No, I did not get to sleep in the shelter last night. Instead, I had a job opportunity, gathering work experience. I got to sleep in the kitchen of the restauraunt owned by the socialist social services worker who suggested that I sleep in the kitchen, rather than my nice rack by the radiator in the shelter. They had a corporate function to cater, and my work experience was needed …

If you ever work in a kitchen, a commercial kitchen, a kitchen in the Toronto tourist district, you soon discover the importance of having someone who can find things that fall into the various bowls of food. I am that person. It is a gift, a skill, a talent. Things find their way into the food all the time. Caps from salt shakers, spoons, shards of glass, plastic fragments, cigarette butts, matches, lighters, condoms, and on one notable occasion, a glass eye, have all found their way into the food, the batter, the sauce, the gravy, or the salad dressing.

I have steady hands, and my fingers have a sensitive touch, cultivated over the years when I was not homeless, when I had a house, a job, a car, and the ability to choose the television channel as something not the CBC. My right hand, immersed up to the wrist, or more rarely, the elbow, in some bowl or tub, can soon find the lost item. Plastic tends to float, but not cigarette butts. These you find by shape, these foreign objects. The cigarette butt will soon be soggy with whatever liquid it is immersed in, be it salad dressing, soup, or sauce. Glass, porcelain, and pottery will sink to the bottom, but they have a hard texture with has them stand out from the surrounding matrix of beef and barley, garlic butter, or batter.

As a victim of capitalism, racism, sexism, and the lingering effects of colonialism in Africa, I have learnt several important lessons during my hours of obtaining job experience. Canadian cooking sherry should come in a plastic jug that cannot break when dropped by a drunkard chef. Medication of any kind, euphoric or anti-biotic or MAO inhibitor, should not be taken around food that matches it in color. And, if you have a glass eye, dental prosthesis, or a spare colostomy bag, keep them secure in your eye socket, mouth, or under your pants. Onions are the great enemy of the glass eye in the kitchen. With the flow of tears, the rush, the flow of tears tend to push out the glass eye, and gravity, which never lets you down (unlike the coalition), takes it straight and down into the simmering soup of the daily special. Smoking provides too many opportunities for dental work, be they the forward fangs or the middling molars, to find their way from the mouth to the poutine. And colostomy bags are not to be used for temporary storage of beef gravy, no matter how well the opening fits over the spigot on the beef gravy bucket.

Most of our customers are CBC people. I watch them through the window on the kitchen doors. The hair on my arms below the wrists has mostly dissappeared, like my expectations of living a life like my parents and grandparents. The main stream media have done a good job vilifying that Leave it to Beaver lifestyle, that Canadian-Canadian culture which had me with a job, a house, a car, clothes that did not reak of insecticide, and vacations. Now it is gone for me. Now our automotive workers live in fear, as do anyone working for a bank or financial institution. All gone, all going. The greenies celebrate, no more cars means more shivering in the cold in the line for the shelter. And I am learning to find mooshy condoms in their pasta salad. And the humid air in the kitchen is so much better for my tuberculosis. And we take turns feeding Willard, our pet rat. Willard is homeless, too.

All is not lost. Today I got a certificate for mastery of my first recipe. Here it is:

Flavoured Lard:

Melt in a pot a few blocks of Lard

Top up with bacon grease, or scrapings from the frying pan or plates back from the serving area

Add the following spices; you can keep the spices in a sock so they can be reused; use a non-polyester sock as it tends to bleed color into the flavoured lard, unless you want a colored flavoured lard

cumin, coriander, cayenne pepper, monosodium glutamate

After the lard is melted, immerse the sock of spices in the hot liquid. You might want to tie a string to the sock, so you can pull it out quickly in the event of a fire. Do not use an elastic band, as it will melt in the lard. An experienced cook will use the sock from the right foot, as these seem to have fewer holes in them.

After the lard has changed color from clear to murky, take out the sock. Now you have a supply of flavour lard, which you can use on most anything.

I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this

A special thanks to that kind lady from the CBC who gave me a half smoked cigarette when I was hanging out back, waiting for the alley rubbie to pass out so I could steal his socks. People like you, who ate the life force of the western economy and culture from within, like a tree bark boring beetle, are what make my moments of homelessness less miserable and more joyeuse.

xpd Mitchieville, DustMyBroom

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 8:08 am and is filed under Joy of Homelessness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.