YOU WAKE UP UNDER a slowly rotating fan, the sweat pouring from your body onto the sheets of the bed you barely remember sleeping in. A tatty venetian blind casts narrow shadows across the room in sepia. One of The Doors’ songs, naturally, plays slowly, as you give a monologue describing your mental disintegration, and the progress of your terminal journey through another country’s trauma.

WHO DIDN’T TELL ME about this? Who neglected to mention the simple process, that could have delighted me so well in the years since I have been old enough to be trusted with a sharp knife and a hotplate? What horrible self-censorship stopped me ever doing this, and what shameful ignorance ever ruled the process out of bounds, non-decision, un-knowledge?

Take half an onion, chop it very finely, toss it in a teaspoon of flour, and fry it in lots of sunflower oil.

The recipe is that simple, if you want lovely crispy onions like burger places put on their hamburgers, like Indian places put on top of rice, like anybody would want an onion to turn into. The italics are mine for importance: this has been an honest-to-Protestant-American-come-to-Jesus-moment-cliché revelation. Open palms in the air, dancing, call-and-response, Billy Graham with fried food, genuine hallelujah-and-pass-the-chicken-salt stuff.

Put it all over your messy-as-hell omelette. Yeeeeahhhhh.

DIFFERENT RULES FOR DIFFERENT times of day are symptoms of a subtle tyranny. Humans have always obeyed the sunlight, getting up and going to sleep with the light, but it’s the modern city of workplaces and—and, though it’s a subject for another time, public transport—that has forced us all under the oppressive rule of the clock. Up in the morning and out to school as the song goes, we’re creatures of punctuality, routine, and the habitual regimen of the time-of-day, more self-disciplined to the hour than Medieval monks ever were. Even the most notoriously time-bound workplaces of all, the watches of sailors on board ships in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were enforced by relentless explicit violence and compulsory drug abuse. Like proper post-Foucauldians on board the Inner West Line train to work, we get the discipline without the fun.

‘HOW DO YOU MAKE such nice toasted cheese sandwiches?’ my assistant asked me.
‘Emmental’, I replied.

HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES writers and researchers, a great secret is being kept from you. You know about C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures, and you’ve probably encountered scientific and technical types on the Internet, recognising them by their ferocious militant atheism, their communication through image macro memes, and their irrational fondness for light rail projects. When you sigh, minimise your web browser and get back to work in MS Word, though, their laughs are on you: it’s a horrible platform for writing, a worse one for presenting lengthy text, and there’s a much better alternative.

DESCARTES GAVE THE WORLD a philosophical distinction between material and mental, a sharp break between the body and mind. He was hardly the first to make an artificial dialectic to justify other stances, but because Enlightenment idealists liked to attach the names of Great Fellows to Great Ideas, we’ve been talking about Cartesian duality ever since. Flesh and spirit. Matter and mentality. The apparent world of measurable, objective reality and the immanent world of subjectivity.

If you, reader, are reaching for the safety catch on your Browning at the gross oversimplification of three hundred years of Western philosophy I’ve just committed, I am sorry. Because sometimes vulgarisation of a philosophy is a helpful approach to answering the important questions in life, like: “Where am I?” and “What the hell did I just eat?”

EVERY CULTURE HAS RECIPES where everyone gets to be an expert. They’re the ones where there’s no particular recipe, but you kind of know what to expect, and where the whole exercise in cooking becomes a self-reinforcing cliché. Clemenza’s meatballs in The Godfather are are the perfect example; the roly-poly gangster gives a cute little New York Italian lecture on criminal patriarchy, he sugars the chopped meat, then they go and kill some people. It’s culture, self-representation and wrapped in a fork-sized meat ball!

GLUTTONY, AS ONE OF THE main canonical Sins, is pretty encompassing. There’s a lot to it and if you want to do it properly, it needs hard work. It’s not quite like Lust or Wrath which you can get done in a morning, or—so I’m told, if you’re into that kind of thing—have them together, bash out a couple of hundred thousand words and publish the results as an erotic fan fiction bestseller. No, to be a Glutton one has to put in the hard yards.

WHEN MURDOCH PAPERS ARE MENTIONED in class its always with an undertone of sarcasm. I don’t understand why. After all, my mum works for The Australian and she likes her job.

Pity poor Max Maddison, first year journalism student, whipping boy of the week for everybody like me in Australia who disdains not just the Murdoch press institution but the entire sordid establishment of our media. If I have a hobbyhorse I like to ride, then at least I know there are many more like me: we are an angry, sarcastic cavalry of dissatisfaction.

Lift off: a Titan-Centaur rocket (NASA)

ON THE 20 AUGUST IN 1977 an ugly rocket drew a smoky curved line in the sky, starting as a noisy flash at the launchpad at Cape Canaveral into a blink somewhere out to sea, off and out into the solar system for Science. “Ugly” is a kind word for it; a Centaur-Titan combination looks, sadly, like nothing else than the kind of phallic symbol you see chiselled into toilet doors all over the world. Take one big liquid-fuelled rocket designed to lob bombs across the Arctic (the Titan stage), strap two generic solid-fuel boosters onto the sides to get it off the ground in the first place, then onto the top add another big rocket to speed a robot up to escape velocity (the Centaur stage). It’s the kind of rocket that you set off underneath the ugly tree, expecting it to hit every branch on the way up. If Moe Syzlak were a rocket engineer, this would have been the lets-strap-together-a-bunch-of-rockets-to-make-one-big-rocket rocket he’d have come up with.