Subterranean Beefworks The mechanical whir whispers our secrets.

For posterity

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
--Robert Frost

Pervii nax!

Well, I might start with the good news that the beep is gone. Maybe my friend was right, that it was a smoke detector warning of a low battery, or maybe somebody else just shared my distain for such a useless noisy device and went ahead with setting the building on fire. Either way, my block is finally able to get some real sleep.

I'm a little bit concerned about America. Not in any sort of deep political or social way-- at least not that will be covered with my little candy-coated weblog --but rather in a touristic way. The United States: is it still fun to visit?

I feel that over the years, other cultures have observed America's qualities and ideals-- even just the superficial ones --and have borrowed them, adapted them, and made them in many ways much much better. Take food for example, the hotdog specifically. Now this is only heresay, but I understand that in Brazil, there is a hotdog on offer that has not only the dog, not only the exciting fixings that everyone knows and loves, but is also piled high with mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes! and it's supposedly much cheaper than the emaciated boiled hotdogs that have somehow become famous on New York's city streets. I imagine that if anybody here got ballsy enough to be creative about their hotdogs, they wouldn't hesitate to charge $5.00 extra for a variation including potatoes (and the consumer, already bored to starving, wouldn't hesitate to shell out the dough for this unexpected innovation). People come to this country after seeing it on TV, seeing all our supposedly delicious food, and eating all their local adaptations of it, expecting that the original will simply blow their mind. But what they get is over-priced disappointing caricatures. It's a little bit sad.

And it's not just foreign tourists who experience this. I've felt it myself after moving to New York. Where is all the delicious food? All these little foodstands on the street just smack of economic depression and an abandoned desire to innovate. $2.50 for a wet hotdog in a spongy little bun. You can shroud this embarassment in sourkraut at no extra charge, but that in itself is something to bemoan. They already charge you for the toppings, even if you don't order them.

Now it must be said, I have not experienced much of New York yet, not the way it is supposedly intended to be. I don't get out that much, and I don't yet know about the places that would end my argument with one juicy, delicious bite. I haven't given up hope that at least somewhere in the city, or in the country for that matter, there is a surprisingly cheap, surprisingly delicious, and uniquely surprising delight that Americans and visitors can both enjoy. But where is it?

I've turned to the public access TV stations to find the answer. Fortunately, New York is so taken with itself that people will make chic, informative shows about New Yorky things; they praise gritty little pubs and expose charming facets of the boroughs that would otherwise go unnoticed or underappreciated. I think these shows are mainly for the gentry to watch, so they can strengthen their wir Gefuehl with respect to living in "The City" and never run out of things to go "blog" about. But for me, well, I can at least see what's around me since everything remotely cool is so easy to miss.

I am trying to think of the coolest thing in New York that I have seen so far. Coney Island is always at the top of the list, but has recently fallen under my strong critique, as I just recently spent $7.00 on a water and an oven-baked funnel cake.

An oven-fucking-baked funnel cake. What the hell are they thinking?? It had all the heart-warming traditional delight of a Thanksgiving turkey cooked in the microwave. Every spongy, flaccid piece was a reminder of all the poor little kids who come here expecting to create childhood memories and instead get handed a tired, impotent doughy mess not fit for a volunteer firemans' fundraiser. I expected more from a perminent carnival at the center of the world.

If we can get the food right, ladies and gentlemen, we can get everything right. But among bans on trans-fats, market conditions favorable only to pseudo-health-food, and a nation of fatty fatties trying to get everyone to help them lose weight, we've lost something important.

We've lost the crunch in our funnel cakes. :*(

Giving you something

It's a little bit too late to begin writing. Beginning anything after 12am usually means either a shitty day at work or just some off-putting bags under my eyes. It also means I might not wake up in time for a shower, which would make it the second day in a row that has happened.

Things have gotten a little better in the sleep department though. Since putting in my air conditioner, I no longer have to endure the intervallic shattering of perfect night-time silence by this useless and disturbingly consistent, neighborhood-wide "beep." I am not sure when it started, but since then it has been a fixture of my backyard's auditory palette with a short "beep" every 30 seconds or so. Just seldom enough to torture, just quiet enough to infuriate, and just useless enough to make me want to find it and rip it from whatever it's installed in.

The air-conditioner has greatly improved things though. I get to sleep refrigerated, I get to drown everything else out with some frigid white noise, and I get to find some respite from the thick, oppresive heat of my top-floor apartment. Not bad, considering it's a hand-me-down from the girl who used to live in my room.

I think I'll go to bed now. Today was a long day, and not all-together that great. Closing my eyes now, however, promises another chance when I open them tomorrow morning.

What it is, homes?

As it happens, Indonesia was once a colony of the Netherlands.

However, in 1945, they declared their independence from the Crown, and finally four years later, their independence was recognised as relevant to somebody.

A scant 43 years later, a small, unassuming woman from this not-so-newly independent nation decided to start a lovely little restaurant in the New York called Rijstafel, offering the unique mix of Dutch and Indonesian cuisine that came about as a result of their long-term...ahem...subjugation by my ancestors. "Rice Table" is how it translates linguistically, and gastronomically, it means an unexpectedly full stomach and a restless bladder.

I ate at this restaurant tonight, all of the various preparations of chicken, beef, and what seemed to be chunks of sugary fish that were placed in front of me, and although thrilled by the tastes, what made this remarkable is the unplaceable feeling of familiarity.

Had I eaten this stuff before? Were the homely aesthetics something I had known in another part of my life? I thought about this as I ate the food and looked at the tablespread, and tasted the food...and although I couldn't actually confirm it, I really felt a remarkable familiarity with this place. It definitely started with the puffed rice chips that my grandmother used to bring for my dad, which I then of course enjoyed by default. I'll have to have him remind me of what they're called.

Everything down to the sterno hotplate in the middle of the table had me constantly pouring through memories of fondue and remarkably ugly, but oddly comforting decor. I like this place for that, and for the fact that my cup of water kept getting filled every time it got a little less than half-full.

It was just splendid until we realized that the nice lady from once-colonized Indonesia who now ostensibly ran the place had no intention of giving us the check, but rather mumbling things about the next thing she was prepared to offer us (the all-encompassing meal ended with these two soft bricks of pudding, one pale-white and the other colored teal, sitting in puddles of sweet syrup). Ah, and then the tea. Almost 2.5 hours after we first sat down.

As you might have noticed, this is the first entry since nearly a year. I am very sleepy, but this had to be typed. Any desire for more?