So here I am unwrapping the dreaded ‘glad-wrap’ plastic to seal over a plate of food that I will perhaps reheat the next day….and I’m in kind of a hurry. When you are cooking for just one, you’re always in a hurry to get your cooking done and with the minimum amount of energy expended. So ideally you want to prepare enough to get the most out of slaving over a frickin’ stove for just one person – that being me, myself and I. So instead of peeling 2 potatoes I’ll peel 4. Instead of boiling just 1 cup of vegetables, I’ll boil 2. Why? So I can reheat the additional tatoes and veges the next day and then I only have to cook the obligatory meat.
And see, da-da!…..

So that’s next day taken care of. Phew!
Do I care how reheated mashed potatoes taste the next day? You guessed right. I don’t give a frog’s fat arse.
Now it could be presumed that I have this process  mastered or to put an Aussie spin on it – ‘down-pat’.
Well not quite.
Unrolling glad wrap to the specific length and cutting it in one piece often turns into what I call a ‘Broken Shoelace’ event.

Allow me to digress if you will. I always had the Charles Bukowski poem called The Shoelace lingering in mind and I wondered how I could incorporate it in my blog rather than just doing a cut and paste job and say ‘Oh here, read this great poem’. Over time I realised incidents analogous to Bukowski’s ‘Broken Shoelace’ occur to us all the time.

Excerpts from The Shoelace

it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

so be careful
when you
bend over.

Now back to the glad wrap conundrum: Anyone that says that glad wrap is easy to unwrap and put to use is fibbing. What often takes place unless one has undertaken night-classes in glad-wrap handling is they will begin to strip the glad wrap clear of the roll and it will ordinarily cling to the the side of the roll like a baby to it’s mother’s breast. Now trying to back-track to find the point at which the separation of the main strip of plastic and the ‘son of a bitch’ piece occurred can take the better part of a day and you’ve wasted a good portion of the wrap unfurling so it co-joins anew. And even when you have it broken off to set as a cover, you must then ensure it does not fold back onto itself or just become a mesh of twisted plastic which if you’re a fumbling jack-arse like me can be a near impossible feat. This nightmare scenario also occurs with insane regularity when using blasted Sticky tape or when your toilet roll doesn’t have a split sleeve just after you’ve bought it or trying to split open the impenetrable ointment cylinder. And worst of all, you’re at your wits end, because as I stated at the start of this post, more often than not you are in a hurry to just to get the damn plastic off so you will not die from starvation or in the case of a toilet roll to wipe your backside.

Goddammit, Bukowski was right! Broken shoelaces (and lets not forget broken glad wrap, sticky tape, toilet rolls and ointment cylinders) can send a man to the madhouse.