Where to eat in Kingman didn’t seem like a big decision except for finding a place still serving breakfast at noon. One of the choices was the Black Bear Diner. I thought it might be a step up from Denny’s, but this cafe had given up on herself. I saw it in the waitress’s eyes, hopelessness. They were giving her free food at the end of her shifts and she was in too deep, now, to get out.
Nothing makes cheap food so unappealing as piling it on. Typically it’s potatoes or bread but I had the grits. In my mind’s eyes the cornmeal was the base for a dish, maybe some salt or butter added in. No. It was a big soup bowl of cooling porridge, lumpy and unburdened by imagination. I had an omelette because how can you f.u. eggs? Remember in the detective story how the poison was invisible because it was so common it went unnoticed?
“How was it administered, Inspector?
“It was in the oil.”
There is something spiritually uplifting about a meal which detaches from mediocrity and rises to parody. Camaraderie is made of this. How uplifting to share a cascade of jokes about the food, the numbness of the staff, and the cook’s courageous exploration of the grim reality behind cuisine.
Isn’t it funny how a business can commit suicide by making itself ridiculous with cheap ingredients? Colbert makes fun of Taco Bell, Jon Stewart dissed Arby’s, and my low benchmark is Black Bear. Of course the one in Kingman might be especially bad and others might be okay, it’s not a review, it’s elevating a bad experience into a good one by making it funny.
We were taking the Mini Cooper Roadster on a road trip from Prescott, Arizona, to San Francisco. Now there’s a car here and I can fly in and visit my friends north and east. In the city it’s easy to park, and fun to drive. I do wonder if I’m going to be still driving it when I’m eighty, and whether one day I’ll get stuck in it, not able to climb out, and will have to call for a discrete extraction.
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