The FSTR

While watching an episode of Jeopardy! the other night, maddeningly bored by the current champion’s dominance, I held my salad bowl in my left hand. There was another dish on my placemat and, coupled with turning to my right to watch the television, holding my bowl aloft has become essential. As Amy, the transgender winner who has the appearance of a one-off South Park character, successfully responded in the form of a question yet again, it went down.

“AH, FUCK!” I yelled out.

“What happened?!” my mother asked in a predictable panic.

I could’ve told her that a fork was stuck in my thigh, or I’d poured coffee on my groin, but it wasn’t that severe.

“I dropped my salad,” I informed her. “Now it’s a floor salad.”

She laughed and offered help, which I gladly accepted. Part of the reason I spilled spinach, arugula, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, chickpeas, mint, and parsley on the tile was because I’d smoked marijuana minutes earlier. My mother had inhaled too, but she wisely uses an Invalid Station—my nickname for the tray table positioned in front of her spot on the couch—to avoid similar mishaps.

“It’s not too bad,” she said while surveying the scene. Then she pulled the trashcan away from the wall.

“Guess I missed that part,” I said while tossing a handful of tainted garbanzo beans back in my bowl.

“You’re gonna eat your floor salad?”

“Yeah. The floor’s pretty clean, right?”

“I haven’t washed it since last week. Bet you’ll be picking out plenty of hair.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Right, right, right,” she jokingly said as the evidence was returned to where it originally sat as pre-evidence.

“Or maybe a tomato got stuck in the radiator,” I suggested. “Whole house burns down due to a floor salad tomato radiator.”

And just like that—no apologies for stealing the title of the godawful Sex and the City reboot—I’d discovered the true evidence. Of what? If you shot a lazerbeam through a sandwich, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that the result might be a floor salad tomato radiator?

I envisioned the broiled greens and tomatoes, smoke from the flames dancing throughout the kitchen, and began to wonder if I’d found the title of my next book. Planning to title it Portmanteaujam—which currently serves as the name of the Bose speaker I use when streaming music via Amazon—maybe I’d unearthed its essence: the smoldering remains.

No, I haven’t written a word of my next book, nor do I plan to any time soon. The Mead notebook containing all of my essay ideas sits closed on the basement coffee table where I wrote the LBS. Gabe the Otter and my thesaurus rest in the place I left them upon finishing edits of “The Outlet,” the final piece written for what’s now known as Floor Salad Tomato Radiator, Part I: LBS Edition. There’s also the option to release the audiobook—my buddy Connor told me that the files I gave him nearly a year ago, which he reviewed last week, are too muffled and will need to be re-recorded—with an updated moniker for marketing purposes, not unlike deluxe reissues of classic albums. Brace yourself, Brain Salad Surgery!

While many listeners will be floored by Connor’s production choices, unaware that my monotonous drone could be polished to sound like Steely Dan’s Aja, it’ll be the ambient sounds that truly stir the soul. Light crinkling bits of iceberg lettuce, a bell pepper being subtly sliced on a carving board, and the kicker, a handsomely plump heirloom splatting against a tiny furnace. As the final paragraphs about Augusta National Golf Club bring you aural pleasure, it won’t be the sounds of a babbling brook or singing chickadee native to the grounds that you’ll hear, but a Bic lighter roasting a bottle of Newman’s Own balsamic vinaigrette.

“What is a frontier?” Amy had accurately written to win an additional twenty-five grand during Final Jeopardy!Meanwhile, I was deciding if the shaved remains of a rogue mouse’s goatee decorating the bowl made me want to continue irrationally chasing my daily fiber allotment.

Images of a poncho-sporting fisherman in a harbor holding a jar of Welch’s grape jam while viewing a bunch of bobbing big toes surrounding his boat flashed in my head. Portmanteaujam vs. Floor Salad Tomato Radiatorwouldn’t headline the next UFC pay-per-view or upcoming Supreme Court docket, but it would provide the standoff necessary to challenge my imagination during another THC-drenched night.

“What is ‘Hair’s to you, FSTR’?”

“Correct,” Ken Jennings responded before adding one of his customary witty observations. “Looks yummy but who shaved his pubes in the kitchen?” 

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