Over the past week it may have seemed at times as if I’d abandoned the burger life (having gone two whole posts without a mention of flipping), but no. I was back at my 350 degree desk yesterday, making greased pucks for  customers who had completely tired of ham or turkey. My work in burgatory may be lessened this coming year, as I have some other employment goals to fulfill. For now, it’s just a matter of slinging hamburgers through the holidays and being the guy that fills all of the staffing gaps.

I work in what is now termed “nutrition services,” for a 250 bed hospital (and its regional network of hospitals). The door to our staff office is 300 yards from the morgue. No big deal, really. All of us undesirables are placed in the hospital’s original basement. Environmental Services, maintenance, Laundry and Patient/Associate Feeding are all in the bowels of the oldest building. Generations of nutrition managers have found ways to store materials in out-of-the-way corners and converted closets. So, to fill our convenience store sized soda displays, I make the 300 yard walk down the corridor to a little known storage room. Yesterday, on my trudge, I ran into a funeral director and one his clients. One of them was pacing the hall, the other being very quiet and lying on a gurney. I’m learning that these encounters are all part of the process, to say hello, and to move on. I had plenty of college biology trips to the cadaver lab. At 22 I was assisting a minister, the kind of job that required my constant presence at funerals. Despite these training moments in a life generally misspent, I still never know what to say to either party when I run into them with a cart load of Cokes. I should have gone all Mean Joe Green and thrown a soda and a smile the guy’s way.

I was thinking about cutting back on coffee, which would make this blog even more unreadable. Yesterday I came across a Washington Post article by Carolyn Butler  which made me think that my nervous, over caffeinated rambling had health and sociological benefits. I have not a vice left besides the devil drink and I’m glad that at least it offers some lifestyle benefits. By that logic, I should be the healthiest man alive. Onward and Upward (at least one last time this year).

Coffee may have health benefits and may not pose health risks for many people – washingtonpost.com

watching the end of life as we know it, 12/21/12

My wife and I found ourselves earlier tonight going through what has become a Sunday night ritual of sorts. We were channel surfing for any sort of suitable program to sit and stare at like drooling vidiots. The past three days have been absolutely wonderful for us, so it was strange to end up back in front of the TV wasting time. Still, after all the relatives had been visited, gifts handed out, punch consumed and board games played, it was inevitable that we collapsed in front of the old tube (literally. We’re down to watching our last ginormous-assed, 85 pound, tube television. I dread the day when this old, circa 1993 beast dies, because I can’t bear to lug another one away). We caught the tail end of a repeat documentary about David Koresh. The final tag line to flash briefly across the screen stated that “some believe he will return in 2012.” As my wife asked if I knew what the deal was with the year 2012, I went into full Archie Bunker mode for several minutes, shouting ignorant statements to no one in particular. Even my wife left at some point.

December 21, 2012, if you aren’t familiar with the theories, is believed to mark the beginning of the end of human history. This was popularized by Roland Emmerich’s massive hit film release this past November, 2012. The idea is that according to translations of the Mesoamerican Mayan Longcount Calender, a period of history will end. What has been attached to this by new age philosophers is a realignment of the universe. Skeptics have used the anthropological translations of the Mayan calendar to assert that the earth will be crushed by cataclysmic disaster during the 2012 winter solstice-between the 21st and 24th of December. I won’t be searching for last-minute holiday bargains that year, I guess. This is the idea behind Emmerich’s movie. Now, of course, many websites offer 122112 t-shirts at premium prices and even the studio behind the 2012 film put up a hoax panic website. NASA, inundated with a nervous public in need of scientific information, has put up their own crisis site. NASA – 2012: Beginning of the End or Why the World Won’t End?

This too shall pass. Like Y2K, I’m just going to go on living. Until I’m not alive, that is. I remember that night distinctly. 12:00 a.m. hit and I was in the car midway across the bridge at Saugatuck crossing the Kalamazoo River. Co-workers had told me to not make the hour and a half drive south that night, because all technology would cease to function at midnight. Nothing happened. At 12:01 I was still merrily speeding along toward Saint Joseph, watching the colored lights twinkling  on the river. What can we do? If history ends, it ends. Time moves along, even if we aren’t around to mark its passage. Rather than fatalism, I think that we can make these into a remarkable final three years. I hope to be more compassionate during the next three years. Just in case the world keeps on chugging around the sun in 2013, I’d love to have developed ways of feeding and clothing others in need. You know, just in case….

A happy and peaceful holiday season to all! I wanted to send all of my friends a message of hope at the end of a year (and a decade) in which hope has often seemed to be in short supply. For every momentous event during 2009, whether it was Captain Sullenberger landing a jetliner on the Hudson River, or Barack Obama being sworn in as President Of The United States, it felt at times like there was a sucker punch waiting to hit the country in the back. Jobless rates climbed, deficits soared and we continued fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. These may not have been the times that tried men’s souls, but they certainly made us shake our heads in wonder. We’ve arrived at Christmas and the end of the calendar year. Symbolically a time of rebirth and a moment for humanity to look forward toward new beginnings and the start of prosperity. Humanity, after all, has been at this crossroads many, many times before. This is not the worst things have been and that alone gives us hope that 2010 will be a positive year for America and the world. I’ve been thinking about a night like this 41 years ago and how bad things were on Christmas Eve, 1968. Three men traveled 240,000 miles, sending a message of peace and a reminder that our problems are tiny compared to the vastness of the universe.

1968 can be classified as one of the worst years in American history. Riots, assassinations, war in southeast Asia, an economy on its way to the recessions of the 1970′s, racial unrest and a generational divide threatening the moral foundation of the country. In the midst of this, the space program had almost lost its way. There was to be no astronaut walking on the moon if NASA couldn’t get them there. The fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in January 1967 (on the launch pad) had effectively stopped manned space travel. By October 1968 NASA had finally sent the Apollo 7 crew into earth orbit, testing the command and service modules-the capsules and rocket packages that would keep men alive and transport the lunar module to the moon. What wasn’t revealed to the public was that NASA planned to send a crew to the moon by the end of 1968. NASA was fighting against time and the idea that the Soviets would launch the mighty N1 rocket toward the moon by the end of the sixties. The NASA equipment had been tested, but never under the conditions expected for Apollo 8. There was the massive Saturn V rocket, the most complex, powerful device ever created by humans. The rocket had to stage perfectly and put the astronauts into a trans-lunar orbit, at a time when no humans had ever travelled out of the earth’s gravitational pull. Men would be going to the moon just 16 years after Sir Edmund Hillary had climbed Mount Everest and a full eight months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Apollo 8, of course, is now lost along the concourse of history. The men who went there in December 1968 didn’t walk on the moon and became a sort of footnote for the space program. At the time, however, the job they did was remarkable and without them Neil Armstrong may never have set foot on the lunar surface.

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders had launched on December 21 and were orbiting the moon by Tuesday, December 24th. As Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, has pointed out in interviews for many years they were focussed on making sure their rockets fired correctly to translate them out of orbit, or they’d still be circling lifelessly. Still, the three astronauts did something remarkable, and unheard of in the age of political correctness. As they became the first beings to photograph the earth in its fragile entirety, they beamed home a message of peace for all of mankind to share, taken from the biblical book of Genesis. The message, written into the flight plan with the help of the staff at the U.S. Information Agency, went like this:

Anders: “In the beginning , God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void;  and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light. And God saw the light and it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness.”

Lovell: “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said ‘let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And so it was.”

Borman: “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And so it was. And God called the dry land earth; And the gathering of the waters called he seas; And God saw that it was good. And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, A Merry Christmas and God Bless All of You-All of You On The Good Earth.”

For the first time in history men could look at the earth as a whole and see that was good indeed and that men and women from across its surface are united by the common bond of living on that good and wonderful planet. The vast formlessness of the planet had been given a lease on life and a population of intelligent, peaceful beings full of hope for the future. It is on that note that I wish all of you on that same good earth a wonderful Christmas! Thanks for reading the Spatula and we’ll see you in few days!

One of the questions I get asked when meeting new people is “What made you want to become a cook in the first place?” This is usually preceded by the inevitable “So…if you graduated from culinary school and worked in fine dining, what the hell are you doing flipping burgers in a hospital basement?” That question is the easy one. I loved having the prestige of working for solid chefs and making creative dishes, and may go back to it someday. Still, selling out for better health care and timely raises has moments when it beats prestige. The other question, the one about what led me down the path to the dark side, leads to an explanation of Pyrexophobia.

Pyrexophobia (not to be confused with Pyrexiophobia, which is the irrational fear of fevers) is a panic brought on by homemade casseroles. I was raised an upstanding, churchgoing boy in the 1970′s and 80′s. Those were the days when fast food took a bigger chunk out of the family food budget and the home cook still ruled. Part of being a polite church kid was that I was made to take part in potlucks and functions on a weekly basis. The term “dish-to-pass” still strikes fear into me. We dined on such delicacies as chicken salad with grape jelly and a host of bland oddities. Friends wonder why I punish my food with such inordinate amounts of hot sauce and jalapeno.  It is because I was brought up eating all kinds of food on margarine slathered dinner rolls, the margarine coating the palate enough so as to mask taste. So it was that I turned a wary eye toward church women bearing Pyrex serving ware. My real nervous fear began in earnest after the neighbor lady offered me a  layered salad, which I immediately tucked into. She’d dusted the lettuce with Seven to ward off rabbits and “forgot” to wash the vegetables before composing the salad.

My fear wasn’t limited to potlucks. God love my mom, but she learned to cook in what the State of Michigan politely termed during the 1950′s “blind rehabilitation.” Criminals and drug addicts get rehabilitated, I always wondered, so what did blind people need to be rehabbed from? Any rate, the state gave its ward cans of cream of mushroom soup and pointed them at the stoves. My father was a farm kid, but somehow he learned that everything tastes better with cream of mushroom, as well. Our food was variant shades of gray. It was only as adult that my sister and I found out that you don’t cook pork steaks by throwing them in a pan with mushroom soup and water and cooking them until they turn into serving bowls. I once came home after living on the East Coast and asked if my dad needed to go shopping. “Yeah, I need some cream of mushroom.” Looking in his cupboard, I counted only 23 cans. So, we went and stocked up.

When I was 16, I helped rebuild a house outside Charleston, South Carolina. I was a volunteer, but the owner wanted to give us something, so he set up a crab boil in the yard. This was my first glimpse that food could taste like…food. A year later I was sitting in the Department of Agriculture building’s commissary in Washington, D.C. I had Caesar Salad, which seems so simple, but I’ve never had a better one. I could go on and on about those two experiences, but you get it. Culinary careers have been built on less. I discovered flavor and texture and never went back. My parents have discovered flavor as well. They buy Scwann’s dinners. None contain mushroom soup. Onward and Upward.

Christie D’Zurilla posted a blog entry a few hours ago on The L.A. Times website noting not only the death of Brittany Murphy, but also remembering the scene in 8 Mile in which her character visits the auto plant in an effort to seduce the film’s protagonist, Rabbit. I don’t want to dwell on the untimely loss of another way-to0 young actress. Instead, it might be better just to treasure up that memorable cinematic moment in my heart. It was nasty, poignant and I only needed to see it once.   Brittany Murphy dies at 32; young Hollywood reacts | Ministry of Gossip | Los Angeles Times

Well! The burger flipping life has offered me a few moments of respite, and I’m taking advantage of this fact. I spent the weekend eating outstanding meals prepared by friends (in honor of my wife’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Lori and sorry about the rest of this post) and just kind of “watching the wheels go around.” John Lennon may have had his fault’s, but he often got to the core of what ends up being meaningful in one’s life. I remember seeing studio footage of him producing “Wheels”  and his telling the musicians “You aren’t driving the thing, you’re just watching the wheels go around.” So, I didn’t drive the thing. I made my kid laugh and read some good books, enjoyed some home cooking and had some long overdue conversations. I managed to get in trouble, as usual. My host made chocolate cake. Not just any, mind you, but flourless with smooth, rum ganache. Chocolate and I don’t do well and I knew that I might be in for a day of sickness, but I didn’t want to be a jerky guest. Actually, it would have been worth being sick. Damn fine cake. Still, I started to feel the migraine an hour after coming home, so I took a handful of everything in the house. Really. Not a great idea, but I was in for it. In my fevered state I had this insane dream about a nurse I’ve never spoken to, but one whom apparently knows me. I’ll never view scrubs the same way again, nor will I try to kill a headache by trying to carpet bomb it into submission. In the end, it’s better to just watch the wheels turn and leave the chocolate cake alone. I just have to let it go.

I wanted to put together a little post yesterday morning, but only managed to walk around the house gibbering Yoda-like pronouncements before going off to work. Hard to write a cogent entry when the only words I could manage were “Flip the burgers I must.” After a few cups of coffee I was fine (relatively. Until experts declare me legally and clinically fine, that is). The past few mornings I’ve been looking at the end-of-decade lists posted by various news organizations. For the most part they’ve been pretty dour. What really was there to get excited about? In a decade permeated by listmania and obsessively compiled groupings of the best and worst of everything, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of excitement to list the greatest achievements of the ’00s. Understandable. For me, the decade really is marked by its extinctions. Not just wildlife or the structure of the earth itself. No, I mean the cultural extinctions. A lot of time-honored ideas went by the boards in the past ten years and will be relegated to existence only as entries on Wikipedia.

>>   Pay phones died this decade, but before you assume I’m going to go all Andy Rooney here, let me assure you that I hated them. The only way I’ll ever be able to explain the concept to my kid is that when you wanted to make a call and you weren’t home you drove somewhere to find a phone that you could rent for three minutes provided you were carrying enough money. Oh, and providing that the phone worked. Usually it didn’t. The line was nearly always cut and the coin box jammed. Sometimes you’d find a phone only to realize that you didn’t like the people near it and went to find another one, maybe several blocks away. The phone didn’t have apps, but it did have a voice to remind you to add more money. One slight benefit of the pay phone was that you could leave the number at your job in case they ever needed to find you. I gave one employer the digits for a bar pay phone several towns over.

>>The network movie of the week. Every Sunday night you could see a really bad movie after a day of church or starchy family dinner in the comfort of your own home. Patrick Swayze winning the Civil War, or Meredith Baxter-Birney throwing up in dumpsters. It didn’t matter.  They were the wallpaper of our lives.

>>Four Non Blondes. Any group that leaves the world with the most messed up, bowel loosening song ever (“Whats Going On?”) and doesn’t do a decent follow-up (or issue an apology for their one-time existence) should be tried before the World Court.

>>Saturday Morning Cartoons. When my child was a few months old we got ready to watch our first morning of sugar sponsored madness only to find that the shows had been replaced by Lester Summerall and some bimbastic colleagues. As a mortgage paying, hard-working, stand up citizen I don’t want to watch Sting play his new songs on Saturday morning, or view proper toothbrushing techniques. No, I want bad foreign cartoons on all 140 channels and a bowl of Honeycomb in each hand. Another wish gone with the decade, I suppose. Onward and Upward.

Television and I have been going through a painful, messy divorce during the past 12 months. I want to stop watching and go spend time with something wholesome (or someone human), but inevitably keep watching. Oh, there are periods of separation. I walk out and promise never to turn the set on again. Then the TV seduces me in some way (e.g., “Hello Yourself, Bombshell,” posted 11/23). After the fun of make-up viewing- maybe a couple of good episodes of Fringe, Glee, or the surprising finale of Top Chef Las Vegas-TV programming  ends up irritating me all over again. I hate myself for going back and the cycle continues. So it was during one of my “I am not watching this trash anymore” periods over the Thanksgiving weekend that I happened to be…watching television.

My father has a sort of diy set-up that involves rabbit ears, a satellite dish and a block of wood all wired to his flat screen TV, the whole thing balanced on a transcendental tea cart. During our holiday visit, conversation lagged and we all tilted our heads sideways to watch some digital distraction. This is when I first saw the promos for TLC/Discovery Health’s The 650 Pound Virgin. My first reaction was similar to watching Crouching Tiger in a theatre full of high schoolers: “Aw, that ain’t real!” I promptly dismissed the show as more exploitive trash and moved on. This past Sunday night, during the pre-Christmas dearth of intelligent choices, I actually watched the 650 Pound Virgin. Discovery Health Channel’s Sunday night lineup was always a favorite destination in the bad old days when I’d watch whatever show was on. I’d watch Jan Adams explain plastic surgery (Pre-Donda West) or Dr. G. solve death’s riddles (“So that’s where his keys went!). It was because of one of those DH Sunday programs that I began to understand some of the complex operations my daughter would go through to combat Crouzon’s Syndrome. Slowly, the network has become a cautionary hub for weight disorders. Many of the programs on DH depicting the lives of the morbidly obese are exploitive. The 650 Pound Virgin, it turns out, is not.

The 650 Pound Virgin, which debuted last Summer, follows the life of David Smith. Mr. Smith’s story follows the typical arc that comprises most shows about super obesity. He gained unusual amounts of weight as a child and found comfort in food, leading to loneliness and persecution. Smith dealt with the death of his beloved mother by shutting himself in the house with food. The story takes an inspiring turn. In 2003, contemplating suicide, he reached out to local television personal trainer Chris Powell, who designed the program that would help Smith Lose 430 pounds without gastric bypass surgery. David Smith is now a 220 pound personal trainer himself. I was shocked by some of the realities of this so-called reality TV. David Smith at 650 pounds ate many of the things I do, in the same amounts. No breakfast, fatty lunch, half-gallon of ice cream at night. So, I’m motivated to live like he did. Is Discovery exploiting his story and the fact that he hasn’t had an intimate relationship? Absolutely. The man’s personality, however, is infectious and his drive to live and fight on is inspiring. No surgery, no Subway, just the force of his will. No sarcasm, I just like this story. Thanks TV.

I have been charged with writing the family Christmas letter this year. This would be the first letter the Mel Thompson’s have sent around in a number of years and I’m pretty freaked out by the task of renewing the tradition.  Not so much a tradition. We sent out one letter. Well, two. There was a year when we just re-printed lyrics from  Counting Crows A Long December. That went over well. Friends started sending us samples of Xanax and the county put our dog under protective custody. This year I really want to get the letter right. The message must embody the best and most heartfelt sentiments of the holiday season. You know-love, warmth, peace. All of that crap. I spent several minutes wasting time at work today mulling over the holiday greetings. Yes, it’s hard to write a letter while flipping burgers, but I’m a multi-tasker. Yeah, thats it. Here are some beginnings of letters I was working on.

• “We had another good year here down at the Bada Bing. The girls can’t wait for Santa to stuff their stockings.”
• “This was the year I discovered my inner child. I also discovered at least three other children I never knew I had.”
• “Santa Claus gave us everything we asked for this year. Since he fulfilled his end of the deal, we’ll untie him and let the old guy out the basement now. Man, I hope he’s Santa.”
• “We had a kind of frugal year. Not only did we subsist on bologna, but we found a way to re-caulk the tub with it.”
• “The family has been truly blessed in 2009. After all, we could have been the Detroit Lions.”
• “I would take a moment to honor those in our family that passed this year, except no one did. All of the relatives are still hanging on and I’ll be damned if any of them show signs of weakening.”
• “After unsuccessfully trying to find professional electro-shock treatments we’re doing them at home.”
• “Every dark cloud has a silver lining. After our meth lab exploded, we noticed that the side of the house looked like Elvis and sold the pictures on Ebay.”
• “Our oldest boy Blinky got his own special on the Discovery Channel. I guess more kids should eat deodorant and start to believe they’re Diana Krall. Even though he looks kind of hot in a gown, I wish he was our old Blinky again.”

Okay, that does it for that idea. Everyone is getting pre-printed cards this year.

After a self-imposed hiatus, I’m looking forward to clanking out a little spatular goodness. The days away from the keyboard were full of fun and (for once) I let my mind off the hook for a while. Southern Michigan had some nice little storms and most conversations started out with “This isn’t a storm. I remember the one in…” By Friday, I got out, barbecued, baked bread and had some domestic fun. Saturday night, my wife and I went out for the ultra-rare grown up party. After a few drinks, we snuck out and went Christmas shopping. The problem is not so much the shopping, but the morning after when we saw the crazy purchases and wondered what we’d done. Our seven year old girl probably needed a chainsaw, anyway. She certainly had been good enough this year and deserved the Gweneth Paltrow perfume display we stole from a department store. No telling how we got it into the car. ( I kid. One of us was completely legal to drive. Not to shop, but at least to drive).

Was I wrong in previous posts about the whole Tiger mess? Yeah. Somewhere between bar server #12 showing up on Today and his appearance on Paula Deen to explain marital problems I got that this is a murky topic and way beyond me. So, onward and oopsward toward other topics.

Today I read one of the first reviews of Julie Powell’s Cleaving, the follow-up to her enormously successful novel (and it’s film adaptation) Julie and Julia. Even though it might seem that all I do is watch TV and flip burgers, I do occasionally go to the theaters, and liked the Nora Ephron film about the intersection of Julia Child and Powell’s original blog project very much. Not a terribly manly thing to say, but it was a good flick. Afterwards I punched myself in the face for an hour to restore order and testosterone. In the case of the book, no punching was necessary. J&J in its un-Ephronized original form was messy and human. The book rambled on like a cross between a culinary student’s diary and restroom wall poetry, which was a pretty entertaining combination. Cleaving follows Julie Powell as she figures out what comes after celebrity and becoming a full-time author. The journey of “what now?” finds her in upstate New York, learning the butcher’s trade. I’ve read a few writers lately who become transfixed by butchery (notably Bill Buford in Heat). There seems to be a heavily spiritual aspect to breaking down pigs. Not for me. I respect the animal and thank it for giving its life to sustain humanity. I enjoy the beauty and delicacy of seafood and love breaking down fish. Would I want to do it as a career? Maybe. Honestly, though, if I became a massive success and wanted to find my next thing, there are a few jobs I dream of pursuing to fill up my empty days and the long, windy nights testing the very core of my soul. Here they are:

1. I’d like to throw things off of buildings. Maybe going to be a lowly assistant with Underwriter’s Labs or Consumer Reports would be just the thing. I’d find the deeper meaning in chucking toasters out of windows and hurling microwave ovens over the sides of the laboratory.
2. Padma Lakshmi’s biographer. If she wanted me to carry her bags, or push her baby around in its carriage, I’d do those things, too.
3. I have always wanted to combine late night talk show comedy and televangelism.
4. Inventor of Banjo Hero.

Well, there you have four reasons why people like me don’t achieve great celebrity and wander the earth in search of meaning. We’d only squander our enlightenment on Banjo Hero and exploding kitchen appliances. Onward and Upward.