Carbs round 2!
I need to not mess with pasta. I also need to stop treating canned tuna like ground turkey. And, apparently, I need to never buy canned peas. Three things important enough on their own, made exponentially more potent when combined. It’s like putting Mark Wahlberg’s perfect body with George Clooney’s perfect face with the vocational orgasm that is boat captaincy, to create the titular storm from The Perfect Storm – a movie I will never see. Today’s failure was a joint effort by my baseless need to add protein to everything and my baseless need to cram every food group into a single bowl. To be clear, those needs aren’t baseless because they’re impossible, or even difficult, but because it’s not like I lift enough weights for my muscles to demand extra protein, and I own more than one bowl. The failure, as with several failures chronicled thus far, comes from a sort of false equivalency. Or maybe just a mental homogenization of protein. Meat is meat is meat. And that’s true enough if your options are chicken, ground beef, and ground turkey – not so true if you include grade-d tuna. Fish dominates more than it complements, unless you pay a premium for the more expensive fish, who taste much less like fish. I don’t necessarily understand that.
A quick google search for “Seafood Pasta” confirms that it’s a very real thing, and, surprisingly, a google search for “Seafood Pasta Canned Tuna” indicates that it is also a real thing. But that doesn’t mean it should be. Shrimp Scampi is a wonderful thing, but, much like the romanticized impracticality of boat ownership probably on display in The Perfect Storm, doesn’t make any sense in the day to day. So shrimp becomes canned tuna, from-scratch garlic butter sauce becomes jarred alfredo, and five stars becomes three and a half on AllRecipes.com.
But tuna wasn’t really the problem.
I don’t often buy canned peas, and there isn’t any real reason I chose to buy them now. The lack of mental footage from the time of purchase suggests I zoned out in the canned food aisle and stared, unseeingly, at the wall of veggies for a suspicious amount of time and, upon cognitive reentry, panic-grabbed the first thing my hand could reach. And that’s fine, I eat frozen veggies all the time, canned veggies can’t be that much of a downgrade, right? Wrong. Turns out canned peas are just an edible sepia filter, sapping the life from anything they touch, leaving behind only the ghost of a flavor. Even the garlic in Newman’s Own Garlic marinara, a potent ingredient in its own right, was skewed by the dreariness of the canned peas. And that’s likely the best way to describe this dish. Dreary. Exhausted. Sad. A bowl of pasta that started chain smoking. Made fresh, it tasted a week old. Do you get it? Canned peas are, much like the storm of feminine arousal in probable romcom The Perfect Storm, an overwhelming force. I’m still struggling to reconcile how something so strong can be so bland. Much like Mark Wahlberg.
Why so much The Perfect Storm talk today?
Because I overcommitted early and there’s this little thing called thematic consistency and everybody’s doing it.
But also because, and don’t correct me if I’m wrong, The Perfect Storm is about a highly improbable convergence of forces. And I feel that. Separate data points brought together through some dubious stroke of fate. The difference is, in film the improbable is inevitable. In reality, human interpretation of facts might be infinitely variable as well, but reduce the scope from ALL HUMANS EVER to the couple dozen detectives at the Denver Police Department and the improbable should be impossible. Institutionalized deductive reasoning. Hunches and half-facts are for Grisham novels, maybe. I’ve never actually read one.
Detective Cosden came back tonight, alone. Not to talk to me, but to pound on Neighbor Steve’s door and to jiggle the doorknob and to peer through the glass and to jiggle the doorknob again and to take a slow lap around the house and, eventually, to climb in through an oversight, an open window. I’ve seen too many movies to know if that’s legal or not, but I think not? His second foot disappeared through the window, and there was a moment of dissonance as my eyes stared at the windowless wall while my mind choreographed his movements behind it. He moved slowly around the living room, in my head holding a magnifying glass and bending only at the waist, other hand behind his back. Too many movies. He started where he was, at the front wall near Neighbor Steve’s TV, but moved on quickly to the kitchen. Maybe he saw the Dale’s Pale Ale cans on the kitchen bar – I couldn’t remember if Neighbor Steve had moved those to the recycling bin or not, but I thought not – or maybe he saw the days-old wine glasses. Or maybe a hair longer and blonder than anything from Steve’s brown high fade. Or maybe a piece of furniture out of place, or a scuff on the wall, or a chip in a table, or a shard of green glass, or something.
Or nothing.
I’ve never been good with the not knowing.
He stayed in there for eight minutes and when he exited, through the front door, I said hello and asked if he needed anything. He turned, not startled – not anything, really. And said he was just looking for Neighbor Steve, I still hadn’t seen him? I said no and asked why they still needed to talk to him, doing my best to be curious but unconcerned. He said he had a few more questions, just to clear things up, and I asked if there was any new information on the case and he laughed, or scoffed, and said he couldn’t really talk about it. His face was still impassive, almost fully blank. He was looking at me but his eyes, squinted and black, didn’t meet mine. After a few seconds of silence, he cleared his throat and said, again, to let him know if I heard anything from Neighbor Steve. Sure thing.
We were only a couple feet apart and I noticed for the first time that he was probably bigger than me. But, if he was, barely. But then he nodded goodbye and turned toward the street.
And that was that.
Burned and Bland 