Upshift!

Operation Sirloin

Back in the saddle after my day of rest.

I began Operation Sirloin with a can of salmon last night at around 11:30. (Eating when you should be sleeping is a great way to gain!) I made the salmon into a simple "salad" by adding delicious, versatile mayonnaise, the condiment of champions. Some people think that this kind of salad needs things like relish or celery or capers or chopped walnuts or whatever other horror-nubbins they can scrape off the fridge floor or their back teeth. Those people are what I call nutjobs. Tuna salad is tuna and mayonnaise. Chicken salad is chicken and mayonnaise. Salmon salad is salmon and mayonnaise. Ham salad is ham and mayonnaise. Egg salad is egg and mayonnaise. What makes a wad of animal byproduct into what the human community has agreed to call a "salad" is the addition of mayonnaise; lipsticking the pig with your little bit of pickle is just nothing but sad.

Hey, check it out: you can get good canned fish at your small independent grocery store where they sell the Dr. Bronner's and the green algae toothpaste--see if they have it. That salmon was seriously good for canned fish, and according to the blab on the can it was sustainably caught wild Alaskan salmon. The tuna from the same people was good, too, and just as bleedyheart. We ought all to be eating sardines, of course, and that's what I aim to do as soon as I can find some that haven't been drowned in mustard.

This morning thanks to the decent food of yesterday I managed to get out of bed in the morning and do what I have been trying to get up and do all week: I brought my beloved mechanic a box of brownies from the yuppie bakery. I also dumped the leftover Mexicolas on him--he's got three sons and they're at the shop on their feet all day playing monkey in the middle with spent car batteries: I figure they can handle six Coca-Colas between 'em with no lasting ill effects.

I had breakfast at Steak 'n Shake: two flavor-free eggs; four sad, limp bacon strips; two wagon wheels of insipid sausage. A modest effort, but I'm just starting out. I did manage to shake about a tsp of salt on the eggs, which should help with my endgame effort to retain water. Steak 'n Shake is perfectly calibrated to appeal to my demographic. The air conditioning is freezing cold; it's all diner-ey inside--black and red and white and steel and tile and glass; and they play, like, "Roxanne" and "Karma Chameleon" and stuff. So it's like the fifties as imagined by the eighties! Which is great: Steak 'n Shake can make even the dreadful, inexorable passage of time all warm and bite-sized and batter-fried.