Saucy Odyssey

Quite a few years back, a buddy and I traveled across the lower forty-eight in search of inspiration, cosmic answers, strange American exoticisms and spiritual sustenance.  We wanted to soak in the hands and faces of our countrymen, and extend the hand of solidarity to all manner of folk--to let them know that our great land was still one of curiosity, warmth, brotherhood, and adventure.

Floating in the ionosphere of our lofty objectives was to, I believe the phrase was, “find the best goddamn bar-b-q in the country.”  Oh well, what we lacked in originality we more than made up for with appetite.

We muddled our way down California and choked down a few overly chi-chi baby backs soundly defiled with stuff like red wine, balsamic vinegar or tarragon.  Tarragon—just the kind of bent rib-nannigans you’d expect from some new-age doofus chef who doesn’t know that you don’t mess with ribs.  Shoot, you might as well make a margarita with gin.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love California; It’s the best place in the world… just that nobody gets it right every time.

Along the Kingman highway we endured Arizona's feeble attempts at capturing that je ne se qua so very critical to ribs.  Something about Arizona and a roaring open fire I guess…folks cooking stuff too fast over too hot a fire and calling it bar-b-q.  A rib shouldn’t be chewy, folks.  Can someone please tell Arizona this?  I ain’t a dog.

We meandered around the many landscapes of Texas and I gotta tell you we started getting pretty darn impressed; one contender in Lubbock held the title for six-hundred miles until one unimaginably broiling day near Vicksburg, Mississippi. 

That hot blowing through the open car windows made it too stiff for anything, no talking, no smoking, just staring out the windows, letting the hangover work, and mulling the phenomenon over and over in your heads.  Like I can’t even believe this is on Earth.  

We were driving along the river marveling at the burned-out one-room churches and overgrown farms, drowned in the scream of the bugs and the sting of a South that keeps trying to right itself but may never.  You can get lost in the thickness of that myth (which is my roots by the way), the one that lulls a heart with notions of proper folks and mighty oaks, Spanish moss and a mint julep.  It’s tough to see which way is up down South, and when and if you scratch the surface you’ll see a scar runs longwise tickling the empathies of passersby—a scar toughed up, mangled, shiny with shame, poverty, and frustration.  It’s nothing but an overgrown network of rock-hard dirt roads, dead ends, humiliated ditches that don’t do nothing but stop the way from flooding with the obvious.

Things can start getting serious till you remember it’s all about bar-b-q.

Then we saw it: a house as we hit the edge of town, at the bottom of a steep river-bluff hill, like the house was on the first step of an escalator about to get drawn up into the sweet arms of the silver hot sky.  We saw this house, a little thing, and noticed it had smoke coming out of the chimney and about 20 cars parked in all directions, willy-nilly, fit in like puzzle pieces.  Along the side of the house was a piece of OSB leaned up that had spray painted on it, "BBQ:  chicken $4.99, ribs $5.99, both $7.99."  Needless to say, we both were in it for a "both."

These people are not playing games.  They burn an impossibly mellow wood fire under this massive grill and keep it at a steady 250 degrees at the cooking surface.  The sauce is angelically sweet, hinting cloves and black pepper and cumin and maybe even whiskey.  The ribs…forget it.  I’m not even gonna try…but lemmie tell you the sombitches fall apart on contact.  The beans?  Mustard and onions maybe…a little vinegar and parsley.  Whatever their recipes, they’re original and just right.  I didn’t bother asking ‘cause I knew they weren’t sharing.

I'll leave out the really graphic part where two hungover wanderers, devoid of self-consciousness, sit on the stoop sweating in the impossible heat and practically have sex with two giant Styrofoam clamshells overflowing with a rack of ribs, a half chicken, coleslaw, and baked beans, but let me tell you that this chapter ends with me agonizingly gorged, stumbling up and shaking my sauce-covered fist at the steamed-up-glasses wearing lady behind the counter, heckling her up and down telling her she oughta be locked up for making bar-b-q that good and other crazy stuff like that. 

"Aw, I wish all my customers was so sweet like you."  She said.   I guess she likes a fool.

Her big pie of a smile was the dessert, period.

Then I got a cup of coffee to go.  It came out of a batch that shoulda been dumped out like a year ago…the kind of coffee you send back with indignation.  It was thick and ugly and I choked it down with the smell of the sauce still on my fingers.  I regret drinking that cup of coffee, the fitful caffeine fever that ensued.  The turbulence forever in my blood further exacerbated into an obsessive unfair self-reflection lasting twenty hours.  It kept me awake all the way to Newport News, the city Frank Lloyd Wright dubbed America’s ugliest.  Were it not for the afterglow of that bar-b-q, we might have noticed it too.

Internal Combustion

Dear Readers,

I have $1500 invested in my laptop and the piece of junk is melting down up for the umpteenth time. I’ve been using computers for 20 years, yet still am helpless. High-end, all the bells and whistles, and totally screwing up. Network connection is taking longer than usual…windows cannot fix the problem. What? How in the world am I supposed contact my network administrator? What does that even mean? Isn’t that me? I totally have work to do. I’m stuck in this terminal for the next 3 hours. What am I supposed to do now, sit here pretending to text people? Play solitaire? Wait, I’ll restart my computer…yeah. Still can’t get on the Airport WiFi. Dammit. My mouth is getting dry, windows has detected a problem, was my screen blue there for a second? Oh God, the screen was blue…what did it say? It disappeared before I was able to read it. My head might explode.

Then a calm comes as it occurs to me, we’re living in the early times.

Loveable and angst-ridden Northern California radio DJ Jack Armstrong once described my dilemma to the letter. I’ll paraphrase. Armstrong said: of all the things associated with daily life that bring frustrations and uncertainties, I never feel more angry, desperate, enslaved, and absolutely powerless than when I am having problems with my computer.

Tell it like it is, brother.

So I sit here in a busy terminal at LAX (after attending the 2010 Opportunity Green Conference) and contemplate the 21st century; it brings with it such promise, so many enlightened ideas, burgeoning mentalities that will inevitably guide us into an age of post-racism, sustainability, global communications, increased harmony…I’m downright inspired! Then I glance next to me and the lady sitting there also can’t get her computer to open up a PDF file. I look all around. Can it be? Are all these suckers with laptops sitting there cursing the day they bought their piece of junk computer?

But to Armstrong’s point, why does our stuff break? Why does it crash? Why does it have to power down, delete, freeze, and spontaneously restart?

I can tell you why. It’s because your computer and mine are both comparable to the Model T.

I invite you to hearken back with me to a not-so-distant time in our past…to the time of the advent of the automobile. This time came to pass in the first decades of the 20^th Century, and in the beginning, as with computers, automobiles were for the few, the daring pioneers, the wealthy. By the time a larger segment of the general public had access to personal automotive transportation, the technology was about 30 years old—hmm, that’s about how long personal computers have been in the mainstream.

Now, breathe deeply and imagine with me a lovely day in the Southern California Valley…long before the great suburban sprawl. We’re talking country roads, fruit stands, horses and cows; no Del Tacos…no smog. It’s 1925 and you’re driving from Los Angeles to San Fernando in your Model T, and you’re on top of the world. You see, when you’re chugging up that gorgeous oak speckled mountainside in a Model T in 1925, in that fertile paradise of the adventure-seeking American spirit, you feel just like Neil Armstrong did when he crunched the flagpole into the soil of the moon forever puncturing people’s dubiousness toward space travel. Yes, in a Model T you feel the same as someone does standing on a busy street corner in New York in 2010 interfacing a smart phone with the office computer, copying presentation files to someone in Tokyo for a WebEx with a client in Rio. It’s downright exhilarating!

But it can’t be that easy, can it?

Nope.

All of a sudden, chugga-chugga-cough-wheeze-shhhhhhh—silence. No more internal combustion and now you’re staring a 15-mile walk in the face.

All of a sudden lots of loading bars and spinning hour glasses and whatnot take over—no more WebEx. In a split second, your career has gone on the line. Please God. C’mon…don’t do this to me…not now. It just can’t be, but one of your moving parts has just stopped moving. After a few choice words, you consider your recourse. You flip through the Ford owner’s manual and it tells you to contact the manufacturer from the middle of the desert valley. You try to remember what the error code message that flashed on your smartphone said; you try to auto repair…no dice. Your computer tells you (with a straight face I might add) to contact your manufacturer.

Well, here’s reality: both of you were using something that you needed; now you don’t have it, end of story. Well, not quite end of story…end of chapter maybe. I’m not being gloomy. Here’s why: Give it a few years, folks; ‘cause you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Today what we expect in a car 80-some years after the Model T is a lot different from what we settled for in the past. Now I can buy a car and drive it for 20,000 miles without even changing the oil. The same applies today with computers. We’ve got systems that crash. We pay big bucks for virus protection and then an phantom army of criminal geeks easily infiltrate our networks and destroy our stuff or steal our information. We plan our lives as though our systems perform perfectly and then lose our freaking marbles when our technology fails us. It doesn’t make sense. We have all these assaults on our peace of mind and yet we would swear we’re living in a time that eclipses all others in reliability, efficiency and innovation.

Horsepuckey.

What I’m saying is lookout! The future holds amazing capabilities. Imagine whispering to your smartphone in a meeting: Hey, I forgot to add that graphic to that sales presentation…you know, the one about long-term ROI…yeah…that one. Drop it in after the part about customer satisfaction.

Do I hear you snicker? Guffaw? Well save your skepticism because it’s going to happen. You’re going to pull out your pad computer and say, how do I get to Jane’s office from here again? And viola! A soothing voice will take you all the way. We worship our electronics because we have faith in the idea of them. It’s not as though they make our lives any more liveable…or great even.

Well it certainly is a great time to be alive, but that’s because life is great, not our computers. And if my stupid computer (and its makers) didn’t have me by the scruff right now, I’d smash it to pieces, and switch to a pen.