Are there Big Macs in Heaven?

Jim Delligatti, Who Created the Big Mac, Dies at Age 98.

In heaven they say there’s no beer;

I wonder if Big Macs appear?

Or must we all eat

Them down in the Heat,

Where burgers so readily sear?

Restaurant Review: Rice King. Provo, Utah.

SPOILER ALERT: I am becoming more and more disenchanted with Chinese American cuisine. The last time I had an authentic Chinese meal was in Bangkok, about 7 years ago. Since then I have sampled nothing but American versions of Chinese dishes prepared by overworked possibly illegal aliens who think frying in rancid oil improves the flavor of everything from gristly pork to shoe laces masquerading as noodles.

Okay, I got that off my chest.

Rice King is on Center Street in downtown Provo. When I was working for Nomen Global down the street I dropped into Rice King several times for their $7.89 lunch specials. But now that I have retired from the hurly-burly of the workaday world and can devote myself to literary maundering about cuisines, I decided to order from under the column marked 'Chef's Specials'.

The place, by the way, is so narrow that you cannot go inside and say "Fried Rice" -- you are only able to manage "Stewed Prunes". And I think I would have been better off ordered stewed prunes.

I ordered the mu shoo pork. Here it is:

It came with thin cold pancakes, which were tough and flavorless, so I ordered some white steamed rice. It came in an open bowl with no cover, so before I could finish my lusterless meal it also was stone cold. The mu shoo was nothing but stir fried cole slaw -- all cabbage and grated carrots, with nary a whisper of a mushroom. The whole shebang, mu shoo, pancakes, rice, hot and sour soup, came to $10.29. I'm not recommending it. I give the place Two Burps.
But what do I know? While I struggled to get down my drudge a half dozen people came in for big  takeout orders. So the place is popular. Go figure.

Light the World #1

And I, God, saw the light; and that light was good. And I, God, divided the light from the darkness.   Moses 2:4.


Light and darkness mingle in a smother that is ill,
giving neither warmness nor providing soothing chill.
No stars or moon or sun distinct the canopy display;
the virgin Earth lays torpid with no sense of night and day.

But such is not the state that the Creator deigns to keep.
His voice of power overrides the great and vasty deep. 
The light comes forth, the darkness stays -- obedient to His word;
The wall between the two no longer tepid, thin, or blurred. 

Come to the light, come follow bright, come to the warming glow!
The Lord provides a beacon that the blind may even know.
Good light, pulled from the darkness long ago by God's decree,
gives hope and love and comfort to the likes of you and me.

Bring light!

. . .  and joy because of the light of Christ unto life.
Alma 28:14.

Bring light! Each life to start anew.
Bring light! Our faults to see right through.
Bring light! To make us blind to hate.
Bring light! To keep our travels straight.
Bring light! All sorrow to upend. 
Bring light! To follow Christ our friend. 

Sonshine

 . . . for behold, at the going down of the sun there was no darkness; and the people began to be astonished because there was no darkness when the night came.  3 Nephi 1:15 


The Light is come and blazes forth
from tropic South to frigid North;
The brooding night is held at bay
as with the Son we spend each day.
No darkness can withstand the Lord;
in heaven He has bathed His sword.
The setting sun will give its light
to celebrate our chief birthright.
Let others find in darkness bliss;
it's murky joys I shall dismiss.
In wonder I will bow my head
as Sonshine melts away my dread!

The Voice of God

And it came to pass that again they heard the voice, and they understood it not.
3 Nephi 11:4

The voice of God reverberates throughout the universe;
there isn't any particle through which it can't disperse.
The stars ablaze, the planets on their rolling wings, obey;
the photons and the black holes do as His clear voice does say.
And only man, in image made just like the Master Planner,
can hear His voice and disregard it in such callous manner.
Our ears are not attuned to godly discourse anymore.
Our senses can't distinguish tween the truth and groundless lore.
O give to me an open mind, a heart that can receive
Thy words upon first hearing them, that to them I may cleave!  

En Strengen av Perler: A Thai Ghost Story.

I am suffering from good health today. By that I mean my schedule is all disrupted because I feel so doggone good. Normally I arise with a backache and dizziness around 4 in the morning, drag myself to my recliner, bow my head, and whimper a prayer of thanksgiving which is barely audible and as anemic as Esau’s love for his brother Jacob. Then I sit for at least twenty minutes, wondering why I bother to get out of . . . what’s that thing called where I lay down sometimes? Oh well, whatever it is, I wish I were back in it, or on it, or maybe even under it. But I’m not, so I check my emails and Facebook and Twitter. Then I remember I have to take my pills, but my stomach is gurgling like the Maelstrom. So I leave a message for my daughter Sarah on Facebook; I do this every day when I get up since having a bad fall one night a few weeks ago so someone knows I’m alive and still able to get around.

After I manage to choke down the pills I again sit for twenty minutes wondering why I bother to take those . . . what are those little round things that taste so nasty and make me pee all the time? Oh well, thank goodness my memory is still in good shape. But my body now wants to go back to sleep, so I close my eyes to think about doing that, and an hour later I open them after deciding that I do not need to take a nap. That settled, I start to write again. Until I remember I’m hungry and I need to go to the Rec Center to swim and exercise. Should I eat first or should I go to the Rec Center first? I know if I eat first I’ll never make it to the Rec Center; I’ll have to wait around to have a bm, because if I start walking to the Rec Center I’ll get caught halfway there with a terrific urge . . .

The rest of the day is no better, but at least I have it planned out. That gives me comfort.

But today I slept soundly until six thirty, had a marvelous bowel movement, ate a hearty breakfast, and couldn’t wait to shout my prayers to heaven and then get on the ol’ laptop to start writing.

This is not me. Suddenly my libido is back. I dream about Joom. I dream about Amy. I dream about a couple of bar girls who wanted me to teach them English.  I clean the stove. I put the vacuum cleaner back together. I not only wash the dishes but soak them in Clorox water first to make sure they’re antiseptic. I go shopping for Bush’s Baked Beans for lunch so I can have them with wieners and a dash of Tabasco Sauce; a fool’s errand when your bowels are as finicky as mine.

It’s one-thirty in the afternoon and I haven’t put the beans on yet. In fact, I haven’t even unpacked the groceries, which include milk and anchovy paste and cream cheese. Plus some Utah chocolate truffle candy bars, which I have never bought before. I gave up candy bars when I gave up swearing, dammit.

And now, when I should be reading and napping the afternoon away, feeling slightly sorry for myself and hoping God notices what a martyr I am to my ill health, as per schedule, I am going to write a Thai ghost story! Because it’s all about Joom. I’m sublimating something or other for something or other else, but can’t explain it beyond that. Nor do I want to. At may age I get in trouble when sex enters the picture.

******************************************************************************************************

All Thais are superstitious. They believe in portents, magic numbers, auspicious days, and ghosts.

Joom frequently dreamed of the winning Lottery number and would not leave me alone until I coughed up a hundred baht for her ticket. It never won, for which she blamed me:

“You were disrespectful in front of Spirit House. You didn’t bow. So the spirit sent me the wrong dream!”  

“Would you like another Leo, princess?”

That usually settled her hash.

Of course the one time I absolutely refused to give in to her fetish and fork over the baht, her number came up for two-thousand ticals.

She was surprisingly laid back about it.

“It’s not a problem, thi rag. I am not angry; only sad for you because in the next life your karma will be so bad for keeping me poor.”

“Thanks for your understanding, princess. Let me put some ice in that glass of Leo for you.”

Joom could tell instantly if someone had a good spirit or bad spirit about them. She consequently told me who I could be friends with and who I could not be friends with. I didn’t really mind, because all the people she told me had bad spirits were boorish British drunks that I didn’t want to spend time with anyway -- and most of those who had a good spirit, according to Joom, were attractive women who drank too much and liked to give free foot massages.

The bungalow I rented for us was haunted. By the ghost of the landlord’s daughter, who had taken her own life in it when she found out her husband was unfaithful. She did it with poison, and it took a long time for her to die.

Joom cheerfully told me this one night when the electricity was out due to a violent monsoon storm, and we had only candlelight.

“Have you seen her ghost?” I asked skeptically.

“I feel her brush past me all the time; and I can see her faintly in that mirror” Joom pointed to a cracked piece of glass hanging on the wall next to the bathroom door.

Just then her dog Nipoo began howling in the corner.

“She comes” Joom announced solemnly.

I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck begin to stiffen. My saliva turned ice cold as I gulped several times.

There was a crash of pots and pans from the dark kitchen. Something was running amok among the cheap tin cutlery and plastic chopsticks! Drawers banged. The kitchen tap gushed.

There was something in the kitchen, no doubt about it.

“Go say hello to your ghost” I told Joom, smiling weakly.

Her eyes were bugged out like ping pong balls. Through a rictus of whitening lips she barely replied that I was the man of the house, the one who wore the skivvies, so I should be the one to confront whatever nameless terror was making a percussion section out of the kitchenware.

Since I was the rationalist, I had to do it.

I took a candle and tiptoed into the kitchen. A pair of red beady eyes glared malevolently at me. There was an unearthly yowl and something grabbed at my hair as it sped past to the open window behind me. I let out a yell that could be heard from Chiang Mai to Phuket City. Trying to escape the fiend I barked my shins on a low wooden stool and nearly fell into the bucket of Plaa Ra that lay festering under the sink. I caught myself just in time to twist around and peer out the open window, where a wretched macaque monkey was busily stuffing the remains of our dinner into its mouth.

When I got back to the living room Joom had retreated to her bedroom with Nipoo, and was swaying in front of a painting of The Nine Famous Monks of Thailand, imploring them to keep her safe, never mind that infidel farang boyfriend of hers.

I waited for her to finish, then calmly explained the origin of the ruckus. She hugged me violently, her scarlet fingernails digging into my shoulder blades like surgical knives.

That night as I lay in my bed I kept having the same looping memory -- of Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in movie The Wizard of Oz, repeating over and over again “I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do!”  

Leftovers

When leftovers are the entre
I hesitate not to say "Nay!"
The turkey that's wilted
is easily jilted
and sent on its botulus way. 

En Strengen av Perler: Cursed are the Gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers are superfluous and hateful. They practice simony and barratry without shame or hinderance.

I’ve always thought so, ever since Kindergarten -- when my teacher dictated who got to play in the sandbox and when; and who got to use the colored clay sticks and when; and told us when to lay down for a nap and then, just as I was starting to get sleepy, telling us to get up.

What kind of life is that for a child? Being denied time in the sandbox because it was time for finger painting, and other folderol.

I have spent a lifetime cocking a snook at gatekeepers and trying to escape their baleful influence.

I hated my father for being the gatekeeper of my allowance. In the early morning I would get up and hide his dentures so he would be late for work. Down with oppressive gatekeepers!

In high school when I told my counselor I wanted to be a circus clown he told me I couldn’t do it. It was impractical. There was no future in it.

He tried slamming the gate on my dreams, but I fooled him good. I got into the Ringling Clown College and then got a contract with the Greatest Show on Earth, and went on to perform as a clown for nearly the rest of my working career. It kept me broke, ruined my marriage, and estranged me from my children for 20 years, but by the Great Horn Spoon I did it in part  just to spite that high school gatekeeper!  Nyaaaaaaaah!

“Stop!” “Who goes there?” “What’s the password?”

That’s all I’ve heard all my life. When I worked at Circus World in Haines City, Florida, the boss clown fired me for changing my makeup without permission, leaving me with a sick pregnant wife to care for and no income. Who the hell made him the gatekeeper of my clown makeup? Nobody. The finicking bloated martinent!

When I wore a bowtie instead of a necktie to work at radio station KSAL in Salina, Kansas, I was fired for insubordination. What in the wide wide world possessed those apple-knockers to think they could deny me employment because of what I wore around my collar? Such abuse of power was, and is, as shocking as it is moronic. Those gatekeepers should be made to sleep on a bed of sandpaper in the nude. Grit size P12.

The Utah courts would not listen to my appeals against my wife’s petition for divorce -- they called it “No Fault Divorce”. The gibbering villains. The supine homebreakers. The monstrous gatekeepers, battening on the law for their indifferent subsistence!

Who says I can’t put mustard on my scrambled eggs? Protests when I use a paper plate as a Frisbee. Frowns when I leave dirty dishes in the sink until lichen grows on them. Tells me eating at McDonalds is a civic and moral sin.

I’ll tell you who says all those despicable things. Dirty lousy gatekeepers. Officicious, prying gatekeepers. Malign and self-serving gatekeepers, without a shred of any real jurisdiction, and nobody else!

When I wanted to dress up like Hitler so I could parade past Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and give him a Sieg Heil during a Ringling matinee, who stopped me? Charlie Baumann -- that tumefied Teuton gatekeeper!

At my first radio job in Williston, North Dakota, I wanted to announce the self-inflicted death of a prominent Catholic businessman. The station manager, Bill Anderson, wouldn’t let me do it -- because he was nothing but a ferret-faced, toadying gatekeeper for the business community. The other radio station in town and the town newspaper gave full coverage of the suicide. Pfaa! It makes me ill to write of it.

My own sister took me to court to rob me of my inheritance from my mother, leaving me homeless and unable to pay my child support. Why? Because she wanted to play gatekeeper of my money and self respect -- she thought I had too much of both. Once decided on such a foul career, no gatekeeper can keep their heart beating with anything but malice. If they can keep their heart beating at all.

I worked for the Utah State Tax Commission as a telephone tax collector. When I applied for an opening as supervisor of telephone collectors an insufferable gatekeeper named Dorothy from HR told me I was disqualified because I neglected to include a small detail on my application about previous employment -- a job that had lasted barely 3 months. She denied me the chance to progress in government employment and so provide my family with a stable and adequate income -- the bilious old crow of a gatekeeper!

I curse her, and all gatekeepers who function without authority, compassion, wit, or humanity.

I curse the gatekeepers at the Minnesota Department of Recovery Services for revoking my driver’s license for back child support when I was making regular payments, all I could afford, and taking care of my dying mother. Because I no longer could drive I could not take her out on the brief excursions she so much enjoyed, and so her last months on earth were made much more miserable by soulless and rancid gatekeepers to uphold an unjust and unhallowed piece of legislation. May their ears fill with coarse hair and their lungs fill with kapok.

The gatekeepers at airports. At Costco. At Walmart. At nameless roadblocks and speed traps. At gas stations that want payment before pumping. In MBA programs and at walnut burl desks in Washington. Cops that profile skin color and imagined nationality. They all proliferate like maggots on dung.

My own body is full of gatekeepers. My narrow arteries that won’t let the blood circulate freely. The enlarged prostate that restricts my urine flow. A digestive system that takes too long to process my meals, giving me sour breath and constipation.    

When will God strike down the gatekeepers and give us surcease from their senseless, useless, and cruel blockades?

And there are gatekeepers who keep out the real gatekeepers. Yes there are. Such usurpers thrive amidst the noisome din of existential and atheistic clap-trap.

I loathe the unfrocked and unchurched gatekeepers who block the path to repentance and forgiveness.

In Thailand I was often drunk, and lived with a Thai woman who was not my wife.  And there were so many pseudo gatekeepers who told me “It’s alright, you may pass; you have nothing to worry about and may continue on with your life as you please.”

Thank heavens I recognized them as the mountebanks and chiselers they are, and finally sought out the true gatekeepers -- for have I said such do not exist? -- to seek their kindly help in finding the correct and proper way into inner grace and harmony.

These real gatekeepers, with authority and conscience, have conducted me safely into green pastures. And so they may do the same for you, if you have both the wit and humility to recognize them. And if you don’t; well, you might be lucky enough to be beaten into recognizing them, as I was. And still am beaten from time to time, for my own good (and maybe Someone Else’s amusement).

How often do I talk of Christ?

And they were also conversing about this Jesus Christ, of whom the sign had been given concerning his death.    3 Nephi 11:2

How often do I talk of Christ outside of Sunday School,
Creator of the cosmos and the blessed Golden Rule?
How frequently do I invoke his teachings in my life,
the scriptures he inspired to end all my grief and strife?
Not take his name in vain as television preachers do,
but speak about his nature -- loving, wise, and always true.
His melancholy sacrifice that from Golgotha led
to atonement and redemption as my sacred Head.
Tis not enough; tis not enough -- his name upon my lips
should be as nectar flowing that my soul unceasing sips! 
O help me talk with dignity and words not multiply,
and never say a word that might His life re-crucify!