Every time I smell cigarette smoke, I think about Dead Air Time.
It’s amazing how we’re slaves to our senses. We can’t help it; we’re constantly making subconscious connections with smells and sounds and tastes. I think it was Rousseau who wrote something about that. A taste of a pastry brought back memories of him being a small child with an Oedipus complex. Rousseau was a pansy.
Anyway, the reason cigarette smoke brings back the memories it does is all because of Pete’s porch. Carriger, the dorm we were living in at the time, was old and had two small second-story porches. In a freakish act of the remodeling gods, one of those ended up attached exclusively to Pete’s room, forming a sort of sophomore-level executive suite (the other porch was sadly normal and connected to a hallway, where the dorm’s resident frat boys and their hangers-on would gather to drink Natural Light and discuss how many sorority sisters they had violated).
If I haven’t mentioned it enough times before, back then Pete smoked like a three-alarm apartment fire. A three-alarm apartment fire in an R.J. Reynolds warehouse. Since smoking was verboten all of the buildings on campus, Pete was elated that he had a place to smoke without leaving his room. He wasn’t much into standing in the rain in one of those goofy orange ponchos, shielding his cigarette with one hand and getting two steps closer to pneumonia instead of just one.
Anyway, since the dorms lacked air conditioning and most folks need fresh stuff to breathe, Pete’s porch became the hangout for everyone we knew and even some people we didn’t who threw a grappling hook over and climbed up. And as always, there was Pete with a lit Marlboro in hand. So much for fresh air.
Since we were there anyway, the porch became the place where we hashed out our scripts. Most of the time, it was handwritten and typed on my computer later, since Pete’s aging Macintosh wasn’t up to the task. Besides, I’d always have to return to the dank hole in the ground I inhabited with the Smelly Italian to mix the sound effects anyway.
Those were good times. Oh, most of the scripts turned out well, but it was mostly because it was just fun to hang out there and BS. Much of this is a moot point now, since Pete no longer has the room or the porch and has stopped smoking thanks to the wonders of The Patch. So now instead of dying of lung cancer, he can die from getting run over by a bus or struck down by a piece of errant space debris flung from a passing shuttle. That doesn’t stop me from making the connection every time I smell cigarette smoke, though.
There’s more to it, but that is the history of Dead Air Time in a nutshell, and the final Article of the Day.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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