The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.

It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about "Give me your hungry...your oppressed...give me pretty much everybody"-that's the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are-and should be-a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones.... We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women.

Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.

For their own good, vegetarians should never be allowed near fine beers and ales. It will only make them loud and belligerent, and they lack the physical strength and aggressive nature to back up any drunken assertions.

But it's Atlanta that can lay claim to the best of the best (which is to say worst) chef-friendly dives in America: the legendary Clermont Lounge, a sort of lost-luggage department for strippers, who perform—perfunctorily—on a stage behind the bar.

How many'd we do?" is the question frequently asked at the end of the shift, when the cooks collapse onto flour sacks and milk crates and piles of dirty linen, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their shift cocktails,

the pernicious spread of raw food continues, and its prodigiously farting adherents continue to multiply. They must be stopped.

How did the age-old equation that poor equals thin and rich equals fat change so that now our working poor are huge and slow-moving and only the wealthy can afford the personal trainers, liposuction, and extended spa treatments required, it seems, to be thin?

Perhaps eager to put the boot in again, she agrees enthusiastically that Spain is indeed "the New France" but shrinks from the tiny bite, pinchos/tapas thing: "I still have an attention span. I can eat a meal.

CHINA SYNDROME China is great. China is BIG. China is FUN. And it's hugely frustrating to know that even if I dedicated the rest of my life to the project, I'd never see all of it. There's little question in my mind that as China continues to emerge as an economic superpower, and as we find ourselves increasingly dependent on its manufacturing—and its credit line—that it will eventually pretty much rule the world. To which I say, "Welcome to our future masters!" With China as our landlord, we will, at least, be eating a hell of a lot better.

Now the tourists are scarier than the locals. They don't even look worried, consulting their maps and adjusting their lederhosen without fear of discovery. Who's gonna stop them? You can't even spray-paint your name on the subways anymore. Subway cars used to be an exciting showcase for dedicated artists, a place where they could create masterworks two and three hundred feet long that would rocket across the boroughs, write their names in the sky, every wild style "piece" more outlandish and distinctive than the one that came before. Now, every subway car, like every American city, looks the same—another soulless space, filled with slack-jawed, sleepwalking bodies, unconnected to anything, running from nothing, to nowhere.

When I die, I want to come back as a Mexican, a Poblano, a fucking grown-up.

while banks and lawyers and government agencies would still be bending Marvin over a sawhorse and probing rudely for assets.

Las Vegas no less—the Ugly Shorts Heart of Darkness

I was spitting mad, having just endured a four-hour flight, economy class, on American Airlines where I'd found myself seated between two gigantic specimens of humanity. One of them, a woman of Jabba the Hutt proportions, literally took up half my seat in addition to her own, leaving me balanced on one butt cheek, leaning forward and against the seat back in front of me. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sit back. I couldn't do anything but fume silently. Neither she nor the flight attendants ever acknowledged my obvious distress. For the duration of the flight, I tried to lull myself into a state of calm by focusing on the in-flight telephone against which my face was mashed, imagining what would happen if I wrapped the cord around my neck, leaned forward with my full body weight, and ended my life. That thought was what got me through.

The carioca is a role model and the ideal state of being is his. What is a carioca?. Simply put, he's a lovable scamp, a guy who somehow finds a way, always, to avoid legitimate toil in favor of the popular Rio diversions of going to the beach, flirting, making love, dancing, and hanging out. He is a man who survives on charm and what are called jetinhos, improvisational, amiable hustler/joker strategies to avoid work and keep doing what he's doing, which is basically nothing.

Let's face it. I'm pushing fifty. If I had to go back to the kitchen now? It would break me. This vida loca better last—or I'm fucked.

At forty-seven years of age, I was the youngest person in the room.

And you know what surprised me? While airborne, as I flew out, and then plummeted down toward rocks and sea? I didn't care. I was not afraid. I've known love. I've seen many beautiful things. And it was enough. That was what I was thinking. Stone cold. Serene. Yet . . . happy, as I dropped, and the water rushed up to meet me at sixty miles per hour. Needless to say, I survived the experience. It's hell on the soles of your feet hitting the water at that speed. But jumping into the void made for an illuminating few seconds. And we got the shot.

quick vodka tonic in the hotel bar and then I limp up to my suite to change. I'm tired, having flown in from Sydney late the previous night, jet-lagged, my brain and liver still struggling with the vast amounts of alcohol I consumed Down Under. My tooth aches, a dull throb threatening to take over my head, and my throat is sore from talking about myself nonstop for the last year and a half.

Tomorrow's criminals will simply move tiny blips from place to place on their computer screens, theoretical felonies that take place somewhere in the ether.

I am always pleased to find historical precedent for my darker urges. And in the restaurant business, where one's moods tend to swing from near euphoria to crushing misery and back again at least ten times a night, it's always useful to remember that my crew and I are part of a vast and well-documented

Debrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A debrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se debrouiller—get it done somehow.

Because I always think for sure the next book or the next show will tank, and I better make some fucking money while I can.

Words fail me. Again and again. Or maybe it's me that fails the English language