So, bread is up to $7 a loaf at Whole Foods. I’ve been wringing my hands about this tidbit for a while, so if I’ve already circulated my discontent, I apologize to my reader.

I heard a rumor it is possible to bake one’s own bread. Hogwash, you say? Perhaps. Still, it seems plausible … I mean, how else do the companies that sell such a fine product obtain said product? Yes, I suppose magic is a possibility, but as much as baking and magic may seem like the same thing, I say the former is more akin to alchemy. And everyone knows how easy that is!

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I’ve never really lived anywhere else than in the area of New York City. I spent a few summers in the bucolic Upstate countryside, four years amidst the flat nothingness of mid-Michigan … but I spent an entire childhood and adolescence amidst the flat nothingness of anti-urban-but-not-quite-rural Long Island only 38 miles from Manhattan, and have now spent close to a decade in Brooklyn.

New York, when I was a kid, was the place where my dad worked and where the Rangers played hockey. It was the place where my poster of John McEnroe walking through a smut-filled Times Square was photographed. But I had no concept of the city as a grand and dangerous place. It was Barclay Street and Madison Square Garden. For a long time.

The nature of this place in the ’80s was lost on me because I was never permitted to be subjected to its vagaries — except to witness what seeped into my limited locales. Unlike the cougar I dated who romped and stomped through the Lower East Side in the Koch years, I was watching Thundercats and Transformers in a cookie-cutter house out east.

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It’s been a little more than a week since I attended my niece’s baptism. It was the first such ceremony for me in at least four years and my first ever non-Catholic baptism.

The ceremony was held in this quaint little Episcopal church, upon a bucolic little plot in the southeastern hinterlands of Long Island. Now, my sister was raised Catholic, which I fault as the inspiration to baptize her child, but I don’t quite get the Episcopal thing. I don’t know to which brand of religion subscribes her husband, but I didn’t think it to be King Henry’s American variety.

Which sect of Christianity, though, is rather moot. In my experience, the degrees of Protestantism do not absolve the faith of its nascent ties to the Roman Catholic Church, which I fault for many of the unconquerable ignorances of the theologically persuaded.

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It’s President’s Day. That means that the trains are running like shit and nothing is open. It also means that I’m at work and that the trains running like shit and nothing being open really fucks up my day. Add to that my wanting to brutally murder anyone involved in the development of a particular blog platform because all it does it confound and frustrate me, and the frustration coupled with blood lust added to incessant pain and further frustration brought on by the crippling results of knee surgery — it would take very little to make this keg go kaboom.

So, I went out to get some lunch … I put on my iPod and O’Malley’s Bar from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads album came on. It was just what I needed, a song about wantonly murdering people.

Sadly, when the song ended, the brief uptick in my mood did too. I brought my cold cuts back to work knowing full well that I wouldn’t be able to toast my bread in the 3rd Floor canteen because they’re all off from work today, and I realized I had no greens nor any mayonnaise or other dressing to put on my bread. So, I sat at my desk and ate cold cuts wrapped up in slices of cheese. Just now, I went to put what I didn’t eat in the fridge and saw my bread lying on the floor by the base of the fridge. It made me so happy.

I have celiac disease. I can’t eat your bread. I can’t go to any old store and pick up a loaf to make sandwiches. So if I don’t have my own bread around, I’m fucked when it comes to making things requiring the use of bread. The bread I buy costs a lot of money and tastes like shit unless it’s toasted. The consistency sucks unless it’s toasted. And it really isn’t any help to me for someone to throw it on the floor in the kitchen at work because they put something of theirs in the fridge. Might they have been able to replace my bread after it had met the floor? Would that have been so fucking hard, motherfucker? Whoever you are, you’re a worthless, goddamned motherfucking piece of cocksucking shit and I hope someone pushes you in front of a fucking train so the rest of us won’t have to deal with your selfish, thoughtless ass ever again.

It exists. I’m serious.

On Saturday, my lady friend  and I went to the butcher in my ‘hood, which has been there since 1931 and — judging by the people spilling out the door — is the place to be on Saturday morning.

Old Haitian ladies and other folks from the West Indies stood around waiting for their numbers to be called so they could order 20 pounds of lamb, 50 pigs feet, a ton of beef bones and a kiloton of tripe. I’m exaggerating about those last two, but some woman really did order 20 pounds of lamb. One of the men behind the counter came out of the walk-in with the ass end of a lamb in his hands. It still had feet and everything.

All we wanted was a pound of ground beef to make some tacos, but we drew number 96 upon walking in and the board behind the counter read 59. I tried my damndest to make our ticket say 69, but it didn’t work. Goddamned reciprocal numbers.

When the board got up to 74, we’d been waiting about 20 minutes and I was done with it. I was either going to leave or get my pound of beef. It was right then that the lady ordered enough lamb to feed all of Brooklyn that I saw one of the guys come around to a scale right by where I stood.

“Hey,” I said as he weighed a bag of chicken feet. “Should I have called in my order? Would that have made a difference?”

“Naw, man.” He answered. “Why, what do you want?”

“Just a pound of ground beef…”

“That’s it? Man. Let me get that for you.”

So, we got our pound of ground beef right then and, in a little display case behind the counter there are all of these soups — chicken, fish … and cock, so I asked for a packet of cock and we paid and went home.

Funniest thing about the soup to me is not that it’s cock-flavored soup but that I can’t eat it because it contains wheat ingredients, so I truly did only buy it for the comic value. I guess cock must only mean rooster to West Indian people, but the male chicken isn’t the first thing that pops into my mind, hence my childish amusement.

I’m backtracking a few days to a night out with some friends. Had some pretty pedestrian Italian food at a pretty mundane “family style” (read: dull and unimaginative) restaurant. The service? Dismal. The fare? Bland. The prices, high, and the environment? Cheesy. (Does that string of questions annoy you? Me too.) By the time the gargantuan check arrived, there was discussion about what the tip should be.

The eatery did the public service of printing what 15, 20 and 25% of the bill would come to, but I posited that the service warranted 10% at the most. There was some agreement from my fellow diners until I whipped out the $20 that comprised the 10%. Much hand-wringing and questions of “Is that enough?” ensued.

And I wondered when it ceased to be an option to tip accordingly to the service one receives.

I felt 10% was generous considering we’d sat before two other tables and were the last table to be served. We waited eons for our entrees and longer for our drinks to be refilled. Maybe that they were bringing us fare from their gluten-free menu was the cause for the delay, in wich case — had they said that to us — I would have had no gripe. I’d gladly wait longer to avoid being sickened by my food, but a good waitress would apprise us of the situation, apologize for the delay and — if she was really smart — give us a free round of drinks, an action that more often than not results in a greater tip. But none of that happened; she wasn’t much of a waitress.

Still, my compatriots weren’t comfortable with leaving 10%, so they bumped it up to somewhere a little higher than 15%.

I used to work for tips. Some people are just tightwads, sure, but I found that most people tip generously when provided with good service. I also never felt entitled to a tip, especially not if I did a half-assed job or had a bad attitude. I believe people should get what they deserve and, if you suck — at least when it comes to food service jobs that might warrant tips — you don’t deserve an automatic 20%. When you suck at anything else, I feel there should be a commensurate penalty, too.

Unfortunately, fairness is not a guarantee and a great many people who — objectively (and, yes, subjectively) — don’t deserve the spoils they reap still get them. I, though, try at any opportunity to be fair. By tipping large for a sub-par performance, it’s encouraging the mentality that people will be rewarded regardless of how well they do. It breeds a culture of entitlement. I would much prefer one of merit.

As an aside: I overheard an elevator conversation where a parent was talking about their child’s sports team having a “player of the week” award. They then said that every player on the team was going to be the player of the week.

Really. Why bother?

I was just downstairs buying a bag of Fritos and I saw a co-worker who’d served in the U.S. military. He’s quite thin, not exceedingly tall … hardly imposing. The same things have been said of me, and it got me thinking that I’d be at an even bigger disadvantage than that dude because I’ve got Celiac Disease.

I really doubt the U.S. military has a gluten-free menu when it comes to chow out in the field. If I were pressed into service, I would become so cumulatively sickened by the food I’d have no choice but to eat, I would become a liability not only to myself, but to anyone else with whom I served. As far as I’m concerned, my dietary quirks would be grounds for a 4-F dismissal, which would be fine with me. However, I imagine the military does not care one iota whether I can digest wheat, barley or rye and would throw me in a uniform and point me at some Muslims the first chance they got.

And that brought me to the most morbid part of my thought. The reason the military would send me off to war without regard for my personal health is that my long-term survival is not something that concerns them. My gluten intolerance isn’t immediately debilitating, so the odds are that I’ll be in a position to kill someone before my health declines to a critical point. Even if I killed only one of the military’s enemies, they’d have broken even on me. If I killed two, they’ve made a profit. If I killed six, they’d have made a truly worthwhile investment and the loss of my life becomes not only acceptable, but also preferable to that of a solider who dies without having returned, with enemy corpses, on the military’s investment.

In 12th grade, we read “All Quiet on the Western Front” and talked about the dehumanizing effects of war.

No kidding.

I saw a concert at the McCarren Park Pool last night. Decent show. The Black Keys. Couldn’t hear the vocals at all, but no one else seemed to mind. Then again, based on the appearance of most of the crowd it didn’t appear that they cared about much of anything.

I’d never been in the Pool before. It was a decent venue. A lot space, which made it nice to be able to sit along the edge of the basin far away from the crowd amassed in front of the stage. I could see just fine and hearing the music wasn’t any issue at all; I could have heard it for free sitting on the lawn of the park across the street. The aforesaid lack of vocals wouldn’t have mattered then, either.

Thanks to celiac disease, there was nothing I could drink and I don’t smoke, so I just sat there on the crumbling, weed-choked cement against an old metal railing and took in the show. Simple, straight-forward blues-inspired rock ‘n’ roll. I like the band, so I didn’t wrestle with that much ambivalence when deciding whether to go. However, I generally detest concerts.

I don’t like mass gatherings. I need my space. I don’t think claustrophobia is the word, in this case … what’s the term — besides misanthropy — for a dislike of proximity to other people, or detesting the lack of personal space? Because of this crowd aversion, I tend to avoid concerts. This one being outdoors, with an abundance of room, motivated me to go … but I also don’t like concerts due to the quality of sound. Last night, I couldn’t make out the words. The engineers were more focused on pumping out the guitar and drums than they were of pushing the vocals above the din. I tend to like songs as a complete work, so to hear only the music with only a vague sense of lyrics being sung makes concerts less enjoyable.

The set was pretty short, too. They didn’t go on until 8:30 and then were off a little after 9:30. By that time King’s Feast had already closed and there went my one thought for getting some chow before heading home. I grabbed a bus back to Flatbush and was dumped at Empire Boulevard where the connecting bus never came. The overwhelming fatigue that had set in deterred me from walking home, and when I saw a yellow cab drive by, I hailed it.

It didn’t stop.

The windows were open. I know he heard me. I walked over and tried the door, but it was locked. The driver heard me and turns around and gives me the “Huh?” — intentionally playing stupid, like he has no idea what I’m doing trying the door handle of his in-service yellow cab.

“I’m going your way, right down the street.”

“Huh?”

“I’m going ten blocks down the street.”

The door was still locked.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

My indignation had boiled over by this point. The guy was sassing me. He wasn’t opening his door and despite heading in the precise direction I was going, despite his lack of fare and the light atop his cab showing that he was in-service, he was not going to pick me up.

So I said: “You know what? Fuck you. Fuck you and go to hell, you fucking prick.”

As he drove away and I proceded to walk home, I guess I showed him.

The bus came after I’d made it a few blocks, so I got on and took it the remainder of the way. No buzz, no looming hangover upon waking up, just the memory of a passable show, enourmous fatigue, an empty stomach and the sky starting to drizzle accompanied me home.

I slept through the Red Wings game today. I couldn’t help it. I was watching the first period and I started to get that feeling, that all-encompassing fatigue that comes from having eaten something containing gluten. When it comes, I have to conk out else expend an immense power of will to stay awake. So, I slept. I missed periods two and three, and the resultant 5-1 victory by Detroit over the Avalanche.

When I woke, my stomach and its associates were extremely displeased. Another sign that I’d eaten something I shouldn’t have. It’s my own fault, though; I played fast and loose with some cold cuts today, buying a brand I’d never before bought and not asking to read the ingredients. Celiac disease is such a bummer that sometimes the frustration and annoyance borne of rooting out every potentially contaminated food is too burdensome to invite. But then the result of not being diligent is so bloody unpleasant that I feel like an ass for being so cavalier about something so debilitating.

I’ve got a hockey game tonight and I always play like crap after I’ve eaten something containing gluten, because I’m totally enervated from consuming it. My hope is that I’ve enough time before the game (11:30 tonight) to try and eat some good carbs and protein, all of the food g-f, and build up a good store from which to draw. Just hope my stomach can calm down in time.

Newcastle played today, too, and they came back from a 2 – 0 deficit against West Ham to draw 2 – 2. The Magpies are now undefeated in their last seven games, I believe. Good stuff all around, sports-wise. Food-wise… I’ve got a long way to go, it seems, before I really learn my lesson about my illness.

I’m by no means a foodie, nor a gourmand, but I do enjoy food when I don’t have to make it. Unfortunately, my reliance on others to prepare food for me is severely hampered by my body’s violent aversion to wheat, barley, rye and possibly oats. Pretty much everything has wheat in it, whether in the form of flour or something else.

When forced to pay attention to such things, it’s almost asinine some of the things with wheat as an ingredient. Soy sauce?!?! It makes going out for sushi a real pain; unless a place has La Choy (no wheat used in the fermentation process), then I’m dissolving my wasabi with water or rice vinegar if they have it (if they actually understand my request. The language barrier is usually pretty big in sushi restaurants).

I needed a snack the other night while out at Pete’s Candy Store’s Wednesday night “Quizz-off”, so I went to the (what do you call an Asian-run bodedga) and bought a bag of Doritos without reading the ingredients. I looked them over when I got back to the bar and, sure enough, there was “WHEAT FLOUR” staring me in the face. I had to take them back and exchange them for potato chips (read those ingredients really closely). It’s a complete hassle.

Worst of all, I can’t drink conventional beer. I love beer. Tough shit, though. I’m stuck with ones made from sorghum or rice or any non-wheat or -barley grain. My one consolation is that whiskey is okay for me; distillation removes the gluten. I’ve tested it. Bingo.

Still, a life without real beer is pretty sad. And sadder still is a life without donuts. I miss kaiser rolls, too. Gluten-free bread sucks. It’s very dense and not at all pillowy.

Sometimes I want to go buy a sixer of Newcastle Brown Ale (Come on, United!), buy a deli sandwich on a poppy seeded kaiser roll and have a donut for dessert … then I remember feeling every day like I was poisoned, waking up with a hangover when I hadn’t had a drop, and getting sick all the time because my immunity had plummeted like mercury before a storm … and I push that idea aside and thank my lucky stars I’m not allergic to peanuts.