#3 Chicken & Noodles

Sending this one from my phone. Excuse any typos.

Goodie can only cook about 2 things.  Chicken & Noodles is one of them.  I capitalize it because, that's the name of the dish.  He cooked last night.  Now, this isn't your regular, when-you-have-a-cold-chicken-noodle-soup.  No way.   Its much more complex.  It's with egg noodles and perfectly seasoned chicken wings and onions and -- well, it's actually pretty damn simple.  It's just chicken with cream of mushroom soup mixed in a pot. But it's delicious.  Chicken & Noodles.

It's good because he knows exactly how to cook it.  It's good because it's something he likes to cook.  And it's good because it's not trying to be anything it's not.  You give him a cookbook, or try to add something fancy to his dish?  He'll just kinda grunt and say, "Nah.  It's better this way."  You try to make a South American version of this, with all kinds of spices and plantains and beans and shit, just to show him the various ways you can make it?   He'll pass.  "Nah.  It's better this way."   He doesn't go out of his lane.  He knows what he likes and he does that.  Seems simple, right?  Inthefuckcorrect.

I find myself always drifting into lanes.  Trying to explore.  Trying to experience "things."  Giving it all a shot.  Jack Of All Trading it.   And it's awesome because I get to expand myself in ways I never thought I would.  And I've learned stuff about myself that, otherwise, would stay forever buried somewhere in the chasm of Jason Lee.  But it also sucks.  Because, when you try new things, it's inevitable that you're going to fail.  And I've been failing a lot lately.  But we all know the sayings, how you learn from your mistakes.  And failure is just practice.  And Jordan missed a billion shots.  And whatever else people say to make getting something wrong feel right.  But when you're a self-proclaimed perfectionist who doesn't like to lose.  Hates not winning.  And despises the idea of failure.  Or the word "can't."  Or wallows when they get something wrong.  You're going to spend a lot of time trying to fix a dish that you maybe should have never tried to make in the first place.  I'll take dad's recipe and try to perfect it.  As FAST as humanly possible.  (Maybe I think I'm going to get some kind of Presidential award for learning it quicker than anybody.  Even though nobody's even watching.)  I'll make it 10 different ways.  Fuck up the dish until it's no longer edible.  Just to come back to the original and realize, oh yea.  It is better that way.  Goodie always knew.  Why didn't I?

It's because it's HIS dish.  Not mine.  He knows exactly what he needs to accomplish making the dish he wants.  That's how you get shit done.  You've got to know.   I never wanted to cook Chicken & Noodles until I saw him make it.  I never wanted to make that dish.  I should have been busy making my own dish.  Seasoning my own dish.  Creating my own dish.  And my dish is...

Oh shit.  I don't know.  And that's the thing I realized.  That sometimes, I just don't know what I want.  And if I don't know what I want, I'm going to spend a lot of time trying to make "dishes" to see if I magically stumble upon it.  But it doesn't work like that.  We have to know.  Not guess, but know.  What we want out of life, out of family, out of career, out of love, out of everything.  Know what you want in order to get it.




I think...

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