Breakfast of Champions
While I was in college, Kurt Vonnegut, a notable fellow alumnus of Cornell University, wrote a book called Breakfast of Champions. The title is an obvious take-off from the General Mills breakfast cereal called Wheaties, which specializes in putting the pictures of famous athletes on the box to encourage young Americans to eat their breakfast cereal, which is basically a corn flake with bran added to keep the youngsters more or less regular. Vonnegut is classified as a science fiction author, but he wrote a special brand of SciFi that had tons of social commentary thrown in. In Breakfast of Champions he focused on the issue of free will and whether America gives a shit about its citizens. The main protagonist is a guy named Kilgore Trout and he is a thinly veiled version of Vonnegut himself, who gets tangled up in a strange relationship with a local car dealer in Ohio who goes slowly insane. Like all Vonnegut novels, it is very random and scattered and that makes it hard to follow. In the end you find yourself liking both Vonnegut and Kilgore Trout because they represent a degree of truth that is otherwise missing in modern American life.
Breakfast is supposed to be the most important meal of the day and yet it is probably the meal that is most often skipped my many people who are either too busy or too slow to pick up on any hunger signals from their stomachs until later in the day. Americans seem intent on exercising their free will to skip breakfast and muscle through until lunchtime. That being said, breakfast is a meal that is comprised of foods that most of us like a great deal and actually hanker for. That is what causes breakfast-for-dinner to become so popular as a filler meal for times like Sunday night. There is something very soothing about breakfast. Mothers and Fathers are heralded for their parental achievements by their children bringing them breakfast in bed as a reward once a year on their appropriate faux holiday. Being on vacation and getting room service breakfast is considered a great luxury and decadence. Fathers make their mark with the children by making them pancakes and who doesn’t get excited about waffles, especially if they get topped by strawberries and whipped cream. I still remember the Belgian Waffles from the 1963 World’s Fair, purchased in the Belgian Village and accompanied for some reason with a battery-charged lantern one would dangle out of one’s shirt pocket as they walked the night through the Flushing Meadow park.
I go through stages on breakfast. There are times when I desperately need to eat as soon as I awake and I usually fulfill that need with some combination of English Muffin with butter and a slice of cheese or perhaps peanut butter spread amply across it or perhaps a bowl of Special K, another of General Mill’s patently under-nutritious breakfast cereals that is sold as an adult version of Wheaties. Eating Special K with milk and sugar somehow makes me feel more healthy and righteous than if I eat a buttered English Muffin, for God knows what reason.
When Gary and Oswaldo come over to stay, Oswaldo plays breakfast short order cook and makes me either a breakfast burrito or an omelette. When we have other visitors, I will either go out and get bagels (Everything bagels being almost everyone’s favorite) or I might go down to the local deli market and get big old egg, cheese and sausage breakfast burritos that can feed two or three people apiece. When we are traveling, the breakfasts are most often included in the night’s stay price, so we will meet whomever we are traveling with in the breakfast room and partake of what is usually a lovely breakfast buffet. During these travels, the fare is focused on breakfast and dinner and lunch is usually skipped, ignored or casually grabbed on the go. In fact, you might say that breakfast and lunch trade places when at home and on vacation, while dinner still anchors the eating day, whether that’s a good thing physiologically or not.
But every once in a while I get in the mood for a good American breakfast. To me the ideal and complete American breakfast is as follows, to drink, a diluted orange juice (full octane is too acidic) with either seltzer or Sprite, a cheddar cheese omelette, crisp bacon, either hash browns or home fries and then sourdough toast. Depending on what type of potato the joint you choose to eat in specializes in, that is the perfect breakfast for me. In fact, it is a bit too heavy to really be called breakfast and may be better named brunch since it is certainly hearty enough to constitute two meals.
Today is Thursday, which means I have to get out of the house again for the cleaning crew. Kim is off to the veterinarian for Betty’s eye appointment and I started my day by dropping off my BMW R1250GSA motorcycle at the dealership for several recall notices and its annual servicing. I had several hours to kill and had had nothing yet to eat, so I went to a place in Escondido called The Golden Egg. It’s more or less an old fashioned breakfast diner that has all the usual offerings. I didn’t even look at the menu and ordered exactly what I always prefer for a good old American style breakfast. And I have to say, I ate more of it than I thought I could and it was all wonderful and just the way I like it. It’s nice when you you get what you want and nothing goes wrong in the process. I’m not sure that is such a monumental accomplishment in the grand scheme of things, but I will say that it made my day on an otherwise dreary and June 1 gloom day here on the hilltop.
After my brunch, I had a bit more time to kill so I headed over across the parking lot to Harbor Freight, which I have come to learn is the best value spot for buying tools. I had only one tool in mind specifically, and that was a new set of pruning shears. I have two others which are suboptimal and one good pair that I lost somewhere on the back hillside, so I was in need of a new pair. I thought I might get a choice at a tool place like Harbor Freight, but they literally had only one model and only one set left at that moment, so I splurged on the $8.99 item, still thinking the prices at Harbor Freight are hard to beat. While there I bought a few other tools that I felt I could use in my growing collection of DIY home tools and a few extra pair of garden gloves, which I have come to understand you can never have too many of.
I felt like I had had a productive morning as things go around here these days, so I headed home to see when I could reclaim my lost house from the cleaning crew. I did a walk through the garden and down the back hillside to make sure that I could see all the things that Joventino accomplished yesterday and everything looks as it should. Now I just need to await the call from the BMW dealership telling me that my motorcycle is ready for pick-up and I will feel like my day is complete. I’m not sure it would qualify as a perfect day, but starting off with a breakfast of champions is a pretty good way to get it going in a positive direction.