5:57


Its like gel but not really. It's not transparent. It's more liquid based, more of an ooze texture that soaks into Wonder bread like sponge-love. And when it's boiled at exactly five minutes and fifty-seven seconds (according to my G&E Gas stove) the eye of the egg bursts like soft lava up and down the whiskey glass right as you stab the whites with your fork, which is my favorite part. It took me seven attempts and a carton of eggs to get the consistency just right, or rather the way it's supposed to be. The first time I tried I ended up with two halves of de-saturated yolk staring at me: 'you over-cooked us dummy.'

No good; not what I wanted. The yolk ooze has to in fact ooze between the broken egg whites the way it did at Cafe Kante in Frankfurt where I first tried them.

I ordered two eggs 'in a glass' ' partly curious of how exactly they were going to be served. 'In a glass?' When I walked in orders stood on the tables with remains of tangerine smudges on the crystal. It was the cheapest thing on the menu and obviously a popular order at the quaint corner cafe near the bohemian district of corporate Frankfurt, so what the heck.

And if you've never been to Germany, a word of context, the buildings are gray, the sky is gray, the sidewalks are gray, sometimes even the bread is gray, and that's pretty much Deutschland in January. So you can understand my enthusiasm when I stumbled upon the whimsy of egg volcanoes erupting yolk ooze as I was ready to sip my morning milch kaffee.

The two eggs (boiled and prepared with the shell peeled off) came in a short fat glass. 'Krauter' and crushed black pepper were showered on top; definitely not computer science. But then I stabbed my fork down the middle and a pungent gel came oozing out. I was stabbing and cutting, aroused with the sort of art class assignment I felt I was doing, when I realized that it was just another version of sunny-side up! So I grabbed my colorless bread and dipped it in the sunny-eye of the facial expression that I used to make as a kid, which was now morphed and dissolved to broken bits. I devoured the eggs in less than two minutes. The only evidence left was a faint smell of uncooked yolk beginning to cringe to the dry cigarette smoke lingering in spirals around the cafe.

The following day I felt like making them for myself at home. I couldn't be bothered getting dressed out of my boxers and torn tang-top and I figured it wouldn't be so difficult to make some eggs a la Frankfurt style. But as I learned, it's tricky to get eggs to that exact yolk ooze stage. In Japan they have special appliances that cook eggs at precise consistencies. But I wasn't in Japan at the time; I was living in Germany, and so all I had was my practical means and my ingenuity to work with, along with a pot, a stove and some water.

I had it it in my mind that once I figured out the exact time it took to get the eggs the way I liked, I'd call them by the time it took to get them just right. Like that I wouldn't forget how long to boil them when that future urge might come along.

The second time I tried preparing my eggs I was a bit closer to that ooze love that I was looking for, but still no dice. I let them boil for 6:30, but the yolk was soft, and curiously hard. Half of it was glassy and the edge was stiff. The third time, 5:30, I didn't even solidify the egg whites let along the yolks. The forth time, 6:10 (I think?) the eggs sort of cracked in the water and created clouds of highlighted cauliflower trees. The fifth and sixth attempts were close to promising, but still not right. Until finally, after the seventh try, 5:57 were my new favorite way of having eggs; boiled no second longer and no second less. The yolks were perfect.

I made a cup of coffee and sat in front of my couch; at last. And as I was wiping my mouth I saw on television a news announcement on CNN Europe. Someone in Turkey had contracted the Bird Flu and had died that afternoon! Banners of red scroll panned from right to left at the bottom of the screen saying 'Pandemic Warning!' And suddenly all of Europe was terrified because it was gaining closer, never-ending.

This is getting pretty serious. Perfect! Just as I figured out my 5:57 eggs.

And what exactly is pandemic? I looked it up. The Dictionary of Contemporary English states: a disease that affects people over a very large area or the whole world, ex. AIDS.

Pretty clear. Pretty serious.

Then I thought of AIDS, and fortunately I'm not infected, but to protect yourself, they tell you to wear protection when you have sex and not to use dirty needles. So far, okay, I've complied.

But now the Bird Flu. They didn't say anything about how to protect yourself. They just said you that you might die if you eat a chicken. Beware. Be cautious. Be afraid. Don't eat eggs. Dam CNN Europe. What is that? That's like saying don't have sex. Is that even possible? I mean, isn't there a priest somewhere in a suburban US town getting a little rub-down right now?

How am I supposed to know what to do to protect myself from the bird flu? I eat chicken; you know I eat eggs. Does the bird flu mean I shouldn't eat poultry, or eat eggs, like they tell you that abstinence is the most accurate protection against AIDS?

I looked at the lining of the glass that was wet with tangerine spots and black pepper; I thought of how I wiped it with a corner slice of bread and buried it in my mouth; how my tongue curled over it; how freakin' delicious it was!

I ask myself if that should be the last time I eat eggs. No more. I don't want to get the flu because it's deadly. No more chicken either; that's it!

But, I can't. It all makes sense, but the extremity of drama blazed on television has to be questioned. No? Sometimes?

This is how I see it: if I take away my eggs than I'm taking away my breakfast, and I've always been told by my mother that breakfast is the most important meal of the day (and no one is counter-arguing my mother); but, if I take away my breakfast than I'm taking away my coffee, and coffee is absolutely crucial to the dreamer self who thrives on caffeine, as I do; and if I take away my coffee than I'm taking away my momentum, and momentum is pretty much how I'm going to keep moving, and how I evolve; and if I take away that then I'm pretty much taking away my inspiration; and if I take away my inspiration than I'm dead, CNN Europe has killed me anyway and I am back to where I started, trying to substitute the infinitive 'to live' with the caution against death. The only thing that might make me feel better is having 5:57 eggs because that's all I can think about.

We could talk about it with dripping yolk off the crack of our mouths. We can talk about the fact that someone said the other day in conversation, 'It's not a matter of 'if' it becomes pandemic, but a matter of when.'

I figure my question is answered anyway. The world as we know it, our human participation, will end with the Bird Flu; mother nature will strangle us with the birds. Alfred Hitchcock eat your heart out.

With all that's going on: moral nagging; religious differences; lack of respect and divisions of indifference; the fallacy of a supposedly just government; the liklelihood that World War III is creeping up at the end of the decade, here we are concerned with Bird Flu. Who'll be left to read and tell stories anyway whether it be suicide bombs or a flock of birds. It's obvious we've become fools dressed up in high school outfits gaining too much popularity for the inconveniences and brutalities we impose on others less fortunate than us anyway. Mother nature is pissed and she's doing us in. Greek tragedy made some sense after all; Medea's on prime-time television slaying her kids.

And if I try to think of myself as the collective whole of humanity, then okay, I'd try to make it all better, more lovely as the English say, and stop everyone from eating poultry and getting infected with the Bird Flu. But if I think of myself as one single person, then I find living a mere part of everything, a small expression that has a few more years to enjoy the details that just might wipe a smile to my face before the closing credits start to scroll over my grave.

So I turned off the TV, took a shower and felt refreshed; decided that I'm going to continue my regime of 5:57. For the meantime anyway.


[Mind you, this was written before I knew that as long as you cook the bird, or the eggs, assuming it has the flu, you kill the virus. This was written in my journal about a year ago in 2006. Funny how CNN Europe hasn't mentioned anything about the Bird Flu since.]

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