Publisher’s note: The Garden has correspondents spread across all corners of the globe and all four dimensions, including that of time. From the Near Future desk we learn of startling events occurring in the spring of 2020. Just before Super Tuesday, Satan declares his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States of America. Due to Russian hacking, cynical crossover voting by Republicans, poor debate performances by Joe Biden, and 24 x 7 promotion by Fox News, Satan wins the nomination at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee in July, beating Pete Buttigieg on the fourth ballot and announcing Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate.
These developments put Democrats as well as Republican “Never Trumpers” in a bind: whom to support for President? Since Satan’s record of public service is not well known to the American public, we provide here, as a public service, a voter’s guide to the differences between the incumbent and the challenger.
Health Care
Satan: Invented french fries, opioids and recliners
Trump: Ripped apart Obamacare because the name contains ‘Obama.’
Honesty
Satan: Known as ‘The Great Deceiver’ but never actually tells a lie
Trump: You’re kidding, right?
Experience
Satan: Former angel
Trump: Former real-estate developer and reality TV personality
Immigration Policy
Satan: Welcomes all humankind
Trump: Wall
Educational Policy
Satan: Led the movement to spread the knowledge of good and evil to all mankind
Trump: Founded Trump University
Vices
Satan: Favors a nice pinot noir with dinner
Trump: Doesn’t drink
Charisma
Satan: Handsome devil
Trump: Comb-over on top of an angry scoop of orange sherbet
Foreign Policy
Satan: In a tense but functioning detente with God for 2,000 years and counting
Trump: Thinks NATO is stupid
Mental and Emotional Stability
Satan: Thinks he’s the greatest
Trump: Thinks he’s the greatest
Military Experience
Satan: Has led the Armies of Darkness since the beginning of time
Trump: Medical deferment (bone spurs)
Favorite Books
Satan: Loves The Fountainhead and How to Win Friends and Influence People
Trump: Favorite books are the bible and The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump*
Fantasy Dinner Guests
Satan: Roy Cohn, Vladimir Putin and Andrew Breitbart
Trump: Roy Cohn, Vladimir Putin and Andrew Breitbart
Personal Income
Satan: Based on tax returns for the last ten years, approximately 1M souls per year
Trump: Undisclosed
P.R. Firm
Satan: The Christian church
Trump: Fox News
Campaign strategy:
Satan: appeal to our worst instincts
Trump: appeal to our worst instincts, especially in ‘swing states’.
Conclusion: Satan 2020!
* according to the Wikipedia article on The Art of the Deal.
Julie’s Noodles: a little bit of heaven in a bamboo steamer
When you’re a child, and your mom and dad have a favorite restaurant they like to take the family to, you naturally believe that the joint has been there forever, and will always remain. (What’s more, you don’t understand all the work it takes to keep such a place going and attractive.)
But like all things made of man, it is temporary. (Unless of course it’s something like McDonald’s or Taco Bell, which are as permanent and unchanging as a Styrofoam container in a landfill.) The enchilada house burns down (as happened to the treasured La Casita of my Denton, Texas childhood). The barbecue pit gets behind on its taxes or lease payments. The pasta joint’s owner gets sick, or, god forbid, dies. Some bright kids get sent to college, graduate, and settle into high-paying professions, and their parents’ Chinese restaurant, having thus served its purpose, closes its doors.
So as I’ve grown older I appreciate even more those mom & pop places that are welcoming, cheap, and highly competent at what they do. I gather me rosebuds, and cheese and onion enchiladas, and roast duck, while I may. One of the current standouts for me is Julie’s Noodles, here in Austin, a place that serves first-rate Beijing style noodles and dumplings.
It doesn’t pander to generic Chinese-American tastes: you’ll have to go elsewhere for cloying fillers like lemon chicken or sesame beef. On the other end of the spectrum of inauthenticity, neither does it countenance precious, overly-contrived “fusion”-style contraptions. No Szechuan tacos, no pork-belly-stuffed jalapeno poppers here. No aioli anything, thank goodness. (There is something called a “Beef Burrito”—sliced, spiced brisket rolled in a Chinese-style green-onion pancake—but that is just a case of lazy translation. And deliciousness.)
It does a few excellent things, inexpensively and with consistent craftsmanship. Pork-and-leek dumplings with thick, meaty shells, served steaming hot. Pork and crab soup dumplings, with thin delicate skins containing a little meatball and a spoonful or two of boiling hot broth. (Woe to the diner who carelessly bites into one before letting it cool! The penalty for such impatience is a burned tongue and a splattered shirt.) And their ja-ja mein: wide, mile-long home-made noodles in beef and black bean sauce. And not incidentally, they provide a clean, friendly, and unfussy place to enjoy the food in.
I consider Julie’s Noodles (and its culinary little brother, Chen’s Noodles) almost more of a public service than a commercial enterprise. It’s one of those places, like the Upper Crust bakery, that make this community a little nicer, a little more human.
Who knows how long Julie’s Noodles will be around, but as long as it is, I will continue to demonstrate my loyalty, with my wallet and belly.
Jonathan Eaton’s “In Praise of the Live Performance” tops our readers’ poll for best blog post of 2019
Despite facing stiff competition, the novelist Jonathan Eaton’s essay in support of the theatrical arts, “In Praise of the Live Performance,” centered around a no-wardrobe malfunction he witnessed during a Skokie Community Theater production of Equus, has won the first annual Garden of Eaton Readers’ Choice Award.
It was a long, hard battle. The Overseas American votes favored posts with an international angle, such as “ANOTHER COUP FOR BRITISH INTELLIGENCE”, about the internal diplomatic cable that leaked all over the carpet. The evangelical wing of our audience voted for the pious sentiments expressed in “A Prayer for the President”, ignoring the fact that it was posted after the contest was announced, making it ineligible for this year. Progressive Texans and armchair historians supported the daring and remarkable “I Live in Slaveholder, Texas.”
But after the electoral dust settled, the Garden found itself in an unprecedented predicament.
A predicament! Without predecent!
“In Praise of the Live Performance” and “ANOTHER COUP FOR BRITISH INTELLIGENCE” were tied for first place, at one vote apiece!
According to the Garden’s ancient and hallowed bylaws*, if the contest should end in a tie, the winner is decided by the Plenipotentiary Ad-Hoc Subcommittee on Dealing With Shit.**
After urgent consideration over a cold beer, a nice nap, a lovely lunch, and another nap, “In Praise of the Live Performance” emerged as the winner.
As the judge remarked, “It just stood out.”
Congratulations, Mr. Eaton!
*established by me, just now
**committee chairman, sergeant-at-arms and sole member, me.
I believe there are two types of great writers in this world: those who seem to have been born with an inexplicable knack for it (Jane Austen, Isaak Dinesen, Yukio Mishima, Mark Twain, to name a very few), and the rest of us.
If you are human, and your eyes are open, and your heart is open, and you have the temerity to write honestly about your experience, you can write something well worth reading.
About thirty years ago, I was judge of a short story contest sponsored by a community college. The record will show (if the record still exists) that there were three persons on the panel, and I was none of them. The reality is, I was all three (and that’s a story for another time). I awarded the first-place prize to a woman who wrote a story about a woman who was so envious of the love and attention the family dog got from her husband and her children, that she began turning into a dog herself.
I heard that at the awards ceremony, she said she hadn’t submitted the story with any hope of winning—in fact, she had only submitted it because submitting a story to the contest was the assignment of the week for her English class. She said getting the award changed the way she felt about herself—that for the first time in her adult life, she felt like what she had to say—how she saw the world—was significant. I don’t know if she continued to write (or if she even wanted to), but I hope that feeling of pride in her own voice stayed with her for as long as my memory of her remarkable short story has.
Those of us who want to write, but weren’t born with the inexplicable knack, can still be great. We all have something no one else has: our own experience and our own voice.
I’m not encouraging everyone to write. I’m not one of those who believes that everyone should write, just like everyone should brush their teeth. But if you do want to write, and what’s holding you back is that you don’t think you’re any good at it, or you don’t have anything to say, I beg to differ.
Here’s some tips for the beginner, which you can trust absolutely as having come directly to you from a beginner:
If you can’t think of anything else to write, try writing yourself a letter. Write as if you were your own BFF, and hadn’t seen or heard from yourself in a year, and you want to catch you up on everything that has happened in your life. Remember that honesty is key here.
If you want to write a story: Explain nothing, just tell the story. Don’t make your characters explain anything, just let them speak. For the advanced beginner: Try coming at things sideways, just for grins.
If you want to write a scene: Get the scene in general in your head, then imagine that somewhere in your scene, you have hidden a beautiful gem for your readers. Take a long walk and think about what that gem might be, and where it might be. Keep walking until you find it.
If you want to write a novel: Join a writers group. Don’t think of your fellow writers as critics of your work, think of them as people who will show you how your writing affects people. Remember that the first priority of a writers group is to encourage people to write. Take criticism humbly and with an open mind. It’s bound to hurt a little bit, sometimes, but you can handle it. Give criticism kindly. Perhaps the best advice I can give concerning criticism in a writers group is, it’s often less hurtful and more productive to say “Tell me what you were going for here” than “This doesn’t work.”
One last piece of advice: Read Isaak Dinesen’s “Seven Gothic Tales”, and Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life”, and Vonnegut’s “Long Walk to Forever.”
Finally, what some might say in anger or frustration, I say with love: If you’ve got something to say, say it.
“Can you believe that I will be impeached today by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, AND I DID NOTHING WRONG! A terrible Thing. Read the Transcripts. This should never happen to another President again. Say a PRAYER!” – the president of the United States of America, December 12, 2019, via Twitter
Dear Lord or Lady in Heaven,
I know you know I’m a Jewish atheist but at this point I’m willing to try anything.
I do not hate the Trump “base,” LOLIH. They know not what they do in their ignorance and funny red hats. They are but victims of cynical pandering, Russian misdirection, and thinly veiled white nationalist rhetoric masquerading as journalism. In other words, Fox News.
I pray today that You will touch their hearts, O Lord Or Lady, that they may see the error of their ways, and the benefits of a single-payer affordable healthcare system. I also humbly pray that they will start to take the roasting and drowning of this planet, Your awesome creation, seriously, O LOL. But most of all I pray that they will repent of their Tea-Party ways and rid the White House of…well You know who. The Orange Face of Anger. The Manhattan Mephisto. The Vile Tweeter of Vitriol. The Prince of Snarkness. We get the joke, L or L, but it’s just not funny anymore.
Give unto us a President Pence. The man has some problems, sure. For example, he lives in an imaginary world in which he leads a crusade against a fictive ‘war on coal’. But we’ll taketh what we can getteth. You gotta admit, he’s pretty super in the church-going line. (As a manner of speaking only, L or L! I know You don’t ‘gotta’ do anything!)
I know You’re quite busy, Lord/Lady, as the cosmic CEO. I don’t ask you to enlighten every deplorable. But if You could see Your way to touching the hearts of at least, say, 20 Republican United States senators before the impeachment trial comes up for a vote…I’ll convert!
Don’t think I mean it? I dare You!
Also, if You wouldn’t mind causing the nail salon in the strip-mall next door to my apartment complex to revert back to the great little Italian joint it used to be? Cause now I have to drive to Lampasas just to get linguini with clam sauce! I know You didn’t mean for that to happen!
Thanks, Lord or Lady, and keep up the mostly good work.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party secured a landslide victory in the British general election[…]The election marked a sharp realignment of the country’s election map along lines shaped by Brexit. Johnson ran on a platform to “get Brexit done,” a promise that seemed to win over areas that had voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum.– “U.K. Election Results Map: How Conservatives Won in a Landslide,” New York Times, December 13, 2019
It’s not true that we Americans have a stereotype for the Average Englishman. We have several.
There’s the overeducated nob, probably the Twentieth Earl of One-Thing-Or-Another, who can quote Horatian odes in the original Latin but needs help buttoning his jacket. These are the ones generally in charge of running the country.
Then there’s the rough and ready northern factory worker or Welsh coal miner who loves to grumble about the class system and makes a hobby of going on strike but is the first to sign up whenever his green and pleasant land is threatened by Bonaparte, say, or The Hun.
Then we have the uncomplaining lower-rung bureaucrat who lives with his family in the kind of narrow two-story row house that we’ve all seen in a thousand BBC movies and TV shows. His idea of a great time is sitting in front of the telly in an old cardigan and slippers on a Sunday afternoon, drinking beer and watching so-called “football” or some inane variety show on the telly. He’s almost American.
And finally we have those thuggish louts with shaved heads who like to go to soccer matches on the continent, get drunk, urinate on the local sacred monument, and beat up their counterparts from Germany and Holland. But no one here thinks his kind is representative of the nation.
In general we have an impression of the British as a slightly better version of ourselves. Polite, worldly, moderately progressive. You’ve gotten over your resentment at losing Empire. But that history means that you’re quite used to rubbing shoulders with third world chaps. London neighborhoods as well as newspaper offices and newsrooms are filled with brown and black faces in addition to white ones. Unlike Americans, who vacation mostly in America, Brits vacation in places like Spain, Cambodia, and Kenya. Watch a news report about an NGO bringing clean water or vaccinations to a benighted African or Bengali village, or saving elephants somewhere, and the person running the operation usually seems to have a British accent.
Sure, you had your Thatcher era. But no one’s perfect. And that Brexit referendum? Well, you just got a bit complacent, that’s all. Too many sensible people stayed home because no one thought such an evidently stupid idea would ever pass. Like what happened to us in 2016. But now you know better, right? Right?
So what the hell happened, England?
Is the fabled English penchant for playfully masochistic sex now transformed into a kind of national mania for real self-inflicted pain? Do you feel guilty about all those years of duty-free Bordeaux? Do you miss those long waits in customs and passport-control lines? Or do you secretly just want to piss off your sensible Scottish and Irish neighbors who want to stay “in”? Or are you weary of having a voice on the world stage? I suppose it has something to do with your immigration problem—which is what, exactly? Or self-determination. And what is so important that E.U. membership prevents you from self-determining? Please explain it to me, England…’cause I don’t get it!
Are you really so resigned to a future of mediocrity that you would turn your fate over to someone like Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson? The con-artist with a bespoke education? A man whose pro-Brexit position, so late in arriving, was so transparently a political calculation? A yellow journalist who claimed in his newspaper column that staying “in” would result in bans on teabag reuse and balloons—claims which are simply lies?
Is it the man’s charisma? The magnificent hair? The habit of speaking to reporters by mumbling as he looks at the floor? Is this the best you can do? Did Nelson die…for this?
Oh, I know what you’re thinking, England. You’re asking what gives me, an American, the right to question anyone else’s political choices? Haven’t we done just as badly…or worse? Isn’t our president something like a louder, semi-literate version of your prime minister?
But this is the thing, England. We expected better of you than of ourselves. Where’s that vaunted British phlegm, that calm logical approach to problems big and small, that absence of hysteria, that skepticism towards easy nostrums and soapbox oration? Sure, other European countries have recently gone down the jingoistic, xenophobic rathole recently. But Italy is not Albion. They may be proto-fascist this week, socialist next week, and then Christian-Democrat again after that. And whatever they pick, they don’t really believe in it.
But if it can happen in England, it can happen anywhere. If you have the chance to undo a terrible mistake, but instead give your squalid, self-serving leader a second chance—in fact, given the new majority your latest election has endowed him with, an even better chance than before—to do bad things to your country, then so can we.
I wish to set the record straight about some rumors that have begun to circulate in the cybersphere. The truth is that the global campaign to “save” the “planet” from overheating and pollution by mandating the use of energy- and water-efficient technology is indeed nothing more or less than a ruse to make Donald J. Trump look silly.
Er. Sillier.
After an earlier experiment (code-named ”John Boehner”) exceeded our wildest expectations, we proceeded with a project to introduce “efficient” LED light bulbs whose real purpose to was to turn Mr. Trump a bright orange.
Or, as he would say, arange.
We were able to heighten the effect by adding “just back-from-a-ski-trip” type white puff-pads around the eyes. And the unnatural way the middle of his lips open when he speaks, while both ends stay shut? Some of our best work.
And we didn’t stop there. We are responsible for permanently freezing the Vice President’s face into a parody of a squinting Clint Eastwood-esque self-satisfied grimace-smile, and for Devin Nunes’ beady little weasel eyes.
We also developed a process to turn Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell into a nice frog green, but some of us felt that nature had already punished the man enough. We don’t pile on.
For the record, we had nothing to do with Kellyanne Conway. Also, Sean Hannity’s 1928-style haircut is all on him.
Why do we do these things? For fun, or course! Life isn’t all about just bringing the American economy to its knees by promoting useless environmental regulations, developing energy efficient technologies, and saving animal species with funny Latin names that no one even cares about.
Not all of our projects are frivolous, however. But our plan to use an infrared ray gun to increase the stiffness in GOP senator Lindsay Graham’s spine appears to have failed, and, judging on the evidence, may have made his condition even worse.
I don’t have time right now to explain our plot to make Americans flush the handle 10-15 times per bathroom tip. I’ll just leave you with this: sadly, it’s the only exercise many of you ever get.
the Garden of Eaton is beautiful but a bit prickly
And unlike our Republican friends, we don’t require 2 picture IDs!
As this hideous year slouches towards its conclusion, we pause to admire the sparkling jewels of wit and wisdom that bloomed (pardon the mixed met!) here in the Garden over the past 12 months. We have selected the best of the best, the crème de la freaking crème, the crispiest, longest French fries out of the fryer (the ones with the little bits of skin on the end) as our nominees for Best Blog Post of the Year. As ever, you, dear reader, are the judge! Vote for your favorite by posting a comment below by Friday, Dec. 20!
Note: this being the cheapest format that WordPress provides, you will have to scroll past a bunch of annoying ads in order to find the comments section at the bottom. But it’s there.
The Garden of Eaton 