bastard guacamole
I am here once again to impart a quick and easy recipe that you can both read and make in under five minutes! That’s how simple it is! I do it all the time!
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Before we proceed, I’d just like to thank Noodle Kidoodle for sponsoring this recipe. The first ten people to enter the my code GUAC at checkout will get absolutely nothing whatsoever, because Noodle Kidoodle went out of business in 2000. The oldest people reading this also get a free reminder that the store ever even existed. What a deal! Thanks again to Noodle Kidoodle for their posthumous financial contribution to my straightforward recipe post. Kids learn best when they’re having fun.
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
So what you’re gonna do first is ohhhhh my god holy shit I just saw a really big dog walk by outside. I didn’t take any pictures, but trust me. It was a massive beast. A Newfoundland, if I had to guess. Sorry. Anyway.
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
I actually made this guac last Thursday night and I had a bastard cocktail to go with it! Essentially, it’s a vodka gimlet, except I disregarded all measurements and just dumped roughly a shot of vodka and a shot of lime juice into a glass with a sugar rim. It was passable. But I wasn’t expecting it to be passable, so I was like, “HOLY SHIT IT WORKED,” and immediately made another one, this time with an ice cube. (I recommend the ice cube.) I hadn’t drunk in a while, so I ended up getting absolutely hammered. Under normal circumstances, this drink will not get you hammered, probably. Anyway. Little bonus recipe for you all. On with the show.
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
(The original title of this recipe was actually “Bastard Guacamole for Broke, Lazy White People”, but I figured the last thing I wanted to do was gatekeep my family’s shameless misinterpretation of a classic dish from anyone who might correctly discern that the secret ingredient is deceit.)
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
I was a senior in high school ten years ago, (Jesus Christ) which means we are coming up on the one decade anniversary of the time I cut myself on a bagel. Has anyone else done this? Trying to prove a point to my beloved friend who makes fun of me for it several times a year. Because it is! Possible! I have done it! I broke the skin of my finger with nothing but a piece of toasted bread, and yeah, it’s fucking cringe or whatever, but it’s doable! I’m sure it’s happened before! The earliest recorded existence of the bagel was in 1610. You can’t convince me that no other person has been physically harmed by one. It’s just a very rare occurrence! Which I will outline the optimal conditions of here for you now.
HOW TO CUT YOURSELF ON A BAGEL:
Live in a region that experiences polar vortexes
Forget to moisturize your skin like, 90% of the time, leaving it incredibly susceptible to crackage
Be the child of people who buy cheap, terrible store brand bagels that are sliced poorly
Use a butter knife to finish the bad slicing job, leaving a ton of jagged bits at the center and edges of each bagel half
Toast bagel until it’s medium dark
Remove first half from toaster without incident because you are a somewhat competent bagel extractor
Grab other half, unwittingly placing thumb directly onto one of the jagged parts, which has become very sharp in the toaster
The jagged part will pierce your shitty, dry skin
Make huge mistake of telling people about this
Be haunted by it indefinitely
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
I think my mental health would improve somewhat if it were socially acceptable for adults to climb trees. I used to climb the shit out of trees, and then I’d come home and log them in my journal. I’d be like, “Found new hickory on [Street]. Made it four branches up. [Friend] made it six, and I am not jealous.” Or, “Huzzah! [Other friend]’s dad rigged a rope so that we can climb the sycamore in the backyard!” (I said "huzzah" a lot back then.)
I haven’t climbed a tree since 2014, and now my upper body strength is in shambles. How am I supposed to get it back if I can’t climb trees anymore? Gym memberships cost money! So does the rock-climbing place! And lot of cities don’t even have rock-climbing places! Trees are free, goddammit!
The only thing I liked better than climbing trees was reading in trees. The first time I ever read my beloved, somewhat poorly-aged Wendelin Van Draanen novel, Flipped, was in a maple tree, and when the protagonist Juli’s favorite sycamore tree got chopped down, I fucking cried. And society is denying me opportunities to recreate that unique emotional experience! Let me climb a fucking tree. I will do a bad job, but I still think I should get to do it. I’ll start with a fruit tree; I remember those being lower to the ground and easier to climb. This is true across the board — when I was a kid in New York, I climbed apple trees; when I was an “adult” college student in Southern California, I noted the equal climbability of orange trees. And avocado trees. Hey wasn’t this about guacamole or someth
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Is this a safe space for me to admit that I did not fucking like what Mike Flanagan did to The Haunting of Hill House? Like, okay, so the book is about four strangers doing a research project on the house, in the house. Two of them — Eleanor and Theodora — have a pretty homoerotic relationship even by 2010s standards, let alone 1950s. So why in the fuck did Flanagan write them as siblings? And then write the guy who’s inheriting the house as their sibling also? And give them two original siblings on top of that????? Is it ontologically possible for this guy to conceptualize a haunted house story without the Heterosexually Married Dad Forces Nuclear Family To Move Into Obviously Evil Building Because Of His Job trope?
Speaking of that trope, the invented older brother is so clearly just that one Stephen King archetype. He’s a horror writer, so his characters must all be horror writers. Mike Flanagan have an original idea challenge. And then! The shitty horror writer brother gets to read off quotes from the book like they’re his own. The only thing worse is when they change the text to fit the show better. Here are Shirley Jackson’s original closing remarks:
Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
And Flanagan’s bastardization:
Hill House, not sane, stands against its hills, holding darkness within; it has stood so for a hundred years and might stand a hundred more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet neatly, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and those who walk there, walk together.
I love how the show’s version is in present tense except for the word lay. I can’t believe Flanagan and the script supervisor and the actor who had to say the damn thing and the person who mixed the audio didn’t catch that. It’s so jarring. Jackson’s son is credited as a consultant! How the fuck did this happen?????
Anyway, you may notice that Flanagan’s version is not scary. This is because the show isn’t scary. The show is just NBC’s This Is Us if you put them in a haunted house, except at least This Is Us had Mandy Moore, and an original narrative, and, you know, it wasn’t trying to deceive you about what kind of show it was. I wish the opposite would happen. “Watch our reality-based family melodrama at 9:00/8:00 Central! JUST KIDDING, POLTERGEISTS.”
I stopped watching This Is Us after season three because it got too… This Is Us-sy, but I have read about what happened after I dropped off, and I think I could’ve fixed the show by making Kevin gay. I know I say this about every TV show, but Kevin has nothing to do ever. He struggles with addiction for a finite period, and then shadows his presumed-dead Vietnam vet uncle Griffin Dunne, and then Mandy Moore is like, “Build me a house, Kevin.” Okay????? Oh, he also dates ten thousand women. I found zero of these relationships compelling.
But! What if his serial dating was an unconscious attempt to delay or even prohibit a sexuality crisis? That’d be a cool thing to have unfold over the course of six seasons. And if Kevin is gay, all three triplets are distinctly marginalized. Who has it hardest, the show could ask? That’s a question without an easy answer, so you could easily wring six seasons out of it.
I don’t want to imply that the show was devoid of queer people, because two main characters were an elderly bisexual man and a teenage WLW, and both of them were Black. “But why wasn’t this white guy gay?” is a stupid, insulting complaint. But why wasn’t that white guy also gay? It’s not like there’s a limit on queer characters. I know the timeline wouldn’t match up, but suppose Kevin had a heart-to-heart with William about this, and then Randall found out, and it drove yet another wedge between him and Kevin, and between him and William? Same thing could happen with Tess! And Randall’s like, “Why are you talking my daughter through her coming out? You’re not even gay!” and Kevin says some stupid shit that implies Randall is a bad father, (demonstrably untrue, from what I recall, but Kevin is so mean to him always that I think it could happen) and they have another fight in the middle of the street that Seth Meyers has to break up.
I was talking about The Haunting of Hill House at one point. That show did have a lesbian in the core group of siblings, and that is its sole triumph over This Is Us. But Dan Fogelman shouldn’t lose any sleep over this, because Hill House is first and foremost a very bad adaptation of a classic horror novel. I’m so glad Flanagan’s deal with Netflix is over.
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Okay sorry, real quick tangent before we begin, because I just fucking sneezed, because it’s winter, and over the years I have become increasingly aware of how much I hate sneezing. Like, “Ohhh noooo, I inhaled some dust :(” can it wait? Can it possibly wait? Give me two seconds to finish washing this dish. If I sneeze on it, I will have to wash it again. Is the human body really so fragile that it has to expel dust now? I mean, I can understand if it’s something poisonous, but dust? Fucking dust? I’m not even allergic to dust! I’m only allergic to [NICE TRY, ASSASSINS].
And the worst is when the first sneeze doesn’t even work, and you have to sneeze again. Why is one sneeze insufficient? Why would something so eventful not take care of the problem? Hey everyone, look how bad I am at getting rid of whatever the fuck was in my respiratory system! And then you have to blow your nose, often in a separate room. Just take the rest of the day off at that point.
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Learned some information recently. Trying to see if my experience was universal.
Do you know the name of the lead singer of Cascada (of "Every Time We Touch" and "Evacuate the Dance Floor" fame)?
a) Yes, I know what her name is
b) No, but I think it might be Cassie
c) No, but I don't think it's Cassie
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
You will need…
One ripe avocado (good luck)
About two tablespoons of medium salsa verde (three if you’re working with a particularly large avocado)
Maybe like, seven or eight drops of lime juice
Normal amount of salt
You will not need…
Cilantro
Tomato
PurpleRed onionYour dignity
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Do you guys know what my family members want for Christmas? Aside from the things they’ve explicitly asked me for, I mean. Almost nothing stresses me out like gift-giving, because there’s an intuitive component that I really struggle with. A gift someone asked you for will never match the sentiment of a gift you thought of on your own. The former makes the recipient feel heard; the latter makes them feel seen.
And of course, getting someone a gift that’s extremely far off the mark is the faux pas to end all faux pases. Is that the correct plural form of faux pas? I remember a Baby-Sitters Club book where Kristy’s deadbeat dad gets her a baseball glove, but it’s for the wrong hand, and since then I have obsessively cataloged the dominant hands of everyone I know, like a creep. But you’ll never catch me making Kristy’s dad’s mistake!
Every time I take the love languages test, receiving gifts comes in dead last by a wide margin. Like, obviously if someone gets me something out of the goodness of their heart, that’s amazing, and I’m incredibly grateful, but the pressure! Now I have to make them feel equally seen, or I’m gonna feel like shit! But I can’t admit that, because then they’ll feel like shit!
My love language, apparently, is quality time. This rules because it’s the only one you can really accomplish solo. Yes, I know how that sounds, but I don’t even mean it that way; like, I can go for a hike alone or watch a movie by myself at 3:00 in the morning, and have a quality time without the company of another person. Can the words of affirmations bitches do that? It’s not an act of service if you’re doing your own chores, now is it?
So. On behalf of gift dipshits everywhere, just tell us what you want! We’ll get it for you! We’ll be so relieved, in fact, that we might do it right that second! You want Rumours on vinyl? Fuck yeah, into the cart it goes! Posthaste! Otherwise, my brain will tie itself into knots, all, Oh my god, what if they already OWN Rumours on vinyl, which I’d know if I were a TRUE FRIEND.
I’m also just really bad at wrapping presents. Whoever invented the gift bag has saved me countless humiliations over the past two decades.
Anyway, I’ll probably get my grandma a kuchen. As in, I’ll buy her one from a bakery, because I have no fucking idea how to make one. I only know how to make an extremely rudimentary approximation of guacamole. Here, I’ll tell you how!
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Here are some of my 2024 Grammy picks:
Record of the Year: “Kill Bill”
Album of the Year: The Age of Pleasure
Song of the Year: “Dance the Night”
Best New Artist: Ice Spice
Producer of the Year: Daniel Nigro
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
With the holidays upon us, allow me to share the tale of My Brief Existence As An Extra In A Hallmark Movie. I don’t mean I was literally an extra in a real Hallmark movie, I mean I was in a situation that was so Hallmark moviesque that I was convinced I had genuinely undergone interdimensional travel.
So it’s December 2016, and I’m a junior in college, and I’m flying home for winter break. I have a layover at Chicago Midway Airport, which is the worst airport in Chicago. There are only two major airports in Chicago, but one of them has a rainbow tunnel and, you know, more than three places to get food, and it’s not fucking Midway. Which actually has even less shit to do now. Make sure you fly into O’Hare when you make your mandatory pilgrimage to The Pants.
Anyway, I get to Midway, and my second flight is canceled due to a blizzard in my hometown. The blizzard is maybe supposed to stop later in the day, so I’m trying to finagle myself onto an evening flight, and by that I mean my parents are trying to finagle me onto an evening flight, because I’m just having a panic attack about potentially being stuck in Chicago’s worst airport overnight. When it hadn’t even hit peak badness. I was only twenty, you see. I couldn’t legally purchase alcohol at the airport’s one bar to chill myself out. I’d also had kind of a shitty semester in general, compounded by the election results, and all I wanted to do was go home and eat spaghetti.
(This isn’t relevant, but I’m still mad about it. I had to wait for a million years at the Southwest help desk because this woman who was supposed to be on my canceled flight was ranting to the agent about how she hadn’t just flown ALL THE WAY from FORT MYERS, FLORIDA to get stuck in Chicago. While I was waiting, I had time to look up the length of her previous flight, and it was less than two and a half hours. And then I really wanted to strangle her, because I was coming from California, and mine was four. I’d gotten up at ass o’clock in the morning Pacific time, flown for four hours, and then internally lost two hours because of the time change. Fort Myers is on Eastern time. She’d gained one. And since then I have held a grudge against the entire city of Fort Myers, which I do not see ending any time soon.)
Anyway, my parents managed to get me on a later flight to the second-closest airport, and then there was nothing to do but hang out and see if that flight also got canceled.
For those of you fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the layout of Midway, it has three concourses with a food court in the middle. I went over there to get some Ben & Jerry’s, (which is closed now, of course) and there was a local band playing. So I’m miserably eating my ice cream, and trying to enjoy the music, and it’s 2016. I’ll give you zero guesses how they closed out their set.
I have to assume you’re currently going, “Pssssht. I’ve seen Hallmarkier.” You have not. You have not, because everyone else in the Chicago Midway Airport food court also started singing “Purple Rain.” No one was eating the food they’d just purchased, because “Purple Rain” was of greater import. I was singing “Purple Rain”, even though I was not remotely in the headspace for a public singalong. My ice cream melted. The only thing that mattered was “Purple Rain.” And afterwards, I felt a million times better.
My flight did take off as scheduled, and my dad braved extremely hazardous driving conditions to pick me up, and I got home at midnight. And I did immediately make spaghetti.
(This was also the time I ranked all the adult human male Disney protagonists by fuckability, due to the lack of anything better to do. And then I sent my correct list to various friends, and they were all like, “Ashton, we’re very sorry you’re stuck at the worst airport in Chicago, but where the fuck is Kenai from Brother Bear?” And I had to be like, “HIS FINAL FORM IS BEAR. HE IS DISQUALIFIED.” The Beast and Prince Naveen and Emperor Kuzco are all human by the end of their respective movies; Kenai is a grizzly bear. Of which I am afraid. The studio-mandated girlfriend he gets in the bad, direct-to-video sequel? TURNS INTO A BEAR FOR HIM. I could not, in good faith, include him in my list of humans. Can you imagine how fucking stupid I would’ve looked?)
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Every time I eat a donut I feel like I should be in jail. If I buy donuts with money at the grocery store, I think I should be tried at The Hague. For whatever reason, they are the patron food of the morally bankrupt. To me. I suspect it’s largely due to their association with cops, but eating donuts doesn’t make you a cop. I think. It hasn’t yet, anyway. The one thing donuts have going for them is that they’re the only toroidal breakfast food with which I’ve not lacerated myself.
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Here is a picture of me holding a really big leaf.
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Okay, earlier I think I made it sound like This Is Us showrunner Dan Fogelman has never committed any crimes against humanity, and that’s not true, because he did in fact write, direct, and co-produce Life Itself, an Amazon Studios film about a Bob Dylan stan played by Oscar Isaac who tries to cope with his wife’s (Olivia Wilde) death by writing a screenplay narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. And then he doesn’t finish it because he commits suicide in his therapist’s office. The movie is now about his infant daughter, who somehow survived when Olivia Wilde got hit by that bus. She grows up to be a singer. Now suddenly the movie is about olive oil. It’s about Antonio Banderas giving a very long monologue in Spanish about his personal relationship with olive oil. The guy he’s talking to is like, “Okay? Anyway, my wife is pregnant.” They have a baby and then visit the United States and are on the bus that kills Olivia Wilde. The baby grows up, goes to school in New York, and meets Oscar and Olivia’s daughter. They fall in love. And then you find out that the omniscient narrator is their daughter, and she’s reading an excerpt from the book she wrote about them. For some????? Reason?????????? The movie is not good. I heard that it was not good in a very funny way, so I made my friend see it in theaters with me on a Friday night as revenge for consistently trivializing my serious bagel injury, AND THEN WE COULDN’T EVEN MAKE FUN OF IT BECAUSE THE THEATER WAS FULL OF PEOPLE ON DATES WHO WERE AUDIBLY CRYING DURING SEVERAL SCENES. INCLUDING THE OLIVE OIL MONOLOGUE.
BASED GUACAMOLE:
Put cilantro in it. Put tomatoes in it. Put purple red onions in it. Garlic, perhaps. Maybe season it with something other than salt.
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
I’m still thinking about Treasure Planet. And yeah, that’s kind of my default state, but usually I’m eager to put something out of my mind once I’ve spent a week or two living and breathing it for article purposes. But I am thinking specifically about how I would have ended the film without sending Jim to fucking military school. Or at least I’d emphasize that it’s a tragic ending inspired by the way the United States military preys on troubled, low-income youth with promises of housing and financial security. Actually, you know what? Go ahead, Disney. Send him there. Send him there, have him realize he hates it after like, two months, because he would, and then let him sneak out, build another solar surfer, and go find Silver. Who is, I don’t fucking know, building a fast food empire? And then they just hang out. It’s like the end of Shawshank.
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Oh yeah, somehow, Big Time Rush was only my fourth top artist in Spotify Wrapped. I didn’t see Hozier live once, let alone four times. You know I didn’t see Taylor Swift. The people I did see live — BTR and Måneskin — were both many hours’ drives away. And do you know what we listened to on the way to those concerts? BTR and Måneskin. How the fuck did Taylor Swift beat BTR? The only song of hers on my Top 100 was my beloved “Hits Different.” Is she buying listeners? I don’t see why she’d need to. I am extremely tired of thinking about her, though. Wake me up when the next leg of the Eras Tour starts so I can resume being a hater. WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE’S TIME’S PERSON OF THE Y
BASTARD GUACAMOLE:
Cut the avocado in half lengthwise
Try to remove the pit in that cool way that accomplished chefs do, i.e. slamming the knife blade into it and pulling it out with ease
Fail at this and simply make incisions around the perimeter of the pit until it falls out
Remove any avocado flesh that has turned brown (hastily, as it will continue turning brown until you’ve neutralized it with lime juice)
Scoop the remaining flesh into the smallest bowl you own
Add salsa
Mash
Add lime juice
Mash
Add salt
Mash
Serve immediately with tortilla chips or whatever the fuck