There are things I would love to do but there isn’t room for them, in this crowded life. These days leave big piles unfinished. Time marches on and I never get to the end of the to do lists and I always discover you don’t need to do all of it. There isn’t time or room or space to finish. Get the bare minimum done and get out and onto the next thing. There is always a next thing that starts before the last thing ends and so it goes.

If i had time I might fish, actually bait hooks with worms bought for the garden, which if i had time, would bloom year round with flowers and fruit. I’d toss the mudfish and bullheads back into the water, humanely and quickly, hoping for trout with the next bite, the next nibble.

I’d catch rainbow hued silver skinned and plump freshwater creatures and slit them with the sharp knife on my belt, pulling the maroon and pink guts out handily and bloodless. I’d cook the flesh quickly in deep pans of foaming hot butter, or steam it on the bones inside of parchment paper. I’d serve it either way piled with woody bunches of herbs tossed with a drizzle of fragrant oil, like a salad.

If there were time I would make bread at dawn, kneading the flour and allowing the loaves to rise with the sun. I would beat them down and let them rise again, and maybe even once more, the gluten creating and recreating itself in a bubbly web, lending softness and air to the chewy insides. The crust would bake hard and brown and cut the roof of mouths with its freshness.

Perhaps I would have caught many small fish, and the loaves would be flattened with my hand and split in half just after baking. The fish would be fried whole and hot in a buttery bath then stuffed between the bread halves with frisee and whatever herbs might be at hand. Sandwiches made with fishes you caught and bread you baked might taste profoundly good, bibilically so. I’d feel like i accomplished a great deal, and would go to bed satisfied.

I am not repulsed by what is inside the crisp skin of a hot dog. It always sounds like a good option to me. I will always want a hot dog, especially a dirty water one on the street in New York City, when its painfully cold outside, possibly right after we have finished ice skating, our breath coming out in big white clouds.

In addition to the delicious NY hot dogs, I love it when vendors sell sausages outside of nightclubs in Los Angeles, late night/early morning, fried with onions and peppers until the skins are blistered, served up with a heavy portion of grease spilled onto a stale-ish white bun. These are more of a sausage variety, the insides revealing chewy knots of fat and cartilage, as opposed to the uniform pink of a regular frank. The smell is intoxicating and good to soak up the booze and whatever else you might have enjoyed during your night out on the town. Its best to eat away the damage that bars and clubs and rock shows can do, at least I always have, the faster the food the better. Its disgusting in the brute sunlit reality of 9am, but I choose that dry mouth regret over an un-braced for hangover.

Generally, I am of the belief that hot dogs are made of the mess on the kill floor, the butcher’s aftermath, whatever can be swept and salvaged and formed into tubes. The mass of protein which is likely – blood, brains, nerves, glands, eyelids and eyeballs, teeth, gums, jowls, jaws, bones, marrow, organs, skin, jowls, fat, hair, a good bit of fear and terror and confusion in there too, all the chemicals and drugs they’ve been fed, as well as undigested grain and fecal matter – everything nose to tail – smashed up and spiced and heavily salted and packed into tight, toothsome skins, possibly intestines but maybe an edible beef extract injected plastic-like skin that spurts a tiny, satistfying spray of brine when bitten into, mimicking an itsy bitsy blood spatter. We are predators after all.

Yes they say hot dogs are 100% beef, which I do not doubt, but what makes up the 100% may not be the percentage of the beast you would choose to consume. 100% means all of it. Are you ready for all of it? All the truth? All the misery? All the offal? all the awful?

I say if you are going to eat the animal, eat the whole thing. Honor the life you have taken and don’t waste a bit. Make no assumption that you are humane by eating only the sanctioned portions of muscle neatly surrounding the bone, such as in an expertly seared, pepper crusted t-bone steak, and don’t think that you’ll be getting this when you come over to my house to eat. None of my heat sources will get hot enough to sear meat properly, and I refuse to light the propane grill outside. It’s always scared me and I have never used it with the simple ease or homey comfort that barbecuing is supposed to represent. My meat is always grey and tough and we should have hot dogs instead. That would be the better option.

If you think it’s inhumane, you are right. Yes, wake up and smell the blood. We who eat animals have no right to call ourselves humane. We eat, we kill, there is blood on our hands and in our mouths, meat is murder, it really is, and its real, and its ok and it’s pretty good. Admit it and pass the mustard.

I could really go for a tv dinner right now.  The 70s kind, like the Hungry Man dinners from Swanson – Salisbury steak that has the compartments with the meat in the middle then peas, mashed potatoes, a corn bread puff or chocolate cake above the meat like word balloons. What was that corn bread puff? It was like cornbread but also usually soft inside and sweet like a dessert. Did I dream it? Maybe. I am not sure. Food memories can be dreamlike and misleading. It could have been what I wanted it to be instead of just a small portion of creamed corn.

It’s been so long since I had one, the containers then weren’t microwaveable! That’s so crazy. They had to baked in a convection oven. I loved how everything kind of tasted the same and it was like a home version of the airplane meal, but unpredictable, since you would have to do the heating, and usually I burned the meal slightly, just to brulee it, bringing the prodigious sugar to the surface and adding crunch and caramel. If I had a propane torch then I would have just defrosted it on the counter and seared the top.

The salisbury steak or turkey tv dinner was preferable to the turkey and chicken pot pie because even though the pies were delicious, after 40 minutes in the oven, the creamy white a’la king insides would get unbelievably hot and my tongue would be blistered for days because it took forever to cook and by the time it was ready your patience would have been tested and your appetite ravenous and unreasonable. I always took it out of the oven prematurely, and proudly persevered through doughy centers rather than put it back in because the wait was just too much for me.

Could you make these dishes yourself now? Yeah totally, but it wouldn’t have the same gravity, the emotional weight that comes from cooking for yourself for the first few times. The pulling of cold cardboard out of the freezer and reading of boxes and preheating. If you were real little, like me, you’d have pulled up a chair in the kitchen in order to reach the back of the freezer, dragging the legs across the floor and scraping up the new tile.

There was that scared, alone feeling, and the momentary envisioning of a twilight zone style apocalypse, where you are the only one left alive, and it’s just you and all these tv dinners. It’s like Burgess Meredith with the books and the oven is your glasses. Those first few times I was always afraid the oven would explode, but it was always ok. I ate a lot of these dinners and also hot dogs with American cheese – boiled and I must admit raw at times, which I didn’t mind. It’s kind of good and all the same really.