Breakfast: A Guide (From the Grave of Henry Valentine Miller)

So you see, eating is an art. Just as fucking, and letting your heart go does, before it kill itself and bleeds onto all the onlookers while they stand at the side of the road, staring down at their shoes and wondering why they feel so damn Good when they first put a pair of new shoes on. Like a duck in the bath, sloshing its ass around happy as the yellow in the sun greets it upon ever single new morning. So mornings and breakfast. One of these things is wonderful, the other not so hot. While a sunrise is something to see, it never fails that your seeing it through hazy, cum soaked eyes of glittering, viscous adventure and filled to the lids in the best array of liquors the world has to offer you for free is the more preferred way to see the sunset. LE SUNSET. It’s not as routine as the overly self-aggrandizing motions of getting yourself out of bed after a full night’s sleep in order to stand with your un-spiked coffee at the window, looking out onto the sun. He’s around the corner, beating your better intentions and pointing out how you are an embarrassment to the natural order of things, the meals, the drink, the fuck, the rage, the fanaticism. Oh yes, all meals should have some level of fanaticism to them…like a good Pentecostal snake charming service, tongues wagging and licking up the Lord as he bears down on you, in full glory through the tiny, dead eyes of the otherwise unappreciated garden snake. So there should be revelry, torn clothing, at each and every meal, even if you dine alone. And always a little something to tickle your insides with liquid-wise. Something delicious and open hearted.

Therefore, leading me to breakfast. It has its place in the day, but I find enjoying it at or just after noon is the best way to truly savour its specialties. Your mouth is awake, hopefully has enjoyed a rollick good go at it in the bed, on the table, in the window (remember, they’re staring at their shoes and they want to be looking at you, so make it good. Give them something to see, before the blood nicks them in the corner of their leering eyes. Under their hats and above their fears of themselves and who they could be, if they didn’t let the world cage them in so. Your mouth is open, you see, alive and tasting all that it can, not like a numb cunt too late at night sloshed on drink or too early in the morning, before she’s had a proper amount of time to wake up – all closeted and bundled up. The lights are on, and it’s time for breakfast. What a wonderful array of food items one can enjoy. If there is any way to avoid the idea of lunch, your world will be such a marvelous place. Lunch is for chumps, you see. Suckers, and life peddlers who mock at the idea of actually Enjoying something, but doing it, going through the motions, because it is time. The act of eating lunch is an act of true depravity. Nothing noble, or giving about it. No heart to be found there at all, in that black pond of filth and muck lying at the side of the highway. You might as well be on a desert moon trapping gazelles for all the life lessons and pleasure you could get from a lunch. You hear people talking about meals they had out – grand, fantastical meals that sound as if they got fucked up the ass by the whole theatrical cannon of the western world. And then got served a dessert on top of that.

And those about breakfast, the Right ones, they lay in bed or put this ransacked, alluring meal together when still drunk, or so sick they can’t see straight – Then they taste the glory in their food. When it serves to lift them out of the pit of despair they have carved out for themselves, thought by thought, regret by soulful regret. Seeing their sunrise in the midday, glaring and warming them from the inside, secretly hiding away from the demons of the daytime with their lover, never to get out of bed, while downing canyons of coffee, cathedrals of sweet bread and syrup. Dousing themselves in bacon grease and sliding their day into oblivion. That’s breakfast, my dear. Be sure not to miss it next time it comes around, even if you’re about, say, 6 or 7 hours too late for it. And the champagne! Oh, the absolute mindfulness of bubbles rising in your glass, your cunt, your stomach. Like a slow orgasm rolling its way up the sides of the flute (even that word speaks to God --- drinking out of a Flute for heaven’s sake!). Of this specific diet is no one thing, but many – preferably a combination of meat – the baser and dirtier the better- just like whores, you want the ones who know that a good debasing is a mass at St. Peter’s undone. Sausage, bacon, I like the back bacon – Irish or Canadian style. Thick and chewy, where you can taste every inch this animal struggled through, and his pain and grief at the death process, he is alive in you and oh does he bring you good tidings. Double smoked, applewood…you can’t fail with a start like this. If you did your head in the night or morning before, then this is the most surefire way to slap yourself in the ass and get going. As your own pace, of course. There should be butter, or jam (both is a wonderful thing to have together, on good crusty loaves of bread. Give your bacon something to bounce up from as it acrobats into the stars found just below your lungs, in the sky of your belly’s celestials. This should be done slowly, chewed, swallowed, engorged inside you. You need to know every moment of your life is coming together in the moments to come.

Eggs are optional – they fit or they don’t. I love a good scrambled egg, cooked in butter with chives, dill, maybe a little tomato or red onion if I’m feeling frisky and progressive. They can be another, more civilized layer to this breakfast of the daytime, creating colours and pastels in your fields at play. Also, a well made sunny side up (or down, as I prefer, I like poking it and seeing where it’ll leak, almost like reading tea leaves in the shady dealings of a gypsy- taking your money and not even giving you a good fuck. What’s the future worth like that? If you are a real zealot, I mean a foot soldier in the legion of Living – someone who knows that the light in someone’s eyes can annihilate you, or muffle your screams in their adeptness, that the mountains are all the walls of your body, the one we are now feeding, at the table, with the fork and spoon…someone who can see themselves, and the world for what it truly is. Devastating, inept and beautiful, and alive. Then, my dearie, will you know what you have gotten yourself into here, the bacon almost gone and the eggs and their maddening colours and textures making you cry. Also, there can be a trade off with the butter and jam, and the runny golden juice of the sunny sided egg. Your choice. I like an ample supply of bread to cover all three, sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. Now, the final gorge. If we were in Rome, it’d be time for the tickle of the feather, probably along with a few good slap and tickles, because when in Rome, do as the Romans do (especially when there is almost nothing that they won’t do)…you know, the good upheaval of the contents in your stomach. Most nowadays don’t go that way, and I only do when I’ve hit midnight too hard with brown liquors and forgotten to eat a meal. Myself, I keep it all in, a packed house for the opera and its ultimate climax. Something sweet and bready, pancakes, French toast (my favourite), waffles, anything that you can drown in terribly sugary chorus girls singing your body all the way home. This is the kind of meal you won’t need to supplement with snacking before you start up again for supper time.

Of course, I don’t even have to mention that the champagne is flowing through you like good biblical verse, Jesus coming into Jerusalem to be crucified, riding on an ass, green palms rattling in his terrified face. Bottles should come neatly, one after the next, with no cause of stopping until it’s a natural act having nothing to do with the supply. White wine, Lambrusco, sparkling rose, anything like this will do. You’ll have your choice of afternoon drinks later, long past the time you sleep all this madness off, and look your cunt in the eyes again, bellybutton first. Lastly, this ritual is only complete with a good, strong coffee or tea – black only, caffeine always, and don’t you know, always tipped with a little extra something. Be careful here. You don’t want to fall overboard from too heavy a pour of whiskey or brandy in your coffee, or in your pot of tea (always a pot, never just a cup. It’s bad luck, or so the gypsy told me before she fucked those sailors for free. Wonder if she saw them coming in her crystal ball). Savour this last piece of the pie, it will stay with you, allying you throughout your day, here on this earth, creating and destroying yourself, your gods, each other and the light inside the darkness hour after hour. There is always time for a surprise crucifixion and you, dear one, are now ready for it all. Old Testament and new, birth and death sacrament, tongues inside you and pricks making their way up your river Nile…the deed is done, the first one and now all the rest can follow.

Most importantly, make this breakfast last as long as you possibly can, preferably do it with people you love in one way or another (but by yourself has its place too, long as there is love, acceptance and a rough and ready desiring). Stand up from the table, and if you’ve the courage, recite some words which construct inside your esophagus, the sweet, the bubbles, the fallen beast, all mingling and creating a poem that God himself could not pen without this call to the sun to move his teetering ass across your sky, since you are already riding him from behind, belly up full of taste and fanaticism. Get up and shit it all out, and then make your way into the world. The sun’s not going anywhere just yet, and we still have supper to consider.

~ M. Lucia