I was running in circles. I don’t know how else to explain it. Concentric circles, successively diminishing in diameter to a miniscule point – a spiral, travellng inward, towards the spatio-temporal ground zero at the centre of consciousness. A big part of me wanted to project myself into some ideal, atemporal reality, one in which I was a ready-made fully-realized being. But then, as if by clockwork, I was plagued by the inverse. Whatever happened to process, to the journey? True ‘Self Actualization’, I would tell myself, is the stuff of suicide bombers and godly perverts – balls to paradise, to static fulfillment. And then the twinge of self-doubt, the whole modern mental disorder of feeling not quite there – with the next rung always just one leap away, ad infinitum. True, I was working here and there, but these contracts were satisfactory only in their affinity to a Franz Kafka story — Gretel’s Bavarian Style Spaetzle, Dieter’s imminent Uber Senf North American tubed mustard campaign. I could take a kind of bitter intellectual enjoyment in the ridiculousness of it all, in the scrotum-boggling balance of the mundane and absurd that these projects represented, but that was it. I was plagued by the thought that other occupations – hawking pharmaceuticals, fire fighting, bar tending, laying bricks, teaching yoga – were somehow more rewarding. It was in this numb, contradictory mood that I greeted Ping upon his return to the City after his first two-week stint in Halifax.
It was a featureless, overcast Saturday afternoon in mid-September and Ping and I were sitting in Hal’s, a 2001 Space Odyssey themed-cafe around the corner from my apartment. We were sipping double espressos out of small Styrofoam cups and nibbling on biscotti. Ping was visibly rejuvenated from his latest business trip – animated to the point of cartoonishness. Suddenly, as if cued by the mastication of the hard, crunchy Italian biscuits, the conversation took a turn towards crustaceans. Ping spoke declaratively, with conviction: “If I had to choose what my last meal would be – ‘my last supper’, so to speak – without a doubt it would be lobster. I lived off the stuff for three weeks, man. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Steamed, boiled, grilled … broiled. Fried in cakes. Baked in loaves. Simmered in pasta sauces. Sauteed in butter and lemon.”
“What about braised? Did you eat any braised lobster?” I inquired.
He continued, oblivious that I had asked the question. “Even if I was a Jew, it would have no bearing on the matter. These aren’t the impoverished, gnarled Mediterranean lobsters of Biblical times. We’re talking Maritimes, brother.”
“Braising. I’m serious – I have a strong interest in braised foods,” I said.
Ping snapped back, “Look, if you knew a goddamn thing about cooking you wouldn’t ask that question. Who the fuck braises lobster? You might as well braise a filet mignon.”
“Braising is an art form, man. It’s one of the big ones. You sit here and spew out this litany of cooking methods, I assumed braising would be in there.”
“Don’t assume, Mike. You make too many assumptions. When it comes to lobster, you have to approach it like an infant. Pre-linguistic, no preconceptions. Lobster as pure phenomenon … you don’t even have the word for lobster yet.”
“Exactly, that’s why when I leave this cafe I’m going to the market, buying a lobster, taking it home and braising it. First I’ll pan sear the bitch, and then let it simmer for two hours in a Dutch Oven in some kind of ‘braising’ liquid.”
“You’re fucking crazy, you know that!”, Ping shot back
“Ah, who really gives a crap. Lobster is over-rated. They’re essentially giant insects. I ate a grilled cicada in Laos once – tasted like lobster. And they have this timeless, militant look that makes me think boiling them alive may be bad karma. That human-lobster relations may take a one-eighty at some point in the next epoch.”
Joe Becker's 'Slug Hunt'
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in three weeks!” cried Ping. “You’re a cicada-eating landlubber. I get it.”
“I’m not saying I haven’t had good experiences with lobster. My first date with K was at a Red Lobster, and you know what a soaring success that was. It was pretty much love at first sight. Me and her, a heaping plate of crustaceous goodness between us. All that cracking and sucking, that butter-flavoured partially hydrogenated soybean oil all over our fingers. It was the height of eroticism.” I stopped to breathe, to reflect. “And lobster pairs well with beer, it’s definitely got that going for it.”
“I know, I know – it’s out of this world,” he mused, his mind swiftly drifting eastward, to Halifax. “I think I’m suffering from withdrawal. I got home last night and ate a shwarma. Had a couple eggs this morning. Look at me, I’m trembling – the lobster has left my system.”
“Well, you’re going back on Monday, right?” I asked.
He nodded vacantly, his spirit suddenly transported to Atlantic Canada. “Wednesday. And I’m counting the minutes, Mike.”
He took a cacophonous bite of biscotti. In the relative silence of the cafe, with its ambient music and whispering customers, Ping’s chewing seemed obnoxious, almost hostile. He continued, his mouth half full, “I came back to check on the house, on Amber. On the dog, Andy. You know, my entire life in Toronto. And I have to go in to the office early next week, before I return. Give a full report on my calls.” He paused, and gave me a wistful look, “Man, it was a taste of freedom, brother. I got to scour the whole area – Moncton, The Bay of Fundy, Charlottetown. Just cruising in the rental car, no traffic, listening to the Grateful Dead channel on Satellite radio. Rungs, buddy.”
He’d spoken the magic word, and I pounced on it. “I’ve been thinking about what we were talking about, about the rungs. About the climbing or ascension – however you phrased it. It looks like Dieter has another contract for me. Promo and web copy for Uber Senf – this kick ass German mustard that comes in a tube!”
“A tube!” he sputtered. “Did you say a fucking tube?”
I shot back, flailing my arms defensively, “Tubes are protocol in Central Europe, man! Everything comes in tubes – horse-radish, fish roe, mustard, mayonnaise, certain relishes – everything.” I hunched over, and lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “As Dieter explains it, it inhibits the oxidization of the mustard, preserving freshness and flavour. You know when you have a jar that’s down to the dregs? You open it and there’s these crusty areas and little pools of mustard water, and the smell is a little off, a little sour or something?”
Ping leaned back in his chair, and pushed his palms outward, as if to shove my words out of the stagnant air hovering above our table. “I get it, I get it – makes sense. But this is not exactly ground-breaking. We’ve had tube technology here for decades. Tubed mustard, and mayonnaise for that matter, seems more of a German idiosyncrasy. They have higher standards for everything – they have medieval laws governing beer production. They keep themselves up at night worrying about shit like the oxidization of condiments. Do you think you’re average Canadian is going to give a shit? Not likely.”
I stroked my chin meditatively, in an attempt to be objective about what Ping was saying, to keep cool, to hold my ground. I said, “I was about to say that this project represents a next rung for me, an ascending step towards my ultimate career goals. From spaetzle to tubed mustard – you have to admit that this is definitive progress, Ping.”
Ping hunkered down in silent, spasmodic laughter. He looked up at me, red eyed and contorted, and with his hands mimicked the motions of a balance scale. “Spaeztle. Tubed mustard. There’s no substantial, qualitative difference. These things exist on the same plane. This is a lateral move for you – it’s not rung material. I’m sorry, my goal is not to be a dick, I’m just giving you the bottom line from a cold, realistic business perspective.”
And then I snapped. “I don’t fucking agree. We’re not talking about mustard per se, we’re talking about a fucking delivery system that can revolutionize the way we consume condiments. This has wider socio-cultural implications. This has real potential to change consumer patterns and behavior.” I slapped the table hard, one of the empty Styrofoam cups tottered over and rolled onto the floor. I gave Ping a hard look – in an attempt to cross the impenetrable mote of values and concepts enveloping his being – and said, “As Dieter said, It’s in zee minds … And we plan on changing them.”
Ping nodded thoughtfully, taking in my words, churning and weighing them. The look on his face told me that my argument had driven through to him, albeit in a subtle, undigested sort of way. He stood up, his animation downgraded to a tightly wound exhaustion, and said, “The bottom line, Mike, is that I’m going to be eating fresh lobster in approximately 86 hours. That’s all that really matters to me right now.”
