Lao Tzu Was A Hero To Most, But He Never Meant Shit To Me (Mostly Because I Had No Idea What The Fuck Any Of It Could Possibly Mean)

When we were adolescents we read a lot of books that as adults we never would have considered reading. The Bell Jar sticks out in my mind. I remember slogging through the Tao Te Ching, too, except that it wasn't really a slog on account of me allowing myself to let my mind wander freely while my eyes skimmed some words on the page; I sort of think that I shouldn't even say that I "read" it, more than displayed it on a bookshelf for however long until my parents moved out of my childhood home and the book disappeared to I don't know where while I was living thousands of miles away.

Reading a book and understanding like none of it is kind of a crummy feeling. Part of me wonders whether high school English instructors keep teaching Shakespeare just to tweak children; they just seem to really enjoy explaining what stuff like "the beast with two backs" means. Me, I hate riddles. And all that is faux-homespun. Like I said, you can feel real crummy sometimes.

Which is why I eventually gave in to my insecurities and at some point decided that I really shouldn't care that I don't "get" Lao Tzu. And once you do that, it's just a slippery slope down past Pynchon, Joyce and whatever else until you one day realize that you summarily dismissed Blue Valentine after 45 minutes on account of it not seeming to have much of a plot: "Don't give a fuck; can we please just watch Breaking Amish already?"

All of which is to say, it wasn't all that clear to me after finishing Herbert Read's The Green Child how much time I needed to spend thinking about all that I didn't understand about the book. I decided it wasn't worth that much time.

Basically, there's a world with no weather where ex-dictators go to stare at crystals and die.

I remember talking to Frank's dad about Edward Albee's The Goat a while back when it was on Broadway and he was just exasperated: "I don't get it; it's a goat! He's bonking a goat!" He didn't use the word "bonk." I don't remember him using a more robust word, either, but you could see it in his soul: Edward Albee wrote a whole play about a guy who fucks a goat. And we're supposed to care why?

The Wikipedia page for Green has a couple of funny moments. One is a relatively recent remembrance of the novel, which I think can be boiled down to something along the lines of, "If you're going to write one novel in your life, you might as well make it fucking ridiculous." (Actually it said, "But The Green Child is the kind of book to write if you are going to leave just the one novel behind: singular, odd, completely original." Go big or go home!)

The other funny thing in the Wikipedia entry is the Orville Prescott The New York Times review of the book, which is basically this: "But, in spite of the limpid grace of his writing, his parable is ridiculous as well as vexatious. One feels constantly that shining truths are about to be revealed; that there is something important, something significant, hidden in these pages. But it is never made clear, while the ridiculous details remain all too conspicuously in view." It's funny how contemporary reviewers feel like they need to really represent a book. I don't know that you have to spend that much time thinking about a lot of stuff, but it's good someone does.

The other thing Prescott rips is Kenneth Rexroth's "pretentious introduction of uncommon density." I read it after finishing the book and thought that I must have really missed something. It's a hoot:

There has been a great proliferation of fiction in our day. There has been an even greater decline in quality. Since Ulysses, if you accept Ulysses as a great novel, there have been very few really great novels in English. Lady Chatterly, The Rainbow and Women in Love; Ford Madox Ford's Tietjens series, really one novel; some of Sherwood Anderson; the unfinished promise of William Carlos Williams' First Act; a few others. The Green Child is fully the equal of any of these, although it is of a rather more special kind. Graham Greene speaks of it as surcharged with a sense of glory — gloire — that special lustre and effulgence which Aquinas marks out as the sign manifest of great works of art. . . .

It goes on like that — for less than two pages, though it seems like 20 given how many names are dropped: Landor, Bagehot, Mill, Clerk, Maxwell, Walton, Gilbert White — you're like, fuck, was I high or something through undergrad? But this is the kicker:

I am not going to tell you the meaning of Read's allegory — the secret of his myth. At Eleusis the priestess rose from the subterranean marriage bed of the hierosgamos and exhibited an ear of barley, and today, scholars in their ivied halls by the Cam and Thames and Charles dispute about what she means. . . . What does it mean: What does the Tao Te Ching mean? What does the Book of Changes, that immemoriably subtile document, mean? All myth, all deep insight, means the same as and no more than the falling of the solar system on its long parabola through space.

Say what now?

So then of course I went down a rabbit hole about Kenneth Rexroth. What a charmed life! I mean, sure, he lost both parents before he really hit puberty and then got locked up in jail after being accused of running a brothel, but when you think about the way life goes, there are way worse outcomes than hitchhiking around the country, bumming around Paris, Mexico, South America and Greenwich Village before moving to San Francisco and becoming a poet. A poet! Who does that?! It's awesome. I mean these days running a food truck is considered "edgy." Artisanal mayonnaise, on the other hand . . .

And If Someone Wrote A Story About A Rooftop Sign Decrying Halal Cart Vendors Who Get Asinine Summonses From The NYPD And Then Are Posthumously Baptized By Mormons, My Head Might Actually Explode

There are several candidates for the most infuriating story of the day.

There was the piece about city officials bending over backwards to approve a new "iconic" sign for JetBlue in Long Island City's Queens Plaza. Basically, JetBlue wants to build a 40-foot sign on the top of a building it's leasing. They want to do this because there are two similar signs in Long Island City, both vestiges of the area's industrial past, when people thought nothing of putting ugly-ass signs on the tops of buildings. The context here is that New York had to lobby hard to keep JetBlue from leaving for Florida. So basically now you have city officials selling ad space.

What, not infuriating enough? OK, how about the Business Improvement District head that called out sidewalk food vendors for being "terrible citizens"? Sure, not so strange, until you see the accompanying photo of a halal cart in the article and a report that the BID apparently objects to "odd smells." You hear the same language from landlords looking to discriminate against tenants from cultures that make "pungent" food. The solution, according to the BID, is to embrace more foodie-friendly food trucks that make less smelly food. This is what gentrification looks like: A neighborhood gets a Business Improvement District that forces businesses to contribute money ostensibly to clean up a neighborhood until it gets too powerful and starts to dictate who or what happens in the neighborhood. Maybe you feel good about more hipster food trucks. I do — I love hipster tacos, hipster mayonnaise and hipster small-batch bourbon — overpriced artisanal products make me feel better about my small, shitty existence — but at some point you have to step back and ask the simple question Who the fuck do these people think they are?

What, you don't care about a dumb little food cart? OK, fine — maybe it is a bit of faux outrage. How about this: First we heard stories about poor saps in the Bronx and places that we don't really spend a lot of time in who were not just given tickets but actually arrested for putting their feet on subway seats. And that's shocking (even worthy of a pre-emptive revenge fantasy), but then this first person account makes the whole practice look totally fucking insane. There's a literary quality to the back and forth, but what might be the most infuriating thing are the comments underneath that seem to blame the victim for being entitled to think that the cops shouldn't be handing out idiotic quota-filling tickets. The message seems to be Don't think you're too good to get harassed by the police. There's something seriously wrong with the NYPD. And sure, maybe you should be more upset when cops shoot unarmed civilians or surveil whole communities based on their religion (in other jurisdictions, no less) but there's something that's so blatantly and stupidly wrong about this that it almost rises to its own level of idiocy. You may not be an 18-year-old kid in the Bronx or a Muslim in Newark, but nearly everyone takes the subway. And you probably put your feet on the seat once. The mayor or city council either needs to let some fucking common sense prevail and fix this or the commissioner needs to go.

Easy collars don't make you that upset? OK, then here goes: Mormons have posthumously baptized Daniel Pearl in 2011, who was forced to admit "My father's Jewish, my mother's Jewish, I'm Jewish" before someone who was quite possibly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself beheaded him. The idea that he should be Mormon in some weird quasi-Freemason white-tiled heaven of some sort is frankly one of the most offensive things I've ever heard. Daniel Pearl's head was sawed off not because he thought Joseph Smith dug up zinc tablets sent down from god that were transported by boat to Palmyra, New York from Israel (or whatever they think). Daniel Pearl's head was sawed off because he was a Jew.

I thought I learned once why Mormons do this. My recollection was that it was sort of like cooking the books — an easy way for missionaries to build their up numbers. (I vaguely remember asking the guide at the temple on 67th Street — before it opened and they allowed non-Mormons to tour the building — about this and I think that's what she said.) But, really, I totally don't give a fuck why the Church of Latter Day Saints does this — it's so offensive and horrible that it should never, ever happen again.

The church was already shamed for doing this for Holocaust victims and I thought I heard they stopped. The article says that officials admitted that it was wrong to have baptized Pearl, but the fact that it happened at all is just astonishing. It's sort of like, Dude, this is supposed to make people think Mormons aren't totally bizarre? You're not helping . . .

And there you have four stories that may raise your blood pressure just a little bit.

Thinking Too Much Can Ruin A Good Time!

So we're cruising through the Williamsburg iteration of the Brooklyn Flea and I'm all, "this is cool, this is right, this is a bunch of people just like myself feeling great about browsing for old bottles because, well, old bottles just look cool and if there's nothing else people like myself feel great about, it's browsing in Brooklyn for old bottles" when, all of the sudden, we turn the corner down at the end of one of the many aisles at the Brooklyn Flea and notice the food offerings up at the back of the gravel parcel — the gravel that slows down strollers and folks in uncooperative footwear — and there it is, abutting the brand new buildings up there on the Williamsburg waterfront, a table selling mayonnaise.

It's not just any mayonnaise, no — and, to be sure, had the price/ounce ratio not been so clearly posted on the placard at the front of the table, I probably wouldn't have even noticed it, but it was there, and since I did notice, I made a point of turning to Jen and commenting, out loud, at least to her anyway, that five dollars for four ounces of mayonnaise, even "decadent" mayonnaise, seemed awfully expensive.

"You should write about this," Jen said.

"Why, so you don't have to hear me complain about it for the next half hour?"

OK, so here goes: Five dollars for four ounces of mayonnaise, even "decadent" mayonnaise, seems awfully expensive.

Just as a point of comparison, a 32-ounce jar of Duke's Mayonnaise, which is pretty good mayonnaise, by the way, retails for nowhere near five dollars for four ounces.

Which is also to say, if Duke's priced its mayonnaise at five dollars for four ounces, the normal 32-ounce jar of it would cost $40. And not that I'm endorsing it, but a one gallon receptacle of Miracle Whip — that stuff that Kraft is trying desperately to rebrand (or re-rebrand) in that cute ad campaign — would cost $160.

Unless I'm wrong, one tablespoon equals half an ounce. One tablespoon is what many recipes recommend you put on a sandwich that involves the condiment. So given that, this five dollar jar of mayonnaise will provide you with eight servings of condiment — or 62.5 cents a serving of mayonnaise. I don't think it's just me — that's a pretty steep price to pay for condiment, right?

And what is mayonnaise anyway? Alton Brown tells me that it's just an egg yolks, salt, dry mustard, sugar, lemon juice, white wine vinegar and safflower or corn oil. Even if we're using farm-fresh organic free-range eggs, Himalayan salt, whatever dry mustard, some top-notch sugar, Meyer lemon juice, whatever super-awesome white wine vinegar exists and the finest safflower or corn oil you can find at the Costco, I can't believe that artisanal mayonnaise producers aren't making cash hand over fucking fist.

Clearly, everyone here is wasting their time on old bottles when they should be spending their time on condiments.

If I were to rewrite The Graduate, it might sound like this:

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you — just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: "Condiments."
Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in condiments. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Ben: Yes I will.
Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That's a deal.

Look, all I saw was the sign. And God help me if I Google "Brooklyn Flea Mayonnaise" because I'm not sure I will appreciate what I will find at the end of that search.

Soemtimes you wonder whether all the things that first attracted you to New York have finally been obliterated by all the things that make you really sick of New York.