Ricky'S Lunch Blog

Friday. Lunch time. Traveling down the main drag east of town. Blinded by hunger, I vowed I’d stop at the first place that looked halfway decent. Fast food wasn’t an opton.

Down the road a piece I passed a Mexican chicken shack. Across the front were written the words “Rico Pollo.” Now, much like Flashman, I have a natural facility with languages—and with the ladies too, for that matter. Anyway, I was able to instantly translate: “Chicken Ricky” or perhaps, even better, “Ricky’S Chicken.”



With tires squealing and skid marks burning on the pavement, I spun my 1994 BMW R100RT motorcycle around. I parked next to all the fancy pickups in the parking lot. Inside Mexican music was blasting with that standard 5-1 bass line, and I even heard some accordion in the background. If I had any doubts, they disappeared.

I got the grilled chili chicken leg quarter which came with 3 different chili sauces, rice and beans, and 4—yeah 4—piping hot corn tortillas, all for $8.64. I took the booth in the back and a read my kindle as the mix of grease and sauce rolled down my forearms. As I got down to the bone on the drumstick I noticed it looked a little pink, like maybe it hadn’t been cooked enough.

Then I got frightened. I didn’t want the mud butt to come back.

I had a patty melt yesterday for lunch, but I didn't finish it because I'm bigger than that.

Also, I don't like ketchup packets. They offend my sense of efficiency and convenience. Del Scorcho packets? That's a whole different kettle of fish. There's no comparison---it's apples and oranges.

Did you notice all the food analogies in the previous paragraph? How do I do it?

Strange, but ever since last week when the inside of my pants were moist and I got that cobb salad, I’ve returned again and again to the supermarket at lunch to buy their sub-standard, pre-made salads. I stay away from the cobb and have been going exclusively with the chef. While the chef isn’t as weird as the cobb, it sucks just as bad. Yet I keep going back. Why? I think it’s the lunch equivalent of, like, when old people run errands in their pajamas and slippers.

I know what you’re thinking: what happened to those scrumptious Battle Ax salads that were the envy of the cyber space 2.0 online virtual lunch community? Hell if I know. And what gives you the right to pry into my private life? Damn. Certain things in Ricky’S life are off limits, and you need to respect those boundaries. But let me set the record straight: I don’t consider my performance issues to be problem; I prefer to think of them as an inconvenience.

Over lunch today I went to the driving range and worked on my short game. I got sweatier than expected, and my black jeans felt moist and clingy on the inside. Then I drove to the supermarket and bought some espresso beans for my yuppie coffee maker. While there, I picked up a pre-made salad in the deli section. It was lame, like this blog.

They labeled it a "Cobb" salad. I think that's a bad name. It makes me think of Ty Cobb and corn cobs, neither of which I want anywhere near my salad. It had a hard-boiled egg in it. Weird.

Anyway, I brought it back to the office and ate it at my desk with a cup of styrofoam chicken soup. I hope tomorrow's lunch is better.

I think it would be best it you left now. I have a headache and would like to turn in early.

Busy day yesterday, so I had to eat lunch while driving down the interstate. I’d grabbed two items out of the fridge before I left the house: the half-eaten remains of an Italian sub and a container of macaroni salad.

The sub was the easy part. I’d eaten some of it as a midnight snack a day or so ago. When I reached over to the passenger seat and pulled it out of my sparkly disco-rave purse, I saw the bite marks. It looked rugged and untamed—like me.

After that I made my move on the macaroni salad. I found a fork in the console of the caddy. I don’t know how long it had been in there, and I didn’t give a damn either. I steered with my knees and shoveled the warm, glazey macaroni salad into my cake-hole. Only a seasoned lunch practitioner can pull off something like this without hurting anyone. Sure, I got a little on me, but hell, those things are going to happen. It washes right off anyway, just like the urine.

I licked the mayo off the fork and put it back in the console.

Damn, this is sub-standard blog entry. I disappoint myself.

There was a piece of glass in my lasagna at lunch. I’m lucky I didn’t slice off my tongue. I picked up the phone and confronted the Battle Ax, because she’d made the tray of lasagna a few nights ago. I got all up in her grill and let her have it. I was in no mood to hold anything back:

Ring ring. Ring ring.
“Hello. This is Ricky’S Battle Ax”
“My little sweet pumpkin? May I bend your ear a tick?”
“What do you want?”
“Well, I found something in the lasagna you made the other night, and I thought it might be an opportune time to…”
“Goddammit. Do you really think I have time for this right now?”
“No…no…I guess you don’t. I’m sorry.”
“This has to stop.”
“Ok. I…um…I hope you have a good afternoon.”

I love her dearly, but there are times when I just have to use a firm hand. I wish it didn’t have to be that way, but that’s the only way they’ll learn.

I had pizza today. Then I stopped and put some gas in the car. When I got back to the office I grabbed a handful of M&Ms from the Human Resources candy dish.

I mean, seriously, what's the point?

Today is the third anniversary of Ricky’S Lunch Blog. It all started a thousand magical days ago with this perfect expression of lunch minimalism: Ricky’S first lunch web log entry.

I want to celebrate this milestone by taking you all to a virtual lunch, my treat. Here’s what’S on the menu: Everyone who reads this needs to post a comment in which you: 1) Say something nice about me, and 2) Tell us, if you were lunch, what would you be? Don’t be afraid. Here, I’ll go first:

1) Ricky: You continue to astound us. Each year you set the bar higher, redefining thought leadership in the lunch arena without even breathing heavy. It’s not so much the insight; it’s the nuance. You must be so proud of yourself. Oh…and drop the feigned humility. No one’s buying it.

2) If I were lunch, I’d be a Frito pie served in a paper cup, but one that had a plastic coating so the chili wouldn’t leak through and soil the bedding. That way, you’d never have to call housekeeping after the doctor left at 1:30AM and sheepishly request a linen change.

I took the entire Ricky’S Lunch staff to Acapulco this week to celebrate the third anniversary of Ricky’S Lunch Blog and to do some team building. I’m actually blogging from Acapulco right now; they have an on-ramp to the information super highway down here.

Almost everyone came except for the VP of Web Production and Technical Support. No loss. He’s on his way out as far as I’m concerned. He refuses to follow my direction and create a document that specifies the Ricky’S web site architecture. I can’t put up with that kind of indabaydenocean. Those who know Ricky know that he has zero tolerance for indabaydenocean.

Damn Ricky, any chance you could find something less interesting to blog about?

Okay, okay, settle down. Here’s my little lunch update:

Yesterday morning I awoke abruptly with a bit of a sour stomach, so for lunch I had two Imodium tablets. Keeping with that theme, for dinner I opted to dine at the medical clinic where I enjoyed 150 cc’s of saline solution taken intravenously. Then at about 1:30AM, I received my mid-night snack via room service, which was delivered personally by the resort physician: 4 more Imodium tablets and a thick maple-syrup-like shot in my ass-cheek of 6 different antibiotics.

As I write this, my ass-cheek still hurts.

I made the best soup ever last week, and I just ate the last of it for lunch today--not 20 minutes ago. It was a navy bean soup, and I used two types of pork: bacon and smoked ham hocks. I suspect that frying the onion in the bacon drippings contributed significantly to the overall success of this soup initiative.

I was pretty excited, so I was all like, “Hey Battle Ax, come here and take an action shot of me eating my excellent soup because I want to post a photograph on the information super highway.” The results are displayed in Figure 1, below. Those are my hands and fingers there on the right side.

Note the nice loaf of pumpernickel and the warm, spreadable butter in the background. Both are crucial.



Figure 1. Ricky’S soup-themed lunch.

This is what I do now: I tear off a little corner of the Del Scorcho packet, then, using my thumb and forefinger, I gently spread the taco shell, so there’s a gap between the shell wall and the taco filling. I slip the Del Scorcho packet deep into the gap and distribute its contents evenly—and this is the important part—along the bottom of the shell. Then I repeat with a second Del Scorcho packet. You can, of course, substitute Del Inferno if you like.

This isn’t just some theoretical speculation—or some academic exercise—on my part. I walk the talk. In fact, I applied this very technique on all five of my tacos yesterday at lunch, leveraging my $3.20 lunch investment.

Don’t thank me. I’m just doing my job.

I made an unscheduled stop in wiener heaven at lunch today. There were wieners of every imaginable size and flavor, and—I’ll be honest with you—I wanted put them in order, from smallest to biggest, and work my way right down the line. That’S silly, though, because I know I wouldn’t have been able to keep it all down.

Ricky: Are you proud of yourself for that paragraph? After nearly 3 years of bleeding-edge thought-leadership, you make us suffer through…through…that? Really? I bet you’re actually snickering right now, aren’t you, you pathetic, inspirationally bankrupt middle-aged hack. Why don’t you back up, start again and—this time—think it through before you begin.

We have a leaky tub in the master bath, so today at lunch I went to the gigantic hardware store to buy expensive replacement parts. Just outside the exit, a guy named Woody has a hot dog stand that offers an impressive selection: foot longs, brats, Italian sausage, Sabretts, Chicago dogs, and two types of polish dogs, all of which made my mouth water.

Woody’s an old guy with an annoying feather-duster mustache who pretends to be cheerier than he really is. I got a spicy polish dog with kraut and a can of Pepsi. I had my Kindle, so I sat at the Spring 2009 Patio Furniture Blowout! display and read while I ate. Before I’d swallowed the last bite, I was on my feet ordering a second one. Woody said that the spicy polish was his favorite too.

I have an urge to close this blog entry with sophomoric innuendo that compliments the tone of the opening paragraph, creating a sort of a puerile bookends effect. I’ve opted to suppress that urge because I’m bigger than that.

Possibly the worst blog entry of my career.

It was the best of times: lamb stew.
It was the worst of times: week-old red potatoes soaked in cabbage juice

I knew the lamb stew was solid. I made it last Saturday for dinner. “This is pretty lamby!” the Battle Ax had declared that evening upon the first bite, right after she’d cut the top of her thumb off while making me a nice dinner salad.

Knowing that a lunch of lamb meat alone was unacceptable, I scanned the fridge for a starch of some kind. I found the greasy glass bowl with the potatoes. They were at least 10 days old and mixed together with the limp cabbage, carrots, and some stringy corned beef fat. It was impossible not to notice how the thin gray fluid that had pooled in the bottom had softened and discolored the submerged portion of the potatoes. I gulped, held my breath and scooped two of them into my favorite lunch Tupperware container.

When I took it all out of the microwave in the lunch room, I mashed the lamb and the potatoes together into a kind of workhouse gruel. That helped, I think.

God bless us, everyone, especially Skeeter.

I want, so badly, to tell you about lunch today, but you'd never, ever believe me, so the hell with it. You brought this on yourselves. I hope you're happy. I'll simply say that--sometimes--fantasies do come true.

Sleep well. If I could sprinkle talcum powder on each and every one of you, help you into your Droopy Dog pajamas, and kiss you on the forehead before switching on the nightlight, I would.

I’m fantasizing about today’s lunch. It’s 9:30 in the morning and I can’t concentrate on anything else.

I begin by sneaking away from my desk. Nobody sees me leave. I walk down to the kitchen, glancing over my shoulder once, and then again, just to make sure. In the kitchen, the primitive urges grow stronger, and—tingling—I move to the refrigerator like a hyena toward the bloated carcass of an ibex, whatever that is.

I open the door and caress the smooth red-topped Tupperware. Inserting two fingers beneath the lid, I pull back, becoming further inflamed by the deep musky scent that twirls up into my nostrils; it’s the scent of a gentle spring rain falling on the bloated carcass of an ibex. I hesitate, savoring the moment.

Then I glance down. It’s as if I’m laying eyes on it for the first time: Left over corned beef and cabbage.

Red potatoes and carrots dance around the edges like sprites, or maybe they’re like pixies—let’s just call them pixie-sprites in the interest of time. Everything glistens, dripping wet with my creamy home-made horseradish sauce. With the urgency of a man who must posses what he desires, I turn to the microwave…

I can’t share the rest of it. That’s just for me and the corned beef.

(Note: My favorite part of this exceptional blog entry is the semi-colon in the middle of the second sentence of the third paragraph.)