Nobody Likes an American

So I’m up here in Brisbane , minding my own business and what do I find walking through the Myers shopping Centre on a Friday night? Sunshine Kebabs! Bless the Queen there it was! After calming myself down, taking a deep breath, and counting to 10, I approached the nice Asian fellow at the counter and through a gushing grin asked him for a mixed kebab with sour cream and hot chili sauce. Now before you get too excited I’m going to jump to the disappointing part, it wasn’t very good. I am not sure if its Queensland ’s warm weather or high population of Asians, but this Sunshine Kebabs missed the mark. I am going to email the company and propose to them the idea of sending the *Kebab Nazi in St Kilda to the various SK’s around to show them the proper way to make a kebab. Allowing the customer to decide what they want is the first thing he needs to disband. In Brisbane all the kebabs are pressed in a heating press making them hot and toasty. That may sound yummy to you but it killed the freshness to me. They put too much meat from their vertical rotating meat cookers as well which dominates the taste causing you to walk away feeling like a carnivorous freak. I took it on myself to give Brisbane ’s kebab industry the benefit of the doubt. After a week of digesting the 2 pounds of lamb and chicken flesh I consumed that afternoon another Friday rolled around and at lunch time I hit the streets in search for the perfect kebab.  Enter “Kebabs: The Magical Roll”, which is located in a food court off Elizabeth street. A magical kebab? Sign me up! Well it was better then the Sunshine Kebab because it had a little less meat, but still was not very good. Again, hot pressed in an iron. Later that night I took a walk around South Bank, which is a very nice restaurant, shopping, arts, and picnic area along the river. Well, I hadn’t yet fully digested my lunch kebab but there in front of me was another kebabery called Southbank Kebabs. Another friendly Asian girl was there to take my now less enthusiastic order. This kebab was the worst yet. So much meat! Too much meat! I ate the whole thing however and paid for it. I walked around the outdoor marked that is held every Friday night sweating out pork and lamb through my pores. Let me tell you all that I love Asians. LOVE them. BUT I have to apply a lesson I learned first hand in America, that if you want good Mexican food, get it made by Mexicans. When the moon is full and the uncontrollable urge comes for a kebab, heed my advice. Get it done by a Middle Easterner. And if you’re in St Kilda, stop by Sunshine Kebab’s on Fitzroy Street and say hello to my bearded friend.

*The picture in this image is not an actual kebab I ate. This one actually looks increadibly good. For the kebabs I was refering to, take away anything non meat and replace with….well meat.

Those that know me know that I am someone who paces back and forth even when it is in the comfortable settings of your dining room or kitchen. (I love the remodel you’ve done by the way) I find that when you first visit a new city things are fresh and new. Each people and person you pass on the street is someone you capture with the photographic Polaroid camera in your impressionable foreign mind and sometimes out of complete speculation or possibly utter boredom you scrawl on the back of the celluloid picture of your imagination the hypothetical thoughts, passions and stories that your mind will paint on the limited or unlimited imaginative canvas that your mind allows of the people you momentarily rub figurative shoulders with around you. This new and idealistic view I’ve had whilst travelling can at times change however when I suddenly find myself, not as the smiling adventure seeking passerbyer I had first enjoyed being, but simply a hunched, bland, grey coloured, saddle bag growing businessman that advances from airport, taxi, hotel, work, pub, hotel, taxi, then airport pub, then taxi again and so on and so forth.

I have found in these few desperate visits to the travelling corporate doldrums, that I go from buff, hotel gym, outgoing ambitions to late night Hungry Jack (the name the Burger King company took in Australia because a Sydney restaurant already had the name) binges for the sheer sake of tasting processed American style fast food that is followed by a pint or two of Kilkenny at an Irish pub down the street. This is me feeling fat and tired. Perhaps the combination of insomnia and indecision is now being complemented by me being homesick ( Melbourne that is) and exhausted. Tonight I walked around the CBD (Central Business District) in bored silence. I sat and stared at my Sapporo by the non appetising rotating sushi plates that twirled around me in what was supposed to be known as one of Brisbane’s top sushi parlours while two other business men in suits sat to my right and left doing the very same. The only human contact we had was when after a long silence I asked the man to my left if I could borrow his soy sauce. He sprung up surprised at the sudden attention shown to him and awkwardly made the transition back from a suited android to a human being and passed me, to my dismay, the red bottle that had the the higher sodium. Damn that sodium. It’s kryptonic poison to us businessmen everywhere.

Friday night I went to a dinner party at my friend Aiddon’s place where we were entertained by fine wine, spicy curry, and the never ending and always brilliant antics of Aiddon himself. He’s a fiery guy, both in personality and hair colour, who will walk into an empty McDonalds late at night and announce to the staff in a completely over the top, ridiculous, and pompous English accent (even making gross large teethed, puckering, then sucking expressions with his mouth) that they are all working very hard and deserve to have a song sung to them. He will then, in the calm pose and demeanour of a shakespearean actor, close his eyes, look down with his chin on his fist, and break full volume into the song “Anthem” from the musical Chess. He is the same guy that will phone the SunCorp insurance help desk and in the same accent ask them if they will insure the buttons on his shirt should anything happen to them. Comedic genius in my book and one of my favourite people I’ve stumbled on in my travels.

I have been tactful with my pad and paper, taking notes throughout various cities in my limited travels throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, England, and Australia. The results have been more or less the same. Lately, I have observed several incidences of this epidemic. Last night I was out doing research and I had the fortune to have a case study unfold right before my eyes. There was an Australian and a Malaysian male and female sitting in front of me on the train here in Brisbane only a few centimeters in front of my knee caps. These two succumbed to this strange disorder and were uncontrollably forced to fall into each others arms. I sat, observed, and after some soft talking and eye contact they fell into an unpredictable pattern of what I am now labeling as “Uncontrolled Fibromagneticsism”.

The most difficult part of when two people fall under this disorder is the fact that others are unable to control their eyesight. I myself have trouble knowing where to look and have found that my eyes are often forced to look down at my hands. I have observed this with people around me as well. When an outbreak occurs of this sort of Fibromagneticsism (Latin: basium morbus), the person or persons around them are physically unable to look at them while they are performing this uncontrollable act. It happened again tonight as I went into the Queens Street Mall and ate at Joe Joe’s in the CBD. I ordered my steak and my Beck’s schooner and sat at a table I thought would be comfortable and discrete. I think there is a possibility that a cook, disgruntled employee, or someone of low moral character put something in the food, because the attractive young male and female who sat down in front of me started to imitate the same behavior that the people on the train did and with the same results.

There is a disease out there. People at random become enflamed in a terrestrial pull that causes them to lose all social reasoning. It causes people to forget that others are in front or around them. It’s called Fibromagneticsism. People need to be told. People need to be warned. Spread the message everyone. With knowledge there is hope.