Slang teacher

"Wha' type of shit is this" Fong snapped upon entering the room
"Oh, Tea's never seen 'Chef'" Dan rolled over in the couch, he had bits of popcorn, morning cereal and wrappers clinging to his belly.

"The ' fuck is up with the couch, it looks like a dump? And this movie?!" Fong seemed a bit shook
"What? It's cool, he won't take shit from the owner!" Tea came to the pop fiction's defense.

If you've still not seen the cinema verite "Chef". There will be some spoilers here...


"Oh cmon', get real. The chef is a total beta the whole first half of the flick" Fong barked
"Yeah! its a movie, that's how shit always goes down. Hero grows balls half way through!" Dan moaned from the sofa.

"This guy's biggest problem is his owner wants him to stick to a menu? Gimme' a fucking break" Fong started pointing at John Favreau's head while he pranced lovingly in front of his pre-teen lovechild, while John LeGuizzamo provided some legitimacy on set.

"You think anyone with more than a decade's experience would realize that a job like that is hypothetically high profile. They'd  take note of their age, market value, and overall BMI. Chef's not getting any younger here....you think that'd be the time to jack in a job on Melrose?" Fong moved from the throat.

"No, but look he's obviously got some savings, some infrastructure. How do you think he affords a stagecoah to make cubanos?" Tea brought the obvious to light

"Let me tell you something, in 2020, there was more than thirty-percent unemployment in hospitality thanks to animatronics, sensors, and tablets alone!" Fong chuckled

"If and only if, anyone with that job was going to leave a position paying more thank sixty-kay a year just so they could cook Cuban fusion on a bus with his son,  he'd also been a day trader in a former life, and had a separate penthouse in Manhattan where his crew was holding tasting menus weekly, and a catering business run by Venezuelan refugees he smuggled across in beer kegs."

"Well cmon, it's a family flick" Dan waved, his back facing the hi-def.

"Exactly, family. There's no family out there like Sofia Vergara's that would somehow let this dude go on a cross crountry rampage with some sando's" Fong had reached the peak

"Sofia wouldnt be anywhere near that dude in real life" Dan spewed

"Exactly, Chef would be on defense most of his life after forty here. Sofia would be the main reason he'd keep the job, keep kissing up to his boss, and renegotiate his salary next year." Fong snorted

"Oh gosh, way to be the realist" Tea rolled her eyes in her skull. "Fine, let's watch Bagger Vance."

"You should be in the air right now, in fact you could have left hours ago, no?"Maurice snapped
"I'm set to fly out later this morning. Should get in by 9am" Cless said.

"I'm seeing the program absolutely, but also relatively. Maybe all this stuff I'm doing won't matter in five weeks." Cless thought aloud.

"There are too many other people out there that would kill to be in this position you're in. If nothing else, you owe it to yourself to game hard here." Maurice said

"Is it that I'm being written into someone elses script? That's it isnt it, its still unfulffiling because all this is just someone else's construct. I'm not even working for my own good." Cless confesses.

"WHO'S SCRIPT? WHO IS CONTROLLING THIS SCRIPT?" Maurice yelled

"It's not me, it's my ego" Cless started to crumple.

"Then give it up. Stop. Go back home, you know where this is going"

"I can't there's too much in the pot."

"Then live here like you're immortal, press forward into the chaos. Things won't change! GET ON THE AIRPLANE, GO!"

"Got it, Ok" .

"Sure, I'm bartending tonight, my name's Cless"
"Sure, i see you, come in. Report to Robert over there, he's the dude with the ear-piece."
"Thanks"

"Youre' Cless?"
"Yes."
"That's a funny name, what is it, Danish."
"Yeah..."

"You even bartend before?"
"Of course. Hey can you lend me a black vest though?"
"Don't worry about the vest, as long as you can make a drink. That's a cool tie."
"Hey, thanks, where am I at?"

"Over there, you're with Anthony. he'll cue you up on the set up."
"Hey thanks!"
"We're meeting in forty minutes."

"Anthony! I'm cless."
"Hey, cool to meet you."

So they starte slanging, one a pro, another an amateur on a mission to get the green."
"What's a Dirty-Shirley?"

One broken shaker in the way, they split one the rest on the night.

When the dust settled and the entire holiday party had been whipped. Cless made his move to the local dance floor.

He swept accross lower Mission to downtown. Crossing vagrants, homeless, leaving half his leftovers to the night dwelers.

How to get in? It's a $35 cover. He drew the stamp onto his hand and check it out for a short while/

Nora? What was she doing here?

I wish it would rain down.

2019 is riddled with an obscene amount of unseasonal rain on the West Coast. It's an intense notion to be alive this far in the future, in Trump's America.

I feel the backbone of nostalgia, here in my Oceanside living quarters. I've weathered the storms of San Francisco, and now seek unsettled terrain back in SD. I write here and now to recall the feelings on content that the sound of raindfall bring.

I can remember the Fall of 2015 and Winter of 2016, the amount of rain we had in San Francisco. I often felt a ghost to the environment, and it's really the same now in San Diego. It's true - you can never really go home.

There's certainly fresher air, and we know the air will bring around a resounding victory.

Well let's hit the road.

"That's an easy one, the F&B will have your head in a vice before he every gives up his accounts downtown"

"No one's ever put me in any sort of sleeper hold, and we're not going to get started here. Watch and listen, dear."

The two strolled passed the gilded mezzanine, a wry reflection of the evening light spattered across the marble tiling. The floor staff moved unison, acting like a shield, keeping the reflection from hitting Cless' vision.

"Now that's synchronized. I wonder what the tasting's like." Rose fawned.

Didnt know you had it in you.

Cless runs over to grab his deba and plunges it into Roy's neck before he can get his composeur.

Cless can smell the burning flesh and hair.

Roy doubles over onto the wet alley floor.
"y que vamos hacer manana?" Lisandra wonders what'll happen next.

"ninguna llamada, ninguna llegada." The two drag Roy by his legs to the nearest trash compactor.

You're not playing fair

"Six-thirty and I've not broken a sweat. Where's all the action??" Job looks at his line mate.

"Check this out!" Cless flexes his bicep in front. The lateral head looking a bit plumper than usual.

"That's nothing. " Job kicked out his calves. Somewhat veiny.

"Eww...."

Then they start rolling in. The scan line droning of an Epson printer breaks the jocular atmosphere on set.


"Fire one squash, one cuzzinetti, one fromage, one truffle tag......." Montes shouts pertly down the line.

"Click, clack, click clack"

"Oder one turbot, one mussel, one duck" Keeping up.

"Click, clack, click, clack"

"Fire one tomato, fire a dozen oysters, fire one more tag....." Easy.

"Fire one neck, one trotter, one carpaccio."

"order a hali, order greco, no garlic,  order eggplant, no salt." No garlic? Okay.

The boys spin into action, muscle memory taking over. Sometimes memory is a mystery. Keep up!

Job starts the side of turbot in it's pan with some clarified butter. The toasty aroma offset by a pan full of egg noodles and truffle juice coming to a simmer.

"ive seen three-fifty-sevens, I've seen forty-fives on military special, I've seen twenty-two-zip guns, it's about things you think you'd never see on the streets..." Job snickered to the range.


No longer are they the victims of a self denying complex that is the result of inexperience. There is no chatter in the skull over whether or not the volume will over take the chef. When you know these processes back, forth, and in your bones, it's a simple motion of the arms, hands, and legs. We're at the point of fluidity, what your afternoon talk-show guru's call a 'flow state'. The incessant breathing becomes smooth, the torrent is apparent.


Cless rolling a crispy pigs foot onto some paper for seasoning and onto a pan with a puree of green plum, and some smokey peanut brittles. He hides a few balls of cabbage that envelop a creamy rice porridge inside.

"Trevor, are you set on the carpaccio?" Tracy echoes nearby

"oui, it's all up" Tracy flips the salmon neck onto it's skin and glazes with maple, some dried thyme, an punctuates it with the just-clipped-vines of a pea plant, still wet with dew somehow.  It's all these parts that make this canvas an art.

A quick orchestration is complete by a sub-communication of silhouette.

And that's dinner. Just a few more hours to go.

Try doing it for four years?