Sunday, June 20, 2010

Smothered in dark

I was making mole tonight. Not mole, as in the animal that burrows underground and eats dirt. No, I wasn't making mole to eat, I was making mole. That's MO-LAY. That's how it's pronounced. It's some kind of sauce, a dark brown sauce, Mexican sauce. Lots of peppers and nuts and stuff and it's all ground up. I personally like to add a lot of chocolate syrup to it, it makes it mo bettah. A former girlfriend of mine introduced me to it. She was Mexican Catholic, and I hated mole at first... but it grows on you. Truly it does (Scott and Ed didn't like it, by the way).

So, I was making MO-LAY tonight. But first, in order to make MO-LAY, you have to cook chicken. So first, I cooked the chicken. I had bought chicken breasts from Safeway (yes, there are grocery stores here on Mars) and boiled them. I normally wouldn't boil chicken breasts, because usually I buy a whole chicken and tear it apart and boil all the component pieces. But holy cow, it was cheaper to buy a bundle of chicken breasts that weighed more and cost less than a whole chicken. And it's all white meat, not bones and giblets (those are chicken guts) before you get to the meat. So, the chicken breasts, which are all white meat, cost less than the whole chicken with all the other stuff. And I boiled it, and cut it up, poured the MO-LAY sauce all over it, then wrapped it up in tortillas and ate it like a burrito.

So anyway, the point of this little tirade isn't to explain all about my own personal history with MO-LAY and how to make it and how they have great chicken deals here at the north pole, but it was to describe one particular moment in the making of the MO-LAY.

That moment occurred when I put the cut up pieces of white meat chicken into the dark brown sauce, which was simmering on the stove. I had cut up each piece of chicken breast into little cubes on a cutting board. They were an almost pristine white, compared to the dark sauce. I stood there with the little miraculous pieces of white chicken, about to dump them into the dirty brown MO-LAY sauce, and I didn't even hesitate. I dumped them in there.

So, as I was stirring it all up, some pieces of white chicken didn't want to get dirty. I stirred some more, and more of the dark brown dirty got on the pristine white. Then I had a kind of epiphany. I saw a couple of pieces of white, which hadn't been touched by the sauce at all. They didn't want to get touched. But I pushed them around until all the white, which had never ever ever been touched by the dark before, got all smothered. I realized at that moment, that's how I feel. Not that I was ever pristine, except when I was born, but that I'm getting smothered in dark.

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