Ah, Live Garden

I've learned precious few lessons in this loopy little life of mine, but, if there's one thing I have learned, it's that when you're bumming around on a Saturday with a twice-pregnant lady, and it's 3:40pm and you haven't had lunch yet, there's a very high probability that you're going to end up at Olive Garden.

I haven't been to an Olive Garden for probably nine years-- maybe more. I don't know. The mind plays tricks on one, like a cheap whore or a street mime. I can remember being at an Olive Garden-- the same Olive Garden, in fact, at which my wife, unborn twins and I dined yesterday at 3:40pm, and I can vaguely remember where I sat, but I have no recollection of with whom I dined, and/or under what circumstances. I'm reasonably sure it wasn't another pregnant lady.

Whatever the reason-- call it refinement or snobbery or circumstance or a typically logical and appropriate scheduling of breakfast and lunch, or a generalized ambivalence towards heaping portions of cheese-infused cheese, Mrs. Apron and I don't tend to end up at Olive Garden.

Yesterday, though, meals got screwed up-- way too much time had elapsed since breakfast, and there we sat, in chairs with casters, staring at a menu that was essentially coated in cheese, looking at meal options that were...

...expensive.

I mean, maybe to us they seemed expensive, and, to you, paying $16.50 for a lunch entree would be no big thing, and that's okay, because that's what makes America great-- that we all look at things differently, but I was kind of blown away. And not in the good way, where you're blown away by a cheap whore, or a street mime.

Anyway, not including the tip, our meal came to $31.47. Now, sure, I got a wildly overpriced Diet Coke, but we don't drink alcohol (neither do the twins), and we don't get appetizers, and so, frankly, to me, that's a large price to pay for an impulse-driven lunch.

At Olive Garden.

Sure, I get that they're building the cost of their unlimited salad and breadsticks into the cost of their entrees but still. Come on. This is basically dog food. And I say that with all due respect to the nation's Olive Gardens, their loyal patrons, and this country's pet food manufacturers, purveyors, distributors, and consumers.

(Disclaimer: This is where the post gets racist.)

So, Mrs. Apron and I couldn't help noticing that we were practically the only white people dining at the Olive Garden. I didn't really know what to make of that, except for the fact that this particular Olive Garden is located on the sort of dividing line between the suburbs of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia of Philadelphia. It's also right on the major SEPTA bus line, and I don't think it's terribly offensive to make the contention that minorities are heavy consumers of SEPTA mass transit services in the Philadelphia area. So, maybe it's just this and similarly-situated Olive Gardens, or maybe it's a blacknomenon. I don't know. And I don't care, it was just interesting.

You know, in that racist way.

The meal itself was fine-- unremarkable, I guess, if only for the fact that the waitress asked if we wanted grated cheese on top of our already superfluously cheesy meals, which I thought was uncheeselievable. While we were eating our salads, she came over with our entrees, looked at us, paused briefly, furrowed her brow and asked,

"Is something wrong?"

I wanted to say, "Yeah, there isn't enough cheese on this salad," but I didn't. When we declined her offer to further inflate our already-outlandish bill with dessert, she curled her lip down like a child pouting in a toy store. It was bizarre. I wanted to punch her in the face. Instead, I gave her a 20% tip because, sometimes, logic just doesn't enter into it.

I guess food at the Olive Garden is to Italian cuisine what No. 1 China takeout is to traditional Chinese fare. The one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. But we eat it anyway, because we like cheese and unlimited salad and breadsticks and cheese and it's 3:40pm when the waitress says, "Good evening, my name is Miika."

When I Make a Tweeter

Yesterday afternoon, my world came to a dizzying, traumatic, abrupt and despairing halt. Used to be, it was the 3 a.m. phone call that brought us to our knees with news of calamity or tragedy. We're barely awake, unable to comprehend the enormity of the words being spoken to us.

These days, our phones light up and there's a little "bop-bop!" or "be-doonk" noise or, if they're on vibe, that disconcerting "vvvvvvvv-vvvvvvvv" going on in your pocket. And you pull the phone out and you look at that little indicator light, blinking its insistent orange or red or green or whatever it happens to be. Flashing, like an emergency light in the night.

Warning.

Something's wrong.

It's just, I don't know, different from any other mundane text message you get from your friend who wants to go back-and-forth for two days exchanging "Royal Tenenbaum" quotes (Chas: "HEY! Are you LISTENING to me!?" Royal: YES, I AM! I think you're having a nervous BREAKDOWN!") you know, somehow you know, that this text message is the big one.

I got it yesterday afternoon at 3:49pm, Eastern Standard Time. It was from my father. He knows that I get out of work at exactly 3:00pm every day, and he knows that my commute lasts for 45 minutes. That classy sonofabitch doesn't waste a hot-shit minute.

I looked at my Blackberry's little indicator light (mine's red) and, as it flashed with urgency, I thought to myself-- this is bad news.

Thing is, it wasn't.

It wasn't bad news at all. What it was was the. single worst thing a 31-year-old man can ever hear from his father, in the year 2011:

"Pls call me when u have a chance
question about twitter"

And my face went white. I mean, it's not like I was standing in front of a mirror, watching myself react to this, but, like, you know what it feels like when you get blanched like that, when the blood drains from your facial capillaries. My stomach also dropped an inch or two. Fortunately, I was sitting on the toilet when I received this email, which is a good thing, because, when my stomach dropped that inch or two, some shit fell out, too.

Don't make that face, Prudie Tudie. It would have happened to you, too.

They say that, when children reach a certain age, the roles of helper and helpee (yeah, that's not a word, I got it) reverse and the child is supposed to assist the parent(s) through the process of aging, decaying and, eventually, dying. I suppose offering assistance as to the specifics of things like Facebook and Twitter ought to be included somewhere in there, but I find myself uncomfortable in the role of technical navigator/advisor-- more than uncomfortable: inept.

No. Not inept.

Unwilling.

Unwilling as I am to assist my aging, Israeli father in the how's and why's of the digital, online age, I dialed his number after only taking a few precious minutes to recover from the substance of his text message.

What did he want to know about Twitter, I inquired.

Oh, you know, how do people answer when I make a Tweeter? he asked. Do they need some kind of phone number?

I'm Not Herbert Lom

But, these days, I look like him.

Of course, I don't look like him, really. I look more like Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfuss, the character he made famous in the "Pink Panther" films, being tortured into madness by the ineptitude of Peter Sellers' Inspector Jacques Clouseau. Clouseau's rampant and limitless bumbling, paired with his inexplicable and accidental good luck at solving the most complex heist cases, grated on Lom's character, who developed a tell-tale eye twitch whenever in the presence of Clouseau, or even just when his name was mentioned.

"CLOUSEAU!" a psychiatrist yells at the supposedly-healed Dreyfuss during a session at a mental hospital-- to assess Dreyfuss's response. The patient reacts with perfect calm and ease. Until, less than 10 minutes later, he has several unfortunate encounters with a pond because of his nemesis, the moustachioed and impossible to understand Clouseau.

It would seem that Lom's character Dreyfuss and I are kindred spirits, as I have developed a twitch under my left eye. It first appeared perhaps a year ago, stuck around for a few days, and went away-- whatever little muscle it was, I guess, no longer felt the need to assert itself and make its presence known so insistently. This time, though, it has come back with a passion. The twitch re-emerged early in June and it's been hanging around pretty consistently. Sometimes it's a quick pulsation, going up and down with great energy and verve, other times it's slow and faint. No matter the rate or force, I've got to tell you, it's fucking annoying.

And I feel kind of silly writing about it, because it seems like it's the kind of thing one might choose to write about if one were grasping at straws for something to write about, and if that's what it seems like to you, that's because that's true. I was rather stuck, actually, for a topic today, and I felt like asking someone for advice-- a friend or a wife or whatever-- but then I usually end up not using that person's suggested topic, and that probably makes them feel like monkey vom, and it makes me feel guilty for soliciting an idea that I'm most likely just going to shitcan anyway.

But I suppose you're supposed to write about what's on your mind, and what's on my mind most frequently is breasts, but I wasn't really in the mood to write about breasts, although I did recently have an illuminating conversation about breasts a couple days ago-- maybe that's why I don't feel the need to write about them-- and so I thought I would go to a topic that really can't help but be on my radar, and that's this ceaseless twitching below my left eye.

I wonder what people think when they talk to me for any length of time. If they're making any reasonable attempt at eye-contact, they've got to notice it. It must be very unsettling to look at. Most people are probably too polite to say anything about it. Anyway, what would they say?

"Jesus, how about that nasty-ass twitch you've got there, fella! What's the matter-- your eye have Parkinsons?"

I'm not terribly polite, at least, not with people I know well. A friend of mine is pregnant and I haven't seen her in a few months. She's going to pop next week. Anyway, I saw her for the first time in months last weekend and she is so fucking pregnant it's not even funny. And she's growing out-- straight out. It looks like her baby is wearing a hoop-skirt, for Christ's sake. She was wearing a size 2-XL t-shirt. And she was trying to talk to me and my eyes kept going, quite unabashedly, I might add, to her belly.

"I'm sorry, Amy," I said, "I'm just not even listening to you-- I can't stop staring at your fucking belly!"

Which, in a way, was probably a good thing, because she probably didn't notice my eye-twitch that way.

I'm thinking of naming my twitch "Herbert" after Herbert Lom. Since we found out that we're having twins, we've been talking a lot about names. Everything's a name thing now. We were watching Michael Palin's "The Missionary" last night, and one of the actor's names is Denholm Elliott.

"What about 'Denholm'?" I said to my wife.

"That's funny," she said to me. And I presume it wasn't about the movie. In reading up about Denholm Elliott for this post (yeah, I do research. Sort of.) I learned that he was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and died of AIDS-related tuberculosis in 1992. That made me sad. Herbert Lom, however, who was born five years before Denholm Elliott, is still living, apparently. Lom is ninety-four, if you can believe that. I don't think Mrs. Apron will let me name the kid "Herbert" either.

Lom, originally from Prague, was born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru.

Now that's something to twitch about.