Travels with Grumpus

Many many years ago, the gang and I whiled away many a pleasant evening - and killed thousands of brain cells - downing bottle after bottle of this beer in our favorite Metro Manila dive. The beer packs a wallop and we grew powerfully attached to it. When my brother shot a commercial for the brew sometime in that era, we protested that we’d endorse it for free - heck, we’d actually pay money to sing its praises.

While I’m considering alternatives for gainful employment, and realizing that taking a job solely for the money is a sure-fire way of making your life miserable (I’m quoting someone near and dear to my heart), I’m thinking of things I’d actually pay money to do. I’ll admit I haven’t really been thinking that hard, but a few things come to mind.

The Thirsty Traveler’s job is one of them. Drinking his way around the world, and talking about it on camera. That’s already three things I love doing: drinking, traveling, and describing my travails to a receptive audience. I know Grumpus gets tired of my continuous yapping, so having that extra outlet can’t hurt.

Or how about this fellow, who’s just traveled around the US in search of the perfect burger? If there’s any part of that dependent clause that didn’t excite you, you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog. This paragraph alone made me hungry:

If you are any good at burger degustation, you should be able to add all those sensations up in your debauched little sensorium and then, and only then, try to sort out what went into it. It should start with beef, the humble ground chuck — not the pricier ground sirloin or any other variant. Chuck has the Goldilocks amount of fat, not too lean nor too much like hand cream. Chuck also has the right mouth feel; it gives the teeth something to do. You also want a patty thick enough so that it can be charred yet remain moist within. I like mine medium rare, because I want the fat in the meat to get hot enough to melt and spread its flavor. The patty should be seasoned with salt and pepper, at the very least.

And while we’re tooling around our default newspaper, this columnist’s job always seemed like fun: shopping on someone else’s dime for a living, and then telling the tale.

So I like to drink, eat, shop, travel and yap. There’s got to be something out there that pays me to do all these things.

Actually, if we expanded our search to include all known realities, I’d be cruising the universe with these folk, flying one of these, or just firing guns in this incredibly cool manner. Over and over again. For the good of mankind.