Squeeze Inn & the Miraculous Skirt of Cheese

For lunch yesterday, Barnaby and I went to Squeeze Inn (http://thesqueezeinn.com/) for the second time in the last three days.  There are two reasons that we went back again after our initial trip on Wednesday.  They are:

1.)  The Food.

Pictured above is the best damned veggie burger I have ever eaten in my life - a Veggie Burger with Cheese to which I requested the additional toppings of mushrooms and avocado.  You can see the mushrooms (big, meaty, juicy babies), but the veggie burger, avocado, and other toppings are hiding beneath the first thing you notice upon looking at this picture: that miraculous, revolutionary development in cheeseburger technology known as The Cheese Skirt.  From the Squeeze Inn website:

    Q:  What is this unique cooking method I have heard about?
    A:  Our famous squeeze with cheese is made in a unique way. After cooking the patty on a flat top grill we cover it with a handful of cheese and the top of the bun before throwing a handful of ice chips on the grill and covering the whole thing in a hood.  The skirt comes out perfectly.
    Q:  Where did the unique cooking method come from?
    A:  It was invented by the previous owners and handed down to our cooks when the restaurant was purchased.

I believe that everything happens for a reason...  not that I necessarily think this is Absolute Truth; it's just what I believe.  Beliefs are choices.  And I believe that the reason my transition from a vegetarian to a vegan diet - which I intended to make at the onset of my travels - has been a failure thus far was so that I could experience The Most (un)Holy Glory of the Cheese Skirt.  Just look at that thing!  The furthest, distant edges of this cheese galaxy are a crispy mass of hardened brownish-orange bubbles.  As you travel to the center of the burger, the cheese gradually becomes soft, pliable, molten.  Really, when I ate that burger I ate a divine galaxy from it's outermost reaches to it's core.  I'm having trouble explaining it... as with the strange beauty of a dream or a mushroom trip (could they be using that kind of mushrooms?), words fail.

Don't for one minute think, however, that The Most (un)Holy Glory of the Cheese Skirt is just some gimmick meant to spruce up an otherwise inferior burger.  Squeeze Inn's burgers - whether beef or veggie - come with fresh, quality vegetable toppings: the best kind of sliced onions (red ones); thick juicy tomato slices; crunchy dill pickle slices, and some kind of actual, dark-green lettuce (not that iceberg crap).  Mushrooms, avocado, and jalapenos are available for an additional charge.  As I said, the one in the picture had mushrooms and avocado.  On the one I ordered yesterday, I skipped the avocado and added jalapeno.  This second veggie burger ended up in a tie with the first one for the title of Best Damned Veggie Burger I Have Ever Eaten In My Life.

Oh yeah... there was that other reason Barnaby and I returned to the Midtown location of Squeeze Inn.

2.) Our lovely, friendly, and charismatic waitress, Sam (sorry folks: she's got a boyfriend).

OMg

Beirdo vs. Technology: the battle rages on...

Inbox

x

Marcus Jeffries	8:59 PM (13 hours ago)
to Barnaby

Well, Fuck me.  I was doing a little dream journal-transferring onto your computer before heading to Denny's, and guess what happened?  I highlighted a portion of text and then accidentally clicked a letter-key while it was highlighted, causing not only the text I'd attempted to highlight to disappear, but the entire email draft of the dream journals i had transferred to this point... which apparently ALL were highlighted.  The highlight of my day has become a big ol' Never Was. 

This not only means that roughly 16 hours worth of typed words have been erased, but that all the clarifying and editing of groggily-handwritten dream journal entries - which constituted most of that time - are lost.  And why?  Because apparently google doesn't think it necessary to have an edit-option available on the toolbar above the composition-screen that would allow one to "undo last move."  Nope.  Why would such a thing be necessary?  It's not as if anyone, at any time, during the process of composing any google email, might ever - with an accidental bump of a key - delete dozens of pages of text, right?  I mean, if that were to happen, it wouldn't be reasonable for a user of gmail to expect the World's Most Powerful Email Provider to provide a somewhat user-friendly - perhaps "intuitive?" - way, of recovering that which was so easily lost, would it?

WOULD IT?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?@%^$@^%$**@&$()@()%&)%&@)*7

Maybe google considers the ability to edit the body of an email to be an "option" you have to "customize."  Why?  Have the google and apple empires signed a contract in blood, in some subterranean Masonic chamber, to eradicate the grey areas of File Recovery?  Apple makes it damn-near impossible to ever delete anything (so that you will have to buy memory upgrades, I'm guessing), and apparently google doesn't allow you to recover anything you have deleted.  And yet, I'm guessing if any of my lost dream journals contained any words such as ISLAMIC or pairings of names like KONY with acronyms such as C.I.A., http://www.greanvillepost.com/2012/03/15/adios-africa-kony-2012-a-tool-to-fool-the-naive/
a certain room full of monster servers in Mormon Country would know about it, even if it was lost to me forever http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

Anyway, this is a huge setback for my project.  I am far too frustrated to start from scratch tonight.  That's going to have to be a job for tomorrow morning.  Starting tomorrow, every morning until either
a.) you need me to leave, or
b.) i finish typing up the edited dream journals (whichever comes first)
i will get up early, go for a run to get alert, shower, and go out to spend the day working on this.  For now, i'm headed to midtown to find a late dinner.  After that, I may find a bar at which I can process my expulsion from the Garden of My Own(ed?) Psyche via the GoogleSerpent and the Apple.  They'll probably try to blame it on some woman.  I'll be (A)dam(n)'ed if it's my fault.
http://www.realitysandwich.com/first_supper_entheogens_origin_religion

OK, OK, I know.

***END OF RANT***
Sincerely,
Technarded in Sacrament...oh.
 

P.S. - I'll have my tablet if you want to email me.

P.P.S. - The only problem google has with THIS email is the google spellcheck really feels that google should be capitalized!  OMg 

O.P.P.S. - Yeah, you know me!

Barnaby 007 *!#^$%@hotmail.com	9:15 PM (12 hours ago)
to me

Is there a word processor on the tablet that makes it possible to save it on the tablet? Maybe that is the way you should do the dream journals. I also think that unless I kick you out you might stall your journey. So let's say that by Thursday you Should be out.

Sent from my iPhone

The Transcendental Transient

Happy Easter, everybody. Here's another update from Barefoot Beirdo via Houston DeBacle at the Mission of Control:

This correspondence goes out to you from a Denny's in Downtown Sacramento, where I am celebrating the Ascension with a vegetarian Grand Slam and researching the symbolism of antlers.

At first I was focused on reindeer.  A dream back in Santa Rosa featured a dog with reindeer antlers who I found sitting in a merchandise tent beyond the finish line of a Marathon I'd just completed.  The dog got up and led me to a man I recognized as a runner from the book "Born to Run" known as "Barefoot Ted."  He and a small group of people were sitting cross-legged in a circle, and Ted was wearing reindeer antlers just like those worn by the dog.

I was reminded of this dream over a week ago while walking on the shoulder of Hwy 128-E, upon noticing a sign warning drivers of the presence of deer in the area.  Someone had cleverly affixed a red dot to the nose of the deer on the sign in order to evoke a certain reindeer who went down in history one foggy Christmas eve.

And, here in Sacramento, around the corner from Barnaby's apartment, there is a fenced-off garden within which dwells a great, horned plaster animal.  I see it almost every day when I go out to get coffee or a meal.  Perhaps the third time I walked past it, I finally realized it was something larger than a reindeer.  More likely, this sculpture is representational of a moose, elk, or antelope.

What is consistent in all of these images is the antler, not the reindeer.  Now that I understand this, I've also begun to consider when and where this theme started to emerge.  This past Winter in Santa Rosa, deer began appearing to me while I was out on runs.  The first encounter was while I was running through a wealthy neighborhood in some hills east of Downtown.  A family of deer were grazing in the front yard of a house at the end of a cul-de-sac.  I jogged in place for a while and watched them eat, and in turn they seemed to pay me no mind.

A couple of weeks later I was running on a trail separated by a line of bushes from Fountaingrove Parkway.  A gentle rustling in the brush that I assumed was being caused by a bird turned out to be from a gigantic deer who, caught off-guard by me, started to run out towards traffic.  The deer then came back through the bushes and stood, frozen, just a few feet from me as I jogged in place.  We checked one another out for a few moments, and then it bounded away into a grove of oaks.

Then one morning, heading East out of Downtown into wine country along Highway 12, I ran past what appeared to be a recently-killed deer on the shoulder of the road.  The first thing I noticed was the enormous antlers.  This was a male.  Clearly, he'd been struck by a car: a gaping wound revealed part of his ribcage and cracked bones protruded from his right hind leg.  Yet his eyes seemed totally, inexplicably peaceful.  Maybe the eyes of a deer always look that way.  Regardless, the image was both moving and perversely iconic; and for the next few miles I sort of tried to reach out to the spirit world, hoping there was some way that the deer could run, through me, upon the earth for one last time.

So, here at Denny's on Easter Sunday, I decided to look into all this, and The Great Google suggested that I look to my Irish roots.  I've been reading up on Cernunnos, a god of Celtic polytheism.

Interestingly, Cernunnos - like Barefoot Ted in my dream - is a horned or antlered figure who is often depicted sitting cross-legged.  The wikipage for this deity ends with this:

"In Wicca and other forms of Neopaganism a Horned God is revered; this divinity syncretizes a number of horned or antlered gods from various cultures, including Cernunnos. The Horned God reflects the seasons of the year in an annual cycle of life, death and rebirth."

Adding to this, from whats-your-sign.com: "Horns and antlers also point to the recycling nature of all life. Stags grow antlers in the Spring (symbolic of birth, renewal, the return of life), and fall off in the Fall (symbolic of death, introspection and hibernation). This would have prompted ancient consciousness to consider the phases of life, the cycles of being. Cernunnos would have encouraged the populous to viscerally feel the rise and fall of Nature and Time. His horns/antlers are a testimony to transience."

This transient has certainly had transience on the mind.

A Quick Post From Barefoot Beirdo via Houston DeBacle.

Greetings readers of Runnin' Down A Dream: The Adventures of Barefoot Beirdo. I am an associate of Barefoot Beirdo. My name is Houston DeBacle. Beirdo has contacted me here at Mission Control to inform me of some computer related issues that have arisen and therefore I have been assigned to pass along this update to you. We anticipate this happening from time to time, so I would imagine you will probably hear from me again at some point. Here's Barefoot Beirdo's update via an email he sent to me:

Hey man.  I'm typing a the tablet  right now, so please read with caution.  This thing is a semi-autocorrectomatic weapon of mass dysfunction.  The Android that I am traveling w/ has located the internet for the first time in a day, 3 County's & 30+ miles.  So, I got your email.  Yay!  Turns out all I needed to get a connection was sleep in a wooden bus stop shelter in a rural hamlet in the hills of napa County, walk 20 miles along the thin shoulder of hwy. 128 East in a pair of rainboots under the rain clouds, and find an out-of-business gas station/ good mart w/ a solid awning to take shelter beneath as the showers turned into a legitimate rainfall.  Voila, internet!  food - not good - mart.

even tho I haven't been able to express myself or share the beginning of my adventure yet via blog, this tablet has allowed me to chronicle my adventures photographically & through video.  I realize that what I want to express will reach more people the more forms of media that I utilize.  Plus, since I haven't fully (if even partially) developed my voice as a writer, I think that the videos in particular have a better chance of successfully conveying my experiences as filtered through my particular (eccentric, pseudo-sage-ish fool?) perspective.  I'll soon set up a vimeo-account... If this Android - being a peon of the googletube empire - will allow it.

Well, it seems that the rain is considering downgrading back to shower-status, so me & these rainboots - which were not meant for walking' - should get back to pounding pavement.  Because if I can find a laundromat 4 miles down the road in the city of Winters, I won're have to make the choice tune knight between sleeping outside in a sleeping bag in wet clothes or naked (2 knights ago I chose wet over birthday).

As you can see, I kept the message exactly as it was in the email. Autocorrect always makes for a more exciting reading experience, don't you think. In another message he wrote to me I received this amazing sentence: funny; autocorrect keeps sporatically apolonia into dormían.  Dormían!  ugh.  spanish! 

Perhaps to just be ridiculous I'll use google translate to bring you Barefoot Beirdo's next blog entry. Hopefully you'll hear from him again before me.

Yours Truly,

Houston DeBacle