Randomonium

I like liverwurst. Deal with it, motherfuckers!

I was in West L.A. this morning to get my hair cut. I haven’t lived on the Westside for five years... but the guy knows my head, and I’m averse to forming new tonsorial relationships.

Anyway, whenever I go for a cut, I’ll pop over to Junior’s Delicatessen for a bite to eat. If I feel like lunch, as opposed to breakfast, I’ll get the liverwurst on rye. Sliced yellow onion, stone-ground mustard... bam, that’s a good sandwich. (Goes right nice with a cream soda.)

When I was a kid, my dad used to snack on what seemed like the grossest foodstuffs in America. Blue cheese. Pickled pigs feet. Souse. (Y’all hip to souse? Also called “head cheese.”)

Then there was kipper snacks – canned herrings that Daddy would mash up with mayonnaise and relish and spread over Ritz crackers. Oh, how he delighted himself with that crap.

And, yes, Daddy liked liverwurst, though he preferred to call it braunschweiger. Only since moving to L.A. and getting my deli on at Junior’s did I acquire a taste for it.

I’ve done the kipper-snacks thing too, I won’t lie. Maybe I’ll try to find me some souse... though it’s hard enough trying to find scrapple out here in So Cal. (In fact, I haven’t.)

I never felt close to my dad. We were so wide apart in age; he was 51 when I was born. It was like being raised by a grandparent. He grew up in the country. His sensibilities were shaped by the Great Depression.

He never understood why I would leave a good job at the Washington Post and try to write for television. By the time my first co-written episode was shown on TV, Daddy was blind. He couldn’t even see it.

By the time I created my own show, he was dead and buried.

I still dream about my dad. Quite frequently.