Iron Fist

Late Friday afternoon, as usual, finds me at happy hour with my drinking buddy. We’ve opted for McCormick & Schmick’s down by the waterfront.

The waitress comes around to take our food order. I get the buffalo wings and then, just as she’s about to leave the table, I am seized by a reckless daring and decide to get something off the $4 section of the happy hour menu as well. “And I’ll have the Cajun Crawfish as well, please.”

Like most Americans, I am culturally conditioned to expect the food that I’m served to have almost no resemblance to how it would look in its pre-processed state. A hamburger obviously looks nothing like a cow. And it was only a few years ago that I discovered that brocolli doesn’t grow up out of the ground in those nice little clumps like that, and that it is, in fact, a flowering plant.

I expect my Cajun Crawfish to come in nice little nugget sized clumps of crustacean matter, evenly breaded and fried and with a twist of lemon or something. What I don’t expect is to receive a bowl which, once the cover is removed, reveals a half-dozen fully-intact crawfish staring up at me with their beady little arthropod eyes. For the first moment I think they are waving their antennae, as well. I blink, and the illusion of squirming crawfish crawling over one another and waving their claws about disappears.

I realize that I have no idea how to eat them.

I casually mention this. “Do you suppose I just pluck off the legs? I mean, you can’t eat the legs, right?”

“You can go New Orleans style, and just snap the head off and suck the meat out,” my buddy suggests.

I am determined not to let this dish defeat me. I am just a little squeamish about plucking off this crawfish’s head while it’s looking at me, is all. What if it bites or bats at me with its antenna? I’d definitely lose my nerve then.

It’s already cooked, dude. Get over it.

I squish it experimentally, and the shell cracks. I pick out pieces of meat. By the second or third crawfish I figure out that the main body shell can be pried up and off to get at the goods, and the tail can be snapped off and broken open. I proceed to eat the most inefficiently-consumed meal of my life over the next fifteen minutes. I feel like a tool.

That’ll teach me to order off the $4 menu.

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I’m drinking my extra-strength coffee at Stumptown. My cell phone rings; it’s my younger brother. It’s a call I’m expecting: he’s on his way down from OHSU and is supposed to meet me downtown so we can hang out.

“Hey, are you still at Stumptown?”

“Yep.”

“You gonna be there for a bit? I want to check my email.”

Urrrr. “Yeah. Sure. Come on down.”

I’ve got a few minutes. He’ll be walking here from the bus mall. I decide that this is a good time to upgrade the software for my website. I download the latest Wordpress release, unpack it, and open up an FTP window to start deleting the old files on my server and uploading the new ones.

He strolls in, walks up to my table. “Watch the master at work,” I tell him. “This will only take a minute.” He sits down next to me.

“What are you doing?”

“Updating my website.” Files stream through the air from my laptop to the local wireless node and up the hill to a machine in a closet at PSU.

“What?”

“See, I use this software to power my website; it’s PHP-powered and uses a lot of Javascript, and –” and he doesn’t know what any of that means, ” –and…well…it’s complicated.”

He is unimpressed; he has his arms crossed and is tapping his elbow. “You want to get something to eat?” Like a lot of men in our family line, he needs to be fed on a regular basis or else his blood sugar will flip out. This has the effect of turning us into super-irritable bastards who will bitch you out at the drop of a hat.

“Sure, just let me finish uploading this.” Go, packets, go!

Tap tap tap. “Is this going to take much longer?”

“Shouldn’t. Looks like it’s almost done.”

“You can’t do this later?” Tap tap.

“Look, I’m almost done. I can’t stop halfway or else my site won’t work. Here, check your email.” I open up a new Firefox tab for him.

The checking-of-the-email tactic doesn’t buy me much time, since it’s over and done with in less than two minutes. “Okay, you ready now?” he says.

The last file has finished uploading. “Almost,” I say. “Let me run this script to upgrade everything.” My fingers tap the keyboard; his fingers tap the notebook he is clutching to his chest. “There…it’s done.” I show him my website.

“Cool,” he says and stands up to leave. “Send me a link to that shit sometime.”

Sure, dude. Sure.

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