I'm impressed by nothing. This is because everything's just a glorified banality. For example, Beamer's are just a glorified invention of the wheel. Hollywood is the glorified popular kids in high school, caviar is glorified hard boiled eggs, and a $20,000 bottle of wine is just glorified grapes. The President himself is just a glorified geeky high school valedictorian. Kid Rock is a glorified high school drop out, Pamela Anderson is glorified white trash- you see where I'm going. And I'm not alone in this. A woman who works in the deli in Wegmans shares my sentiments- when P requested a link of gourmet sausage, she referred to it as a 'glorified slim jim.'
However, I learned something very interesting today, which opened my eyes to the fact that there was in fact one thing left that I was impressed with, and that like everything else is just a glorified something or other. This last link to my sense of childlike wonder is, or was, sushi. Sushi, the bread and butter of the intellectual elite, the looming wall which separates the blue from the white collar. The ability to use chopsticks akin to being able to distinguish Liszt from Bach, Madame Butterfly from Salome. So when my brother called me and told me somewhat breathlessly that sushi is just a glorified hot dog, he unwittingly completely shrouded my world view in the haze of skepticism.
So this is the story- apparently we've got sushi all wrong. A man from Japan told my brother's friend, who in turn told P, that sushi in Japan was kind of a regular food, like a sandwich or- I'm sorry all of you hipsters!- a hot dog. For one thing, the blue collar Japanese who actually ate sushi didn't even use chopsticks (so don't feel bad if you, like me, find it especially cumbersome to balance that unwieldy chunk of rice all the way from the plate to your mouth- it's unrealistic)- they ate it with their hands (which is what you've done, I'm sure, when no one was looking).
It brings a smile to my face to imagine the first Japanese person who decided to introduce sushi to Americans. He probably thought that he would open a sushi stand on the corner of a street, and sell rolls of sushi in a little cardboard trough along with a drink. Imagine his surprise when the somber Americans reverently tried his glorified hot dogs, awkwardly attempting to grasp the pieces between two chopsticks with minds of their own. Man, he must have gotten a laugh out of that. And like any wily businessman, he went right along with it.
'YES, FANCY FOOD IN MY COUNTWY! MUCH MONEY! VELLY NICE!'
And so the sushi trend began.
Which brings me to money making project # 2,678,065. Why not introduce hot dogs to people in Japan as if they are a delicacy. They have to be cut up and only eaten with a knife and fork which you'd better know how to use if you are cool and cosmopolitan. Only Americans will be able to work at the restaurants, and they will grill the hot dogs in a little row behind a glass window. That is, until some big mouth American comes over and tells everyone that hot dogs are just glorified sushi.
Just so that I give credit where credit is due, all of this is based on a four minute conversation that me and P had earlier today.
