Thursday, February 19, 2009

What the Loser Eats for Breakfast

coffee toast eggs juice cottage cheese
Coffee, toast, eggs, juice, cottage cheese.
Being a Complete and Total Loser means your coworkers will be much younger than you are, and while the young know many good things, like how to get around paying ninety-nine cents for a song on the Internet, how to stretch earlobes, and where to buy cheap beer, they don't know how to eat breakfast. They think a doughnut and a cup of coffee passes for breakfast and that a granola bar or a bowl of cereal is a wholesome breakfast. By 11:30 in the morning they're ravenous and irritable, unable to focus on simple tasks.
The Loser knows how to eat breakfast. He always has, in fact, thanks mostly to his father, who spoke often of having a good "farm breakfast" despite being born in raised in a big city and never having a connection to a farmer save a grandfather he never met.
The beauty of breakfast is that it's not dinner, meaning that you can have the same breakfast every day for many years without being told you have no zest for life.
The Loser has flirted with other breakfastses. There was a Cream of Wheat phase after college, when the nickel-a-bowl dish filled his destitute stomach for hours. When he lived in China he'd have a piece of steamed bread and a hot cup of rice milk. In Japan, it was a bowl of rice with a raw, beaten egg poured into it, a small piece of dried fish and a piece of a pickled vegetable. Yum! Finally, there was the bagel craze of the 1990s. The only good thing the Loser remembers about that is that while he cut hundreds of bagels during that decade, he never once cut himself.
Here is what the Loser now eats for breakfast almost daily. It is the breakfast he would eat if he were to be shot at dawn and offered a last meal that morning, which would be kind of waste of food, if you think about it. The protein keeps him going and this breakfast is the reason why he schedules his lunches at work cheerfully for 1:30 p.m.:


1 egg Scrambled, fried, poached, boiled. Who cares? The Loser beats his, pours it in a small bowl he bought in Chinatown and nukes it for one minute. It turns out perfectly. The scares printed over the years about cholesterol and eggs have always been proved false and his level is fine. The Loser puts a generous dollop of spaghetti sauce on it, as tomato products are said to be good for his prostate gland, which is the size of a man's fist.


1 scoop of cottage cheese About a heaping tablespoon full of a fat free type. Dairy is said to ward off gout, which the Loser thinks of now that he's 50.


1 piece of toast Whole wheat, of course. Why would anyone eat white bread? Instead of butter, the Loser sprays his with one of those vegetable oil hand-pumped sprayers you can buy in supermarkets (Misto is the best one he's used). A woman he was seeing, sort of, a year ago thought this was crazy for some reason, even though he uses high-quality olive oil, the kind she would dip bread into in restaurants. The relationship didn't last long enough for him to ask her why she felt this way and it would seem even crazier if he were to ask her now.


1 glass of grapefruit juice The white kind, not ruby red. It stimulates his mature palette. The tang wakes him up. And you get more out of medications and vitamins you take when you wash it down with grapefruit juice.


1 cup of coffee Many won't drink coffee because of things they heard years ago about caffeine. They were overblown reports, long ago discredited, but they are now the perceived wisdom on it so they go the rest of their lives never having a decent cup of coffee. What is the point of decaf?

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