Last week, around eight, I was driving west on Poplar Avenue just past Mendenhall when I saw traffic backed up for a block, choking off all movement in the right lane. I thought it must be a multi-car, chain reaction accident. It was dark but I didn't see any blue flashing lights. I was concerned that I'd be the first on the scene and be required to help, but when I drew closer I saw the reality. A convoy of vehicles were backed up in one of the most heavily traveled streets in Memphis, waiting to go through the drive-in window to get one of those damn Chik-fil-A chicken sandwiches. This battle of the chicken sandwiches between Popeye's and Chik-fil-A is baffling to me. Popeye's chicken is the hot "Cajun" variety, while Chik-fil-A donates to organizations like Exodus International, an "ex-gay" therapy group, and the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed a hate group, so they can kiss my ass regardless of how their chicken tastes. Without delving into antiquated racial stereotypes, Memphis should be a chicken city, not because of race but because of region. We're Southerners here and everybody, vegans excepted, loves their fried chicken. Some of my earliest memories are of eating Sunday "suppers" at my grandfather's house, consisting of fried chicken and butter beans, without fail. As a child, I ate drumsticks and thighs, but when I grew to be a man, I put away childish things and switched to breasts and wings, the juicy parts. So in a chicken-enamored city like Memphis, how did we allow Nashville to claim the rights to some aberration called Nashville "Hot" Chicken? What's next, Nashville Style Bar-B-Q? I could eat fried chicken six days a week and rest on the seventh, but unfortunately, my zip-code seems bereft of chicken that isn't "hot and spicy" without driving a ways. I feel as if I'm living in the middle of a chicken desert.
I never got the whole "hot" chicken thing. That's why I don't go to Popeye's. Hot "Cajun" chicken is just a bastardization of the real thing. A couple of years ago, word of mouth was all about was Gus's. I heard about all these flavors bursting in your mouth and how people could not get enough of it. So I bought some with great anticipation and after the roof of my mouth was set aflame, I tossed the rest. If you want your chicken
hot, do what my wife does- fry it in the usual way and put hot sauce on
it like a normal person who was raised here. That way, your chicken isn't
saturated with chili powder, or whatever the hell they use, and you can
heat it to your palate. I like my chicken fried and extra crispy, which brings KFC to mind. I kept going there and asking for breasts and wings extra crispy, and they'd always say, "Can you wait fifteen minutes while we fry up another batch?" I said, "It's dinnertime. Don't you people sell chicken here?" For a while, I thought I'd solved the problem and had a good thing going. I skipped the drive-thru, went in, and found a kindly counter-person. When she promptly delivered my order, I tipped her- considerably. She looked shocked as if it never happened before. I asked her just to remember me and consequently, I received hot, crispy chicken every visit and tipped her each time because doesn't the word "tips" mean "to insure prompt service?" I was living in a fool's paradise however, because one day she wasn't there anymore and I was once again asked if I minded waiting fifteen minutes. So, I've given up on KFC.
A colleague of mine once told me, "Church's Chicken is the shit." Maybe so, but probably not in the way he meant. I used to drive to Bartlett just to get some Mrs. Winner's chicken. The intersection of Sycamore View and Summer Avenue was like a chicken paradise with every franchise represented, but Mrs. Winner's was the juiciest. One day, I drove the distance only to find my Mrs. Winner's had turned into an Exxon, and I refuse to buy chicken from a gas station. I've always loved Jack Pirtle's Chicken but the closest one is a good drive away. When cable TV was still in its infancy, I had a ritual. Every Saturday, I drove to Pirtle's on Highland, got a mess of chicken, took it home and dined while watching Georgia Championship Wrestling. I even learned to walk up to the window, bypassing the long drive-thru lines. But they took Georgia Wrestling off the air and I moved away, making my trips to Pirtle's difficult. I'm told on good authority that the best day to get Pirtle's chicken is Thursday when they change the grease. And besides, Cordell and Tawanda Pirtle are lovely people. Every other chicken joint near me is a chain so we've been getting our yardbird from Super-Lo or Kroger's, each having their own taste, but not like home-cooked.
We haven't tried Uncle Lou's, balking at the "sweet and spicy" slogan, or Hattie B's Hot Chicken, a carpetbagger franchise from Nashville. We have yet to try out Joe's, who advertise their chicken is marinated in secret sauce for twenty-four hours. Do me a favor. Rub some salt and pepper on it, add some flour, and drop it in a skillet of sizzling Wesson Oil, which is manufactured in Memphis. Keep your "hot and spicy" and "Cajun styled." Just serve me up some good old Southern fried chicken, like the kind they serve at the Loveless Motel in Nashville. If I had the funds, or if someone would like to back me, a stretch of Summer Avenue is begging for a decent chicken joint. My idea, pending copyright, is to approach the first family of Memphis Music, Vaneese and Carla Thomas, and ask permission to use their father's name. Then I'd start a chain of down-home restaurants and call it "Rufus Thomas's Funky Chicken." We could decorate the place with Rufus' stage outfits. People would come from all over the world just to see his hot pink short-pants getup. The chicken would just be gravy. "You'll flap your arms and your feet will start kickin' when you eat Rufus Thomas's Funky Chicken. Now, did you heard me?"
Well, we human beings had a good run. We've gone from green slime crawling out of the sea to the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, the use of tools, the dawn of civilization, The Dark Ages, the Renaissance, industry, mass production, the invention of the printing press, the automobile and the telephone, modern cities and suburbs, space exploration, and the telecommunication revolution. Then we hit a bump and suddenly we've regressed into green slime slouching back into the sea. Between the melting of the polar icecaps and the fires ravaging the Amazon rain forest, we've reached a climate apocalypse that may well be irreversible. This didn't have to happen. it just proves how mindless leadership can alter the world's climate in the shortest time. Civilization will mock the naivete of such dire forecasts as Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange." Say goodbye to the Earth as we know it and say hello to water wars, mass migrations, riots, and the shredding of the fabric of society.
In the middle part of last century, a clairvoyant named Edgar Cayce became famous for his prophesies and remedies. An institution in Virginia Beach houses more the fourteen thousand of his readings which have been determined to be eighty-five percent accurate. His clients included Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin. Cayce, called "The Sleeping Prophet," would lie down and enter a state of altered consciousness which allowed him visions of the future that were alarming when I first read them many years ago. They're terrifying now. In a reading from 1934, Cayce said, "The earth will be broken up in many places. The early portion will see a change..in the West coast of America. Open waters appear in the northern potion of Greenland. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea. There will be upheavals in the Antarctic..beginning in 200-2001." Any of this sound familiar? Cayce continues, "There are predictions of temperature changes in the deep waters which impact weather patterns, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions." Also, "New York itself, in the main, will disappear. Southern portions of Carolina, Georgia- these will disappear. Los Angeles, San Francisco...will be among those destroyed." On a cheerier note, Cayce claimed that Atlantis would reappear and unearth hidden knowledge. He also said that his dystopian vision need not take place with the proper awareness coupled with action. Considering the state of the planet today, that's pretty incredible stuff, but guess who's rushing us headlong into extinction?
Our mock president's performance at last week's G-7 summit in France did nothing to advance the cause of addressing climate change. Laughingly declaring himself to be "an environmentalist," Trump said, "I want the cleanest water on earth. I want the cleanest air on earth...I think I know more about the environment than most people." This coming from a man who boasted about opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, claimed that windmills cause cancer, and wondered aloud if it was possible to "nuke" hurricanes. Then, Trump skipped a climate discussion with other world leaders, leaving an empty chair in his stead. Other G-7 participants walked on eggshells around Trump, hoping that the human wrecking ball wouldn't destroy another meeting of sane heads of state. While French President Emmanuel Macron was expressing outrage over the "Trump of South America," Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's, handling of the Amazon fires, Trump was advocating for Russia's re-admittance to the G-7 and hyping his Mar-a-lago resort for the next summit, citing its many wonderful accoutrements. They had better hurry before Mar-a-lago goes the way of Atlantis and becomes just another underwater mystery.
Like Trump, the Brazilian president is a climate change denier. He relaxed environmental regulations and permitted farmers and other commercial interests to burn off parts of the Amazon rain forest, then claimed the current conflagration was caused by "non-governmental organizations" for the purpose of "drawing international criticism to (his) government." Currently, the rain forest produces twenty percent of the world's oxygen. The World Wildlife Fund stated that if the Amazon rain forest, sometimes known as "the world's lungs," reaches the point of no return, the area could become a "dry Savannah," emitting carbon instead of oxygen. Without Trump's input, the G-7 pledged twenty million dollars to help contain the fires that are destroying two and a half football fields worth of rain forest every minute of every day and are spilling over into neighboring countries. Meanwhile, both NASA and the European Space Agency have determined that the polar ice caps have melted faster in the last twenty years than in the previous ten-thousand. Antarctica and Greenland have lost three times as much ice as compared to twenty years ago. Most major coastal cities would be inundated by a rise in sea level of more than six feet. If the Greenland ice sheet melted, sea levels would rise by more than twenty feet. So long New Orleans. Nice to know you Miami. It's good that Denmark refused to sell Greenland to Trump. He'd only melt it and turn it into the world's largest water park.
There's this memorable lyric from a Bob Dylan song on his classic album Blonde On Blonde. Maybe I remember it so well because it came from his song "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," which was recorded in Nashville in 1966. It goes, "And I sit here so patiently/Waiting to find out what price/You have to pay to get out of/Going through all these things twice." I have lived through LBJ, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and the Vietnam era. I've seen the golden idol with the feet of clay, Ronald Reagan, say that "Government is the problem," which was arguably the beginning of all our problems. I've seen the hapless Poppy Bush, the lascivious Bill Clinton, and the warmongering Dick Cheney with his malleable puppet, George Bush "The Lesser". But never in my life would I have expected to relive this "love it or leave it" bullshit. I thought we'd put that jingoistic, racist rubbish to bed along with "go back where you came from." But then, I also believed in the evolution of man, a theory sorely tested by the current squatter in the White House. The old "love it or leave it" slogan was the conservative's redneck response to the anti-war protesters of the late sixties. The "go back where you came from" probably dates from the post-reconstruction era and into the Jim Crow South, when cracker assholes forgot that black people were brought here as slaves and had no place from which to go back. Still, I have heard these remarks, aimed at African-Americans, hippies, feminists and others, from cretins dripping with ignorance for all my life. Those who proclaim it or repeat it were on the wrong side of history then, and are on the wrong side of history now. And it will be remembered long after this bulbous, bilious aberration of a human being has been driven from his hideous presidency.
This horror began, as per usual, with Trump's barely literate Twitter feed. After being provoked by a segment on "Fox & Friends," about the four freshman Democrats known as "the Squad," an insipid moniker that should be shed without delay, the Ignoramus in Chief went off on an angry and racist twitter tirade. I'll reprint it here, but to avoid writing sic after every word, the punctuation and misuse of capitalization are all Trump's. "So interesting to see "Progressive" Democratic Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe...now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States...how our government is to be run. Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." The twits on the "Fox & Friends" couch laughed when they read the tweet and said that Trump is "very comedic" but he's "making an important point." Yeah, Trump's a regular laugh riot. He has since learned, or maybe not, that the congresswomen in question were all born in the United States except for Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who came to this country from war-ravaged Somalia and became a naturalized citizen at age seventeen. The common denominator is that these are four women of color and two are Muslims, an accelerant to Trump's racist ideology. I agree with President Caligula on one point; they need to fix the totally broken and crime infested places, which perfectly describes Trump's White House, his corrupt cabinet, and his extended family of shameless grifters.
The "love it or leave it" idiocy emerged during one of Trump's Nazi rallies in Greenville, North Carolina. Broadening his message to include anyone who disagrees with him, Trump echoed Richard Nixon, and after verbally assaulting Rep. Omar by name, the crowd of "Good Germans" went wild, breaking into a chant of "send her back." Hearing from his party members who informed him that this mantra wasn't as mundane as "lock her up," Trump disavowed the chant, then changed directions calling his enraged, aggrieved audience of red hat-wearing Caucasians "great patriots." Even members of the misnamed "Freedom Caucus," thought he went too far. Now that Trump's annoying repetition of "No Collusion. No Obstruction" has been disproven by the halting, mono-syllabic testimony of Special Council Robert Mueller, the bottomless well of prideful stupidity that occupies the Oval Office has ramped up his free-range racism to stoke the animosity and fear of his fellow travelers and running dogs. Trump's latest target for his vile abuse is another African-American congressman, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland.
After Cummings' criticism of the inhumane treatment of immigrants at the border, Trump lashed out on another Twitter bender. Again, the bad grammar is Trump's. "Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting & screaming...about conditions at the Southern Border...The Border is clean, efficient and well run...Cumming (sic) District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess...No human would ever want to live there." "The Democrats always play the Race Card, when...they have done so little for our Nation's great African American people." Then he called Cummings, the son of a South Carolina sharecropper "a racist." A psychologist would refer to this sort of noxious ranting as 'projection." The Baltimore Sun editorial board responded in an article titled "Better to have a few rats than to be one," and referred to Trump's tweets as "undiluted racism and hate." If there were any question before, there's no doubt now that a very sick man is running the government, along with his lapdog, "Moscow" Mitch McConnell, and his legion of ass-kissers. Robert Mueller claimed the Office of Legal Council's opinion forbade him from indicting a sitting president. But the O.L.C.'s opinions are just suggestions, as stated in their 1973 decision; The O.L.C. reserves the right to "reconsider and modify or disavow that determination." But these are very perilous times. If no man is supposed to be above the law in this land, it's time to disavow that archaic decision and show the proper justice to Trump that he so richly deserves.
We had become embarrassingly close to addiction with food delivery services until we stepped back from the brink and realized the consequences, not just monetarily, but socially as well. There was a time in the not so distant past when you had a choice of food delivered to your door: Chinese or pizza. No more. Now, the finest restaurants in town will pack it up and zip it right out to you, and your only task is the occasional fifteen seconds in the microwave. You don't even need dinnerware anymore. You can eat it right out of the sectional plastic tray. The food delivery business has popped up like mushrooms in a cow pasture, or maybe Uber. Of course, it's not just food anymore. Need toothpaste and Dr. Scholl's insoles? Push a few buttons and someone will rush it right over. Don't feel like Krogering? There's an app for that. Where they once made it so inconvenient that you had to drive over there and have someone load up your groceries, they deliver now. In fact, if you hurry, Kroger is having a sale for your July 4th festivities. Nathan's Skinless Beef Franks are $2.99 a pack, their famous mustard potato salad is $3.99 for three pounds, and American flags have been marked down from .49 cents to .44 cents. The beer is regularly priced, but it eliminates what used to be a rite of passage for young males, the beer run. If beer is too pedestrian, they'll bring you a nice Sauvignon Blanc for $19.99. This is a dream come true for agoraphobics. Now there really is no need to leave the house.
Like any addiction
to things like video games or fantasy football, there are
plenty of enticements to draw you in, like free delivery and daily specials. For a hefty deposit, you can get free delivery in perpetuity. It's especially fun to track your order. The restaurant will inform you when your driver arrives and leaves the store. On some services, a little car will pop up on the screen and you can follow it directly from the eatery to your driveway. Our first experience was with Meals in Motion which contains some of our favorites but is limited in their number of restaurants. We quickly signed up for Uber Eats, Bite Squad, and Door Dash. We tried Postmates, but they wanted some ridiculous amount of money in advance to put on your credit card, so they got deleted. Grubhub has yet to arrive on my block. The rest operate in pretty much the same way: choose a restaurant, give them your credit card, pull up the menu, press a few buttons and some nice person will drive your food over- tip included, even if you feel like a bag of Krystals. There's no waiting for a table, no dealing with a harried server, no wondering why the next table got served when they came in after you, and no deciphering the difference between fifteen and twenty percent.
As in any new service, you learn some things by trial and error. For instance, in a restaurant, if they overcook your cheeseburger, you can send it back. Delivery offers that same option, but it will take an additional hour to correct it and by then you've decided that you're hungry enough to go ahead and eat the overcooked burger. It's the same with the occasional menu mistake. There's no mistaking beef tacos when that's what you ordered online, but when they arrive beefless, what are you going to do? The restaurant will give you a credit but that doesn't make up for a spoiled meal. If you order something from a favorite restaurant, say, a beef chimichanga, it's not quite the same as when they bring it fresh from the kitchen. We didn't realize how deeply we were descending into the hedonistic lifestyle until the night we had a hankering for some ice cream. We live within short driving distance from two Baskin-Robbins ice cream shops and one of them is a drive-thru, but they were on the list of stores that delivered. We ordered a variety of scoops in a cup, but it took a while. I kept checking my phone for updates while our cream-cravings intensified. When it finally arrived, the check not only included the cost of the ice cream, but a healthy tax, a pre-arranged tip for the driver, and a five dollar delivery charge that was supposed to be free.The guilt over our obscene laziness was palpable. We could have gone Krogering and have a couple of gallons sent over for the same price.
There's an additional reason that we've scaled back on dinner delivery and it's the same reason we never use self-checkout in a grocery store or any other discount store chain. We figured for every self-checkout lane, a cashier or sacker will lose a job, and although there's no stopping automation, we can do our part until it replaces the entire workforce. The same goes for restaurants. Eating at home is easy but it doesn't quite match going to an actual restaurant, sitting down at a table, and enjoying a meal. Since I'm not trying to promote any individual restaurant, let's pretend you have a particular favorite, and for the sake of argument we'll call it "Patrick's." It's a down-home meat-and-three restaurant. Their food is good and reasonably priced, the atmosphere is convivial, and they have an Elvis wall right in the same spot where I used to play gigs when it was a nightclub in a previous incarnation. Delivery is great, but then we wouldn't get to see our favorite host, Ben Sumner, or the best server in town, Jo Jo Chetter, whom we have followed from her days at Kudzu's and who can enthrall you with tales of Ireland. Delivery services create new jobs for drivers and profits for restaurants, but before the next time you order in, remember the cooks, servers, busboys, and cashiers who depend on you putting on your pants and making a personal appearance.
Last week, around eight, I was driving west on Poplar Avenue just past Mendenhall when I saw traffic backed up for a block, choking off all movement in the right lane. I thought it must be a multi-car, chain reaction accident. It was dark but I didn't see any blue flashing lights. I was concerned that I'd be the first on the scene and be required to help, but when I drew closer I saw the reality. A convoy of vehicles were backed up in one of the most heavily traveled streets in Memphis, waiting to go through the drive-in window to get one of those damn Chik-fil-A chicken sandwiches. This battle of the chicken sandwiches between Popeye's and Chik-fil-A is baffling to me. Popeye's chicken is the hot "Cajun" variety, while Chik-fil-A donates to organizations like Exodus International, an "ex-gay" therapy group, and the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed a hate group, so they can kiss my ass regardless of how their chicken tastes. Without delving into antiquated racial stereotypes, Memphis should be a chicken city, not because of race but because of region. We're Southerners here and everybody, vegans excepted, loves their fried chicken. Some of my earliest memories are of eating Sunday "suppers" at my grandfather's house, consisting of fried chicken and butter beans, without fail. As a child, I ate drumsticks and thighs, but when I grew to be a man, I put away childish things and switched to breasts and wings, the juicy parts. So in a chicken-enamored city like Memphis, how did we allow Nashville to claim the rights to some aberration called Nashville "Hot" Chicken? What's next, Nashville Style Bar-B-Q? I could eat fried chicken six days a week and rest on the seventh, but unfortunately, my zip-code seems bereft of chicken that isn't "hot and spicy" without driving a ways. I feel as if I'm living in the middle of a chicken desert.
