wilcox, arizona, pt. 2

on the long-haul drive from coachella to houston we stopped over at a motel in wilcox, arizona. bedraggled but spirited, the sun was shining, and we were delighted to discover that we were early enough to catch the complementary breakfast, served in a complementary room by a complementary woman overlooking the complementary unheated pool. delight quickly tturned to despair, of course, which just goes to show that there's no such thing as a free compliment: this place completely stunk.

approaching it pragmatically, there's no way to survive an american breakfast without first loading up on oatmeal. it's the only thing at the buffet that won't immediately shorten your lifespan or at least leave you bleeding out of your arse the next day. everything else is fried, and dried, and will make your waist... wide. donuts--really? for breakfast? not to mention the triple-dipped bacon rind. but oatmeal: enough to line the walls of even the most harrowed belly. i admire how brutally simple it is: mixed with water, with the sugar and fruit optional. even on the hardiest of blighty's mornings i've always made porridge with some milk.

this technique is similar to preceding a big mac with a a couple of hash browns and five packets of preserved apple slices, i.e. exceptionally effective but impossibly unappealing.

so, how would you like your eggs? oh, i'll have them hot, wet, and oh-so-lonesome please.

there's no two ways about it: these eggs looked like the swollen face of an albino clown. and, no, that's not a good look--at least not for eggs. well, that wasn't my choice; i asked for "regurgitated."

whose face is that? i feel sorry for the bugger. no, actually, it just looks like scrambled egg. but the presentation isn't exactly confidence-boosting. i imagine the sound of these hitting the plate in an otherwise empty kitchen to have been something like a reverberated "plop."

eggs are eggs are eggs, right. the staple of american civillisation, and nigh on impossible to fuck up, despite how badly they and their mother hens are treated. right! wrong. cook them in cheap margerine, and they taste like death: a death caused by overconsumption, most likely, of cheap margerine. and that isn't a good taste. i had two mouthfuls and hit a wall, greasily.

i wonder why.


the eggs at seattle-tacoma's best western at the beginning of this tour were actually a lot worse. they hadn't been scrambled; they'd been stirred, and then sort of... baked. imagine one of those big bath sponges, but imagine it made entirely of egg, quadrupled in size, heated up to around 80 degrees, and left sitting around for three hours. then, if you choose to adopt the persona of the hotel staff briefly, invite your guests to scoop spoonfuls of it onto their plate. remarkably, they actually charged money for the stuff.

back to wilcox. this might speak for itself:

on the plus side, the coffee was hot, if not necessarily "coffee", and there were some yoghurts hanging out suggestively. there was, eventually, nothing for it but to go for a walk. and so i present here a journey through wilcox.

yeah.

*what's the deal with fat-free, intensely sugary yoghurt, especially in a place like this? of all the foods to strip of its most flavoursome ingredient, why pick on the poor innocent yoghurt? i can think of more worthy targets--like, say, everything