The Eye(s) Have it

The memory is a funny thing. Mine specifically, anyway. Its wrought with gaping holes. Names, dates, places, happenings--nothing is safe from the voracious fog that inhabits my memory banks. I have a theory about that--it's part misspent youth, part not paying a whole lot of attention, part self-absorption, and part life-long philosophy of not trying too hard to remember anything I can look up (there's only so much capacity in the cranium, you know?). Now, I'm not saying these are all equal parts of my memory malfunction. In fact, I'd prefer to just say I'm mnemonically challenged and leave it at that. There are things, though--episodes, escapades, events--that evoke deeply cherished remembrances.

One of those memories can arguably be called the foundation of this blog. In high school my buddies and I had a bit of a ritual. Now, I cannot tell you how often we did this (someone else would have to fill in that particular blank), but it was repeated enough throughout our four years that it seems we had elevated the practice to habit, if not obsession. Back then we'd pile into (usually) Steve's Chevy Impala right after school to cruise around and misspend some of that aforementioned youth. And when the munchies set in we'd head over to the only place that could sate our ravenous needs--Chili Willie's.

Chili Willie's wasn't even the name of the place. It wasn't really even a place. It was a plain white roadside catering truck parked--faithfully, daily-- in front of Highland Park that had a simple "chili dog" hand-painted on its side. This was the chili dog Mecca; the meat-sauce Taj Mahal. Chili Willie was just the moniker we stuck on the proprietor. I can see Willie now, a curmudgeonly cook decked out in a white t-shirt, his enormous gut protruding over his white painter pants. I'm sure that to any living creature inhabiting Willie's floor space, that overhanging anatomical feature was akin to a moving eclipse and he kept it in fine shape with a steady influx of Busch beer, which he kept stocked on ice in a cooler by the truck's doorway. But I digress.

Willie's franks were boiled and his buns were steam softened. Typical roadside fare. But what set his dogs apart was his meat sauce. It was a ridiculous fire-orange, almost neon in its coloration like nothing I had seen before or since. It was sans-beans, fine-grained and was absolutely nuclear as it tingled my taste buds and tickled my trachea, igniting a slow burn that I can still feel rising from my neck to the top of my head, beads of sweat appearing like a biological sprinkler system to extinguish the fire. Damn, it tasted (and hurt) so good!

And, therein, friends lies the basis of this web diary. I have been searching ever since for the chili dog of my youth, the holy grail of sauced franks, the perfect peppery prefabrication of bun, sausage, and chili-laced ground beef sauce. But it's not just wieners I'm after, uh uh! I've also been duly influenced in my youth by many of the other culinary post-chic (don't even know what that means) fares--fried clams, cheeseburgers, malts, onion rings, pizza, etc. Friends who've had the misfortune to watch me eat say they can tell when a morsel is particularly tasty because my left eye spasms like Elvis (circa 1956) singing "Hound Dog".

So, as my left eye and I hit the road indulging, imbibing, inhaling, and ingesting we'll fill you in on what we think is the best of the best (subject, to change of course). From time to time I'll even throw in some sundry selections on music, movies and other pop culture motivations (just to mix things up).

Namasté.