(31 weeks)
MONDAY.
Fully recovered, I’ve started writing a story for my radio show. It’s about a man who spends the morning eating himself sick with pie only to remember—in a flash of sinus-clearing terror—that he’s due to participate in a county fair pie-eating contest in an hour. He’d drunkenly challenged his ex-wife’s new husband to an eat-off several weeks earlier, and now, ready to burst at the seams, he sets off to the fair to do his best.
I want it to be a parable about remaining stoic in the face of nausea. While I know it will end with his being rushed to the ER to have his stomach pumped, I’m not sure what happens in the middle.
I look over my notes. They are not helpful. One note reads “Make pie more existential.”
Writer’s block descends like a … something or other.
Still unable to write the story, I take a break and read the latest New Yorker for inspiration. I arrive at a poem that contains the following lines:
Seasons repeat themselves, but the tree Shading the yard keeps growing.
Ideally, how should a New Yorker poem be read? The same as you would a New Yorker cartoon? Because it feels inappropriate to partake in a beautiful bit of verse filled with simple, profound truths about the human condition and then return to a profile of Lady Gaga on the same page.
And so after finishing the poem, I take a walk in the snow.
WEDNESDAY.
Writer’s block persists.
I decide to nap, and while asleep I dream I’m riding an old-fashioned bicycle while sporting a handlebar moustache drenched in mustard. It strikes me as a portentous omen. I awake and immediately call up Tucker to go for hot dogs.
Tucker says that hot dogs seem like a good idea, that they may buoy his spirits. He says he’s been filled with so much self-loathing lately that he considers starting each day by spitting into his own coffee.
Tucker’s self-revulsion might be part of a growing cultural trend—one that can inspire whole new markets of enterprise. I can imagine seeing these special coffees sold at Starbucks for five dollars a pop. Call them “prison cappuccinos.”
I tell Tucker my idea and he says that if it were to bear his imprimatur, he would not want it offered with soy.
“I’m tired of hearing everyone talk about how they’re switching from milk to soy.Why doesn’t anyone talk about switching from milk to whisky?”
Soon Tucker will bring his trademark iconoclasm to the hot dog joint where, as usual, he will eat his wiener by alternating his bites from one end to the other end until he is left with his final, middle bite.
Tucker’s hot dog technique recalls what Jean-Luc Godard had to say about film: there should always be a beginning, middle, and end—just not necessarily in that order. And like Godard, Tucker upsets expectations. So much so that the counterman, as always, watches him eat while waiting anxiously for the whole confusing spectacle to end. I watch, too, making my peace with the fact that sometimes the middle is the last thing you reach, in hot dogs as well as stories about pie-eating.