“Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain,” goes the line from everyone’ s favorite half black-and-white and half Technicolor movie. But on this day, the first working one of the New Year, after the very first School Night whose strictures I happily ignored, I am having a hard time hitting my rhythm.

The President is back from Honolulu (was it a coincidence that a Prairie Home Companion was live at the Neil Blaisdell Arena there last Saturday? I think you know the answer to that!) and the Iowa Republican Caucus circus is going to happen, whether we like it or not, and the whole shambling beast of Western Civilization will continue its apparently inexorable waltz to the abyss.

With the great issues confronting us, I am going to punt this morning. I came to that conclusion as I got the first bracing mug of Dazbog-brand Russian Roast Organic Timor Astabe free-range coffee of the morning, sweetened with a generous dollop of Pond Hill Farm raw Michigan honey and went to the mail bag.

What I am avoiding, of course, is the matter of Raven, which I am going to ignore until I can contact his attending physician later this morning from the office and attempt to find out why he has taken to his bed, and is not eating and needs oxygen. That is first and foremost, since it will determine if I have to walk down to the Bluesmobile and go back to the Little Village By the Bay.

No one is awake up there yet, so I will defer that, and any opinion about how Mitt and Newt and the other five dwarves are going to do in Iowa. I reached into the leather mail sack and pulled out a note from a pal in Alaska who pays intermittent attention to The Daily. Yesterday’s column was square in her sights. She nailed me with this:

“And raisin toast? Plus hot sauce on the omelet I hope- but no pork products?  Were you really in Culpepper?
Happy New Year, Vic.”

That stung, I was in a hurry yesterday, as you probably could tell, so I sighed and decided to invite you all “behind the scenes” at the back lot of Socotra House productions, with all the warts and no makeup whatsoever.

So come on back and don’t bump your head. The liability insurance is something that the back office people are always bitching about.

My pal’s concern about the pics not quite matching the words- the lyrics and music slightly out of synch- were properly noted. So let’s walk through the production set and try to explain the incompatibility, like Errol Flynn wearing a wristwatch in Robin Hood. At Socotra House LLC, the staff fancies The Daily as a photo-journalism enterprise, a sort of poor person’s Life eMagazine, not some stupid blog.

We were hampered by a mild hangover impacting the perils of the country tri-fecta of satellite broad-band, being Down on The Farm, and a craving for a Big Southern Breakfast.

Here is the sad truth: the pics that accompanied the story were of an imagined breakfast at a known and quite real place. Actually, they were placeholders for some found art I had not found yet. It was dark, and I needed to grind out the product and get on with the business of the real day, not the imaginary one.

I was looking from the laptop at the dining table over at the queer Japanese banner that I picked up in downtown Tokyo the same year I met the husband of my alert reader. I have no idea what it means, though probably could find out, if I had the time. I was pecking at the story, thinking about eggs and took a picture on my iPad camera, imported it, and cropped it. I will get to that some other time, probably when I am hungry for fish, soy sauce and wasabi.

By the miracle of iPhoto, I intended to crop out the logo and the headline, but I did not have time.

It is not that I wanted sushi for breakfast, though I was hungry enough to have a Japanese breakfast if there was a bustling Asian restaurant with a chef who yelled at you when you came through the half-curtain on the door, and whose knives flashed in the dawn’s early light.

Instead, I looked on the web, found a couple “representative” pictures of the restaurant where I intended to dine, and a plate of eggs, which actually had been eaten some months before in Texas.

I had thought of ordering hash-browns, since Frost does them really well, but I saw the Texas version of the grits and they looked good. I had become enamored of the ground corn with fresh creamery butter  through the Third Fleet Flag mess in Pearl Harbor, and my mind wandered through the mid-Pacific via the Ford Island Ferry. Plus, grits were truly southern, and Culpeper and the Frost Diner are nothing if not Southern.

So, I “borrowed” the image, citing an imaginary “fair use,” and making a note to change the order I had not made yet at the Frost Diner to match the words to the story I had not completed about a breakfast I had not had yet, but was making my mouth water.

I looked at the Gnome by the door as I gathered my crap together as the light came up. The dwarf (no Republican, he) had joined my Grandmother’s home retinue at 98 Sagamore Road in Maplewood, New Jersey, about a century ago. His wiring had gone bad, and when that home was broken up years ago upon her death, the creature had taken up a place in the crawlspace in Petoskey before migrating to Culpeper in the trunk of the Police Car, back when I felt guilty about taking things out of Raven and Big Mama’s house, rather than just trying to get rid of all the crap there.

I snapped a shot of the Gnome to remind myself to get fine grit sandpaper, black enamel paint, a small paintbrush, and figure out how to manufacture a sturdy base to affix to his delicate iron boots.

And a pennant to place in the hole in his empty iron left hand. Of course, that is going to mean a trip to the Lowe’s home improvement center in the Big Box end of town, so the picture would help with the shopping list, which I always remember only when I arrive at the farm and am getting unpacked and don’t want to go out again.

Over the course of the last two years, I have commissioned the cutting of new glass panes to replace the lost originals in the lamp. Now I only need to figure out how to attach the original light fixture back into the lamp after re-wiring it. Work in progress, I thought, as I filled up the trunk of the Police Interceptor with the trash (no waste pick up out here, you have to pack it out) and put out some cat food for my absent Heckle, just in case she showed up.

In general order, I needed to get the sun up, the police car into downtown Culpeper, get a shot of the marquee of the Frost Diner to which I actually owned the copyright, then order three eggs and grits from big Stephanie, a country girl of broad sweet freckled complexion and some two hundred odd-pounds, who probably will consider getting her figure back once her daughter is just a little older.

First, I had to stop and marvel at the massive edifice that has been thrown up just down the road from the little vest-pocket farm I own. The light is enhanced, but real enough. It will balance the abandoned share-cropper shack immediately across the property, which is visible now that winter has beaten down the foliage, but will disappear again soon enough.

I thought about going back to get some shots of the ramshackle structure with the No Trespass sign at the end of the dirt lane, but settled on this picture, since I was hungry and the day was calling me. This is important, and could impact my assessment and appraisal value of my property.

I have Raven’s disabled parking pass in the Cruiser, which I only use when I need it, and parked the Bluesmobile in a challenged spot on Main Street, no kidding, that is what they call it, near the diner. I considered that moral impact of the fact that I might be inconveniencing someone more challenged than myself. Screw it, I thought, the pass expires in 2014. I will work out the moral ambiguity then.

Across the street from the diner is the boyhood home of Confederate General A.P. Hill, one of Lee’s more able Lieutenants, and which, in the General’s active (and absent) years, had been home to a ground-floor tobacconist whose most illustrious client had been Ulysses Simpson Grant, who would stop, by himself, alone, to purchase the daily handful of cigars that would eventually kill him when his staff and army of 100,000 men occupied the town in the winter of 1863-64, before the Overland Campaign that at considerable cost, took Richmond. I liked the light on the building, which survived the recent earthquake in fine shape.

Then, having liked the upward looking shot of the Frost marquee that I “borrowed” I looked up, and thought I might be able to do it one better:

The neon sign was still on, and the light of the day was brand spanking new. I liked it.

There were plenty of empty stools in the diner when I went in- push on the left side of the double glass door. it was early, after all, even if the story was already on the street and available to readers in Sweden and the UK in time for their late lunch.

These are the actual eggs, grits, Heinz-57-brand catsup and Pete’s hot sauce (vinegar and pepper-based, not that really hot stuff from J.C. McIlhenny Tabasco sauce, which is way high on the Scoval scale of hotness, and which, for over 140 years, has stood as the ultimate test of gastronomic courage. That was quite beyond me, and wanted no challenge, just some eggs and grits and an English muffin. All I wanted was to jazz up the eggs a little.

No courage required- the sweetness of the Heinz was to balance the jazz. Stephanie delivered the plate to me with cheerful abandon, bantering with the regulars, and refreshed the mug with some steaming hot java. I read a surreal novel called Good Omens as I sat there in front of the juke box, and checked the New York Times on the iPad along with the copy of the story from the inbox on my email as I sat there, happy as a pig in- well, whatever.

There were no overt pork products involved in the creation of the three egg omelet. I have to watch that, since I have alert readers who have been critical of the imaginary diet I have, mostly based on the quite authentic pictures of the Willow Restaurant’s haut cuisine. Meat is bad, for all the reasons you are well aware of, though ovo-lactate is OK, as I understand the rules, which means the eggs and the cheese and the veggies are OK, but real southern sausage is off the menu for cruelty reasons.

They say the hen contributes to a Southern breakfast, but the pig is really committed to it.

It was a great breakfast, and Stephanie gave me a Styrofoam go-cup to keep me company for the rest of the 68 miles to Arlington, where I hooked the iPad to laptop, downloaded and edited the pics, sent them to the production staff in Fountain, Colorado, to make the official record copy on the web site and with some resignation, confronted the new year.

Thanks for letting me explain. In my experience, integrity is everything in this business, and once you can fake that, you have it made.

Plus, if they pass that new Internet Piracy legislation, I might not get the chance,

Now, off to the freaking office. It is the first work day of the year, and I will have to figure out something for the story this morning.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com