SOHO

1889 W 25th Street
Cleveland, OH 44113
(216) 298-9090
http://www.sohocleveland.com/

by Beau Cadiyo

One of my pet peeves is when people talk about an action - smoking, drinking, eating red meat - "increasing" the chances of death.  It makes me want to pull a pre-printed card out of my pocket:

Dear Sir/Madam:

The chances of death for all living beings is 100%.  Nothing can increase or decrease the chance of us someday taking a trip to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.  The action or stimulus you just mentioned cannot "increase" the chance of death any more than the opposite action or stimulus would "decrease" it.  I will die.  You will die.  We all will die.  The end.

Sincerely,
Beau Cadiyo
Cleveland Sandwich Board

Death is something we never want to talk about, or think about.  We hate the idea that we are going to die.  So we pretend we're not going to.  We live our lives as if we aren't going to die, as if what we do each and every day does not matter, when, of course, it is vitally, painfully important.  The secretaries in my office, for example, spend a portion of every Monday morning talking about the television they watch.  They spend a portion of every Wednesday talking about how horrible their week has been, or perhaps what the men in their lives are doing.  They spend a portion of every Friday talking about the guys they're going to see that weekend, and the bars they'll visit, and worrying about the weather.  These are the things that occupy their thoughts, their consciousnesses. They wake up thinking about rain and the sun, and go to work thinking about their iPhones or Justin Bieber, and talk about traffic when they are lying in bed with their loved ones.

Television is mindless drivel.  Work is irrelevant.  Worrying about celebrities, or bar scenes, or the weather - is life so small that these are the things we spend our lives thinking about?

What if they recognized that everyone will die, and that we really don't have that much time left?  That everyone alive today will be memories in two hundred years?  That perhaps the race will continue, but that we have no idea, and that it is entirely possible - I'm sorry, it's an inescapable fact - that we don't know when our time will come?  How would you spend your life if you knew that one day you would be dead, but you didn't know when that would be?  Would you continue to live your life vicariously through Rich Kids Of Instagram? Would you spend more time thinking about the Kardashians, or LeBron, or what the next storm will be named?  What if, instead, we all worked hard to do something important?  What if we made smarter decisions on how we focused our mind, and what we paid attention to?  How would that change the world?

The Catfish Po' Boy at SOHO has an exceptional filling, but the bread was somewhat disappointing - a bit overly fluffed, overly prominent.  The chefs do an excellent job with everything else, and the bartenders mix some incredible cocktails; if they just changed the bread a bit, it would be one of the best sandwiches in Cleveland.