APOKALIPSIS

When my awesome American family came to visit us in Australia, one thing they all agreeed on was how great they thought the food in Australia was. The last time we were in the States, Kim and I also noticed that American bookstores tend to stock quite a few Aussie cooking magazines and recipe books. And in general, I think the quality of food at restaurants Down Under is at a pretty high standard compared to the USA. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t miss certain American foods.

We brought back quite a few kilos of American food back to Australia, but it’s not the kind of stuff that most gourmets would drool over. We could only bring back the kinds of processed, boxed-up, grocery store food that would withstand a 24-hour transcontinental trip, but fortunately this included one box Life cereal, a food I have loved since childhood.

In America there are whole supermarket aisles dedicated to the cult of the breakfast cereal. As a kid I could rattle off the names of dozens of different sugary cereals and the cartoon mascot associated with each one, even though most of them remained were banned from our household for exceeding my mom’s limit of six grams of sugar per serving. Although we were limited to more subdued fare like Kix, Rice Crispies and Crispix, choosing which breakfast cereal I would enjoy with milk, toast and a glass of OJ was always a cherished part of my morning routine.

Australia has breakfast cereals to be sure, but Aussie youth are not well-acquainted with the likes of Cap’n Crunch, Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam. Australian super markets have about as many kinds of cereal as American supermarkets have kinds of salsa. Which is to say they have 12, rather than 120. And crucially, they do not have Life cereal.

Life is not an especially interesting breakfast cereal. It’s just flat little brown squares of processed flour and sugar. When I was a kid, Life was promoted as being a cereal which stayed crunchy in milk for a long time, but I did not find this to be true. It starts out crunchy, but does not stay that way. The best thing you can say about Life is that, though boring, it is not tasteless. The taste is pleasant, but not particularly memorable.

Crucially, Life doesn’t even have any mascot to speak of. It probably owes most of its market share an almost inexplicably popular commercial which ran from the early 70s clear through to the mid-80s.

I personally don’t think that commercial is as good as this, earlier one, which at least makes an attempt at introducing cartoon mascots for Life. Unfortunately, they are probably the lamest cartoon mascots ever:

Both of those commercials were off the air before I was introduced to Life as a child, but it still managed to become my favorite cereal. I’ve liked this cereal for so long that I couldn’t really tell you why it’s always been my favorite. But I’d hazard a guess that its sugar content, which nearly exceeds Mom’s strict six gram limit, played a large part in gaining my favor in my formative years.

Because I ate it so much as a child, Life has attained a place in my reptilian brain as a kind of ur-cereal, the original, truest standard by which all others are to be judged. Its very lack of remarkable characteristics is what makes it so appealing. To me, Life is THE cereal.

It’s a comfort food in every sense of the word. I would not recommend it to anyone who does not already love it. But I love it, and I guess I always will.

Life Cereal

And as far as I know, I have the only box of it in all of Australia.

Just a quick note to say that I had kangaroo for dinner.
It was quite good — a bit like beef but with a slightly different flavor. The tail, however, was a bit gamy, probably because kangaroo tails are like 100% pure muscle. If you haven’t felt the tail of a live kangaroo before you should try it. It’s like touching a fuzzy rock shaped like a tail. You will be astounded!
When we visited Cleland Wildlife Refuge, I saw a Tasmanian devil tear into a big chunk of raw kangaroo flesh, which was fed to him by a park ranger, and still had the skin and hair attached. At the time, I thought it was pretty gross, but now I can understand why those little devils enjoy it.
I’m not sure if I’d like it raw or furry, but I do have to admit … kangaroo is tasty.

Does this make me a bad person?

Since I last wrote, I have been to Boston, Washington D.C., Chicago, Kansas City, across the American Southwest, and then back to my college town of Orange, California. Mind-numbing reports of my travels there are in progress and will be posted soon.
Right now I am in the Los Angeles airport, where I arrived at 9 a.m. this morning to catch my 11:35 flight to Taiwan. However, it turns out that my flight was not at 11:35 a.m., but 11:35 P.M. So I have been at the airport for TWELVE HOURS.
I’ve mostly been sorting through the 1500 photos that I’ve taken so far this month, and trying to distract myself enough that I don’t notice the slow passage of time.
Against my best judgment I had McDonald’s for dinner, since even though a small order of french fries was $2.50, it was still the cheapest thing in the international food court. I hadn’t made it two bites before I remembered the second reason I don’t eat at McDonald’s. The first, of course, is sticking it to The Man and not giving in to the billions of dollars of advertising designed to convince me to buy from a company that I do not respect or agree with (I failed on that count).
The second, and more visceral reason that I don’t eat at McDonald’s however, is that their food makes me feel sick. It only took two bites to realize this, but that was TWO BITES TOO LATE.
I need to head to my gate now, and am superstoked to be a). leaving this country and b). leaving this airport. All told, spending the day here has been a nice break from traveling, and I’m in the international terminal, it’s given me a taste of what it’s like to be surrounded by languages I don’t understand, before I am completely immersed in them.
It’s the tower of babel has just fallen, and everyone is about to be dispersed to different ends of the earth.

Goodness, I am tired! But I promised myself that I would write something tonight. Hang on, it’s too hot to write with pants on…
Ah, thats better.
It’s also too hot to write with socks on. One of the best things about clothing is that it can both go ON and come OFF! Hoorah!
Anyway, let me tell you of my evening.

There was no employee lunch served at the sushi bar today, so I had to feed myself once I got home. This could have been a problem, because contents of my food stores was such:

-One piece of bread
-Three unhealthy, very hydrogenated cookies
-One peach
-Three nearly-empty bags of potato chips
-Half a box of 99% fat free popsicles d
-Some cold cuts and pre-sliced cheese
-random, un-useful canned food.

However! The previous day, when confronted with this same dilemma I ventured down to the seedy corner strip mall that included:
-a chinese restaurant where I had colon-destroying “orange chicken”
-a Mexican market where I bought peaches for 50 cents each earlier in the week
-a laundromat
-Tacos Pepe, which I decided to get dinner that night.

I was the only person there and ordered a carnitas burrito, which was four dollars, including tax! It was a big burrito; so big that I had to return the plate that I got out to eat on that night and get a bigger one. It was so big that after eating just half of it I was too full to continue.
So I got to eat the other half for lunch today! And it was good. Too good to enjoy in solitude, actually. I had checked out the movie Yojimbo from the library, so I watched that while eating my burrito. Even though it was due today, I almost didn’t watch it until I started in on the burrito and realized that burritos are enhanced greatly by early-1960s samurai movies.
Yojimbo apparently inspired A Fist Full of Dollars, one of the classic Spaghetti Westerns which are enthralling by always make me fall asleep. I’ve never made it all the way through one before. But Yojimbo was way better. At least, the first half-hour was. I didn’t get to finish it because I had to leave to go to West Hollywood, but I was able to renew the movie online before I left, so I’ll get to watch it more! hooray!

ok, this is totally boring. I’m sorry.
These other things happened:
-Drove 40 miles to West Hollywood in two hours. At one point we sat stalled at an intersection and waited through three green lights before we were able to progress. Grrr!
-Saw Ed’s band (with a guest appearance by Grant) play at The Roxie for a Battle of the Bands. I yelled “Battle!!” but no one fought. Sad.
-Walked a few blocks to a pizza place that served two amazing things:
1). Gigantic 36-inch pizzas
2). A special “Aro” pizza, which I seriously had to order. I only ate half, so now I know what’s for lunch tomorrow!
-Tried very hard to remember the formula for calculating the area of a circle so that I could determine how many square inches of pizza are in a gigantic 36-inch pizza. I came up with something like 1200 square inches, which seemed excessive. There were equations scrawled all over my menu before I finally gave up.
-Struck up a conversation with the couple at the table next to us about my calculations, which they were impressed by. It turns out that she was from South Africa, he from America and they had met in the Philadelphia airport, then ended up getting married! I’m not a sap, but my inner-vagabond thought that was very romantic.
-Talked to my sister via cellular phone on the way home and debated song lyrics. She was right. It turns out that there IS is a first time for everything.
-Came home, wrote very boring blog entry while listening to sea shanties.
-Slept, I guess. (This one is a prediction).

Having an odd array of food compiled from various sources can result in unortodox meals. Sometimes they are even good!
Today’s sandwich:

Boca burger patty
Cheddar cheese
Half a tomato (sliced)
between two slices of potato bread
with a little bit of mustard
and a little bit of honey.

It was awesome! I shall be opening up a resturant soon.

In other news, I currently am working on three seperate screen plays. I do not know if any of them will make sense.