us were supposed to laugh heartily at those stories, because we could both relate to dumb people humor. It reminded me of a heavy metal band’s lead singer attempt to reach his audience by mentioning the fact that he actually rode in a motorized vehicle on the paved roads of my hometown. “Today as we were driving down MAIN STREET…” YEAH!

He was a nicknames feller. Even though he didn’t apply such nicknames to me, I’m quite sure that he calls more than one male in his life “dawg”. He probably also calls a couple of them “Bra!” and he bumps fists with them as he works his way past their cubicle. I don’t know if he has any authority in his place of work. If he does, I’m sure he asks all his peeps to call him by his first name, because he’s an informal fella who wants informal relationships with all of his peeps. I’m sure he has an open-door policy, and that all his top performers are “rock stars!” He’s a people person who’s not afraid to let his hair down. If one of his peeps has a name that begins with a B, I’m sure he calls them ‘B’, or ‘J Dawg’ if their name starts with a J. He’s also the esoteric guy in the office that conforms to group thought when called upon to do so. I’ve been around his type so often that I can pick them out of a closet from fifty yards away. They all have nihilist beliefs in private, and they don’t bow to the man, until that man is in the room, and then they turn around to insult “the dude” the moment after he leaves the room and they hear the click of the door closing.

We didn’t talk politics, but I’d be willing to wax Brazilian if it’s revealed to me that we see eye to eye on anything. He’s the type who seeks “a third way” of governing. He strives to avoid labeling. He prefers the open-minded perception. He pities those simpletons conditioned to believe that there are actually very few forms of government from which to choose, and that there are only two viable political parties in this country to run it. Their type knows of another way. They don’t have specifics, but they feel sorry for those of us that have bought into the system. They are open-minded. They are extraordinarily intelligent, and they equate their intelligence with their morality. They are thoughtful, and they are wonderful. We are wrong. We attach these labels to them, and they are “truly” so much more.

When he eventually swerves into the whole reason we came to see him in the first place, I’m gone. I’m beyond listening. He thinks he’s warmed me up with his ‘look at me’ chatter, that he considers good bedside manner, but in reality I’ve begun to feel so sorry for him, and his pointless attempts to sound interesting, hip, funny, likable, intelligent, esoteric, philosophical, and personable, were so overwhelming that I shut down and missed the first two minutes of his sales presentation when he finally started it.

“We guys don’t seek medical attention.” He smiled after that one. He thought that was polite guy, fun chatter. He surveyed my reaction. He told me he enjoyed sports, and then he asked me if the San Diego Chargers were still in existence. I normally would’ve enjoyed such ignorance of my arena, but I realized that I didn’t care if he knew anything about the Chargers, the NFL, sports in general, or anything else. This was a huge accomplishment for this guy, whether he knows it or not, for as anyone who knows me knows, I get off on personal preferences. I want to know what books a person reads, what movies they like, what music they enjoy, and what restaurants they frequent. I love top ten lists, the reasons behind why another’s rankings. Some have informed me that this is one of my more annoying attributes. This esoteric ad exec didn’t have to face any of my more annoying attributes, because he managed to achieve a nearly unprecedented place of me trying to avoid the subject of personal preferences. I just wanted him to stop talking.

The quiet types have something to hide, is a description we’ve all come to accept in one form or another. It could be true, in some cases, but I’ve experienced a number of quiet types who simply don’t know what to say or when to say it. I’ve met other quiet types who have been slapped back for saying what they think so often that when they have a thought on a particular matter, they’re frozen by the fear that you’ll uncover something about them if they voice their opinion, so they usually find it more comfortable to say nothing. When a person talks and talks, we naturally assume they are as advertised. We assume that they’re the “open book” they’ve told us they are so many times that they can only be trying to convince themselves. They are extroverts who are conversant on so many topics that we can’t think of anything that they could possibly be hiding, until we walk away from them with the realization that they didn’t say anything. They just said a whole lot of nothing on nothing topics. We might label that obfuscation and misdirection. We might consider that an art form normally associated with magicians, but talkers can display a talent for this art form too. They just don’t use their hands … as often.