Potato Chips and Tuna Salad

The other night, busy doing a whole lot of nothing, I took a break from Googling reviews of my latest album and decided to whip up a snack of potato chips and tuna salad.  Mind you, I did not make a tuna salad sandwich to accompany with potato chips.  Nor did I make some dainty fork version of tuna salad to enjoy with a polite portion of potato chips. Rather I whipped up a mayo laden monstrosity filled to the brim with cheap dill pickles which I then heaped upon ridged Ruffles like some sort of pescatarian white trash queso and devoured by the scoopful. Scarfing my unusual take on trailer park soul food, it struck me, my approach to culinary creativity is much like my approach to songcraft.

Start with something basic. Carnal even. Add a little twist. Nothing too fancy. Nor precious. No raised pinkies. But do that boogaloo a little different than it might have been done before. Keep it satisfyingly salty. Yet color outside the lines with a sufficiently disorienting dash of audacity..

It’s not a recipe I necessarily recommend for anyone else. It won’t make the cut for publication in Bon Appetit. Or even the web version of Better Homes & Gardens. And certainly not the radio equivalent of either. But it’s my own. And it feeds the cosmic void within me enough to silence all the Nietzchian ghosts at least for a while. The pop culture tastemakers may never be able to stomach it. But with a world population of beyond a few billion, I believe there are enough other weirdos out there who are exactly my kind of weirdo, wired with similar quotients of pain and eccentricity, that it’s still worth sharing.

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