A Deliciously Chocolate Retelling

How many times has this happened to you?

You wake up, cursing and clutching the machete kept under the pillow (or maybe that’s just me), and go downstairs to have some breakfast when you find only this in your cabinets.  Except you don’t have cabinets, you’re a in tent in the middle of New Mexico backcountry.  What do you do, kitchen MacGuyver?

Thus the predicament I found myself in while hiking out in the Double H Ranch one morning.  At first it seems easy: boil some water, make the oatmeal and hot chocolate, or if you’re three years old and impatient like me, eat it right out of the pack.

Well you’re wrong!  Because boiling water means haranguing with white gas and cooking stoves and burning fingers and messing up bowls and spoons, and you just do not feel like deal with all that right now.  Luckily for you, there’s a man in one of the other troops hiking the ranch whose name is, in all seriousness, John Slaughter, and who looks like the lovechild of Bruce Willis and a slab of beef.  This is the kind of guy who thinks hiking is basically running windsprints with fifty pounds on his back and has foregone drinking water in favor of the blood of wild animals he hunts down and kills with just a tent stake.  When John Slaughter gives cooking lessons, you listen.

First, open both the oatmeal pack and the hot chocolate pack.  You’ll notice the oatmeal pack is made of flimsy tissue paper, while the hot chocolate pack is aluminum-foil lined and substantially heftier.  This is due to the hot chocolate reading too many Dan Brown novels and listening to conspiracy theorists on the Internet.  But for us, this is a good thing.  Pour the oatmeal into the hot chocolate pack.

Then, add some water.  It can be hot, or it can be cold.  Perhaps even lukewarm.  Temperature to taste.

Obviously you will most likely not have an electric kettle on hand, or be dressed in a shirt and tie.  Most likely, like the first time I did this, you will be miles and miles from anything recognizable as civilization, wearing the same sweat-stained t-shirt you’ve been wearing for the last three days and an inch of brown dust, crouching in a sliver of shade and cursing the sun coming over the hills because that means the desert’s going to start boiling in an hour.  Try to ignore this fact and mix your concoction together.

And that’s it.  Chocoatmeal.  It ain’t pretty, but then again, at this point in the trek you’re not really turning any heads either.  Eat up, hitch up the backpack, and hit the trail.  Or wherever you’re going.

A Dress Code Will Be Enforced

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, ‘as pretty as an airport.’ I’d like to add that it has never produced the phrase “as comfortable as an airport.”  Maybe if it had, I wouldn’t have this story to tell.

Situation: Spending a semester in England and hopping ponds on the weekends to see the rest of Europe.  I had the unfortunate idea of taking a Psychology class that was pretty laughable in its own right at 10 on Monday morning, so most of these weekend jaunts were bookended by me hurrying back Sunday night.  There’s a good story about that too but I’ll wait.  This one’s all about Friday when we were heading out.

See, we had the bright idea of saving some money and catching an early morning flight out so we’d have all day in Dublin to walk around and do the typical tourist business.  So the night before, we said ‘hey, let’s just catch a bus into London, walk around until about two in the morning, then catch a few winks at the airport until our plane?’  Why not?  Because that’s a stupid, painful plan, that’s why.

First of all, it’s cold in London.  Really cold.  For a while we staked out a table at McDonald’s in Queen Victoria station, but around 11 they came around and started doing the patented Dance of You’ve Been Here Too Long.  You know, the one where the waiter/waitress stands off at the bar with a mop and bucket, gazing at the window behind you.  Or they put the chairs up on nearby tables and maybe lock eyes with you for just a moment.  The employees at the McDonald’s didn’t have anything so subtle–they just hung a “Dining Area Closed” sign right behind us and frowned rather sternly.  We left.

Now, about that cold.  London has quite a bit of it, especially in November, and I’m right in the thick of it.  An hour outside, everyone in our group has dug into their luggage for extra clothes and starting to consider lighting a fire.  Time for the Stansted bus.

Except the bus is two hours late.

So by the time it rolled up to the stop, I was already feeling about an 8.5 on the refugee scale.  I had been kicked out of McDonalds, forced to wear five layers of clothing to stay warm, and spent the last two hours huddled at a bus stop rubbing my hands together.  I guess it’s lucky on my part then, because trying to sleep at Stansted completed the transformation.

I don’t know if everyone knows this, but there’s a million airports in London.  Okay, maybe five.  And anyone who’s been penniless and traveling around Europe will tell you: You never fly out of Heathrow.  No, you get Stansted, the red-haired stepchild airport of London.  The place looks like a gymnasium that had to take in some makeshift WWII hospital patients and occasionally a plane lands outside.  It is one huge, echoey hangar with more bodies on the floor than Tarantino can even count.  It’s a carpet of people who looked just like me at the moment, wearing hastily unpacked clothes to stay warm, bath towels pulled up to their chin, carry-on sufficing as a lumpy pillow.  Dress rehearsal for the apocalypse.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep at all.  When we did make it to Dublin the next day, we all fell into bed at about noon.  That was the best sleep of my life.  (Actually, that distinction probably goes to the 15-hour jetlag fix I had after flying over to England, but it’s not like I’m keeping a notebook of these things.  Give me a break.)

On the plus side, I know what to wear for the apocalypse.

The Duck and the Segways

Never pick up a duck in a dungeon.

So there Matt and I are in Franklin Park, fat and bloated from some good Five Guys and sci-fi discourse, trying to keep our laughter down as a pack of wild Segway riders (seriously, there was like twelve of them) circles the park like a trail of grossly overtechnologized ducklings.  I think they were having a class or something, or maybe they signed up for like an anti-dating service.  “Boo hoo, attractive single people keep throwing themselves at me and frankly it’s getting distracting.  I know!  I’ll ride around D.C. with eleven other awkwardly dressed people on a Segway to flaunt my disregard for any sort of personal intimacy in this or the next life!”

But this story is not about the Segway riders stalking me through D.C. (oh, it wasn’t the first time I’d met these nerdy Horsemen of the Apocalypse, oh no this was one of many such encounters.  And by ‘many’ I mean one other time they were going down the street and I ran after them, screaming “Take me with you!  Don’t leave me here with just my feet to transport me around!”)  No, this story is about the man feeding squirrels a couple of benches over, who may have been Snow White in blackface.  (Hey, it may not be PC, but I wouldn’t put it past Disney.)  Squirrels, pigeons, rats, all denizens of the urban park were coming out to raid his backpack for food.  We chuckle a bit, go back to our conversation, and then lay eyes on The Duck.

Let’s set the stage here.  Franklin Park is right in the middle of D.C.  As in, nowhere near water.  Ducks, on the other hand, are nearly always very near water.  So right off the bat we stop, cock our heads a little, and say “whoa, what’s that duck doing here?”  Because it’s just one duck.  One duck, out for a stroll through D.C., wandering along on his lonesome.

Here are the options that we came up with:

1.) He’s a loner, a rebel, a loose cannon exiled from Duckdom and sent out on a spiritual journey to commune with the Spirits of the Ancient Ducks to find his place in life and come to grips with whatever is haunting his tiny duck brain.

2.) He was given a quest by the Wise Old Man of the Ducks to go vanquish some evil that’s threatening his village and the entire hopes and dreams of his family ad everyone he knows rests on those feathered shoulders.

3.) He’s lost.

Either way, this duck appears out of nowhere (4.) He’s a ninja).  He waddled his little feathered butt around for a bit, smells some food being handed out…and starts going after my shoes.  Now, I feel I’m fairly comfortable with wildlife.  I’ve certainly had my fair share of close encounters with more dangerous animals (which is a couple different stories what FORESHADOWING!) and you would think that hey, it’s just a duck.  Well maybe you should read those options up there again, because three out of the four of them sound pretty vicious and the last thing you want to go is give a ninja duck a good kick in the breastfeathers because you know it’s only getting worse from there.

So I bent over a little, looked down at my hungry acquaintance, and said, “Hey, Duck.  Stop eating my shoes.  They are made of plastic and my feet.”  The duck, apparently realizing his dilemma, squawked off and jumped the poor man throwing breadcrumbs everywhere.  Crisis averted.

I hope he saves his village.  Or finds it again.

Whatever, it’s obvious he was a ninja.

How Fast Can You Run With an Envelope of Coins?

It’s one night at the apartment my senior year of college and Gavin and I are too lazy to cook (and probably too under equipped as well–remind me to tell you the story of the ketchup soup sometime).  Gavin was in the nadir of his chickpea hording and I was in the nadir of…um, not wanting to cook at the moment.  Screw the parallel structure.  I didn’t care enough to wrangle with the strangely soft potatoes that had been lurking in the closet all year or the Science Project in a Coffee Machine, but I was hungry.  So Gavin rolls over to the fridge and looks at the Chinese takeout menu that had insinuated its way into our apartment.  You know the one, if you’ve even been in a male college room in the last twenty years.  Nobody knows where they got it from, how it got there, how anyone in this trainwreck had the foresight to get a magnet and stick the dang thing up there, but there it is, awaiting such a moment when one lazy roommate looks to the other and says “Well, I guess we can always get Chinese.”

Bam. Location, location, location.

First problem, we didn’t have any money.  And before anyone says “why didn’t you go to an ATM machine?” first of all, that’s redundant and second of all if we’re too lazy to cook what do you think that chances of walking down to the ATM are?  Nil.  Now hesh up and let me tell this story.

I had some dollars and Gavin had maybe a five.  Enough for three spring rolls.  Not enough to sate our hunger.  Thus we started digging in the proverbial cushions (as we only had a futon with one large bedroll and numerous blankets on top).  A few frantic hide-and-seek minutes later, we have around $20 in small change, which Gavin throws into a large business envelope and then orders a mess of food for us.  A couple different meals, a bucket of rice, probably a handful of fortune cookies too.  We were really hungry.

The envelope is important, see, because it’s raining outside.  Real raining, not “drizzling/misting/barely enough to turn on your wipers” but raining.  Monsoon.  Watch your step because you’re getting pulled away by the storm drain riptide raining.  And we have a paper envelope of heavy metal coins we have to cling to while waiting out on the curb for the delivery guy to arrive.  Maybe this is more trouble than simple Chinese was worth, but let it be marked I commit.

So the situation stands thus: Gavin and I, on the corner of our parking lot, huddling under the one umbrella we own because my awesome Singing In the Rain black walking umbrella was stolen some years prior (still bitter) and the delivery guy is not anywhere.  This is strange–Matrix deja vu suspicion-raising strange.  As anyone will tell you, the delivery guy should have been there before we started digging coins out of our old laundry.  Maybe this guy’s teleporter broke or something, I don’t know.

Ten minutes later, still no sign.  We walk to the other end of the parking lot in case he decided to drive over the grass instead of the only entrance and then BAM someone comes peeling into the parking lot, circles around, and starts driving away.

Aw, hell no.

Remember, we have a absurdly soggy envelope of $20 in nickels and quarters and now we’re booking it after the delivery guy, flailing the arms that aren’t keeping the envelope from massive structural failure in the hope that our dinner doesn’t drive away.  Luckily, he sees us, stops, and we hand over the ungainly envelope with Gavin explaining that there’s “like $20 in there or something, we don’t know, but it’s more than enough.”  The guy just took the envelope (which was really the best thing he could have done, for us at least) and drove off, swearing to get back into delivering pizza where you’re treated with some modicum of respect.

Then we ate our food too quickly and both got stomachaches.

“Oh, She Totally Has Islandwalk.”

In the aftermath of the apocalypse, I wandered through the destroyed streets of D.C. (not that they looked any different than they do right now HEY-O) and fought off legions of  Mad Max impersonators and Fallout fanboys to reach my destination: The National Gallery.  Deep in its hallowed halls, where the nuclear global warming asteroid Whore of Babylon armageddon didn’t reach, I knew I would be safe.  Also, I could play the most beautiful game of Magic: The Gathering that ever existed.

So my friend Matt and I were in D.C. last Friday doing touristy things when this story happens, somewhere in the halls of National Gallery wandering from room and room and wondering why they all look the same (answer: lazy programmers) when we come across this:

And Matt, fresh off his “Napoleon totally looks like Quentin Tarantino” quip, takes a look at this, pulls me over away from the museum guards who are leering in the doorways, and goes:

“I totally want to turn this painting sideways and play a Llanowar Elves.”

Then a public tour wandered through and their guide asked if we wanted to be part of their group.  No doubt because I was cracking jokes about the Impressionists all being shadow creatures.  So we quickly excused ourselves, doused our giggles with a walk through Italian religious art (seriously, why does everyone paint Jesus like you just killed his favorite puppy?  Even when he’s just hanging out with some disciples peeps, he looks like he just watched Requiem for a Dream), and made a promise that when (not if) the zombies rise up, we’ll save as much art as we can, if nothing else to make the most expensive and hard-to-shuffle Magic decks ever.