Bread Meats Bread

7-9 North Bridge

Edinburgh, EH1 1SB

by Beau Cadiyo

A friend of mine from high school recently got in touch with me to say that he sometimes checked this blog to see if it was still active, but that it seems to have "gone dark."  

I'm not saying he is a racist, but I am not sure how to finish this sentence.  

The nerve!  I admit, I have taken a very small break from writing here.  I could blame life - an international move, career changes, an expanding family of children beautiful enough to represent various international clothing lines but not so perfect that when they walk down the street they catch the attention of pilots flying at 30,000 feet and cause airplanes to fall from the sky.  But actually, the slowdown happened a long, long time before all of those things came to be.  To wit: ten years ago, I took a job with NPR.  Yes, the very same NPR that all of you liberals love.  On my first day, my boss sat me down and told me that I would have to stop blogging, as I was so opinionated and blunt in my reviews of sandwiches that people would think I was potentially biased, and it was the role of NPR to not be biased.  I, as a presenter, had to be a blank slate, without any interesting facets or personally-held opinions.  

As my maternal grandfather would have said: is this justice?  And why would a state-funded media outlet demand objectivity from its paid mouths?  

But I was young, and needed the money.  Five years of blogging momentum halted almost instantly; my ideas and opinions were shelved, suppressed, held in.  I mean, in 2010, I took a month off and still wrote 71 posts - and then, it went downhill.  

But, like Saddam Hussein, "I can change!"  A decade of no food reviews has left me hungry.  Plus, I run the number one food blog in Ohio.  Or, at least, I used to be number one, and used to be in Ohio.  

So, Mr. Frank Bart Chandler, you are no racist, or, at least, I don't think you are.  I don't know you now - the last time we spoke was in maybe 2000, and life has intervened.  It is interesting to think that our paths have diverged so radically since we grew up together.  I still have a memory of you in the back of a minivan with Francis Kuhwald, maybe coming back from a retreat in eastern San Diego county, and you were listening to The Breeders on a Walkman, both of you singing something - "last splash."  I remember having never heard the song you both loved so much, and being so jealous of you at the time for being able to listen to that song at will, and feeling left out.  Last year, I was playing something for my son - maybe Rage Against The Machine, which also makes me think of you and your mom, when she pulled your CD out of the player and smashed it because of the lyrics "fuck you I won't do what you tell me," when really, maybe it was everything else going on in her life, and I just want to give you both hugs, or maybe I was playing him the Mighty Mighty Bosstones - but then a song came on, and I asked Alexa what it was, and she said it was The Breeders, and I had a flash of such a strong memory, and I thought: "Huh.  I was jealous of them listening to this?"  

And as much as I hate to admit it, this blog has gone dark.  Black.  Noir.  

No longer.  

I do not know what it will turn into.  I DO know that I want to write more, and am committing to writing 52 posts this year, and to discuss my most deeply felt opinions about sandwiches, to delve deeply into nuances of flavor and texture and experience.  I want to get back into the sandwich game.  

Get back into?  Fuck that.  This is so old that it is being written on Blogger.  I fucking started this game.  

I'm back.  

And the Cali Burger at Bread Meats Bread conflicts me.  On the one hand, it is a superior imitation to an In-N-Out burger - at least, I have to assume that they were trying to copy it, and ended up surpassing it.  On the other, I still hate it when people call California "Cali" - it is still the easiest way to tell if the person is not actually from California.  But something about Britain inspires people to put on masks and costumes and act as if they were American.  Walking down the street, one is guaranteed to see a few things: 

1. A NASA hat, jacket, or t-shirt.  British people are obsessed with NASA.  
2. A Yankees hat, and probably something related to the Patriots - a shirt, hat, jersey.  They are also obsessed with teams named after a group of people who beat them in a war.  
3. Something advertising a real US college or university that they have never visited, much less attended.  UCLA, Harvard and Yale are the most popular - there is a store, NEXT, that sells tons of college merchandise from these three places.  I have no idea what the Brits think they are signalling by wearing this, but clearly they want to be American college students.  
4. Something from a fake US sports organization.  My favorite was the "Mid-Pacific American Baseball Champions Sacramento 1977" shirt a woman was wearing at a bus stop, but there are tons of made-up leagues and events that people wear on their shirts that often don't even make any sense.  

(The good thing is that if you see someone in something from, say, SDSU, or Villanova, or for the Cleveland Cavaliers, it is safe to assume that they are either American or actually know something about the team they are pushing, and it is safe to walk up to them and strike up a conversation.)

So the Brits, actually, just want to look as if they are American.  The Americans, meanwhile, either wear Columbia or REI jackets (everyone here wears North Face or Patagonia - brands that Americans used to have a monopoly on, and used to be a guaranteed signal of tourists, but no longer) or something with a Canadian team on it to act as if they are not American, without realizing that looking less like an actual American and more like a pretend American will make them look British.  

Sigh.  It reminds me, often, of when Stephen Colbert interviewed my former Congresswoman Marcia Fudge and asked her what it was about Ohio that made people want to leave earth.  Maybe we all just want to escape the shame of being ourselves, and we will do what we can to show others we are whatever we are not, so long as it is not us.  

Regardless, friends, Beau Cadiyo is back.  Salve.