twitterin' my way out of doin' work

As I sat at the computer, Ugly Fat Kid cryin' in the crib, I slipped the cursor underneath my Word document and opened up Firefox again. Even though I had only forced myself to close that window fifteen minutes before, I could not resist the lure of checking my Hotmail one more time. Maybe Cordelia wrote to me. A new man porn video I just had to see? Ida May (my battle axe of a neighbor) wrote her 25 things list — surely there would be new comments on her fist-closed, furious rant about me. Hehe, that bitch can suck it! There is always another editorial at The Weekly World News. Oh god, I haven’t looked at Ed Anger since this morning!

The Fry Cook walked into the room and saw me checking Facebook again. He stopped and looked at me, his hands dirty, fingernails caked with something dark and nasty.

“I’m just…. I have to see.”

He smiled and then looked toward Ugly Fat Kid's room then walked back to the kitchen, shaking his head.


If you write fancy, you are probably a good procrastinator.

I don’t mean the kind of procrastination where you call yourself a fancy writer but don’t actually write anything fancy ever. That was me last month, when the sum of my fancy writing was a shelf of spiral bound notebooks filled with ideas for funny fried foods, one after the other. I don’t regret writing down every cuss word — well, okay, maybe I get sick to my stomach at the dang hatefulness of the day I tried to write down every single cuss word that I hurled at The Fry Cook and Ugly Fat Kid in 2 hours; trust me, I was being a bitch. Every cuss word I wrote pushed me toward better combinations (like "son of a motherfuck"), some of them like a good kick in the ovaries. However, I look at them notebooks now and see some of that shit will never be in a cookbook, comedy type or not. (When we moved into trailer, I shoved all those notebooks in a big box and labeled them “tampons,” so The Fry Cook wouldn't steal any of my ideas. The Fry Cook picked up the box and started a'fussin', but I told him to "shut his face" and asked him would he rather I buy them retail.

No, I don’t mean the kind of I-can't-write-good-or-The-Fry-Cook-will-think-I'm-smart-and-find-a-dumber-girlfriend procrastination. I mean the plain ol', procrastination in writin'. Write a recipe for onion soup dip with an inappropriate reference to sour cream, go away. New funny shit gets thinked up while teasing sex to The Fry Cook, then I get down on the bed all rubbing my boobs on his pillow and all quick-like write an entire recipe for peanut butter cookies onto a napkin. I think a cheese dip recipe featuring an old-people joke to death, and then put 'er down. Come back to the less funny shit and immediately see, “I took too long. No wonder it’s so flaccid.” Hey, I wonder if Lorrie has a new post up yet? Ida May's foster step grandkid turned 18? Score. I can read this and laugh, thinking about Ugly Fat Kid turning 18 someday and not write for at least 15 minutes while I day dream about buying that Camaro when the kid moves out and the proceeds from selling food stamps start being for me again.

It sounds a little crazy if you don’t do this. Maybe it is.

One of the most interesting parts of the past three months, with the Fry Cook at home and the two of us working on the self-validating cookbook, has been the chance to learn each other’s minds real deep. We think deep different. For the past 20 years, he has been on the line, on his feet, on the run. When he worked at Bojangles, he sometimes went 10 hours without once sitting down. My job requires a lot of sitting, staring at a single fixed point on a chicken processing line. His work is greasy, dangerous, and a little vague for the direct results. If the Fry Cook sets off to chopping a block of velveeta, within a few moments he has a mound of evenly sized yellow cubes, ready to be melted over okra. One task leads naturally to the next. All he has to do is get his hands out of his pants and into the food, and he’s off.

But writin' fancy is rarely that interesting.

When I taught a the church school, it was easy to spot the student who had clamped down too hard a chaw of bacci'. Them little girls swallowed the juice and got to throwin' up and I had send 'em out into the chapel so it wouldn't cause a throwup domino effect. Most of the time, I’d walk close by her, and whisper toward her ear, “Think sideways.”

“What?” she’d startle, struck out of her anxious reverie by my odd sentence.

“Think about something else, and it won't all come flooding up. What did you have for breakfast?”

Being such a good Christian, she would do what I had told her. Face softened into the memory of biscuits with chocolate gravy, or a bowl of grits drizzled with Mrs Butterworth's, she sat for a moment, enjoying it. Inevitably, she’d be able to hit the spitoon like everyone else in Sunday School and I'd go back to talking about sodom and gomorrah.

That’s what writing is like. I just have to remind myself not to puke sometimes.

Sometimes I wish that I could simply bear down and chop at deep frier recipes with gay-guy jokes the way the Fry Cook attacks that velveeta, never sittin' down, always on to the next fat-bald-guy-turning-40 joke and not looking back. But writing bullshit recipes will never work that way. I’m always going to need the distractions, the chance to not puke, and smoke a cigarette, and not actually write, because basically I am lazy. Ask Ugly Fat Kid. After having completed two self-validating books, I’m at home in the process. This is just the way it is.

Besides, if I didn’t need the procrastination, I would never have found Twitter.

Most of you have probably discovered it already, this community of people eager to share their bullshit time-wasting stupid thoughts and pictures, in 140 characters or less. (It’s like those pregnancy tests in high school, all over again, but with less stress.) As Penny (best friend from the plant) phrased it to me in a message the other day, “It's lovely to have our jug of moonshine.” Those of us working at chicken processing plants without the hilarity of grat boys in cubicles nearby need that social interaction, somehow. You can follow gossip on pissed off people, watch how friends act all fancy to each other, and read about people’s dinners, seriously. And besides, being forced to limit myself to 140 characters made me even more careful with my cuss word choices. I think Twitter has made me a better writer of hate jokes.

Lord bless Twitter. Without it, and my twelve favorite man porn sites I check in a round-robin fashion while I am trying to describe the taste of soft pretzel casserole in a yellow mustard sauce, I would never have completed this self-validating book.

The Fry Cook thought, at first, that I was being a little lazy, commenting on friends’ status updates instead of completing the fancy words for the latest recipe, immediately. But I think he sees now (and perhaps even more after this blog) how I need to look sideways before I write forward, so I don't puke.

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, my name there is gluttonygal.

The Fry Cook don't got twitter cause his phone got cut off when his mamma stopped paying the bill on account of her sugar daddy died and his kids took over the gun shop.

That's all I'm writing tonight. Gotta have a smoke and do this home perm.

Beercan Chicken

We sent the self-validating book into our publishers.

Now they can stop threatening to sue us for that $100 advance. I need smokes.

On Friday, at noon, three fingers pressed down on the mouse to hit send: mine, the Fry Cook's, and Ugly Fat Kid's. I'm sure The Fry Cook had no idea what he was doing, but I did. I fired off our self-validating "cookbook" to our editor, all the recipes, asian massage techniques from the parlor in town, dirty jokes, and hard-on pictures (Fry Cook's, to be precise). Those fuckers should get a kick out of that. Or not.

We're proud of it, even though it will need editing and de-plagiarizing. (It took me years of writing to realize that I was actually just retyping random paragraphs from Woman's Weekly, and a tough editor with a red pen is a gift indeed.)
I do not want to see it in print, with the gross photographs, even though it won't be published in English until spring of 2010. They Germans like that weird shit and want it first. Hey, money talks!

This damn "cookbook" took me 9 months. That's like havin' two preemie, crack-addicted babies! We had Ugly Fat Kid in the midst of it and sometimes wrote in the middle of the night when she woke up at 3 in the morning and we were too drunk to go to sleep for an hour. And the last three weeks, I have been living on the computer for nine hours a day, trying to chat while Ugly Fat Kid was asleep, but usually just turning my back on her while she played with her papa (he was out of the pen on furlough and The Fry Cook was on a fishing trip).
It seemed, at times, that I would never finish that damn book. But I did with the help of Cliff's Notes. Whoo hoo!

We did it. We did it again in the laundry room.

We had beercan chicken for dinner on Monday evening.

I never seen that Yankee movie, Annie Hall, but from what I understand, two nerds get naked, get high, and eat some lobsters. Well, that shit is too expensive, so we made some beer can chicken with a can of Bud and one them escaped feral chickens that wander around the smoking area at the processing plan eating butts. I told The Fry Cook to grab the damn loud one. If we're gonna kill one of them sonsabitches dead, we might as well get some quiet out of the deal. Anywho...

On Friday afternoon, with Ugly Fat Kid bouncing in her seat in the kitchen, I grabbed my camera as the Fry Cook pulled the live chicken out from under a bucket. Oh, we took a few funny photos, with him hanging that dirty bird by its feet, raising the talons to his lips, rubbin' on it in a way that ain't wholesome, you get the point.

So I thanked the chicken and Jesus before we ate him (the chicken, not Jesus). And I remembered again how funny life is — killin' and eatin' all mixed up together, side by side, for free, all the more a little spicy for the nicotine in that bird.

And then we fell into bed. Smellin' of beer and cigs. Oh lord, we are tired. But rednecked as hell.

Now, we'd like to know. What do you kill when you truly want to celebrate? And if it's chicken, what other kinds of weird stuff do you do with it?

Cupboard gotta-haves

This is the cleanest part of our kitchen, because there ain't usually nothing in here.

The Fry cook has been bustin' his rump making all kinds of treats, most of them instant or out of some kind of box. You know, instant scrambled eggs, oatmeal, them frozen lasagnas and what not. They spilled from our kitchen like the orange-foam-laden rivers in the summer time. There has not been a day's rest for the deep fryer, or microwave oven, or the gas grill that needs cleaning. Everything needs cleaning, including The Fry Cook.

After my self-validating book is done. Two more weeks, and then we can resume doing nothing. I'll spend some quality time on the phone, smoking cigarettes, and eating bon-bons while reading Sylvia Day novels. Damn, that girl knows her way around a man. They Fry Cook will be busy though, re-engineering Ramen into something less "Rameny" and more like casserole.

I'm sharing this because I want you to know this before I begin this post: tonight I'm going to write about what works for our lives. We all have such different sausage and potato chip tastes, different soap opera viewing schedules, and different shifts at the chicken plant, and mostly (it seems to me) different ideas of what "meatballs" really means. I don't want to tell you how to live, how to cook, and I really wouldn't know what to say anyway. Truth be told, our book doesn't really say shit either.

But I like to share what works for us.

I write all this cautiously because last week I read this piece in Readers Digest on how to stock a pantry, without having to use all of your food stamps (I save some to sell for beer money), and still make real food. I liked reading the article, even though we already do most of what they suggest. It gave me ideas. It let me see our food stamps anew. I didn't agree with everything they wrote — I like a canned beans; we buy the cheez whiz; dried mushrooms seem stupid to me when they taste so good straight from the jar - but I didn't expect to agree with everything they wrote. The piece, it seemed to me, was an attempt at a reminder. We need to eat more fancy. Here are some suggestions as to how.

I receive hate mail all the time from people who insist I'm an elitist snob for wantin' to eat fancy. I don't understand it. Why are we snobs if we want to use dijon ketchups instead of regular store brand?

I don't want to explore that tonight. That's a much more entangled discussion than I feel capable of conducting. I'm tired. I've been on the computer all day, lookin' at man porn and reading Cat Channel.

But I did want to know, from you, what are the essential ingredients in your kitchen? You know, the ones you are always buying? The ones that, if they are in the refrigerator or pantry too long, you will have a good size stench that don't go away even if you *pump* Febreze in there.

Here are ours, for the moment. (Don't quote me. A week from now this list will be spoilt.)

easy cheese. Not just for crackers, but they do make a fine "whore derve" here and there. Just spray it into a fancy pattern. Pickles and Cheddar'n Bacon Easy Cheese. One without the other doesn't make much sense. Add hot dog buns and make it a threesome.

good beer. Two words: Budweiser Select. It's like your best t-shirt.

ketchup. Ugly Fat Kid wouldn't get no unfried veggies without it. Enuff said.

tabasco. It's like ketchup's slutty little sister. My older sister is ketchup.

shoestring potatoes (in a can). Honestly, I can only think of a few days of the years we have been together that we have not eaten shoestring potatoes. The Fry Cook doesn't know how to live without them. Even if the pantry were empty, we could have shoestring potatoes...with ketchup.

fritos. add easy cheese and/or ketchup and you have a meal.

a jumbo pack of supers (tampons) - we're outta food territory here, but what's in the pantry is in the pantry. it's like vegas in there, but without all the money and lights.

pregnancy tests - one Ugly Fat Kid is enough.

smokes - duh. pall mall, cause we're classy.

sunflower seeds (BBQ flavored). When my little sister is kicked out of my parents house, she stays with us. She can't be takin' chewing tabacco to high school, so she keeps bbq sunflower seeds here.

mustard. Cheap yellow mustard, in particular, one with a bite (we add a little moonshine for flavors). The Fry Cook stirs it into sauces or dollops it onto the plate before he lays down the fried chicken. It's rarely spread on sandwiches around here. There are so many other uses.

By the way, I assumed that salt, pepper, old bay, paprika, garlic salt, Mrs Dash, and Lawry's seasoned salt were standard. I probably shouldn't assume. We have at least four different kinds of chili powder and two jars of that Cajun Injector shit in the house at all times.

What nearly made the cut: relish; lemon juice in a bottle; canned beans of all kinds; whatever fruit is on sale; microwave popcorn; mallow cups; canned tomatoes; dried pasta; sterno for emergencies (we make our own when we plan); all the other oils (corn, lard, butter, and margarine in particular).

And in the refrigerator (a separate list): bacon; sour cream; american cheese (we're patriotic), hot dogs, apple butter.

What about you? Link to a photograph of your kitchen, if you wish. I know we can all learn from each other. And I'd love to hear.

There will be plenty of time to comment, since I'm drunk. The self-validating book will be sent to the publishers at some point, and I'll be hunched in front of the computer until then. With plenty of time to stop and goose The Fry Cook and ignore Ugly Fat Kid, of course.

Brownies, baby poop free

A few weeks ago, these brownies...well not *these* brownies, but some others...flecked with unbaked brownie mix and crunchy from overcooked chocolate chips, made our snow days much sweeter. Stuck in the house because of icy roads and other drivers who don't know how to drive in the snow (mostly those), we wrote and played with Ugly Fat Kid and worked on...well, actually we didn't work on shit.

But made brownies.

For breakfast on the second day, the Fry Cook dunked a piece of brownie in his skunky beer. He smiled at me sweetly through a toothless grin. And then he made the sad face when I told him that he had actually eaten baby poop. Sigh.

Packages

This afternoon, the doorbell rang. When the Fry Cook opened the door, he found the Fed Ex man waiting. All day, we had been hoping for a "package" and here it was.

As the Fry Cook signed for one kind of package, the Fed Ex guy leaned his other package into the house. "Wow, it sure smells good in there."
"Thanks," the Fry Cook said. I laughed as I sat on the computer, with Ugly Fat Kid still in the highchair, falling asleep.
"Is that some funky sausage you have going?" he looked in, obviously yearning.
"No, that's mah wife. She's a little rank this time of the...well, nevermind. " (We would have given some if there had been anything that still had feeling in it.)

"Well, damn. Can I get summa that?" the guy asked, perplexed.
"There was chorizo involved," the Fry Cook told him.
"Oh. Wow." He shook his head as he walked down the steps.

Oh, sausage. You make me sigh too. Plump and juicy, the best of pork-smellin' man condensed, you inspire me every time I smell you to run toward the downstairs bathroom. Sausage, I will never be over you.

cream pie with fish heads: pure gluttony

Pie.

If I want to excite up the Fry Cook, all I have to do is look at him straight on, and say "Pie." He laughs, every time, his head bending down, the stiffie erupting from him. This makes me laugh, and so, within a moment, we are both laughing and I am on my knees.


You see, we are crazy people. Who gets hard at one word?


(The same thing happens with my dear friend Sharon and the word pants. Clearly, this is a trend with some serious double entendres).

Of course, there are stories behind it. Mostly, it is a story I wrote in my shamelessly self-validating book, the epic adventure of taking a still-steaming-hot cherry pie onto a New York City bus. If that's not a double entendre, I don't know what is.

I've always loved telling this story. People roll their eyes and sigh. But no one feigns interest as hard as the Fry Cook. Whenever we are in a place where someone mentions pies — particularly in my self-validating crappy classes where I teach people to be as inane as I am all the while giving them false hope that I am somehow thoughtful and awesome — he nudges my side and starts to giggle. "Tell the story...they will think you are awesome," he whispers. And so I ask for validation once again from people who don't give a shit about me. I mean, they're in the class because they think they are creative or smart or some shit.

French Fries for 2009

Dear 2009,

You sum a bitch, you years do seem to hop along, don't you?

Before I got outa jail, I read this book at the prison library by some fairy with a Frenchy name, and something he wrote has always annoyed with me. Melancholy about the passage of time, he asked one of his older friends if every year went faster.

"Only when you're drunk," she said. Man, I sure can understand that.

When I was in my teens, that seemed true already. A convict at the time, I felt most free in the slammer, when I had hours every day to write. The list of expectations for my accomplishments was lower even there. Those urine smelling months flew by like flatulent sheep leaving trails that disappeared within an hour or two. Damn, them sheep farts is disgustin'.

Now, however, I know better. All the farts are rank. Every day now, the Fry Cook and I look at each other, as we lie on the bed with Ugly Fat Kid between us, and say to each other, "What the hell did you eat? How can something smell like that??!?!"

Our friend Lurlene and I looked at each other today and said, "What is that funky smell? Is that you, girlfriend?"

I just don't know.

All I do know is that Ugly Fat Kid's farts, buzzing out from her car seat as I walked her around the Food Lion, are the best sound I have ever heard. Her kicks, this time last year, were in my belly, causing me to break wind. Now, she kicks against the mat on the floor of the car where she lies while I drive, and propels herself damn near through the windshield. We once dreamed of her as we ate our meals, and now she is spitting green vomit out of her lips and speaking in tongues. Damn devil baby!

2008 changed me.

Without a doubt, this past year was the worst one of my life, of our lives. Ugly Fat Kid was born. Everything else feels great in comparison, except the looming manuscript deadline for my second self-validating book. Once -- all of two years ago -- a book deal seemed like the biggest deal in the world. Now? I'm thrilled to be part of this book (the evocative recipes are the Fry Cook's, the photographs tell the story in a spectacularly self-validating fashion, and my writing, while absolutely absurdly overblown, still plays only a small, but ridiculous part). I really want to share it with you all. Now take it and enjoy it or I will hate you, you fuckers!

A fat kid who rolls around like a mini-boulder, chases bugs and eats them, is afraid of her stuffed animals, and screams to bloody hell when I disappear into the john for a little "mommy time" with the mailman — that's the focus around here.

It feels so damned good to be as awesome as I am.

And so, 2009, as much as we loathe you, already you suck. Last year, I wrote a letter to 2008, hoping for a settlement from my faked grocery store "accident." (To be fair, I already knew I wasn't going to proposition the insurance guy to help the case along.) Much of the letter is requests for halfway decent scratch off tickets and good reruns of Walker Texas Ranger. This time last year, I had so many hemorrhoids, a lot of pain to self-medicate, and a list of foods I wanted to stuff in my fat mouth before noon on Jan 1. Some of them came back up, but most of them just gave me oily gas.

This year is different. Oh, there will be big moments: two Guideposts to read; two breasts to augment (c'mon settlement!); the Fry Cook's eventual return to the Hooters on Route 11; possibly a move to another trailer; my back being thrown out. In fact, on paper, it's another sweet year.

But here's one way 2008 has changed me: I'm not thinking too much about anything. Well, ok, that isn't much of a change.

In the mornings, I've learned to pour myself only half a cup of gin. That way, when Ugly Fat Kid needs me, unexpectedly, and the gin gets ashed in, I don't feel I've missed anything. Those expectations of accomplishments I once had for myself? They're fairly well gone. Life has never been what I planned for, anyway. I just don't want to get knocked up again.

And the other way 2008 — the year of shattering mortality questions and big-scary-adult situations -- has changed me? I'm going to watch more Lifetime movies. That shit is addictive!

I'm not much interested in the future, other than hoping that the guy who collects the rent is replaced with a hot young toothless summa bitch who don't give a shag about collectin' no rent. I'm now only interested in: that the sound of Ugly Fat Kid's hands grabbing the plastic rings of the shower curtain she's under will not bother me; the Fry Cook sitting cross-eyed in his TV chair watching UFC, all high from the MJ; the broken TV on my desk that I have learned to put more broken TVs on; the rusting washing machine in the park across the street.

2009, all I want are long mornings of sleeping in while Ugly Fat Kid eats from the dog's bowl and common law husband with stubble who don't never change his socks. It's not a bad way to live.

Some French Fries might be nice too.