So much has been written about this piece...where to begin? It holds a place in all our hearts, I'm sure, and its warm, buttery glow stands as a beacon for so many weary late-night diners.

To put it plainly, it's a lovely rendering of a vertical broiler. In the style, I think, of De Chirico. Another critic has termed it " Braque-influenced, or perhaps of some Eastern European provenance"
The bold stainless steel facets of the base are clearly cubist, but, I think, only to the extent that it can more forcefully assert its greatness to the common man. The taqueria patron, if you will. The column of meat echoes that stalwart smokestack in "The Anguish of Departure" and as in so many of De Chirico's paintings, the directional sunlight, here a beam of blue energy, that seems to be coming from a hole in the fluorescent overhead, casts long shadows of despair over all who venture into this nether-region of the taqueria. I'm not joking around here. Because I think that this vertical broiler, as majestic as it is, cannot help but symbolize the same things that are evoked in "Melancholy and Mystery of a Street"

Merely scanning and color correcting it has caused me to stop for a moment this evening and think about the sadness and anger that lives just beneath the reach of my introspection. It is there but I have no access to it. So it remains aloof, like this vertical broiler. It was easily within my grasp near this time one week ago. I was so very angry and the associative properties of my brain had been richly re-wired by so little sleep and so much alcohol. I was ready to write my great rant. My bitch session for all of us. I wanted to write something for the pissed off everyone. I felt like I had a handle on it. If only for a little while I knew what I had to say. I know that a great MOAN is being emitted from our society right now. But it is the noise of a body not in the full sway of its emotion. It is a clouded heart.

I told Rose all about it, ate pancakes at that diner on Market where the freeway goes overhead, and bought a brand new skateboard at DLX. After that, it was gone. I came home and watched TV. That's right. It was squandered. Shopped away.

I'm protecting myself now so I don't know if my anger will be provoked any time soon. I have no choice but to protect myself even though it means this anger lives on somewhere in my hippocampus, beyond my conscious mind and its therapeutic attempts. The anger needs to come out and we all need to let it out. I am forgetting what we've all forgotten before.