UNREMITTING FAILURE

Foodie

In our neighborhood there's a thing known as the giant slice.  It's a slice of pizza the size of a laptop, and usually costs four or five bucks.  The giant slice is very popular with the drunks staggering down the hill from Adams Morgan on Friday and Saturday nights.  We've never had a giant slice, but Mrs. UF and yours truly swear on Herman Cain's grave that we'll buy one before we leave the neighborhood.  They're ubiquitous, there being eight or nine cheapo pizza joints (two chairs, a wobbly table, a counter with say four stools running along the front window) running up the hill to Columbia Road, and probably more up there.  The thing about the giant slice is you know it's going to be greasy, and the crust is going to be thin, and the tomato sauce is coming out of a can.  That's why drunks make up their key constituency.  But we don't care.  We're going to buy one.  We're going to look for the place advertising the biggest giant slice and we're going to buy one and eat it, if it kills us. 

Lately we've been eating a lot at a Mexican/El Salvadoran joint called El Tamarindo.  It's not nearly as popular as Loreal Plaza, the Mexican food establishment just down the street, but the food is far more authentic.  Like they have a soup that contains tripe, yucca, and cow's feet.  How big a bowl do you need to get a whole cow's foot in it?  Maybe we misunderstand.  Maybe it's just the meat from a cow's foot, but that's not what the menu says.  The menu says cow's feet.  So what we expect to see, when we finally order it, is a giant bowl of soup with two cow's feet standing in it.  Saturday night Mrs. UF got chicken soup, because she has a cold and chicken soup is supposed to be good for colds.  Plus, it's the only soup they serve that doesn't have cow's feet in it.  Unremitting Failure personally favors the papusas, which are served with a kind of El Salvadoran cole slaw. The combo is delicious.  The view out the front window is of two giant slice joints, separated by an Ethiopian restaurant that nobody ever goes into. 

We like Ethiopian food, but Mrs. UF will  have nothing to do with it.  She's prejudiced against Ethiopians, evidently.  To the point where she boycotts their food, which is pretty unfair of her we think, although she says the reason she doesn't go to Ethiopian restaurants is she doesn't like the food, which we find pretty preposterous.  Everybody likes Ethiopian food.  You scoop it up with that spongy bread and it's delicious.  They throw hard-boiled eggs on top of everything, which we like, too.  Perhaps someday Mrs. UF will rise above her prejudice against Ethiopia and everything Ethiopian (we notice she doesn't own any Haile Selassie I t-shirts, which you can buy all up and down the block) and give Ethiopian food a fair chance.  Or maybe her mind is just permanently closed to Ethiopian food, the way it is against going to brunch, something we've been trying to talk her into for years.  It's sad to run into prejudiced people, like us.  We wouldn't order cheese fondue if our life depended on it, because we're not going to give the Swedes that satisfaction.   

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Day was wonderful, thanks to some excellent company and the fact that, when the turkey made its way around to us, we were able to make off with all the crotchy bits.  Your true turkey aficionado knows that the turkey crotch is where the action is.  You can forget your breast meat and drumsticks, etc.  The trick of turkey eating, as in street fighting, is to go for the groin.

As for the rest of the meal, it was also delicious.  We skipped the sweet potatoes, because they're an abomination in the sight of God, but we loaded up on stuffing and corn and biscuits and ham and pickled eggs.  Pickled eggs may be a regional thing, they're made by hardboiling eggs and then cooking them for a while in red beets.  They emerge a distinctive radioactive pink, but boy are they tasty.  We like to salt them heavily, to make them more dangerous.  In fact we think we took a ministroke just as we were pouring gravy on the stuffing.  We saw our dead father sitting across from us at the table and he said, "Forget the turkey. Eat one of your nephews." It was either that or mom accidentally put magic mushrooms in the stuffing again. 

After Thanksgiving dinner, Mrs. UF and yours truly skipped the television and went out to play soccer with our niece and nephew, Jeffers' kids.  Say what you will about children, nobody cheats as well as they do.  They rigged the game from the beginning by making our goal an old tree, and their goal a ridge of grass as long as the Maginot Line.  Then they proceeded to run circles around us.  We were soon sweating and swearing, and getting kicked in the groin by balls kicked (hard) by our niece from about four feet away.  Part of their goal was a ditch formed by a natural spring.  It was covered by fallen leaves to make it look innocent and bucolic, but several times we jumped in in pursuit of kicked balls and emerged covered with muck.  We've never been enamored of soccer, or football as the rest of the world foolishly insists upon calling it, and we hope never to play again.  We were slaughterized.  Scorekeeping was erratic.  From goal to goal the score might go from 12 to 6 to 27 to 3.  Like we say, children are natural cheaters, and would do wonderfully in corporate offices.  If you think the people in said offices now are pirates, put a couple of six and seven years old in them. You'd see some real illegal horsetrading get done.

We also walked the dogs around our sister's property, and talked to Jeffers who is now wearing a full beard that makes him look like our brother David, and pigged out at the dessert table, where pumpkin products predominated.  Believe us, you haven't lived until you've eaten pumpkin jerky.   

"Practicing Medicine"

This is an unfortunate phrase in English.  Because nobody wants to entrust their health to somebody who is just practicing.  Major lead ballplayers don't go out and practice during major games, why should doctors?  Most people practice at something until they're proficient at it, and then they start doing it for real.  Not physicians.   They go on practicing until the day they retire.  "Medicine? I just practice it."  It leads to horrors in the surgical theater.  "Doctor Jevago, you butchered that patient!"  "Oh well.  I was just practicing."  Last week we went to see the doctor and he sat us down and told us we had brain cancer.  "Jesus! Really?"  "No, I'm just spitballing.  How's lumbago sound? Or rickets?  Heck, I'm just practicing."  That's why we're on the lookout for a nonpracticing physician.  One who's done fooling around, and ready to really get down to keeping us alive in earnest. 

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody

Except you Europeans, of course.  You don't have a great tradition that involves the Indians bailing you out with a great feast and then turning around and exterminating them.  But we do, and we make the most of it.  We gorge ourselves, then gorge ourselves some more, then complain about how much we've eaten and vow never to do it again.  Then we watch American football, whilst lying on the sofa and groaning softly, or watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which features giant inflatable cartoon characters that hover above the streets of New York City like monsters run amok.  We'll be spending our Thanksgiving, as usual, at our sister's home in bucolic York Pennsylvania.  Actually York itself has a reputation as a good place to get murdered, but she lives in the rural outskirts where the deer and the groundhogs play. Meanwhile the red and yellow leaves will be blowing around outside because winter is almost here, and Christmas is just around the corner, and maybe we'll walk the dogs down to the small stream that flows at the outer edges of her property and let them prance along the edges of it because they're afraid of water, our chickenshit pooches.  They're not the types to leap into cold water in pursuit of the casually thrown stick, like your great big Labrador retrievers will, because they're Mexican and their thoughts run to the warm sun and tequila, Sammy Hagar's Cabo Wabo brand in particular.  They're comfort-seekers, our dogs, just like we are, and don't see the point of getting wet up to the nose on a cold day when they should be inside gnawing at the whole turkey like hyenas, that's their fantasy, they have no time for foolish water tricks.  Hold one of our dogs above a baby pool and he or she will begin to mock doggie paddle, with a stricken look on his or her face that says why are you doing this to me.  Anyway, Thanksgiving is a great day if you like gout, an okay day if you like hanging around a bunch of relatives you only see a couple of times a year, and a terrible day if all you really want is sushi, and some sake, and a Korean woman to walk back and forth across your naked back while you moan and groan in indecent pleasure. 

A Wedding in Adams County

 Here's the infamous photo of us at our brother Barry's wedding.  He's the tall one in white who doesn't look like he belongs in the family.  That's us to his left, bloated and bearded in a cranberry tuxedo.  Brother Jeffers is at the far right, looking like the not-so-innocent kid he was.  We remember being terribly hungover that day, and not in the mood for a wedding.  We'd spent the night at brother David's dope den, and passed out in our hard contact lens, and what you can't tell from this photo of a photo is that our one eye was almost completely closed, a fact that caused consternation amongst Barry's family to be.  We don't know how we attended to our ceremonial duties, but we do recall a drink appearing from somebody's flask or bottle, and that helped tremendously.  Within months we'd be in a terrible car accident, and subsequently get together with our first wife, and straighten up some, at least on the surface.  But when this photo was taken we were in freefall, and guilty of all kinds of wasted misbehavior.  About the only thing we weren't guilty of was choosing the cranberry tuxedos.  That wasn't our fault.  They were inflicted upon us, as a kind of humiliation. 

UF, Barry, the Old Man, brother David, Jeffers

Another Weekend Shot to Shit

It's Monday--again.  But blast it all to Hell, it can't be! It was just Friday night!  We remember it all so clearly, we were gloating like Raskilnikov!  But facts don't lie (oh yes they do) and here we are, back in our cubicle in that vast edifice that houses the Trans-Misery Corporation.   

We shouldn't complain.  As long as the work gets done, we're free to do what we want.  We can blog, or bribe a capo to let us smoke outside by the electric fence.  While we smoke, we watch him out of the corner of our eye.  He pounds his sjambok into his other fist and leers.  His last job was in Croatia, and involved doing unspeakable things.  How dull he must find America, where the only unspeakable thing is the idea of economic equality. 

We've got to start doing exciting things on weekends.  Like what? That's where we founder.  All we know how to do is eat, exercise and sleep.  And watch TV.  Last night we fell in love with a corpse on Dexter.  That's how far we've fallen in the romance department.  She was naked, and had a butt we'd eat our way through a park bench to get to.  Is that too much information?  To hell with it!

Friday night we had the worst dinner of our lives.  It was at one of those bars that brews its own beer and Mrs. UF wanted to go there.  We looked at the giant silver vats behind their wall of glass and imagined ourselves swimming to the bottom of one, our mouth wide open.  Anyway, we ordered fish and chips, and the fish came in rectangular bricks the approximate shape and weight of gold bars.  You could knock out a polar bear with one of these weapons of reconstituted carp.     

We won't tell you what we did Saturday and Sunday, because the shame is too great.  Suffice it to say that finishing the Sunday Washington Post crossword puzzle was our biggest thrill.  Give up booze and drugs, and take chasing women off the table, and you've got yourself an animated corpse.  We look alive, and we can cook chili, but we're for all practical purposes deader than Lazarus before Jesus got hold of him.  We could go to a museum or the zoo or the ballpark but they all bore us silly, as does the prospect of taking a drive in the country.  The leaves are changing color, people take drives out Skyline Drive in Virginia to look at them.  We'd sooner sit on a barbed wire fence.  If we had children, all of this would be a moot point.  But we're blessedly childless, and don't have to try and fail to show a couple of rug rats a good time.  We can selfishly bore ourselves silly. 

We could go see some live music, but we're picky about the bands we'll go see.  There are about six of them.  And even then we don't like going to clubs, because they don't let you smoke anymore.  What's the point of a club where you can't smoke?  Our rule of thumb is that any law that would make Hitler happy is wrong.  Does that make us crazy?  Or does that simply make us a nutball willing to stand up in defense of willful self-destruction?    

Apparent Deepening of Man Crush Casts Further Doubts on Blogger's Heterosexuality

Washington, D.C.:  Blogger Unremitting Failure's self-confessed feelings of "tenderness, caring, and loininess" for Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin have friends and family wondering whether he hasn't passed to the other side.  But UF himself says they doth protest too much.  "I'm straight as Candy on Bonanza," says the blogger.  "I just happen to like a couple of Coldplay songs and want to bear Chris Martin's children."  He adds, "I have always loved women and I always will.  I think two failed marriages proves that.  And this is hardly negated by the rather mundane fact that I want nothing more than to stare soulfully into Chris's eyes and slather suntan lotion on his Speedo-clad body on a beach in Ibiza."  Unremitting Failure declined to state whether he is, as some friends say, stalking Martin.  "I run into him here and there.  He always comments on my binoculars, sophisticated personal monitoring devices, and blowgun equipped with curare-tipped darts.  I always respond by humming the "I'll be watching you" part of the Police's "Every Breath You Take." 

"I'm straight as Candy."

Texas Governor Rick Perry Set to Mime Through Rest of Debates

Texas Governor Rick Perry, a Republican candidate for President of the United States, has announced that he plans to mime his way through the rest of the Republican debates.  The announcement follows a long series of gaffes, misstatements, and long and inexplicable silences on Perry's part during previous debates.  "I was captain of my high school mime team," says Perry, and I can express bewilderment, puzzlement, befuddledness and similar mental states much more effectively through the use of animated silence than through the use of words like "I'm drawing a blank", "let me think about that a minute", and "let me think about that for just another minute."  As for his stances on policy positions, Perry hopes a binary "thumbs up or down" strategy will shut up critics who say he's short on details.  "The white face paint," he adds, "should also set me off from Herman Cain, whose lack of basic knowledge and know-how is often mistaken for mine."   

Catch and Release

The recently instituted Catch and Release Mime program is meeting with only mixed success.  Under the program, mimes are captured on public streets in imaginary glass cages, then released in the wilds where they pose no threat except to the occasional hunter or nature lover.  Unfortunately, some catch and releasers are failing to free the mimes and instead keeping them imprisoned for demimification.  This is illegal under the program, but catch and releasers who wish to remain anonymous say that demimification is the only way to ensure that captured mimes don't return from the wilds to endanger innocent strangers on city streets.  "I started by releasing the mimes, as ordered," said one unidentified catch and releaser.  "Two weeks later, that same mime was on the same corner, annoying passersby.  It's a regular mimefield out there, and many of these mimes have been caught and released multiple times.  Demimification is the only chance we have of freeing ourselves from this scourge once and for all."  Surprisingly enough, one former mime told us he agreed with the demimers.  "Nothing was going to stop me from pulling that imaginary rope, certainly not being sent into the forest.  It was a simple matter of making my way back to civilization.  Demimification taught me a real trade, handing out free newspapers at the Metro in the morning, and returned my dignity to me.  I'll never have to tug on that imaginary rope again." 

We Set a Strict Rule About Smoking Around Our New Baby

We never, ever, smoke in his crib.