Several alternate titles for this installment read as follows:
1) "I See Your Samonella And Raise Your Some Botulism. Or, My Child Raped Yours And Is Currently Being Held Without Bond Awaiting Trial. My Bad."
2) "I Can See How Being A Floor Host Would Suit You Perfectly If You Were Raised As A For-Profit Catholic. Or, Your Morals Are Like A Mighty Anchor On Your Livelihood, Mr. Cleaver."
3) "I Once Knew A Sasquatch Named Gur, Whose Movements Were Always A Blur.... Or, I Am A Cocktail Waitress, Therefore, By Definition, Pretty Worthless."
If you look up 'wasted potential' in a dictionary, my face really should pop up next to the definition. Sometimes in the small hours of the night I think about all the lives I've disregarded, all the possibilities I've turned my back on and all the roads I never went down. I feel as if I could've made some sort of positive impact on our world if I'd only made better choices and applied the big thinky-thing in my skull to helping mankind instead of encouraging it to get an hour champagne room or buy a bottle of vodka.
But rather than bettering my world, I've just crawled deep into the slimy underbelly of a degenerate industry and made myself comfortable, not unlike a tapeworm with a body hair problem. And why not? I justify to myself, it's an easy road to travel, my simple needs are fulfilled and occasionally I get to rough up a fellow human being.
Honestly it's an ideal profession for me. I'm large, I'm lazy and I enjoy ruining drunk people's good time. I find it hard to imagine another job I'm so perfectly suited to. (Outside of Dictator/Evil Overlord, of course but the job market's a bitch for Dictators/Evil Overlords these days. Everybody wants 'freedom' or some such nonsense...)
But 'Herdin isn't for everyone. The occupation will eat away at ones moral fiber like a cheerfully determined cancer and only those who've already strangled their self respect to death*1 and hidden away it's gruesome remains can expect to succeed and survive within it.
Take young Billy Hawkins for example. Billy was a Floor Guy I used to work with who I just made up solely to provide a character for something awful to happen to, which reinforces the above sentiment about how working in strip clubs is really hard on the soul.
So Billy was what I refer to as 'dangerously suburban'. Webster's Dictionary defines 'Dangerously Suburban' as:
Adjective
1. Referring to those who use 'Golly!' and 'That's Swell!' in every day language, vote Republican because that's how Mom and Dad vote and believe in stuff from the Bible.
2. Characteristic of a town or village where the worst crimes committed yearly are littering, jaywalking and the occasional and highly scandalous DUI.
Noun
1. A future crime statistic
2. A naive person. Like big-time naive. See Brooklyn Bridge and Magic Beans.
Billy was the most idealistic, open hearted kid I can ever remember working with. He didn't swear, drink, smoke, work on Sundays or take the Lord's name in vain. He didn't covet his neighbor's stuff, was kind to small animals and thought everything would all be OK if we would just take a moment to talk to one another like human beings.
Then he started working in a titty club and it was like 15 years of cynicism and misanthropy cock punched his spirit all at once. If you could've observed him long enough, maybe with the help of time lapse photography, you could've actually seen tiny bits of his soul sour and die right in front of you. Billy was like a tragic ongoing science experiment for us Floor Scum who had already mortgaged our souls to pay the bills and upgrade the transportation sector.
We wanted to help him. We urged him to run like hell from this business, that it wasn't for him. But he was suburban stubborn, which is sort of like garage-veal if you catch my meaning. This industry just plain overwhelmed him. It devoured him. He never stood a chance. It was like expecting one twelve year old boy armed only with a kitchen strainer to take out SEAL Team Six.
He was destined to fail.
Within a year he transformed from a mild mannered 24 year old virgin with dreams of really making a difference in the world and saving the family Ebay business*2, into a broken, raving, booze soaked husk of a man who craved blowjobs and bourbon. By the end of his time at the club he would have happily ran a quarter mile with adorable baby hounds taped to the bottom of his shoes, slapping a dancer every 20 feet.
It was sad to watch. Too much reality, too fast.*3 It fucked him up good and to this day he's still institutionalized and fed a constant diet of Thorazine to keep him calm and unkilly.
It takes a special breed to be a dancer wrangler...
It goes without saying that there are a lot of dudes running around wild in this world who would benefit from having some of their facial bones broken by someone who didn't want to fight, but was forced to in order to defend himself from unwarranted aggression. If only more bullies got their asses handed to them by their would be victims, then the world would be a much better place I feel.
Alas, the same also holds true for some females. A much smaller percentage to be sure, but still there are some...
I'm not advocating domestic violence here of course, it's (almost) never right for a man to hit a woman. Yet even in the face of this undeniable fact, I have witnessed exceptions to the rule. In rare occasions, it's not only OK to hit a girl, it would probably do her some good or at least bring her reign of terror to an end. To persons in the security field, like myself, she'd still have to hit first. Being attacked opens all kinds of doors to the carnage-ly minded; it invites self defense, which in and of itself may actually be a really crippling attack.
Six reasons why I can't hear you in a loud club, for the dumber, more timid waitresses:
A) You're tiny. Which means your mouth is roughly level with my anus, which doesn't hear so good because it's an anus. A fucking anus.
B) I've been in several metal bands and have attended hundreds of metal concerts which means my hearing is fucked. Especially when there's loud background music, like Rihanna.
C) You're talking like we're alone in a tiny camper together. I can see your wee bitty mouth moving, but none of the meaningful sounds are registering in my brain because you're talking to me like I'm a special needs kitten.
D) Whatever you're asking me is something you should already know and I don't care about any of it because I'm tired of helping you do your job. You should tip me every time I point out a new table that you didn't notice walk through the door because there are a lot of them and you really suck at your easy job.
E) I am a total dick who doesn't care about any of your problems or any of your offspring's achievements, thus negating any possible content we could have to interact over outside of me telling you there are new tables to wait on.
F) I have an earpiece in my 'good' ear and it's usually spewing useless, unimportant bullshit that not only impedes the efficient execution of my duties, but makes your rodent-like mewling seem contrived. Almost like you're part of the problem...
For REALZ*4, why is it so hard to have a competent wait staff in a strip club? A girl can make really good money here if she just knows her game. It's not difficult at all. It's not like a busy restaurant where you really have to be at your best and have to have some sort of specialized knowledge, like the day's specials. We don't have specials. Our food sucks and is cooked by idiots.
Which is as good a segue as any to explore the topic of our cooks, which is, quite frankly, frightening.
Our cooks don't just murder food products, they desecrate them. It's like the difference between just killing other humans as opposed to killing them and making interesting rain gear and useful household items from their skin and various internal organs.
The main problem is what we sorta refer to as our 'Kitchen Manager'. He is what could charitably be called Blanco Garbige, or more domestically; one car payment short of being homeless. And as I have elucidated before, birds of a feather flock together. Therefore if one is a lazy ignorant wretch, it only stands to reason that the majority of one's friends will be uneducated troglodytes with a poor work ethic as well.
And this is the case.
I'm not Gordon Ramsey by any means. There is so much culinary stuff that I can't do that it doesn't even bear thinking about. I can't dress a carcass, nor fillet a fish. I am a modern cook who is accustomed to working with shit that's already been neatly cut up for me.
That being said I can be drunk in a wheelchair, blind and half-heartedly masturbating and still cook better than our entire kitchen staff combined. Their knowledge of food safety is laughable if you don't ever intend on eating their dishes, or an intestinal gamble if you do.
I'm just going to list a few of the things they do wrong here to illustrate my stance. Those of you with no culinary experience and who have never seen the Food Network or were even aware of it's existence may not appreciate the following factoids I'm gonna throw at you, but it doesn't make them any less startling nor valid.
1) The first is simply a waste issue, but it bears mentioning. When you take a food from frozen to thawed, you do it in cold water or in the fridge. Most restaurants do it in cold water because it's much quicker than simply letting sit in the fridge.
When you thaw stuff in cold water, you place it in a container under a running faucet. You do this because bacteria has an incredibly difficult time reproducing in water that's not only chilly, but non stagnant as well. The faucet doesn't have to be running full blast, it merely needs to be dripping enough water to keep the surface of the container that is thawing whatever it is you're trying to unfreeze continually over-spilling its confines.
So the reality is that it's not the running water that's actually thawing the subject material out, rather it's the immersion in less-than-freezing water that's doing so. The water just needs to be running enough to keep the surface of the thaw water moving, which is incredibly confusing to bacteria apparently.
But our cooks say 'fuck all that' and keep the water on full blast while they're thawing stuff. They believe in their heart of hearts that it's the running water that will successfully unfreeze stuff, and like medieval peasants, believe in the power of running water to repel evil spirits.
They have wasted, in my conservative opinion, roughly six billion gallons of water in the last three weeks or so. They do more damage to the environment than NASCAR or Mel Gibson.
2) Try to know when something is rotten, it's sorta important. Usually the intense stench of decaying organic matter is your first clue. Serving food that is rotten is bad.*5
I say this because our kitchen staff almost uniformly refuses to date anything, even though it is a food code violation to NOT date EVERYTHING. Anything at all that goes into a fridge must have a date on it, but our cooks are rebels without a clue. No dates, yo.
This came to terrible realization for me recently when a brand new cook we hired did something horrible and unforgivable. He received an order for hummus and pita chips which is an appetizer we offer but none of our cooks can actually make. They produce large containers of a glue-like product that looks and acts like hummus but tastes like rendered slug and has the consistency of something badly infected with a random jungle parasite. All leaky and shit.
Now I was standing 10 feet away from the new cook when he opened the lid to our current batch of 'hummus' and I could tell by the smell that it was past the prime of it's life by a fair margin. It smelled like it was only weeks away from forming a government or inventing television.
New cook never even blinked. He filled a dish with it and shambled off to the microwave, oblivious to the hummus's impending sentience. I mentioned to the 'senior' cook that he might want to smell the hummus container and thus stop the new cook's obvious agenda of manslaughter and intestinal turmoil, which, to his credit, he did.
Needless to say, all hope for new cook shattered.
3) Cooking steaks to temperature is something that takes practice. Hell, cooking any kind of meat to perfection has a little bit of a learning curve, I'd be the first to admit that. But with at least a couple of months of hands on practice, and with proper mentorship by an experienced chef, anyone who intends on continuing to make their living by preparing food should be able to do it by instinct and touch alone. Anyone who cooks meat for a living should have a 80-90% success rate at cooking a steak to correct temp.
I say 80-90% because it is a restaurant industry fact that a fair portion of the steak-consuming population doesn't actually know how it likes its steak cooked. People who request and think they enjoy Medium Well often in reality prefer Medium and those that claim to favor Medium Rare are frequently fans of Rare and just don't know it.*7
Our culinary wizards are like blind squirrels-every now and then they find an acorn and by that I mean they cook a steak correctly.
What other gastronanigans*6 have they been up to you ask?
Well, we make orders of mashed potatoes in plastic bags. I'm gonna pause the narrative for a moment and let that sink in.
(insert intermission music here)
I'm going to assume there's a least a few people who read this blog that haven't worked in a kitchen before and aren't very handy in their own kitchens either and therefore the following statement is intended for them:
Mashed potatoes aren't made in plastic bags.
Fuck it's late and I can't even begin to cover them all. It's motherfucking 10:15 AM and I'm really tired and sorta drunk. I really want to do pictures, but at the same time I want to just publish this already and pretend I did it in time to be a 'year-end special'.
Happy "New" Year and fuck your goddamn pictures.
-The StripperHerder
*1 Quietly, while no one was looking.
*2 Hey I said 'suburban', not rural. There was no farm to be saved even though it would've made a more compelling narrative.
*3 I was going to do a song parody of Mother's Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys here, but when I got to looking at the actual lyrics of the song I noticed something kinda fucked up. Here are the lyrics from the first chorus and the first 2 lines of the second verse:
"Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks.
Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such.
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
'Cos they'll never stay home and they're always alone.
Even with someone they love.
Cowboys like smokey old pool rooms and clear mountain mornings,
Little warm puppies and children and girls of the night.."
Um, children and girls and possibly even warm puppies of the night? Surely I can't be the only one aware of the older and somehow more polite term for a prostitute, 'Lady of the Night'? So presumably, judging by the original lyrics, a cowboy may indeed like a girl, a child or in a pinch, a warm puppy prostitute? No wonder you shouldn't let your baby grow up to be one.
Imagine the conversations between doting mothers:
Miriam: "Hi Nancy! What do you want you babies to be when they grow up?"
Nancy: "Hello Miriam! I want them to be doctors and lawyers and dentists. That way they can make a good living and help others at the same time. What do you want your babies to be when they grow up?"
Miriam: "I want them to be pedophiles and zoophiliacs who have the moral convictions of drunk jackals. That way they can make a good living and destroy others at the same time."
*4 Can't believe I just typed "For Realz". I'm be on crack.
*5 Except in certain quaint regional delicacies, most of which predate refrigeration.
*6 Gastronanigans: Short for Gastronomic Shenanigans. Having fun at the expense of, or torturing others with food. This can be intentional or otherwise.
*7 I myself am one of those crazy people who prefer my steak Medium Well to Well done. A good quality cut of meat cooked to Well by someone who knows what they're doing can be every bit as tender and delicious as a medium rare one. The problem is that there are many folks out there who equate 'tender' with 'squishy'.
