The lovely and talented holybasil at Hot.Sour.Salty.Sweet. And Umami has tagged me for the Five Things meme. I have been tagged before, but I’m a good sport so I’ll take my marching orders in stride. However, I am going to respectfully decline to disseminate the meme—for now—as I feel I’ve already spread the love once.

Here we go, Five Things, redux:

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1. There was an occasion, in the nineties, whereupon I woke up one morning and decided to wear jean shorts—aka “jorts”—that day. For this I am very, very ashamed, and would like to use this opportunity to apologize as profusely as possible.

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2. I graduated from the University of Arizona, yet I don’t call myself an “alumni” as I never received my degree. The bursar’s office demanded that I pay $60+ for a book that I know for certain I returned to the library. They withheld my diploma, and soon began to send me menacing collection notices for a period of time, which I dutifully waited out. Now that I’ve completely paid off the thousands of dollars in outstanding student loans + interest, I feel I’ve completely stuck it to them and have emerged victorious from this scrum. Advantage: me.

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3. Some of my earliest food memories are from the first and second grade, living up in Westminster, Orange County (Southern California). I remember eating smashed bird chilies and salt with mango, chicken soup made from a freshly killed pet, and, strangely enough, still-born duck fetuses. I kid you not. I remember distinctly that we kept duck eggs in our garage, and I would tap to break off the top portion of the egg. This severed portion of the shell would be lifted to reveal a half-developed duck—head, beak, body and all. I would pour an insane amount of salt into the egg and dig into the muck with a spoon. Jesus fucking christ that’s depraved.

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4. I once worked at a purportedly “fine-dining” continental restaurant during my college years. We wore tuxes, and my job ostensibly was to wheel around a cart stocked with various spirits, ingredients, and assorted tools. We’d construct table-side caesar salads, steak tartares, as well as flambé entrees and desserts such as steak diane, ouzo prawns, cherries jubilee and bananas foster.

It was probably the worst-run restaurant in America. The owner was in his eighties and also owned all KFC’s in the area, and kept the restaurant as some weird vanity money pit. The maître d/general manager dealt cocaine AND steroids out of the office, and hired all his friends from high school on which he had man crushes on (many of whom were jocko roid-heads who allowed him to inject steroids in their butts). The rest of the staff were stoners and ex-cons. In the wine room, where the lone bottle of Château Margaux used to be (one drunken night, after shift, we drank it) was ready-to-serve pot paraphernalia. The head chef brought on his buddy as grill cook. One day the first week he was on shift, I walked back into the kitchen, and this 6′8″ guy—tatted to the gills, looking like a Motörhead roadie, trimming the silverskin off an entire beef tenderloin and slicing of little pieces of raw chunks and popping them in his mouth like they were M&Ms—asked me if I wanted to buy methamphetamine.

After a long run, the owner decided he had had enough and was going to close the place once and for all, and the entire staff used the last week of existence as a trial run towards depravity. Everybody left closing night with a bittersweet, empty feeling in the pit of their stomachs. What would we do with our lives, unemployed, over the course of a hot, listless Arizona summer? Then three weeks later we got a call informing us the owner ran into some snag with his lease, and they would be opening for dinner that night and we could all have our jobs back—an offer some of us accepted. When we arrived at work we realized half of our glassware, dishware, serving and kitchen equipment had been carted off in the dead of night by the former staff on closing night, three weeks earlier.

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5. I love MSG. I think it is God’s cocaine.