I could really go for a tostada right now.

I’m serious dudes, I am famished right now. It’s still morning and I’m bleary eyed from my shame, but I could eat the biggest, fattest tostada you ever saw. I would eat it so fast that you would get nauseous from watching me do it.

Anybody here got a tostada?

Holy crap, look at that sweet, sloppy tostada. I bet it soaked right through that paper plate. When I get to heaven, I want to be thrown into a darkened room full of those crunchy corn sons of bitches and just go to town on them for weeks.

I bet I’d never get tired of tostadas. They have to be good tostadas though, no fancy ones with shrimp or fish on it. Just a regular American tostada piled high with beef, cheese, and glory. I like my tostadas piled higher than Abe Lincoln’s hat and fatter than Mary Lincoln’s girdle.

Looks like I’ve got tostadas on the mind pretty bad this morning. I can feel the saliva pooling in my mouth as I write about them. I just wish I was an assistant manager at a Taco Bell so I could sit in some dirty back office somewhere and eat tostadas all night. That would be my dream job. When you’re a Taco Bell assistant manager, the world is your greasy oyster.

Looks like I’m out of time. I’ve got a class to teach. I hope these kids are ready to take notes on tostadas, because that’s about to happen. If I get in trouble, the teacher’s union will accuse the administration of being racist. Problem solved!

See you in hell, all you non-tostadas!

Bridgette and I have returned from our family’s Christmas celebration with a bundle of lovely gifts and a sick baby in tow. Everything proceded splendidly with the exception of our child’s untimely illness and the injury I sustained from eating the Christmas cookie with a needle in it I got from a profanity-spouting homeless man. (A word of explaination – the man was wearing a Santa suit and thrusting his pelvis toward me in a friendly manner so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.)

While at my parents place, I had a strange moment when my mother pulled out her old pickle strainer from the back of the lazy Susan.

(Incidentally the term “lazy Susan” begs the question of who was this lazy Susan and what ingenius fellow was she with who enabled her laziness? Thomas Jefferson perhaps?)

I hadn’t seen this pickle strainer in perhaps fifteen years, and my reaction upon seeing it was oddly emotional. Suddenly I was transported back to my past and the memories of all the pickles I ate as a youngster. Some were crisp, others flaccid, but all equally wonderous. Pickles were, and shall always remain, the reason I rise in the morning.

Here my brother Patrick demonstrated the proper usage and treatment of the Pickle Strainer of Legend.

One of the beautiful things about this pickle strainer is the way it removes the pickles from the murky brine without moistening the fingers. On a day when my baby was screaming and my stools were loose, this pickle strainer brought me nostalgic satisfaction and meaning. If necessary, I would have traded it for my wedding ring.

I wish the pickle strainer could hold me.

I’m eating Malt-O-Meal again. It is chocolate flavored and makes me whole.

Eating this Malt-O-Meal is a wonderful experience. It is like savoring a warm spoonful of nostalgia and calcium phosphate. With mechanical precision I eagerly begin my feast upon the creamy wheat essence; my eyes are staring into the middle distance and my is torso positioned firmly at a slightly acute angle. Each mound of granular brown paste greets my eager lips with a quiver of welcoming before it is quickly smothered and devoured by my ample flesh-hole. The steaming Malt-O-Meal is then swallowed down into my body’s nether-regions never to be seen again until it gets blasted out defecation alley on Christmas morning.

Can you see that my lust for Malt-O-Meal is both beautiful and perverse? It is only in this unnatural entangling that my soul finds repose. Only the sweet sating of an engorged belly bloated with thick cereal sludge and water chestnuts can end my existential agony.

Thank you, Malt-O-Meal, for being there for me. Thank you for filling my mouth time and again with such sweet shame. Thank you for being so delicious that you make Cream of Wheat taste like a bum’s diseased scrotum.

I love you, chocolate Malt-O-Meal. I want to enter a long, abusive relationship with you. I want you to make me feel like garbage night after night with your emotional abuse. I will forgive you. You just taste so damn good.

Look out, Halloween is right around the corner!

In eager expectation of this accursed eve, lanterns have been lit, skulls have been hung, and goats have been violated in the seasonal aisles of Wal-Mart by unenthusiastic employees!

Before we know it, we’ll be inundated with legions of children dressed as hobgoblins and deep sea fishermen with Hepatitis B. Bowls of bite-sized Milky Ways will be tossed in the air to attract feeble-minded passersby as homeless men thrust their pelvises and bellow haggard barks of satisfaction. All will be made right when the clock strikes midnight and the world vomits in unison with unbridled Satanic glee. Halloween is upon us!

Draw nearer to me, my pig! Feel the hot lickspittle from my lips sting your face! Smell the stale blast of cottage cheese on my breath as I hold you down and shout Halloween-related tidings at you!

Halloween is almost here! Mount the celebration device and let us begin!

Now let us turn to the subject of oatmeal.

In the dark and forboding twilight hours of sleepless fatherhood, my precious oatmeal has been my only true companion. Alone, illuminated by the shameful blue light of my laptop and accompanied by my atonal gutteral dronings, my oatmeal has soothed my shames with its warm, creamy essence. In hiding from a fussy infant and beleaguered wife, I cravenly return time and again to my oatmeal in hopes that its hearty texture and savory oat-pleasures will bring me comfort . More often than not, the thickly aromatic oatpaste is able to burrow through my stomach into my soul and fill it with nutrition and meaning.

My oatmeal is flavored with the finest Vermont maple and sweet brown sugar from the engorged breasts of Mother Hawaii herself. In an act of sheer gluttony, I often mix raisins in with this concoction to create a alchemy of oats and dried fruit that would make a priest incontinent. I am like a dark wizard stooping over a bubbling cauldron of oaty enchantment.

Come to me now, my oatmeal lover. My bowels groan for you.

—

P.S. The following illuminating conversation took place midway through the writing of this post as I was rocking Oliver to sleep.

ME: Do you want to take him?
WIFE: I’m in the middle of this.
ME: I just want to finish my blog entry.
WIFE: Well, you have a child now.

Uh…what?

There’s nothing like a Law & Order marathon to make you feel all warm and smushy inside, is there?

Law & Order has everything I love – grizzled irony, child rapists, and characters who lie. On top of that, each episode features more unexpected wrinkles than Willie Nelson’s anus. Every version of Law & Order runs like clockwork, starting with an incident of unspeakable cruelty and ending with some lucky guest star shouting in a courtroom (somewhat like Willie Nelson, though to a lesser degree). It’s twisted, televised comfort food, like maple-flavored cat excrement.

As the hours pass by during a Law & Order marathon, we the viewers begin to take on the characteristics of the show. We greet strangers with cynical suspicion, we squint our eyes skeptically, and floss our teeth with incredulity. We respond to moments of significance with narrow-eyed, incisive comments and resolve ethical dilemmas with physical force and tough words, totally unlike Willie Nelson.

Hooray for Law & Order marathons! They make us awful!