Lately, I've discovered that when I write either a funny diary on a political issue or a frivolous or personal diary on cultural issues, I get a lot of comments and recs, whereas when I write a serious analytical diary about politics, I have much less impact.
It's funny how fashions come and go. Lucky for me, today I'm in a frivolous mood. Here's the story of how today I did something I never thought I would do: I turned into Jack Nicholson.
This diary is mostly about vegetarianism and car repair.
I just walked through my family's new apartment today -- my two stepchildren in tow are about the get their own rooms for the first time in their lives -- which made this a bad day to have to drive 60 miles round trip to repair a car, but when my wife's brakes started shimmying badly enough there was not much option. She's been driving less than a year -- it's not generally necessary in the Philippines, with their buses, jeepneys, and "trikes" (motorcycles with sidecars), none of which would pass safety tests here in the U.S. Anyway, when the car misbehaves, she wants it fixed ASAP so she can drive while in her happy place, and the local mechanic had wanted $450 for the job (later reduced, in three followup phone calls, while the car remained on the rack, to $400, then $350, then $300 -- at which point I decided that if they had that much padding in their pricing I did not want to deal with them), so I drove 30+ miles in dense freeway traffic from Brea to Carson to get it done.
There's a saying that I've seen used in computer repair, but I think it is probably used elsewhere as well:
Cheap, quick, and accurate:
You can have any two out of the three
Whoever wrote that never met our mechanic. He has fixed car problems that I had previously spent over a thousand bucks trying to get diagnosed at three different elite places and charged me around sixty bucks, and had it done in about an hour. When you really, I mean really, understand how a car works, I suppose that fixing them is easy -- so easy that one feels no need to overcharge. Or maybe, as a Filipino guy who works out of two stalls in the auto repair equivalent of a wet market in a run-down part of town, he just doesn't realize how much his work is worth. Each time, I imply it, and he shrugs.
(Note: Daily Kos is not the place for advertising, but if you live in the L.A. area and must introduce your car to this genius, e-mail me and I'll get you contact information. If you live in another part of the country and want to find a great auto mechanic, you will just have to marry your own Filipina or Filipino with the right contacts to find one.)
So, I dropped off the car and headed out to find a place to spend a couple of hours cooling my heels, just me and The Shock Doctrine, which I have finally almost finished. (There will be another diary when I do.) I went to a nationally famous line of sandwich shops that I will not mention, though one of you may guess it. (It's not Subway.)
This sandwich shop has three levels of sandwiches: "value," "premium," and "signature classics," in increasing order of expense. I had skipped lunch and wanted the largest sandwich. The large "value" sub was $5.40; the large "signature classic" was $7.20.
I'm a vegetarian. I'm not a healthy-food vegetarian like some admirable writers on this site; I would better be termed a "carniphobe": I don't eat dead animal flesh. It's fine with me if others do, and the things that happen at my Filipina-dominated dinner table would likely fell many vegetarians. But what others do, within bounds of reason, is fine with me so long as I don't have to ingest it. I have literally not voluntarily eaten meat in, less than a month from now, thirty years. I have no desire to do so and every desire not to do so.
Vegetarians are to the food world what agnostics are to the political world of religious belief. We are, historically, an oppressed minority in this country, but our situation has improved: we're tolerated so long as we don't push our beliefs too strongly on others. (Vegans are, in this analogy, the equivalent of atheists: recognized by meat-eaters everywhere as the enemy. Locavores and fruititarians are probably the equivalent of Wiccans or Satanists or something else beyond public understanding.) Anyway, it is by now the rare restaurant -- and usually the Filipino restaurant -- where I cannot find something decent for me on the menu. And, as a bonus, it's almost always cheaper.
That brings me back to the sandwich shop.
I looked over the menu and saw something strange. There was a $7.20 "Veggie" sandwich in the "Signature" column. There was nothing vegetarian in the "Premium" column or the "Value" column. I spoke to the girl at the counter:
"Excuse me, miss -- do you have any vegetarian sandwiches that aren't the most expensive?"
She pointed at the "Signature" sandwich. This was not going to go well.
"Do you have anything in the cheaper menus, like a cheese sandwich?"
"No."
I pondered for a moment. Perhaps the "Signature" sandwich, with its ingredients unnamed on the board, was some sort of truffle, chipotle, seitan, garlic-roasted eggplant and arugula extravaganza with new potatoes freshly dug out of the backyard garden and smiled at by kittens.
"What's on the veggie sandwich?"
She waved her arm lazily over the array of vegetable toppings usually put on sandwiches: onions, tomatoes, bell peppers, etc. "All of that."
"Uh-huh," I said quietly, both feeling umbrage at how this franchise (which I'd never visited before) ripped off vegetarians and trying to tamp down a memory that I could feel rushing to consciousness like a freight train.
This memory, which is the point of this diary, for those of you who have never seen "Five Easy Pieces":
I felt myself turning into Jack Nicholson. I looked at the "Value" sandwiches. All of them looked wet and runny, like tuna salad, except for -- what's this? -- Oven Roasted Turkey and Cheddar!
This was going to end up one of two ways, one of which would not get me arrested.
"Can you put all of those veggies on any of the value sandwiches?", I asked.
"Sure."
This was almost as bad as the movie, maybe worse. I had to go forward.
"All right," I said, "then I would like the Oven Roasted Turkey Cheddar sandwich with all of the vegetables on it -- but hold the turkey."
The counter girl's eyes widened; she knew she'd been had. I thought I could see a thought form in her eyes, a response of high dudgeon: "You want me to hold the turkey?" "Don't say it, don't say it," I thought to myself, because I didn't really want to say to this girl "yeah, I want you to hold it between your knees," but even though I try to be a nice and polite guy in real life, I wasn't sure I would be able to resist it. How often does a chance like this come in life? I was regretting my weakness, my inability to not go for the joke, but afraid that if I tried to resist saying that under those circumstances some unconscious mechanism would take over my mind and possibly never let go.
The counter girl pursed her lips. "Yeah, I guess I can do that."
The toasted sandwich was pretty tasty and the bill for the repairs came to $176. (My mechanic, he's a genius! A maestro!) And my reputation is safe -- despite my having turned into Jack Nicholson and, in the nick of time, turned back again -- so long as I don't do anything really stupid, like blog about this.