Beware! Your Teflon pans can kill you, kill you dead. While you lie asleep in your bed at night, your Teflon pans are plotting your demise. So sleep with one eye open, because the Teflon pans in your kitchen are waiting for just the right moment to slink into your bedroom, pull back the covers and turn you into worm food. Swiss cheese. Yesterday's news.

(I've always secretly wondered: if I was to be brutally murdered by my nonstick cookware or other nefarious entity, would the New York Post refer to me as "Brooklyn Beauty" or just "Brooklyn Woman"? I'd better leave a few soft-focus yearbook photos around to facilitate the desired outcome.)

It's not the Teflon that can kill you. Teflon is inert. It's the incredibly strong glue they have to use to get the Teflon to stick to the pan. Teflon, you see, won't stick to anything--it's Teflon. DuPont manufactured it that way for us, just as they once manufactured plutonimum for the atomic bomb. How, then, to make Teflon stick to the pan? DuPont solved this problem by thoughtfully creating Teflon's deadly accomplice, the incredibly strong glue. Just like the light side and the dark side of the Force, the pull of the dark side is strong, but not always stronger. The incredibly strong glue can flake off into your food, just as the hazardous waste from DuPont's plants often leaks into the local groundwater. And then you eat it and it kills you dead. Even if you make tofu cutlets in your flaking nonstick pan, your days are numbered. You may not even use up that entire bottle of tamari before you find yourself lying in a cold, early grave.

So we went to Bed, Bath & Beyond and bought some new pots and pans. Actually, Rebecca bought her share of the new pans. Rebecca is the kind of freak who goes to a store, buys the most inexpensive version of what she needs and happily uses it. She seems to have no preconceived notions of what the perfect object would be, no nagging memories of a pot she saw once that she knew was the absolute best pot in which to saute kale. I, on the other hand, always have a specific idea of whatever it is I need. I don't just want any galoshes, I want the kind you get in Costa Rica, not the knee-high, not the ankle-high, the ones in between knee- and ankle-high. I don't just want an N3-B parka, I want the one with removeable fur, and not white removeable fur, gray removeable fur. I even prefer certain covers on certain editions of books in paperback to other covers. Sometimes the ideal version of whatever I object I have in mind exists only in my mind. I want boots I've never seen on any foot or shelf, boots that I simply dreamt. Plato had this idea that each object in the real, physical world is somehow related to a hypothetical ideal version. A perfect table that is the model for all actual tables, a perfect iPod that is the model for all actual iPods. (Or whatever Plato used to store his mp3s.) And so, I don't just want a stainless steel frying pan, I want the sort of stainless steel frying pan with the glass lid I saw my friend Adriana saute the most delicious kale I ever ate in a year ago, but not exactly that frying pan, but the frying pan that is the perfection of the memory of that frying pan, the frying pan that will bring back the feeling of knowing I am about to eat delicious kale.

I do realize that this is an extreme form of coveting, but I argue that it's healthy, since the coveting can be satisfied. The Buddhists say that desire is suffering. But desire is not suffering if you can resolve it on eBay for less than $100. In the novel Lolita, Nabokov explains Humbert Humbert's coveting of prepubescent girls as related to the loss of a love object early in life. eBay's television commercials have been most Zen-tastically advertising that "whatever IT is, you can find it on eBay." The universality of the "IT" implies that eBay, like Nabokov, is aware that we are all searching for the undefinable lost.

At Bed, Bath and Beyond I fell in love with this one fairly affordable quasi-professional pan, promptly found out it was part of a 13-piece set (which was a little like finding out someone you've fallen instantly and totally in love with is married) and that it used to be, but no longer is, sold individually. I spent the rest of the weekend on eBay trying to buy it from people in the Midwest who had accidentally received two of these pans as Christmas gifts.

Some guy named pureallspice is selling these pans. Pureallspice is making me crazier than any dysfunctional relationship I've ever been in. I am trying to survive here, trying to eke out a few more cancer-free years on this planet, and fucking pureallspice giveth and then he taketh away and then he giveth again--maybe. Pureallspice is selling one of these pans. I am the high bidder for two days. At the last moment, detroittigersfan snipes me. So I snipe him. So he snipes me back. Then detroittigersfan doesn't buy the pan. I get emails. The pan is back on the market. If I email pureallspice within 24 hours, I can buy the pan for my last high bid. No I can't. It's too late. But pureallspice is selling another pan. I can "just buy it now" for $74.99, or I can bid on the auctioned pan and hope to get it for something closer to $50. Pureallspice is auctioning off three more of these pans. What did you do, Pureallspice, rob a Calphalon delivery truck in 2002? Pureallspice of Duluth, MN holds the key to my longevity and health, but so far, I do not have this Calphalon Triply Stainless Steel 3 Quart Saute Pan, and so I hover between life and death. The Teflon has all been left in the buildings communal swapping ground (lobby) for someone feeling luckier than I to fry his eggs in, and I am here, watching My eBay.

Not just eBay. My eBay. eBay is all about watching. You "watch items." You look at images and supersize images. How bizarre, I thought, as I bid on my original Calphalon Triply Stainless Steel 3 Quart Saute Pan. Here is a very large digital photograph not just of the Calphalon Triply Stainless Steel 3 Quart Saute Pan, but the very box that this particular pan now sits in in pureallspice's house in Duluth, MN. I can see the wrinkles in the packing tape on the edges of this box. And if I win this auction and successfully snipe detroittigersfan (or his successor), this very box containing this very pan will be mailed to me from the very house where this photograph was taken, where they have what I can see in the edge of the photograph is beige wall-to-wall carpeting. This pan that has lived, promises pureallspice, COMPLETELY SEALED in this box for several years will be mine, and I will saute kale in it, kale that will hopefully prevent the cancer that the flaking Teflon was supposedly encouraging.

Is this the life I'm avoiding Teflon to preserve?

If you enjoy poetry other than haikus, some really great poems are here. Rachel Schiff writes them.

Rachel turned 25 this month. Here is a poem just for her.

by Gregory Corso
from Gasoline
1958

I AM 25

With a love a madness for Shelley
Chatterton Rimbaud
and the needy-yap of my youth
has gone from ear to ear:
I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:--I did those then
but that was then--
O I would quiet old men
say to them:--I am your friend
what you once were, thru me
you'll be again--
Then at night in the confidence of their homes
rip out their apology-tongues
and steal their poems.

Happy Birthday, Rachel. You are 25.

Let's pretend there never was such a long hiatus between posts, that no one came to this non-place in non-space and found it suspended, paused, frozen like a sluggish laptop with too little RAM, rasping that sad little death rattle as it tries to process data, to process images, pop-up windows, as it copes with the accidental simultaneous opening of Word, Excel and Photoshop, groans underneath the weight of all those zeroes and ones, as the pre-Intel chip splinters into a million pieces and the gerbil collapses on his wheel in a handful of inert fur and you say "Fuck, fuck, FUCK" and click and pound and punch, like a doctor on a medical drama desperately giving CPR to a character you've only been introduced to in this episode, not even a special guest star but someone you vaguely recognize as having played the husband of the woman who was killed on the legal show and the paramedic from the other medical drama, the doctor is pressing on his chest and pumping with his locked arms and laced hands in that grotesquely sexual rhythm, his eyes wide with determination and disbelief and horror and effort, but the machine is beeping one long beep and the camera is cutting between the expressive eyes of the nurses, flitting back and forth above the white squares of their surgical masks as they quietly accept the death of this not even special guest star, but the doctor does not accept it, he is locked in his daily battle with mortality, and you see how doctors, as rendered by this actor, who himself you recognize from eighties movies and television shows, you recognize from Top Gun, you recognize from The Facts of Life, your recognize from Fast Times At Ridgemont High (the high school students and handymen and even the dead fighter pilots of the eighties have grown up to be doctors; their fictional mothers are proud), how doctors who have the mettle to battle mortality on a daily basis do not so readily accept it, but the long flat beep will not stop, it will not interrupt itself with the regular peaks and valleys, beeps and silences that even we lay viewers at home know mean we are alive, it is going BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP and we have charged the paddles to two hundred, we have charged the paddles to three hundred, we have shocked the not even special guest star and his body has gone rigid and limp on the table, but to no avail, and now all there is is the long BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP and what has become the mechanical, muttered "c'mon" of the former supporting actor from eighties movies, the true test of his acting skill being whether he can deliver this "c'mon" with just the right concoction of gruffness and desperation, "c'mon, c'mon" because maybe this is not just any patient, but a patient this doctor has promised he will save, because the power of life is his to give and take, and the desire to wield this power and the crushing responsibility of wielding it and the continual realization that it is not a power he holds alone or completely is what gives this medical drama its emotional gravitas, because he is a complex man who lives to work but is also capable of crazed, passionate moments that hint at the carefully--but not necessarily deeply--hidden well of molten lava-like emotion that stews in this doctor's very own beating, beeping heart, because of this all-too-divinely human mess that is the doctor's own insides and the unwillingness of this living mass of tissue, the fighting spirit of this electrified meat that this actor playing this doctor has transmitted to us through the sheen of his makeup and the shouting of the commercials, because it is not going to accept death, not today, not on my table, as the calmest and yet somehow most complicated nurse goes to switch off the machine that is going BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP and the other doctor who maybe this doctor is fucking, a venue in which we see just how passionate and fiery are his lava-like emotions and sometimes just how smooth and firm are his still less well-hidden buttocks, she is putting her gloved hand gently on his gowned arm, and she is murmuring his name, trying to break his trance, and he is pumping the not even special guest's star's chest with a little less regularity and force, he is beginning to realize that the not even special guest star is lost, and we know watching at home that medical drama has advanced in realism to the point where it is altogether possible that he will be lost, the emotional stakes of medical drama now include the possibility that we might attach to a not even special guest star in the first half of the show, come to identify with his plight and admire his pluckiness in the face of death, and he might die today, on the table, and now the doctor is giving up, he stands still, he looks numb, he looks up at the stainless steel clock to do what we know from watching medical dramas is "call it," because it is his responsibility to "call it," and we expect him to say, in his broken, hollow voice, "Time of Death twelve-forty-one PM" and rip off his gloves and storm out of the room to collect himself and tell the family of the not even special guest star that he is dead, an event that may be shot through the window, from the p.o.v. of one of the nurses or the doctor this doctor is fucking, so we cannot hear, only see the other not even special guest stars playing the family of the dead not even special guest star cry out silently in anguish, or perhaps it will be shot through the window but the anguished outcry of the wife/child/mother of the not even special guest star who has just died on the table will be the only thing we can hear, albeit muted and distant, but just as he is about to "call it" the doctor once again does not give in, does not accept the death of this not even special guest star, and he cocks his arm back as if he is holding a hammer and pounds with one fist on the chest of the dead man, not so much a medical maneuver as a gesture of frustration and violence, and this blow makes a fleshy, thumping sound, a sound that comes to rest at the same time as the preverbal grunt of the doctor that accompanied the enormous physical effort of raising his CPR-fatigued, adrenaline-filled arm and striking his patient on the chest, and these sounds are followed by a split-second of silence, and then by the sound of the beeps resuming on the beeping machine, which everyone in the room looks up at in disbelief and one of them states obviously, joyously, "we have a rhythm," and the not even special guest star lives.

Let us pretend that instead of this unnevering pause between beeps, this inconvenient suspension in service, there were instead haiku every day.

Everything I love
Gets destroyed--glasses, t-shirts
My Grandma Betty

Hope it isn't all
the drugs I've done causing my
anxiety attacks

last night i wrote for
fourteen hours straight tonight
i am so useless

i smell rain outside
i need to go away where
there is grass and trees

Why are we alone?
We hate everyone and most
people don't like us

injured from yoga
i whine but no one is here
to come to my aid

Can't control iPod
with my mind; overwhelmed by
choices, I shuffle

drunk and high watching
Lebowski special features
in my underwear

The commuters with
their extra shoes, reading self-
help books on the train

We all know SuperLefty hates holidays.

On my way home from the subway tonight, a hipster approached me on a bike. A nature hipster. Weather-appropriate wilderness gear, attractive crow's feet from time spent snowboarding or windsurfing or some such thing. "Hey," she said, "Is there an AA meeting somewhere around here?" Rather than stop her bike while she waited for my answer, she rode in a tight circle. A playful and carefree nature hipster and recovering alcoholic.

"I don't know," I replied, thinking happily of the cold, cold gin in my freezer, the clink of ice cubes in the cocktail shaker, the sound of them gently cracking as I poured in the room-temperature vermouth, swirled it around, poured it out--

"There's a lot of churches," I said, trying to helpful. Helping lost citizens is one of my favorite activities. The further away they hail from and the more insurmountable the language barrier, the better. "Where are you supposed to go?"

She named an intersection a block away. "Well, you're here," I told her. "There's a Baptist church on the next block, but it's not on the corner. So maybe that's it."

"Oh, it must be!" She thanked me and rode off.

I've had two fine encounters with twelve-step programs. The first occured when I was a college freshman and volunteered to staff the college Women's Center one night a week. This was back when I thought feminism was a cool new thing, before I realized that what was actually oppressing me was thinking about being a woman all the time. Staffing at the Women's Center later came in handy when I stole their copy of Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York for a term paper in a class called "Mothers and Daughters in Jewish Tradition and Culture.

The Women's Center rented out space to a weekly Narcotics Anonymous meeting. This meeting happened to coincide with my staffing slot. So instead of doing whatever it was I expected to do at the Women's Center (record who borrowed this month's copy of Ms., hand out pamphlets on date rape, sign people up for the all-female nude life drawing class) I helped recovering drug addicts gather art supplies to make get well cards for whichever member of their group had relapsed that week. The leader of the group was a manic and adorable gay man who would unsolicitedly tell me the latest NA gossip during the cigarette break. "Our treasurer just OD'd and now he's in the hospital. He wiped out our entire treasury to buy drugs, but we're just glad he's alive, you know?"

I liked the recovering drug addicts. They were more fun than the feminists.

Shortly after I got out of college I was walking in the West Village when I saw what appeared to be a fabulous street party. Attractive, interesting looking people were lounging on the stone steps of a church known for its politically stimulating events and concerts, smoking. The men were sexy--a little lost, a little bruised, more than a little odd. Just how I liked them then, and like them now. "What's going on here?" I asked one of them.

"This? This is an AA meeting."