Potato Glass

I've a few essays that I considered putting up today, but frankly, their importance has been circumvented by a strange discovery that occurred in our kitchen. Today, I tell you the strange tale of potato glass.

Before I get to the genesis of this miracle substance, it will be helpful if I begin by giving you a layout of our kitchen. Like the apartment itself, it is a small little thing, and a bit sad. The kitchen is a small alcove nestled in the corner of the living room. There is some cabinetry, but our passion for the acquisition of kitchen gadgetry easily dwarfs this meager offering of cupboards. It would be fair to say that our kitchen area overflows with food paraphernalia. Due to this scarcity of space, storage of gear requires some unique configurations.

Case in point: the cast-iron pan. A few years ago, I purchased a cast-iron frying pan. In short order, I discovered that there is a reason that people have been using them for hundreds of years. They heat evenly, retain said heat, and fare well on the stove and in the oven. Cast-irons also have non-stick properties without any help from space-age materials from the Kennedy era. It also bears mentioning that the damn things are nearly indestructible. (Key word: Nearly.) Unfortunately, our cabinet containing pans, like the rest of our house, was overflowing well before the cast-iron pan ever made its appearance in our kitchen.

The solution? We put it in the oven. It makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. Cast-iron pans are pretty much impervious to all harm. It doesn't matter to the pan whether or not it gets baked along with tater tots, cookies, or cakes. The cast-iron pan, a true creature of the ages, shrugs off these trials and tribulations. Thus, for the past few years, it has gotten baked along with everything else we ever cooked.

It didn't give a damn.

Until today.

I have this strange tradition on Saturdays following particularly demanding weeks. See, I have my son all day. My wife works. It is a great time, because the two of us get to play and have adventures. The only real hiatus is nap-time, which falls between noon and 2. On these rough weeks, I go to the grocery store and buy a good steak. My wife and son aren't steak people, so I use this small window of "me time" while Jack is napping to cook something no one else I live with is interested in eating. (I call it "Steak-tuary Saturday", but that really isn't relevant to the story. I just like the term.)

As I've previously detailed in other places, I can make some damn fine music when I put together steak and cast-iron. It was with just such a tune in mind that I reached for my cast-iron pan this afternoon. When I did so, I discovered something strange and, upon reflection, more than a bit wondrous.

I pulled out the pan, and ran my hand over it and discovered a bizarre glassy surface instead of the rough, oily, and re-assuring one I was expecting. Upon visual inspection, it appeared that the strange gloss covered a large portion of the pan. It was totally clear and smooth.

It first it seemed a minor annoyance. Just one more pot to scrub in an otherwise tidy kitchen. With an exasperated sigh, I set to heating the pan, and scouring it with tongs and a wet towel. Given that this particular pan is well-seasoned and not prone to sticking to food, that is the most I have ever had to do in order to return it to its pristine state.

In this case, it didn't do a damn thing. Not to be deterred, I got a metric buttload (measured precisely) of kosher salt and scoured hell out of the pan with that. Again, despite vigorous scrubbing and a few suggestions about exactly where this glossy aberration should go, it remained.

By this point, my mind craved some guidance as to what the hell this phantom substance was. In all of my years of washing dishes (and we're sneaking up on three decades of doing that job), I have never encountered a substance like it in my life. I called up my wife at work.

"So, honey, what the hell did you cook in the stove last? Epoxy?"

"I'm sorry? This is the library. Who are you?"

"Oh, hi Inez. This is Pat Songy. Can you please transfer me to my wife?"

"Sure Pat. Please hold."

I heard a click and some muffled laughter. Monica picked up.

"You're baking epoxy? What the hell?" my wife asked with some amusement in her voice.

"No. Evidently, you are! There is bizarre glass on the bottom of the cast-iron! Nothing will kill it, and I've tried  everything short of holy water and a crucifix!"

"Fact: That only works on vampires, not cookware. And for your information, the only thing I've done in that oven since you last used the cast iron was bake two potatoes."

"You're kidding. Just potatoes?"

"My hand to God. Just potatoes."

"You made potato glass."

"What?!"

"There is a substance in our cast-iron pan. It is smooth and clear like glass. It is as hard as steel. Evidently, you made it with two potatoes. Potato glass could be our key to wealth."

"So, how are you going to cook your steak?"

It was a sobering question. It quickly brought me back to the heart of my dilemma. No pan, no beautifully pan-seared sirloin. Now that was a serious problem. You can't expect a man of my station to forgo Steak-tuary Saturday just because my wife inadvertently created a space-age polymer with a potato.

That would just be ridiculous.

I got off the phone with her and re-engaged the cast-iron with renewed vigor. Steel wool didn't touch it. A second round of kosher salt did nothing. Getting it smoking hot and scouring it with wet rags didn't even make a dint. Finally, more than a little miffed, I resorted to extreme measures.

The chisel isn't usually a tool that I go for in the kitchen, but I guess there is an exception to every rule. Using a hammer and chisel, I could not injure the substance, but I did manage to knock off flakes of iron that the potato glass had evidently bonded to on a molecular level. Somewhere in my frenzy of hammering, a little sane thought flew into my head.

"Pat, you bought this for $8.99 at K-Mart. Is this truly worth all this swearing and exertion?"

A friend's grandmother once said that no matter what happened to a cast-iron pan, you could throw it in a bonfire and get it just about good as new. While I briefly considered how I might create such a conflagration in my apartment complex, I put the idea aside. You really don't want to juggle toddler nap-time and a raging inferno, steak or no. That's life experience talking.

Ultimately, I cooked the steak in a lesser pan. Tomorrow I'll have to procure a new cast-iron. Though I think I'll save the original and send it off to a lab. Who knows? In a few months, you could be reading the blog of a wealthy potato glass magnate.

Of course, we'll have to come up with a more clever name. I think, given its starchy origins and my love of Star Wars, I'll call it carb-onite.

Or maybe "Monica's Badass Potato Glass". That has a nice ring to it.





... steak-tuary.

Pullus Phasma Phasmatis

Prologue

I woke with a gasp. My wife slept next to me. I lay in my own bed. Dawn light had just started creeping into our humble little bedroom. The clock ticked. The garish, bright comforter lay haphazardly draped over my wife and I. The only thing out of place was the chicken sitting on my nightstand. 

The chicken cocked its head and looked at me with one beady, black eye.

"You again! Stay away, you sonofabitch!" 

I sat bolt upright in bed. I fumbled at my nightstand and grabbed my knife. The razor-sharp blade flew out with a satisfying "plok". I brandished it at the chicken. 

"Haven't you brought enough suffering on our home? Avaunt!" 

The chicken seemed unaffected by my raised voice and proffered blade. Beside me, my wife began to gently snore, oblivious as to the life and death conflict between myself and this otherworldly gallus gallus domesticus. I continued through clenched teeth. 

"What is it, chicken? What does this mean? Two years that you've been gone, and now this? Are we pregnant again?"

The chicken shook its head.

"The next time you show your face here, chicken, you have my solemn vow that I will end you, braise you, and eat you. Rest assured."

***

In many cultures, totem animals represent all kinds of people, places, and ideas. My wife is the only woman I know whose uterus has a totem. That totem is the spirit chicken. This is its story. 

I seriously debated whether this topic merited its own blog entry, but when I got right down to it, this whole phenomenon is just too fucking weird not to document somewhere. If nothing else, it will be delightful if, twenty years from now, my son reads this and discovers to his horror that his mother's uterus has an otherworldly chicken sentinel. In the bizarre little movie that plays in my head, his reading of this tale will somehow how infect his mind with the spirit chicken. Then perhaps it will follow him around and leave me be. Poe had his raven. Us Songys have the chicken. 

My first encounter with the chicken occurred on the day of my son's birth, October 31, 2009. 

Allow me to paint the picture. It was Halloween and a full moon to boot. The maternity ward at Bayfront was packed to the rafters. The ward had more ready-to-pop prengant women than it could handle. You could almost feel the chaos radiating off the place. In the hallways, frantic near-fathers paced back and forth with nothing better to do. Pregnant women hooked to monitors walked laps around the ward, wearing dark expressions. You could almost hear them thinking, "Please, God, let one of these steps knock this little parasite loose." I swear to God one of them did shikko, the high-legged, fierce stomp that sumo wrestlers sometimes make before beginning their match. The nurses had dispensed with any dressing-up of their coffee. They drank the coffee black, tossed it back like women condemned to die. The coffee was gulped without adornments like cream or sugar. Such luxuries did not exist for the brave tamers of these pregnant beasts. 

My wife, her mother, and I were on our first night in the ward. The doctors gave Monica a drug to induce her labor. The little beeping monitors advised us that she was having contractions, but she did not feel them yet. At this point, her water had yet to break. 

When we first arrived at the hospital, I felt the adrenaline pounding through my veins. After months and months of preparation, it was finally going to happen. Jack the Destroyer was set to come into the world on the coolest birthday imaginable. 

Somehow, the only think I could think to pray was, "Please, God, don't let me see my wife poop on the table." Not sure why that particular prayer came to mind, but that's what I was thinking. We had made it eight years with a strict "closed door while on the toilet policy", and this was about to blow that streak to hell. 

What can I say? You think of weird shit under stress. 

Anyway, one can only be excited for so long. Excited in this case gave way to anxious. Anxious gave way to bored. Finally bored gave way to Maury Povitch (there's an irony to paternity shows in the labor ward). Povich gave way to sleep. I finally closed my eyes to get a few moments of sleep on the little pull-out father couch in our suite. 

When I dream, it is usually a vast and encompassing thing. Bizarre, intricate plots expand over huge, faraway places. My dreams are the subconscious equivalent of Wagner's compositions (minus all the pro-Nazi stuff, of course). I found it more than passing strange when this particular dream began in the precise room where I had just fallen asleep. That is entirely too pedestrian for my strange, sadistic psyche. 

Monica was sitting there in the dream. Sadly, she was still watching Maury. Ray-Ray's father still hadn't been determined. My mother-in-law still occupied her chair across the room and quietly worked on her laptop. The picture seemed entirely normal... but for the chicken sitting on the bed. It was a rooster, though somewhat young. Cockerel might be a better term. Its bright red comb wobbled as it surveyed the room with its oil spot eyes. It had a deep sense of intelligence, and though I feel positively ridiculous saying so, had an air of menace about it. 

The spirit chicken gave me a meaningful look, somehow raised an eyebrow (despite the fact that chickens do not have eyebrows), and walked over to my wife's extremely pregnant abdomen. The rooster gave it an abrupt peck. 

And then, as my clients so often tell me in the comfort of my office, "shit got crazy." 

After the peck, there was a moment of ominous silence. And then, FWOOSH. A torrent of water exploded out of the bottom of my wife's largely undignified hospital gown. And when I say "torrent," I want you to think of that bloody elevator scene from The Shining. This explosion washed away the chicken in its violence. The room filled quickly, a veritable amniotic white-water rapids. 

In that precise moment, I snapped awake. Monica looked at me, shifted her weight, and then paused meaningfully. 

"Oh shit," she said, "my water just broke." 

That's right. You read the above narrative correctly. The spirit chicken, totem of my wife's uterus, had somehow reached into the waking world and predicted, if not actually caused, the breaking of her water. You have to understand that I am not a superstitious person in any way, shape, or form. I do not spend time pondering the unseen or wondering what lay beyond this world. I freely walk under ladders and more than once have intentionally crossed my own path with a black cat. I care not for these silly things. I am a man of science, like my father before me. 

But despite that, this freaking dream chicken broke my wife's water. I swear it with my hand to fucking God. 

From that point, things got relatively crazy. Her heart rate went all over the place. The baby's heart-rate went all over the place. Hours of labor passed. Pain was intense. Evidently once your water breaks, contractions are royal high bastards. Monica got an epidural and promptly wore out the little "more drugs" button. After a brief, but terrifying bout where we were concerned we might lose the baby, I decided to go with a cesarean section. (And yes, I said that I decided this. Not because I know better, or because I am smart or even that great under pressure. It is just that by that point, my wife had hit the "more" button so many times that she was high as a freaking kite.) 

I won't gore or bore you with the details of that process, suffice to say that I never want to see my wife's innards again. 

Luckily, everyone came out happy and healthy. Jack is a beautiful two year-old at this point, and he is the joy of our lives. Thanks to the extremely rough pregnancy that produced Jack and the wickedly powerful post-partem depression that hit my wife, we opted to shut the baby factory down after that first attempt. 

For two and a half years, the chicken remained blessedly, or perhaps ominously, silent. And then the other day, he made the dramatic re-appearance that I mentioned above. If he can be believed, his appearance doesn't mean anything, but hell, how do you go about deciding whether or not a uterus totem animal is trustworthy? I have no freaking idea. 

Regardless, there is no deeper moral to this story. I have no insight about the human condition to share with you today. I just wrote this because I'm one of the few dudes who has had a spirit chicken break his wife's water, and if you can't share that type of thing on the internet, then what is the point? 

Epilogue

Totally didn't see her poop. 

Why the Randomness?

Truly, this could be one of the defining questions of my life. I don't think I'll aim quite that high on a Saturday morning where my back hurts. That said, you may have noticed a dramatic increase in the frequency of my posts, as well as a bizarre hodge-podge of topics. In fact, this entire new "Book of Songy" lay-out as opposed to my thematic, subject-focused blogs smacks of some dramatic new change in direction.

I figured it was high time I address it, so that the subject would not keep you up at night.

... as I'm sure it has for weeks.

As my more dedicated readers (read: stalkers) will attest, I've gone about four years without any sort of regular posts other than the extremely rare musing on martial arts or stream-of-consciousness explosion. This was a vast departure from the previous decade, where I was generating content a few times a week.

The reduction process started for the most noble of reasons. I spent the bulk of my young life as a shameless attention whore. As I became a more seasoned... everything, I realized the error of my ways. On the advice of some people that I trust, I aspired not to say anything unless I had something really worth saying. For a professional bullshitter, such intentional silence is deeply educational.

That said, I allowed it to go too far in my own life. I got super picky, and eventually it got to the point where nothing got past the editor and onto the internet. In fact, my internal editor got so blood-thirsty that I could not even finish the first draft of a short piece before I threw my hands up in disgust. At the grim climax of this internal battle, I stopped writing entirely. That was about a year ago.

The current format and content of this blog are my way of trying to strike some sort of balance between my harsh, noxious, slightly fearful editor and that deeply hopeful, slightly mad inner child who likes to create words and blast them into the collective cranium of the internet (think flushing an M-80 down the toilet). I am forcing myself to create content and share it, even though I think that some of it is totally inane. (Let me defend myself here: I have not posted everything that I've written. I recently generated about 500 words on how to properly clean a coffee pot, and then decided that was even too boring for my most dedicated of readers. The fact is, there are just some topics that are so random that they don't merit sharing. I'm trying to cure a mental block, not commit the literary version of war crimes.)

This choice of tactics to address my problem comes from advice by one of my oldest writing teachers.

"Just write. There's no magic to it. Just keep sitting down in front of the keyboard and letting your fingers walk. Be as picky as you can, but ultimately realize that the muse comes only when she wants to. Like a beautiful and fickle woman, she can't be forced. Your job is just to be available at 3 a.m. when she happens to come knocking on your door."

So this is my version of putting on a pot of coffee and waiting for that difficult bitch to come staggering in from her wild night out.

The lack of adornment on the site and the stubborn refusal to properly package the content and organize it into tidy little neighborhood are all part of the psychological practice. If the inner editor/dictator gets too many options, I fear he will seize power again and institute a second draconian rule that is just as harsh and unproductive as the first was.

To this end, I am deeply grateful for your indulgences as an audience, and I deeply hope to create something rewarding in the future that will balance out all those times that you read my most passionate thoughts vis a vis coffee pot cleanliness.