The Book

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or format without the express written permission of Pamela Catherine (Cat) Delaney.

NOTE TO PUBLISHERS: This version of Success Sucks! by Cat Delaney is a shortened edition for promotional purposes; the full manuscript, roughly double the size, is available directly through Cat Delaney or her agent.

SUCCESS SUCKS!
How to Flambée Motivational Gurus
and Cook Your Life Your Way.

by Cat Delaney

“If you stick your neck out, be ready for your head to get cut off,” words you might hear from Henry VIII, but certainly not from any one of today’s “motivational gurus”! Drawing on western society’s weakness for the accumulation of stuff, for instant gratification, and for the entitlement that says they deserve it, motivational gurus have made millions. Until now.
Cat Delaney has failed, and failed a lot. Many times by following the exact directives issued by these “motivational mangia-cakes” as she calls them. In Success Sucks! she has distilled her experiences so as to instill a little sanity back into people who want it all, want it now and believe that if they think they can have it, it will be theirs.
Part memoir, part tongue-in-cheek philosophy, part recipe book, Success Sucks! is mostly satire that is highly readable for its broad-range wit and savvy observations.
Told with a universally understood culinary undercurrent (hey, we all have to eat!), the book takes motivational-guru addicts on a detox program that doesn’t work instantly, helps to change (not necessarily improve) cooking techniques, and guarantees nothing but a good laugh (mostly at ourselves). It’s also healthy ingestion for anyone not yet addicted to such sirens of silliness; prevention being better than cures when the main thing that might get sick is your wallet.
If laughter is the best medicine, then the icing on the cake comes in the shape of words of wisdom from a writer with a deft touch who was daft enough to believe she, like the entire rest of the world, could be successful by the terms of greedy people who didn’t even know her or her dreams. Or did they? How do these guys lure their victims? By preying on the vulnerable, weak and downtrodden (those who Delaney says have been “chickenized”!).
Success Sucks! is a motivational-guru junkies’ detox diet. More than a survival guide for misguided maniacal goal-setting addicts, it’s food or the beleaguered soul (to hell with chicken soup!) that wants personal fulfillment, not just a Ferrari in the garage, when they die. Which we all do, of course. But it’s also a grand, fun ride to self-awareness, mashed turnips, codswallop, gnus with guns, poetry, spatulas, fully dressed Italians, eligible neurosurgeons, tatty scones in lieu of bullets, lumpy gravy, perfect piecrust, other books, dogs with poor appetites, flying merde and Armagnac.
Bon appetite to your soul, your motivation, and your wallet!

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Skewer, flambée and rinse. Do not repeat.
PART ONE — THE PROBLEM
Chapter I — DICED, MARINATED AND FRICASSEED
– Grocery Shopping on an Empty Stomach
– Changing the Menu
– Stirring the Pot
– What the Heck is Success Anyway?
– Does Success Really Suck?
– Chocolate Veggies
– Nutritional Value

PART TWO — THE CAUSES

Chapter II — AMUSE BOUCHE
– Cause and Effect
– Conveniently Forgotten Ingredients
– When the Soufflé Falls
– Cooking with Narcissists
– Wine is Good for You; No, it’s Not

Chapter III — THE APPETIZER COURSE
– Someone’s in the Kitchen with…
– The Secret of Perfect Piecrust
– Robbins Egg on Your Face
– Bob Proctor Needs a Doctor
– Barbequed Phoenix (not Arizona)
– My Habit is to Hit Dan the Man on his Can with a Pan
– Good Guy/Bad Guy
– Avocado is Healthy; No, it’s Fattening
– Too-amazing Grace
– Nutritional Mea Culpa
– Flocks of Chickens Headed for Slaughter
– The Palate Cleanser

Chapter IV — THE MAIN COURSE
– Burnt Offerings: Motivational Myths Fried to a Crisp
– Toasting Marshmallows: Spiritual Spinners on a Spit

Chapter V — HAVE RECIPE WILL YIELD
– How did I End Up in This Damn Kitchen?
– Please Do Not Play with Your Food!
– There’s a Dog in My Crockpot!

PART THREE — THE SOLUTIONS

Chapter VI — DINNER AT MY HOUSE
– Cook Like a Monk
– Sweating the Small Stuff
– Cooking with Cat
– Cooking Our Lives in the Kitchen of the Universe
– Sharing Recipes
– The Order of Ingredients
– Rules of the Kitchen
– Cat, not Catastrophe!

Chapter VII — DINNER AT YOUR HOUSE
– Clarified Butter
– A Culinary Quiz
– A Schematic Recipe
– Making a Roux
– If You Can’t Take the Heat…

Chapter VIII – THE DESSERT COURSE
– Les Digestifs
– The Cure
– The Motivational Junk-food Detox Diet

PART FOUR — THE CLEAN-UP

Chapter IX — USEFUL INGREDIENTS
– Suggested Reading and Viewing
– Bibliography
– Toothpicks
– Don’t Shoot the Cook!

for my mother, Patricia Lucy Gillgan
(1923-2005)

I loved her dearly, and miss her terribly,
but at least she isn’t cooking any more.

INTRODUCTION

(Welcome to the Kitchen of Your Life)

Skewer, flambé and rinse. Do not repeat.

What’s that stuff trickling down your chin? It looks like lumpy gravy, but it might be something even less edible; maybe, oh, poverty à la mode? If you feel a little hungry and your cupboard is bear, you need a spelling and grammar guru (and yes, that would be moi), but if your cupboard is bare, and that goop on your chin is the trickle-down economics system of (rare) individual prosperity and crazy-ass wealth, then occupy this book for a few hours. You’ll thank me, maybe even ask for seconds.
American poet, Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), wrote: “Find what you love and let it kill you.” That’s pretty much what has happened to the average person — you, yes you, the infamous 99% card-carrying member — in the last few decades or so. Experts say there’s no sign of anything more than marginal recovery; the past false economic highs (and hopefully those nasty lows with them) are gone. Right, so what’s going on now, then? Eh? Welcome to the level playing field. There has been an adjustment. A fat one.
Jobs haven’t scurried overseas, they have been obliterated by automation. University degrees guarantee you’ll know how to write an order for espresso at the joint where you work as a barrista. The only people working are plumbers. Like the idea? Never having to work? Guaranteed income by the state? We’re a many years from that, so swallow hard and figure out how to stay cooking while the rest of the world is waiting to be served. Hey, they’re entitled.
Back to Bukowski. How many women bought this “do what you love and the money will follow” indigestion? Look around at the multitude of “for rent” signs on cute little boutiques. Scrap-booking supply stores. Hand-made jewellery and soap shops. Retail fronts with names like Purses Galore. Bukowski knew; why don’t you?
The (mostly) women who got the hell out of the kitchen and started these hopeful “cottage industries” found no money following them anywhere. They went by the book (depends on the book, I guess; they should have started with this book) and overcame the obstacles, just like they were warned there would be, looming to threaten their cherishes dreams.
Men do this, too, of course; it’s not an exclusive club. And both genders saw the obstacles as something akin to haggis. They had haggis-based choices: turn and run from the stench (and concept); leap over the platter of steaming innards; or toughen up and eat the grey (no amount of parsley helps) haggis (go ahead, try some; yum). If haggis serves as a culinary obstacle to those of us who don’t wear kilts on a regular basis, then perhaps we should select Door Number Four: let it put us off eating for a while (weight loss the obvious benefit).
Some obstacles are there to stop us! Save our lives!
Too many people have taken too literally the preaching of a bunch of suits (and a few tunics over leggings), motivational gurus that spin among the 1% who got there by robbing the awestruck 99% of their meagre savings or credit card limit extension. The worse the economy, the more people can be separated from the last of what money they can assemble in the process of scrambling for a miracle.
These motivational gurus invariably come out with a new book or seminar exactly when a recession is at its peak (or is that, when it hits bottom?). Timing is everything; do not overcook your pasta.
There, consider yourself introduced. Hello. My name is Cat. I lost over $900,000 following the directives and spew of motivational gurus. I am a recovering motivational guru addict, but I am aiming for a complete cure because I know, ay my ripe old age, that success, by the standard definition sucks. Let’s redefine it and save your bacon. Now.

PART ONE

The Problem

Wrong day, ill-equipped kitchen, stale ingredients, inadequate tools, no recipe, unqualified chef, torn apron, bad attitude, no cash to buy any of it (bad attitudes are free).

Chapter I — DICED, MARINATED AND FRICASSEED

Once upon a time, in an era just like the present, in a place just like the one where you live, there was a person – let’s call him/her Phil, since that’s gender-neutral and this blood-sport doesn’t discriminate — who was unfulfilled (pun intended), and struggling like all of us, now and then, some more than others (ahem).
Phil had a boring corporate job that didn’t satisfy him/her, or even cover Phil’s cost of living (not that Phil was living above his/her income, or carrying too much credit-card debt, right?), certainly not coming close to the fulfillment (pun again) of his/her dreams. Lucky for Phil’s wife/husband, Phil liked to cook. In fact, he/she was an exceptional cook, and this is where Phil found solace: in the kitchen.
Phil had leveraged the equity in the family home to make extensive renovations. After all, the kids had all left, so more living space was required for the empty nest. And when the Honda finally died after 15 faithful years, a Caddy SUV seemed the perfect reward for… For… Something that was missing.
As the years passed, Phil worked more hours and earned less money so the boss could earn more for the mansion upkeep; Phil knew that either the income had to go up or the expenses go down, or the federal revenue and tax service fold its tent, preferably all of the above.
But there was this pesky recession, the company had been bought by an international conglomerate, and there was a threat that Phil’s job might be phased out. Phil foresaw a door closing in his/her future and was riddled with fear. What to do? Work harder for less, make yourself invaluable so that when the bomb hits, you’ll be the sole employee worth keeping?
Phil was exhausted from working 70 hours a week as he/she got poorer and completely overwhelmed. Then the door slammed shut. Having gone from being consumed by work to empty days, Phil sought comfort and meaning; even cooking wasn’t reducing the mountain of stress. Employed friends had no time to discuss Phil’s plight, so busy were they trying to keep the wolves from their doors, and then one morning, out of the blue, in through Phil’s non-functional spam filter came a message:

“Positive Power Habits
Motivate YOU to Make Millions!”

Divine intervention? How the heck did Goethe know Phil needed motivation? No harm reading it, right?
Phil opened the e-mail and read the first bait, I mean, paragraph, and felt a rush of blood to the temple. The temple is where he/she probably/definitely should have gone and prayed/pleaded that the motivational gurus wouldn’t find him/her there, on his/her knees, in the worst embarrassment/disaster of his/her life (so far).
Still, Phil wasn’t 22 anymore and making millions. Sounded daunting. Scroll down… The subhead reassured us, I mean, Phil:

“It’s easy! We can show you how!”

Whew! Phil read on. The first words captured Phil’s wayward popcorn (where is gravity when you need it?):

“Are you lost? Rudderless? Overwhelmed by indecision? Strangled by debt? Strayed from your path or just haven’t found it yet? Are your dreams in the trash?”

Before Phil could leap in the air and holler, “Yes!”, there in throbbing red type was the very promise of salvation that Phil was so desperate for:

“Congratulations! This is YOUR day! You opened the right e-mail! In ten days, guaranteed, we’ll have you and your life right back on track and better than ever!”

(It didn’t mention that said track had a high-speed freight train, loaded to the gunwales with exclamation points, heading right for Phil’s wallet.)
A miracle! Even more of a miracle, Phil’s employment insurance payment was direct-deposited into his bank account that day, so he/she even had the funds — “A mere pittance! The best investment in yourself you’ll ever make!” — on hand; never mind that it was budgeted for groceries. Kismet!
But there was a problem. If Phil was to proceed with this instant formula, guaranteed to bring wealth and happiness, he/she first had to know what he/she really wanted from life. No, not just the fabulous house with the state-of-the-art kitchen and the Ferrari; Phil had to decide/dream what he/she wanted/needed to be/do with his/her life now/forever. Not exactly a butter-or-margarine kind of thing.
Phil reread the few words upon which he/she was to base this monumental decision in 30 seconds or less, or the price to “embrace this amazing limited opportunity” would double; there was even a clock ticking down on the screen:

“Do what you love and the money will follow!”

Eleven. Ten. Nine. Eight… Do what I love… Hmmm… Four. Three. Two… Cooking! The Aha! that was felt around the world! Phil was going to become a wealthy chef and restaurateur!
Just $49.95, plus applicable taxes, unless you attend the far-more-motivational seminar, only $3,000.00 if you act today; it’ll be $5,000.00 tomorrow. Winners never wait!
You can, yes, fill in the rest. Just remember what your mother told you:

If you don’t eat all of your dinner first, no dessert.

Grocery Shopping on an Empty Stomach

When it comes to motivational-guru addiction, people treat it like a peculiar disease that only everybody else gets. We’ve all fallen prey. I admit it. You can too. And Phil is about to, trust me! No addictions are pretty, not even if you’re addicted to say, cross-stitchery. Fifty years later, you’ll be blind, bound by millions of colourful threads, have no fingers left and be fifty years older!
Fifty years! That’s half a lifetime! You’ve got problems and you need help right now! Your recession-drained bank account is in over-draft and you’ve compromised Grey Goose for Smirnoff’s, but your kids refuse to wear knock-off Nikes. Now what? Here’s what:

Motivational-guru addiction is only different from chemical addictions in that it’s not a disease, it’s a choice. Here’s the menu; pick something nutritious and tasty to eat. No, not beer and a burger. I said nutritious and tasty, not just tasty.

I know what you’re thinking: Cat, just tell me your version of that one-step, guaranteed success program and save my half-baked fiscal soul, please! Ah, but desire for easy instant mashed potatoes, I mean, gratification, is 90% of what got you into this crockpot in the first place, isn’t it? The promise of certain and expeditious wealth and all the carbohydrates you want! No repercussions! Guaranteed success if you follow the proven formula! One step and you’re done! Oh, you’re done all right!
Since you’re reading this book (thank you kindly), I’m asking you to park your spatula and read it. Yes, read it! Not only that, I’m asking you to ingest it, to see yourself in the recipes and not make up some silly excuse about how you happened upon this particular kitchen and that’s not really you drowning in a tureen of motivational merde.
Why did you ingest all that crap anyway? It’s like eating old-style North American Chinese “cuisine”; you’re hungry again half an hour later. Well, congratulations! Your diet will henceforth be comprised of genuine sustenance, the kind you can really dig your teeth into, not the kind that leaves you wanting more and rots your wallet.
This book will please one of my heroes, Dr. Samuel Johnson; he liked to eat and it showed. If he were alive, he might “digest” it. And he might say, “Poh, poh; language is the dress of thought.” So, here you have my near-fatal mistakes, lessons, insights, observations and thoughts, fully clothed. (Thanks, Sam.)
Ay, there’s the rub: I’m telling you to ignore them, but then what? Do I harbour an alternative that’s viable? Yes. But it may be way too simple for the motivationally addicted to stomach. You need time. What I can do for now is make you a solemn promise:

This book will make you laugh and feed you a morsel of wisdom that should clean your spatula for the rest of your life (in literature, this is called “foreshadowing”, nudge, nudge…). Keep reading.

Other than Murphy’s famous law — what can go wrong will go wrong — there is that other one you can be sure of: you’ll spend more money if you go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. That’s part of what this book is about (prevention).
You have to eat before you swim with sharks in the fib-infested waters of the Untied (intended typo) States-of-Mind of Motivational-land. And if you skipped that meal and got snared in the fake-promises aisle at the motivational gurus’ little shop of success stories (by “stories”, I mean fables), then that’s the other part of this book’s Great Purpose: to bust you out of motivational prison and get you cooking your life sanely again. One step at a time.

Changing the Menu

Because words dress thoughts, here is my new moniker for motivational gurus:

Motivational Mangia-cakes (pronounced MAHN-ja kaykz).

What’s a mangia-cake anyway? Like most words of mixed origin (in this case, Italian and English), this one has evolved from a phrase that literally means “cake-eaters”, in other words, non-Italians (read: the stupido English, eaters of white fluffy stuff).
Supposedly this term surfaced when Mussolini chucked out the Brits who hung around Lake Como, having tea in the afternoon at bistros, screwing up the waiters’ naps after they siphoned too much wine at lunch. All imbibing aside, a mangia-cake has come to mean anybody who is a chooch, a goomba, a goof. Capice?

Stirring the Pot

The goal (there it is: the “G” word; might as well air it now) here is to poke fun at an industry that, well, deserves to have fun poked at it. Humour: a tool I use when I just can’t seem to be serious. Which is mostly. Which is why I’ve survived as long as I have.
But why the food theme? I figured that in order to drive home my points I needed a commonly understood thread. I was going to call the book Bad Medicine: How Motivational Gurus Can Make You Sick. But I sensibly, without motivation, deduced that such a nefarious title might solicit a lawsuit or three.
I gobbled up the food aspect because of its universality, and because I had the worst case of food poisoning in my life:

Within ten months, I had bought and run and closed a restaurant business.

Excuse me while I throw up again.
At first, it all seemed to fit, like a pie in the oven. Well, I guess it depends upon the pie and the oven. And, dear reader, soon-to-be-chef-of-your-own-life, that is the point:

It depends upon the pie and the oven.

Results may vary. If only life’s recipes were as fool- and/or fail-proof as the ones in your professional-kitchen-tested collection of cookery books.
In the kitchen of life, there is soup splattered everywhere, Cheerios on the floor where the dog is eating them instead of Alpo (the baby may be devouring the Alpo, but that’s another book), and flour, from the time you tried to make Scottish baps, still flies off the ceiling fan every time you turn it on.
Motivational mangia-cakes cook in kitchens that are spotlessly clean, and their recipes always turn out the same. Heck, the cookware even matches! A motivational mangia-cake goes into a kitchen and wills a cake to bake to perfection and it simply happens. Just like that! You, too, can cook your life this way. You can cook anything you want (preferably not the corporate books), and achieve instant success, as long as you start now.
Well, that works for pasta sauce because it’s better after a few days stewing, but personally, I’m fed up suffering from the false claims of motivational mangia-cakes, and adding to the barrels of dough they make doing it, and I bet you are, too. If you’re a full-blown motivational mangia-cake addict, there’s a cure (hint: you’re reading it). Or maybe you’re just a curious bystander (so far) and need to learn that prevention is worth a pound of flesh.
Take this book as a warning, because the motivational mangia-cakes are hiding in the back of your cupboards, right next to that bag of fat-free, sugar-free, guilt-free candy, in the kitchen of your life, waiting until that moment when your dough doesn’t rise, so they can drag you into their nasty little crockpots, right after they turn you upside-down and empty your wallet, which is illegal in some countries! No one is completely immune to the sirens of motivational manure. Recipe not included.

What the Heck is Success Anyway?

Success: the achievement of something desired, planned or attempted.

The basic dictionary definition of the noun.
David Orr, professor of environmental studies and politics at the University of Vermont, has this to say about “success”:

“This planet does not need more “successful” people, but it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage, willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.”

Yay, David! I am a storyteller. I love and am loved by a bevy of cats and dogs. This book is my fight to make the world more humane, less Robbins-esque.
Anthony Robbins, perhaps the best known of his ilk, defines the key to success thus: “…to create patterns of movement that create confidence, a sense of strength, flexibility, a sense of personal power and fun.” WTF (what the frypan)? I guess he charges by the word.
So do I, but I’m a writer, not a motivational anything (I can’t even motivate my dog, Skye, to eat). Here’s my version:

When I get 75% of my to-do list to-done on any given day; when the lovely and talented but appetite-deprived Fiona actually eats the breakfast entrée I have selected for her; when the conspiratorial cats do not produce a solitary hairball; when I don’t get the mascara in my eye; when I sign the damn cheque before I seal it in the envelope; when I make a perfect cross-court drop-shot against better badminton players than I am; when I get the cork out clean leaving no particles in the bottle; and when 50% of my bills are paid to current. And most important, when I spend unhurried time with the people and pets I love. And I feel content. Just content.

So, success is about how you define it and perhaps what you make of it. And by the way, cork makes a poor substitute for protein; fish it out. (There’s nothing more embarrassing than explaining that you’re not an alcoholic, then smiling, and there’s cork stuck in your teeth.)
What success is not, is having countless cars in your countless garages, a house bigger than you need that sucks up more energy than a small town, and sending your kids to private school to get rid of them while you vacation in Monte Carlo and your spouse gets sober at a luxury spa in Arizona.
I live in Nova Scotia, Canada’s best-kept secret. One of the catch-phrases here, is, “Come to Nova Scotia. Come to life”. I did. And I did.
When there is a national or global recession, the locals — “Bluenosers” — shrug their shoulders and keep doing what they were doing (fishing, drinking L’Acadie Blanc or Hell Bay Black Flag beer (yes, there be pirates here!), eating lobster, dancing a jig). Why? Because Nova Scotia is deemed a “have-not” province; the people want what they have. They would define success as a state of not wanting for much, as opposed to wanting more than they need. Or want. Clear as the fog in Yarmouth?
I know, I know. The problem isn’t necessarily the material accumulation, but the lack of motivation, right? Keep reading; I’ll motivate you all right… Just as soon as that pasta sauce is perfect…

Does Success Really Suck?

Of course not. Unless your definition of it is about material wealth and having the most expensive kitchen renovation in the neighbourhood. You can’t take that Hobart stainless steel professional range with smoke-free grill with you. Ask Thornton Wilder. And by the way, since when is stainless steel really stainless?
Why is it that we measure success by material gain? Our children don’t know us, our spouses don’t love us with the passion we need. We eschew learning the classics, dismiss them as passé, but we know nothing about life because we haven’t got the classical education that teaches us the essence of it. But we have twenty grand worth of renovations in our spa bathroom and a new SUV in the garage. Beat that in your Cuisinart!
Our heroes are people who have accumulated wealth, but can’t hold on to a marriage or family to save their pudding.
Motivational mangia-cakes know many things about you, and they don’t even know you. Or do they… Hmmm… They know you’re part of an instant-gratification society that covets “stuff” and not substance, and then for some strange reason feels emotionally unfulfilled. They come rushing to your aid with the perfect vessel in which you can throw your piddly life savings or maxed-out credit card and become rich and successful, fast. The vessel is called a crockpot. And the recipe that got you there is a crock. You want it so badly you forget the price: that’s when success sucks.

Chocolate Veggies

At last! Those genius people at the genetically modified foods factories have found a way to make vegetables from dark 70% cocoa European chocolate! Okay, so don’t believe everything you read!
You didn’t just fall off the turnip truck! You recognize merde when you see a dog leave it on the sidewalk just for your new shoes. Right? Don’t be embarrassed. Just like the suck-you-in concept of yummy chocolate veggies, you’ve bought a well-done, succulent casserole of fibs, designed to get you to eat all your veggies so you can splurge on dessert. True or false?
Lies are curious critters. Some are black, some are white, and some thinly disguised as untruths (aka, fake news). It’s like buying a packaged gourmet frozen lasagne, putting it in your ceramic lasagne pan, burning the packaging to destroy the evidence, adding a dash of parmesan and a sprig of fresh oregano, claiming it’s your Italian Nona’s recipe, conveniently forgetting you’re Irish, and serving it to your spouse’s new boss.
We’ve all done it in a pinch. Your guests were salivating; what was dribbling down your chin was guilt. But you pulled it off! Congrats! Ah, but the new boss’s husband asked you for the recipe. Now what? It’s all in your head? It died with your Italian grandmother (not that she exactly ever lived, did she)? It’s a family secret? It sure as hell is; even your spouse doesn’t know. Secret? Lie?
By swallowing the grandmother’s lasagne of motivational gurus, you and I and half the people in the western world have given them all the motivation they need to keep cooking the lies.
If I am going to free you as I have freed myself from the mangia-cakes, I also need to ensure you don’t return to that tempting cesspool for another swimming lesson the next time your halibut sticks to the pan.
I like you, and all; I just don’t relish dipping my hand in that spew again, okay?
The motivational mangia-cakes know they have you in their grips when you can’t tell a secret from a lie, a frozen, prepared lasagne from a squashed manicotti.

Nutritional Value

Why do I get to enter the kitchen of your life while simultaneously warning you to barricade the door with your sturdiest set of tongs against wandering motivational mangia-cakes that come a-knocking?
I’m a writer; there’s the scribing third of it. And a very, very (read: forever) former restaurateur; there’s the culinary third of it. But this book in particular? The third third: experience. My life has been a rollercoaster of — how to phrase this — “events”. Tragedy, troubles, catastrophes, peppered with the very odd exaltation of larks. I have tried and failed (failed? gadzooks!) in dozens of business ventures, brought myself to the waters of bankruptcy several times, and avoided with almost missionary zeal my true path. Bump, bump, crash. Ka-chunk!
Yes, I have subscribed to the sirens of salvation; I have read with frighteningly sacred dedication, gullible need and utterly blind belief, when I was reduced to crawling around on my knees (I’d have been more productive scrubbing my kitchen floor) these self-proclaimed motivational “gurus”, and even attended their massive rallies.
The Robbins one was embarrassing. I refuse to jump up and shout “Yes!” when I want to scream, “Nooooooo!”. Yes, dear reader, I have lined their coffers. But I made notes! Just like they told me to do! And I kept a journal! All the way down to the bottom of the fiscal barrel…
Ah, live and learn. I have, and that is why this book, in particular, has been written by this writer, in particular, at this particular point in time. My mistakes, dear reader, are all behind me now. You can learn from me! Doughnut, anyone? They don’t make you fat, you know.
Okay, kidding. That last paragraph was 100% merde. Just getting you warmed up. Be careful what you swallow.
But it looks so good in the package… And therein lies your culinary challenge. Can you resist, or if you’re already hooked, extricate yourself, from a bunch of unpapered chefs that boldly guarantee your piecrust will be perfect and completely fat-free? Mais oui! Now tie on that apron; we have some messy work to do!

PART TWO

The Causes
Desperation, indigestion, neighbour envy, misguided goals, greed, recessions, healthy cupcakes, wayward merde, weak ankles, entitlement, promising guys in polyester suits.

Chapter I — AMUSE BOUCHE

Are you smiling as you whip that smoked salmon mousse and pipe it onto endive? Is your mouth amused? The idea is that when you place that amuse bouche in your mouth, it inspires your palate, and becomes the trigger to the rest of your meal. If a motivational mangia-cake feeds it to you, pull that trigger!
The motivational mangia-cakes will direct you thus: when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. Recently I saw a T-shirt that reinvented this sappy axiom: when life hands you a lemon, break out the tequila and salt.
The truth is you can’t make lemonade from a lemon. You need a whole lot of them, and if life hands you that many lemons, you’re in bad shape, dear reader. So grab that tequila and salt, have a couple on me, name your next kid or dog José, get over it and get on with it.
Okay, okay, I get that what they mean is not in the literal interpretation, that you should make the best of a bad situation. Hey, I’m a writer; I use symbolism a lot. The point here is utterly non-symbolic:

Sometimes you cannot turn a situation around and what you need is a good cry or a stiff martini, and then either fix what went so wrong as to lead you to this, or end it or change it (the situation, not you).

Sliced lemons strewn around make the neighbourhood cats stop pooping in your flowerbeds; do the motivational mangia-cakes tell you that? Do they motivate cats? Can anyone?

Cause and Effect

Yeast causes your bread to rise; if you eat enough of that bread, your stomach and thighs will rise, too.
Here you are seated at an empty table, starving for inspiration, motivation, any “ation” that will make your life better, pronto. You’re primed, ready to be fed just about anything that is garnished liberally with promises (federal election, anyone?), but how the hell did you get here? Too much yeast? Not enough lemons? What? What??
One thing is certain: whether you were in a wayward taxicab with a motivated driver at the wheel or at the bank motivating your last dollar out of your retirement savings account, the motivational mangia-cakes saw you coming. They’re like fish and chip shops in the U.K., Tim Hortons in Canada, Coors Lite in the U.S.A. and kangaroos in Oz; they’re everywhere. And their traps are baited. For you.

Conveniently Forgotten Ingredients

You followed the recipe for Mediterranean olive bread, and even admitted that the reason you’re making bread from scratch is to deal with repressed anger; you need to punch the living hell out of something, so it might as well be bread dough, and then you can at least have a decent lunch.
So, why won’t it rise? Have you punched it so hard that it’s dead? No, silly; you forgot the yeast, a key ingredient. And when you do add the yeast, remember it doesn’t germinate in cold water. That’s not a motivational tip, but a cooking tip, quite literally. You’re welcome.
Do all motivational mangia-cakes lie? No, of course not (note to my lawyer: is this a what you meant by “disclaimer”?), some of them operate by conveniently omitting that one key — truthful — ingredient, that confessional grain of salt that does not summarily support their claims.
One of Tony Robbins’ great one-liners (if it were only stand-up comedy!) is, “One decision can change your life”. True, and what is conveniently left out here? My uncut observation:

A bad decision, a really bad one, can destroy your life. Change is not always for the better!

Remember that lines and lies have a difference of only one teensy letter.
One of the e-mail services I used to subscribe to was from Max Steingart who writes, ever so modestly, as The Daily Guru. His service had two components: one was motivational messages; the other spiritual. Curiously, when I received The Daily Guru’s Spiritual Messages, my “re” line was only so long, and it came through as: “The Daily Guru Spiritual Mess”.
Which reminds me… Why is it that the (copious) spam in my in-box is from people with unlikely names, like Raphaelo MacIntosh, Avelino D. Wonkersbreath, and Ekaterina Wayward-Wilson?
And why is it that motivational mangia-cakes often have spam-like monikers? Here are a few examples: Doc Childre (did they forget the “n”? A paediatrician with a letter missing?); C. West Churchman (wonder what the great big symbolic capital “C” stands for? Hmm…); Orison Swett Marden (please, where do they come up with these? And no, don’t sweat on my horizon, not today); and one of my all-time favourites, Zig Ziglar. (Did his mother look into his cradle and say, “Aw, he’s so cute that I just have to call him Zig.”? Or was he a twin and his brother was Zag?).
(One small mea culpa here; well, sort of. I found out after I wrote the above that Orison Swett Marden was the founder and publisher of Success magazine. This, for some reason, did not inspire me to edit the preceding paragraph.)
It’s not always what the motivational mangia-cakes say that will send you off galloping down a dangerous path; often it’s what they leave out of your picnic basket that trips your thermos lock. Life is cruel. Especially on outdoor excursions meant to impress potential lovers.
Here’s an example from The Daily Guru:

“YOU CAN MAKE UP YOUR MIND TO BE ANYTHING

You’re special and unique among all the creatures on the planet earth. You’ve been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures inside your mind and to find them automatically printed in the outer world of your environment. You’ll gradually grow into any condition you desire, provided you first make yourself in habitual mental attitude the person who corresponds to that condition. Picture yourself vividly as winning, and that alone will contribute measurably to your success. All your dreams can come true, if you have the courage to pursue them.”

What’s conveniently left out is that you’re free to do anything within your mind, but it might not be possible in practice. Making up your mind is a, yes, no-brainer, but that’s only one pea-sized step in one pod on one vine in a whole veggie garden full of pea plants.
What else? Everybody else’s mother has told them that they were special and unique, too.
Let’s toast the part that reads: “You’ll gradually grow into any condition you desire, provided you first make yourself in habitual mental attitude the person who corresponds to that condition.” The omission (other than several missing commas) is fairly serious: making a mental habit is not the same as doing something in a concrete way on a habitual basis.
He uses firm words like “will” which are extremely dangerous; there are no guarantees.
“Picture yourself vividly as winning, and that alone will contribute measurably to your success.” I laugh when I hear sports teams interviewed after they have won a game, claiming the reason they won was that before the game commenced they visualized themselves winning. What do they think the other team was doing? Tossing back triple martinis and eating nachos? When there’s a game between two teams, only one can win.
And no, not, “All your dreams can come true, if you have the courage to pursue them.” What is omitted is the adjective “reasonable” or perhaps “feasible”, even “possibly attainable”, as in “some of your feasible dreams may come true”; that’s one hell of a major omission.
Steingart commonly writes things that are borderline daft, and his spelling and grammar are atrocious. If The Daily Guru wants (but probably doesn’t) to hear one of my claims, it’s this:

You can’t be successful if you can’t spell correctly or punctuate your way out of a paper bag.

I’d be wrong (not lying, wrong) because most people nowadays (lord, I sound like my grandfather) can’t spell or punctuate (this is why Lynn Truss has become a “successful” author after writing Eats, Shoots & Leaves).
It’s pick on The Daily Guru day:

“FEAR IS CONQUERED BY TAKING ACTION

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. When you dare to face the things that scare you, you open the door to freedom and success. Most of your obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them or procrastinating about dealing with them, you make up your mind to walk boldly through them. Don’t be afraid to take the steps you need to take to make those positive changes in your life. To fight your fears, you must act. Your fears increase when you wait, put off, or postpone. If you understood your situation enough, you would never be afraid. The attainment of your dreams is but a determined action away. Successful people take action.”

The title of this is not an outrageous statement, nor is it choking with omissions, but more true might be:

“Fear may be conquered by learning about that which you
fear”.

I’ve taken out forceful words like “is” and replaced them with words of possibility, like “may”. And if you think about it, if you are afraid of an earthquake, for instance, and you take action (inadvertently running towards it?), your fear might be exacerbated, not conquered. Conversely, if you get the facts about earthquakes, your fears may be allayed, but you may never go to northern California and risk eating at French Laundry again. The food is fantastic, but the tables, dishes and cutlery (not to mention the waiters) tremble now and then.
One thing I will say about fear is this:

Fear exists solely in the future.

It’s not possible to literally fear the past. Think about it.
Now, here’s my really big issue with Steingart’s statement: it was coined by Marie Curie, and he doesn’t credit her. And it’s taken out of context.
If fear is understood, is it any less fearful? Not really. It’s the object of the fear that must be understood.
“When you dare to face the things that scare you, you open the door to freedom and success.” Here’s my rephrasing:

When you face the things that scare you, that’s the first step toward dealing with them on a level playing field.

If my dream is to be a writer (stop laughing, please) and my obstacle is not having a pen and paper, but my fear is 40,000 rejection letters, then I can make my obstacle melt away by going to the local stationery supply store, and I can make my fear melt away by never sending out the manuscript.
True, if you do nothing about overcoming your fears, then cause and effect will rule. And deciding to face your fears is the first step, but it’s a long way from a fearless solution. Ask Fosdick.
What about this bit: “If you understood your situation enough, you would never be afraid.” Are not many of our fears unfounded, existing only because we don’t know the facts? If we fear snakes, for example, is it because we don’t know enough about snakes? A garter snake touring through the grass on your lawn is hardly a thing to fear. A python hopping out of your laundry hamper because you insist on playing that tinny flute that I asked you to sell in your last garage sale is worthy of a hundred-yard dash in the opposite direction.
Fears tend to get worse unless you address them. Understanding what you are afraid of will probably reduce the fear factor, but sometimes the fear is justified.
Sorry, but, “The attainment of your dreams is but a determined action away.” is not just riddled with omissions, it’s simply not true. My ever-so-polite retelling:

The attainment of your dreams is one hell of a lot more than a determined action away (unless your dream is to take a bathroom break; excuse me…). This makes it sound easy and it damn well is not.

And, “Successful people take action.” may be true, but with a great big honking omission: so do unsuccessful people. My hindsight/insight? Here it is:

If taking action surely brought success, there would be no such thing as couch potatoes.

Part of the way in which motivational mangia-cakes get you to part with your cash (and when you are at the point of craving the pie-in-the-sky messages baked by these guys, you are probably close to throwing your wallets at them) that you could better use elsewhere is by making you believe that there is a pattern in place, a sure bet, and if you follow it, you too can be successful like they are, and fast. There is a proven method! Just follow the yellow brick road. Remember, The Wizard of Oz was fiction!
In saying, then, that “fear is only to be understood”, The Daily Guru belittles the magnitude that fear can hold in modest and individual lives. Fear can cripple, even if its source is understood. It’s an ostensibly small omission, but it works for the purpose of motivational merde that shoots to the surface under scrutiny. Excuse me; I think the lid just blew off my popcorn-maker.
Here’s another one of Steingart’s pieces. It’s the only one he publishes that’s outstanding in its reality; I just wish he followed it himself on every other piece he wrote for The Daily Guru; the rest are 99% codswallop, 1% mashed turnips (tasteless and indigestible):

“NO AUTHORITY IS HIGHER THAN REALITY

Truth isn’t a matter of your personal viewpoint. Learn to see things as they really are, not as you imagine they are. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it. No matter what you believe, it never changes the facts. If they are there, the facts always speak for themselves. The truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of people. If sixty million people say a foolish thing, it’s still a foolish thing. The sky is no less blue because the blind man does not see it.”

Absolutely true and utterly brilliant. Argue with that; go ahead!
Key to this message is that it’s pure and simple, lean and nutritious. But such is not the case with most of motivational mangia-cake drivel. And that’s one of their Venus fly-trap tricks. By omitting things and by knowing (they do actually read) human nature, they slyly dip you in their sauce.

When the Soufflé Falls

Blaming other people for one’s own failings or the failings of society has become a global pastime. Motivational mangia-cakes know this; it’s their job to find frailties and use them as can-openers (yes, you’re the can, dear reader).
That cheese soufflé was perfect until your aunt called to gossip and you left it in the oven too long. Bad auntie! You couldn’t say, “Hang on a sec while I get the soufflé out of the oven so that it’s not your fault” or what? Afraid of insulting her? Nah; it’s just easier to blame someone else.
But there’s another thing wrong with that soufflé (other than it’s not chocolate and you didn’t make it for me). You’re going on the assumption that every single one of tonight’s dinner guests likes soufflé and will praise you wildly. Assuming that everyone believes as you do is a fatal flaw and will unpuff your pastry every time. Ask George W. Bush.
I believe that you’re the master of your fate only to the degree to which you are willing to accept culpability for everything in your life, except merde landing on your head from a leaky cloud with no lining, silver or otherwise. Blame yourself when self-blame is due, and credit yourself accordingly. When you make a bad choice, don’t blame me!
Having said that, I do, after an extremely trying childhood, believe that there is some justification in “acknowledging” parental influence on children. Yes, you too can blame your parents for some things. Then again, my mother was a terrible cook, famous for her potato (“tatty”) scones that could choke an elephant, so hard and dry were they (the scones, not the elephants), and I can cook quite well, so I’m told.
Sandy Hotchkiss’s fabulous book, Why Is It Always About You? (The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism), squarely lays the blame for the current pandemic of narcissism on parents who think their kids’ diapers don’t stink. Let’s all raise a Golden Spatula Award to Sandy! And thump Trump’s parents.
Her book is very much worth a read, and gave me more insights than any motivational mangia-cake ever has or ever will. Why? Because she speaks a language they are allergic to: truth. You probably know the expression in vino veritas (in wine, truth; if you don’t, drink more wine and call me in the morning). Well, it’s, ahem, true.
Ms. Hotchkiss acknowledges the effect of narcissistic parents on their progeny, and in so doing helps them understand what triggers have motivated us — even set us up — to take risks, to assume infallibility, and to believe in the rubbish we are fed by motivational mangia-cakes.
She nails on the self-important head what parents of my generation (Baby Boom) have done to make their offspring feel invincible and that success is somehow owed to them. Of course, my children are not like that, but then, they have four legs and tails (well, one tail each).
Rarely have I seen insight into human character as accurately and neatly summed up as this. Ms. Hotchkiss cites the “seven deadly sins of narcissism” as being (mostly paraphrased by yours truly):

1. shamelessness

2. magical thinking — the distortion of oneself as not being flawed

3. arrogance

4. envy

5. entitlement — this is a huge one, and a societal problem virtually across the board. I’ll cite my own example here. When I owned my second restaurant, my staff members were by and large in their twenties. They often called in sick, or came in too stoned or hung-over to work, or stayed out all night and were too tired to risk being in the kitchen handling knives. As a result, they took a lot of time off, but when their paycheques were less than they expected, I was to blame; they never failed to come to me and complain about the amount paid. Hello? You do not actually have to work to be paid; you are entitled to money for nothing because you exist? Apparently.

6. exploitation — Ms. Hotchkiss says: “Exploitation can take many forms but always involves the using of others without regard for their feelings or interests.”

7. bad boundaries — the ability to say “no”, as in, “no, I am not entitled to have everything I want right now without regard for your needs”.

Sound like anyone you know? Someone I like to call “Cheetolini”? Of course, there’s a modicum of one or some of these traits in almost all of us, and others may surface when we’re confronted with unusual situations, but when someone manifests them all, grab your spatula and run!
Motivational mangia-cakes fit this profile (if not all seven traits, six-99/100s), and they manage to instill it in their followers; it vilifies them and helps with that damn sheet they keep throwing over everyone’s head. Trick or treat, anyone?
It’s perhaps this sense of entitlement that is strongest in contemporary culture and this is the Achilles heel upon which motivational mangia-cakes dine. No, dear reader, neither you nor I nor the shameless, arrogant chef with bad boundaries at your local restaurant has a divine right to success.
If your dream was to be an opera singer, and you had no talent, but your parents made you feel entitled to be an opera singer (because they blindly told you that you did have the requisite capabilities, could achieve any dream your little heart desired while they were too busy to notice that you could not sing a note, and they had the money to back up their lies) and you forged ahead, so sure of yourself you were willing to sacrifice anything, and now all you do is sing in the shower after your night shift at the factory, you will find insight and understanding in Ms. Hotchkiss’s wise and savvy book.
Please, dear reader, read and duly ingest the following paragraph at least twice:

Once I realized that motivational mangia-cakes are not just feeding off my vulnerability, but shooting point-blank at my emotional frailties, I was able to extract their psychological bullets, and extricate myself from their claws.

A major part of wresting your spatula from them is not just learning how to chop, dice and skewer them, but learning what they have learned, turning their serrated knives against them: human psychology.
They’ve obviously read the so-called life-changing book written by a dead guy named Napoleon Hill (sounds like a monument; should be a monument!) and spent the rest of time rehashing and paraphrasing his words because it made tons of money for him, but what they know even more is that people, like sheep, hop onto the barbeque spit when beckoned, only we don’t go so well with mint sauce and Viognier.
Motivational mangia-cakes have studied your psychology, so if you haven’t done the same homework, then you’re vulnerable to their capitalizing on human weakness.

Cooking with Narcissists

Here’s a gem from The Daily Guru that absolutely stokes the expectations of narcissistic people who think success is a societal debt to them, personally:

“IF YOU WANT IT, YOU CAN HAVE IT

If you’re willing to pay the price, any of your circumstances will change. If you want something badly enough, you’re sure to get it. The key to success is desire. Obstacles don’t matter very much. Pain, circumstances or other challenges can be there. But if you want something bad [sic] enough, you’ll find a way to get it done. Your desire will in time externalize itself into concrete fact. Your reality will form around your commitment to succeed. You only have to love a thing greatly to get it. Desire is the fire of life.”

In the oft-uttered words of Agent 99, played by Barbara Feldon on the television comedy, Get Smart!: “Oh, Max!”
Yes! Let’s feed the budding narcissists and drain our bank accounts so we can set a good example for them to drain theirs for their spoiled-brat kids in the future. Just don’t look to me to be a grandparent.
The whole point is this: they’re not willing to pay the price for anything. They expect these things delivered on a silver platter; they are entitled to them!
Yes, circumstances can and do change, but not always for the better!
“If you want something badly enough, you’re sure to get it.” is horse merde. Let me put it this way:

If you want something badly enough, and are willing to pay the price, you might get it; you also might not! And it’s no reflection of who you are as a person.

The key to being willing to make an effort normally starts with desire. There, that’s better than, “The key to success is desire.” Desire isn’t enough, and it doesn’t somehow magically or automatically externalize into reality.
Obstacles? It depends upon the obstacle, and it may be affected by rotten grammar.
I can hear the narcissists’ cheering section as they read the line, “You only have to love a thing greatly to get it.” This is their rallying cry and it’s as fragile as a cracked egg.
I love black Russian caviar, but that doesn’t quite cut it; I have to have about a hundred and fifty bucks in my wallet to get it. Will desire net the cash for me? It might inspire me, but work and a paycheque will see the money go into my bank account and come back out at the local fancy food shop. I could, of course, settle for maybe red caviar, which is good but not stunning, a tenth of the price, and readily available at my local grocery store. And perhaps pay my rent, too. Just for a lark.
So, what if I take the opposite tack? What if I say what my critics are thinking right about now? If you don’t love something greatly, you won’t get it. To them I say this:

You’ll get what you get whether you love it or not.

You might love black caviar and get salmon roe. Learn to love salmon roe; it’s actually quite good on Melba toast if you add an olive or two.
Life is like that sometimes. Often. Mostly.
Desire is certainly one of the driving forces behind what actions we take in our lives, but it does not in and of itself fire our lives and it guarantees nothing.
Motivational mangia-cakes always cite examples of people who have succeeded despite perceived limitations. Frequently used among these are: Oprah Winfrey, who started out black and poor, and became black and rich; Barbara Walters, a broadcaster with a speech impediment; and an A-list of athletes who suffer from chronic diseases or wasting ones, like arthritis, but still won a gold medal at the Olympics. Pardon my realism: Terry Fox is dead. I admired him for his courage, am amazed that his Marathon of Hope still resonates around the world today and funds cancer research, but, sadly, Terry Fox died from his disease, as many millions do. Yes, his legacy is profound, but he did not overcome his cancer. It happens.
Yikes, I forgot to be witty for a moment! Where’s my spatula?
Cook to your own recipes and don’t let anyone tell you the result tastes bad. Take credit for your dishes! You made it; you eat it.
Realize that there is nothing new in the motivational mangia-cakes’ blame/credit recipes. They all stack blame and toss credit (mostly in God’s direction). Tossing salad would be a much nicer thing to “achieve”.
In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, there is a line that most people would agree with (and throw in motivational mangia-cakes, for good measure): “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. Lawyers today, unlike in Shakespeare’s time, largely exist because somebody sees fit to blame somebody else. Who “succeeds” as a result? Yup; the lawyers. So, accept culpability for the results of your own recipes; stop making lawyers rich (with apologies to mine).
Embrace what inspires you; allow it free reign. And when you fail, examine your own steps, understand what you let influence you, and wear that merde on your noggin with a modicum of pride and a bigger dollop of embarrassment; humility is one of the last bastions of decency we have left.

Wine is Good for You; No, it’s Not

I’m going to drink it anyway because I like it. And if I drink it moderately, it won’t kill me (unlike cigarettes, for example; no, I don’t smoke unless I am really angry and then only out of my ears).
Another major issue that I have with motivational mangia-cakes is the unhealthy mixture of stuff they put in their grocery carts. A case of soda pop and a jumbo bag of greasy chips, next to a bunch of fresh carrots. They expect you to consume these, no questions asked. And pay them for them, too. One minute, they tell you what absolutely will work and the next they contradict it, sometimes in the same sentence, and rarely properly separated by a comma. Where is Lynn Truss when you need her?
Tony Robbins says that, “Failure should be called learning”. If failure is so important, such a key step to success, then why euphemize it?
In Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins quotes many famous people including Benjamin Disraeli, an arch-conservative, and Lord Chesterfield, one of the biggest goofs in the history of Great Britain (for my British readers, yes, you know who I mean). Here is what Samuel Johnson — thought to be an arch-conservative, but wasn’t (a cynic, yes) — a man most worthy of quoting, said of Chesterfield:

“In the beginning, I thought that Lord Chesterfield was a lord among wits, but I found that he was only a wit among lords.”

Robbins may have thought he was safe quoting this wit among lords; I mean, how many people have heard of this guy, other than sitting on a thing that may or may not have been named after him (for my American readers, refer, please to Lord Couch)? I bet Disraeli rolls in his grave each time someone reads one of his eloquent if starchy quotes in Robbins’ book.
Robbins also quotes Thomas Edison:

“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

This is all very well and fine if you’re not referring to, say, parachuting.
By using the quotes of respected (or laughed at) people from history, Robbins is populating his book with better writers than he is, but he is not making it any more credible as a result.
First, butter was wholesome and good for us. Then it was too high in fat. Everyone looked to margarine, but it has saturated fats; maybe butter, in smaller doses, is actually better. And the debate goes on.
Motivational mangia-cake, Dan Robey, had his e-mail addicts, I mean, followers, write down their loftiest dreams and goals for 2007. In his suggested list, he cited more money, fabulous cars, bigger houses and dream vacations. Max Steingart, in his treatise on “riches lie within you, not in your material possessions” appears, dear reader, to counter The Dan. I would like to dress these guys up in seventeenth-century attire, hand them well-oiled pistols and let them have a motivational go at one another.
When motivational mangia-cakes argue their points and then contradict them, the message is a lot more significant than what to spread on toast. It says very clearly, “I don’t know what I’m talking about. I say what I need to so that it fits what I want to prove.” Imagine if all scientific research was based on such a liberal premise!
As for me, I’ll drink my wine, alternating red and white until they (whoever “they” are) decide which is actually better, by which time I’ll be dead, but happy and pickled. And in the meantime, I’ll put a pat of real butter on my whole-grain organic toast. Just in case.

“Where there’s a will there’s a way. You can have anything you want in your life if you are willing to sacrifice everything else for it.” These are the verbatim words of a motivational mangia-cake (you know who you are, and since you all spout the same gruel, this is all of you). This suggests that nothing else in your life is what you want other than the thing you don’t have that you do want and would sacrifice everything else for. Highly contradictory.
Two of the common motivational mangia-cakes’ dictums are: thinking it makes it so, and nothing happens until you take action. Excuse me while I go take action to think about what I shouldn’t be doing if I happen to move and knock my thought out of my head. Maybe I better stay still and pretend not to think at all. Where’s my spatula?
One last fish-gutting knife into The Daily Guru, and we’ll get on to the appetizers, palate cleanser and main courses. He says: “the highway to success is a toll road” versus “success is closer than you think”; good, because I’m out of loose change.

Chapter II — THE APPETIZER COURSE

Did the Ancients have trouble getting motivated? Heck no, they had an entire world to populate, languages to conjure up, civilizations to cultivate, wheels to invent that would move their fannies, and fire to discover so they could cook their food, stopping it from squirming on the way down.
The practice of motivational guru-ing is recorded history, and believe me, ladies, it’s not herstory.
Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill was, depending on what story you believe, published in 1937. According to the author’s notes, Hill was but a boy (a cub reporter) when the great and wealthy Andrew Carnegie approached him (a classic example of merde doing what it will at its whim) and offered to share his “secret” (oh, that word…) formula for creating wealth.
Hill evidently spent twenty years getting this secret out to other people; thank heavens he’s not stirring my custard. Then again, maybe it was he who told my mother how long to bake her scones.
Hill claims to have assembled all that he learned from Carnegie and his contemporaries into his book, and that this “secret magic formula”, because it worked for Carnegie and Hill, and others, is a tried-and-true recipe for getting rich and doing it PDQ or RFN. Reading a book about getting rich doesn’t make you rich, but these guys got rich because a bunch of people bought the book! Nudge, nudge…
Carnegie’s “secret” may have worked for him, but it does not and cannot work for everyone because:

No cookie-cutter approach, no template, no formula will ever work for everyone because we’re all different, all individual, and all see things with our own set of perceptions.

If the reverse were true, then why did my mother’s scones turn out like inedible little rocks and mine turn out perfectly when I use her recipe?
That some people employed Carnegie’s method and became wealthy is Hill’s basis for hollering “success!” I have no way of researching this, but I’m willing to stake my steak on the “fact” that maybe ten times as many people went bankrupt doing the same things. Okay, let me rephrase this: I did.
Carnegie’s “system” comprises thirteen steps (not directional steps, but points) and Hill’s book issues statements and mantras still in use by motivational mangia-cakes. Among those is:

“Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.”

I can conceive of a great big honking mangia-cake knife. I can believe it will silence these motivational mangia-cakes for once and for all, but is this achievable? No! Because another one of them was born five minutes ago. And another one will be born in ten minutes. How else can society keep babies off the dole!
Part of the motivational-claims deal is to say that all great achievements are the result of plans and goals, and precisely measured identical condiments, but what about when things are discovered by accident? Like America, for example.
I’ll use a more serious point here. How long has mankind tried to eliminate diseases, especially fatal ones, like cancer? Have we succeeded? No! Is it lack of desire? Have we somehow failed to conceive of a cancer-free world? Or to lack belief in a cure? Then why haven’t we achieved it? Because we read Napoleon Hill’s book and didn’t apply his techniques? Balderdash! Codswallop! Horse manure! Bullshit! Mashed turnips! I’m back.
Opposite the inside front cover of Hill’s book is the following:

“…With only $100, the desire to succeed, and the principles in Think & Grow Rich, W. Clement Stone was able to build an organization that now produces a gross annual income of over thirty-six million dollars.”

Okay, let’s start with omissions. It doesn’t say what year this unbelievable mathematical feat took place. These days, $100 buys a laser ink cartridge for your computer printer, and if you are prone to establishing a new business in, say, Ontario or Nova Scotia, Canada, the fee to register a sole proprietorship.
The other omission that will choke the vulnerable into thinking unrealistic thoughts is that nowhere does it mention how long it took to parlay this hundred bucks into millions. And it doesn’t say that Stone’s business is profitable; you can have revenue of zillions, but if your costs are higher than that, you’re bust. And finally, what about Stone’s personal life? Was he a good father and husband? A man with a soul? A boss who respected his employees? Omissions. Where’s my white-out?
Here is the condensed version of (up)Hill’s steps (remember, going downhill is the easy part…):

1. Desire. Hill calls this “the starting point of all achievement”; I call it “the starting point of all motivational mangia-cake copycats”. Think about how misguided desire can be. I can sum it up in one word: Hitler. Okay, two: Trump.

2. Faith. Hill’s version is “visualization of, and belief in attainment of desire”, another motivational mangia-cake standard (yawn). He touches on the “disaster” of negative thinking. Positive thinking can be equally disastrous. How about we try realistic thinking?

3. Autosuggestions. Hill sees this as “the medium, for influencing the subconscious mind”. Hill says you can “see and feel money in your hand”. Maybe we should try to see and feel love in our hands, care, ethics, and yes, peace.

4. Specialized Knowledge. Yes, you’d be better off, and so would your patients, if you actually learned to be a doctor before making that incision.

5. Imagination. This is what motivational mangia-cakes lack so sorely that they keep on repeating Hill. “What I would do if I had a million dollars” is a subtitle in this chapter/step. If you think the correct life-answer is to buy a Ferrari, you’re still not on my tour bus, so make that a quick pee break and get back on, get in your seat and pay attention.

6. Organized Planning. Hill’s subtitle for this is “crystallization of desire into action”, again the pedantic ramblings of every motivational mangia-cake in the history of the universe thus far.

7. Decision. We all make them and they happen every second we exist, and there are ramifications to every one.

8. Persistence. Sorry, but it doesn’t always conquer resistance. Don’t ever forget this universal truth. More later.

9. Power of the Master Mind. This deals with increasing brain power (talk with your local neurosurgeon about this before trying it at home) and the power of positive emotions. This might suggest that we can facilely control our emotions. We can’t control the consistency of our pastry, never mind our minds.

10. The Mystery of Sex Transmutation [!]. Well, okay, Napoleon, if you say so. Just get your hand out of that jacket and please, don’t tell us where it’s been.

11. The Subconscious Mind (subtitled “The Connecting Link”). Including, at no extra charge, “the secret of effective prayer”. Puhleeze. The only prayer that is sure to be answered is the one that goes like this: I pray that if I wake up tomorrow morning I will be awake.

12. The Brain (subtitled “A Broadcasting and Receiving Station for Thought”); the shortest chapter in the book, by the way.

13. The Sixth Sense. Note to Hill and all his successors: there is no “door to the temple of wisdom”. Know why? There is no temple of wisdom. It is, like most things in life, a process. Lumps and bumps, missteps, big errors and the like are what through time develop wisdom within us; we hope.

The remaining chapter of Hill’s book deals with fears in their many manifestations. In short, he ends where they all end or begin or both. Fear.
One of the fears that motivational mangia-cakes use as a hook in your vulnerable flesh is the fear of loss. They make you think that the dark chocolate-iced cupcake in the bakery window is the very last one on earth, the last one that will ever be made. Don’t buy it! Not the cupcake, not the threat.
Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way:

Fear may bear (other than its best friend, desperation) the most powerful negative effect on any decision you will ever make. Step outside of fear (but keep some sense of trepidation; that’s healthy) and desperation, and you’ll find your decisions are made more soundly.

Obviously, I think Hill’s book is a load of mashed turnips and not in any way edible, but…
Let’s play “what if”. What if Hill was right? What if these thirteen ingredients are essential to success? If you don’t put salt in the water when you’re cooking pasta, you’ll still get pasta (and keep your blood pressure in check), but if you do put salt in the water and forget to add the pasta, you’ll get the Indian Ocean in a saucepan.
What’s essential and what isn’t? Like many people who have thoroughly failed in business ventures, I’ve done these thirteen things (well, not the sex transmutation deal!), these and more. What they don’t include are things like luck, timing, research, due diligence, risk factors and risk quotients (see Chapter VI, “Dinner at My House”), and a range of other influences outside your control.
I noticed with great interest that not one single professional writer (and we do influence people, right, Mr. Shakespeare?) was included in Hill’s A-list. The membership roster here suggests that only male lawyers, politicians and businessmen rate.
Hill’s book is so gender-biased it barely even mentions women, except as being behind every great man. I wonder how Hill and Carnegie were born; did they think it and will it? Immaculate convection? Into the blender with thirteen steps, one pint of good quality blood, a bit of skin and a few busted bone-china cups, pulse for 45 years and voila! A motivational mangia-cake to go. Ick. My minestrone is boiling over.
Andrew Carnegie could just as easily have applied all of his magic-formula steps to himself and had a different outcome. The economic climate (never mind the chilly climate) in his native Scotland might not have supported his efforts had he tried to make a fortune marketing haggis as an international delicacy. Ka-chunk! (I can just imagine the list of ingredients on the package: everything.)
None of the motivational mangia-cakes’ recipes have worked for me; I’m not wealthy beyond my dreams, and in forging ahead with their dictums, I’ve done damage to myself and others — innocents along the way or co-conspirators, it differs not — for which I am deeply sorry. But my caveat emptor, then, is that they made their choices, too.
So, who are these latter-day Hills, anyway? These greed-mongers who get away with telling other people how they should live their lives? Who died from eating my mother’s scones and voted them chefs of our lives? Did I miss an election?
Let’s turn the candidates for chef du jour sideways for a moment, and get a quick profile.

Someone’s in the Kitchen with…

Motivational mangia-cakes are almost all males, between the ages of 40 and 75, white, from middle-class backgrounds, and American. They are Bob and Dan, Max and Tony, Brian and Donald, Andrew and Og. Og? Probably a typo.
Go ahead, name one prominent female motivational mangia-cake. I’ve skewered a Canadian one later in this chapter, but she’s hardly prominent. In fact, so aching to be prominent is she that her website invites people to promote her to the U.S.A. Here’s your coat, lady; why such a rush!
Name one prominent female Italian motivational mangia-cake. I can: “Hey, you! You wash-a dose hands before you comma to my seminar, eh? Okay, now you shut up and listen to me. You no motivated! You gotta make something of yourself, so go get a job, eh. Come here and I’m gonna motivate-a you ass!” That guru has a name: Mama.
Not every single motivational speaker/writer/guru sort is a user of other people’s money; not all of them take advantage of their prey, and some even impart the occasional words of wisdom. Some, I would even venture to say, actually give a rat’s behind about other people and the betterment of our short tenure on this planet. We’ll get to him later.
For now, a look at the far more populated side of the fraction, those worthy of avoidance. Beware, dear reader, the ones who make the Big Promises or the inanely Impossible Claims. Also, the ones who, when backed into a kitchen corner, worm their way out with three cups of motivational guru-spew to one cup of stale breadcrumbs. Mush.
So, we have this bunch of white guys in good suits. (Il Divo, anyone?) They hang out their signs, register their domain names and set up shop. Qualifications? Schmalifications! They read Napoleon Think-Rich Hill, too! And like lemmings to the lemming soup pot we go. Lemming bisque: that could be you.
Now, let’s take a walk around the mangia-cake zoo. Don’t worry; they’ve had lunch and generally don’t eat plaid Bermuda shorts or glittery pink t-shirts (you’re safe).

The Secret of Perfect Piecrust

Oh, that word “secret”! All it implies and all it hides. But it’s only a word. Still, it intrigues like almost no other, and is often whispered to add to its magnetic appeal.
In Giuseppe Tornatore’s magical film, The Legend of 1900, the young French woman who is the object of the protagonist “1900’s” love (unrequited) is asked by her travelling companions to tell them the secret of the sea as told to her by her father. The lady replies, “It’s a secret and secrets are to be kept.” That’s why we all want to know everyone’s secrets: because they’re secret.
Okay, so I’m going to tell you a secret. Really: I am. The secret of perfect piecrust. No kidding. It’s one of those things known by the ancient Babylonians, but miraculously it has passed down through three or four thousand years and a trillion people or so, and it’s still a secret. Quelle miracle! Sure, the Ancients likely used things other than raspberry jam as filling (see, I know your secret!), but the crust’s the thing. So, dear reader, here it is: my secret about to become your secret: the perfect piecrust…
All you need is one secret ingredient! Okay, that and a bit of dough to pay for it. Ready? Set your oven temperature to exactly 187-1/2 degrees Celsius (for my American and British readers, that is hot enough to make your mascara turn into little globs on the tips of your eyelashes). Ready for the next simple secret perfect piecrust step? Here you go:

Pick up your phone and dial your local patisserie and ask them to make you a perfect piecrust.

Turn off your oven, put on that T-shirt that says, “Village, your idiot is on the loose”, take your dough and walk (conserves fuel and will make you thin enough to get away with eating the entire (humble) pie you’re about to purchase) to pick up your perfect piecrust. There. The secret.
The Secret by Aussie author (okay, collector of authors; no, make that collector of motivational mangia-cakes) Rhonda Byrne is a great big honking crockpot full of drivel. Secrets and lies.
The premise of this book is that “The Secret” is something that’s been known throughout the ages and saved Byrne’s life when she was digging for scraps in a down-under dumpster. This secret (how do you build a whole book on one tiny premise? easy: by using lots of white space, enormous point size for your typeface, thick coated paper stock and a lot of useless and over-used quotes from a lot of people as crazy as you are) is simply: the law of attraction.
For this revelation thousands of innocent people forked over money, and the only secret they have is the one they are keeping from whoever it is in their lives who does the household budget.
Byrne begins by quoting the ancient version of the law of attraction: “As above, so below. As within, so without.” She puts this in handwritten script and then says it’s from something called the Emerald Tablet, circa 3000 B.C. Ahem. They didn’t write with pens and in English back then. Tablets are for taking when you have a headache and her book gave me one.
Let’s de-bone this thing. As above, so below. Okay, if this is a universal truth, let’s apply it to the ocean. I live very near the ocean. I watch it in action every day in a place where extreme tides are legendary. Mostly, above it are sky and lots of pesky seagulls. Below? Not far below there are fish and crustaceans, and below that, who knows… Shipwrecks and giant squid? A mystery we’re still unfolding.
But here, at my part of the sea, there are times when the ocean exists and times when it exits; water up to your gunwales every six or so hours, and bare red mud on the opposites. (Hey, the groovy thing to do here is dine on the ocean floor, but you better know your tide times.) There’s no red mud in the sky, not that I have seen. Or ever hope to.
Those days when you feel glum and down, your outlook is glum and down, and even a sunny day can feel like a bummer. Well, guess what: this, also, shall pass, and what have you got? A rainy day upon which your optimism is so screamingly out there that strangers summon the paddy wagon and seize your spatula on the spot.
What you carry within you often reflects outwardly, unless you’re a thespian and performing on stage or in film. That’s called acting. Yes! Acting! Something we all do when we have to put on a good face even though our innards are scrambled like so many rotten eggs.
But let’s get back to the nuts and bolts (snack, anyone?) of the law of attraction. According to Byrne and her cohorts, this law (distilled) is: like attracts like. Nonsense! Hogwash! Codswallop! Mashed turnips! A pox on both your faces!
What about that other little law we all know about? I’ll bet that we have, to a person, experienced it firsthand: opposites attract.
Byrne’s film and book have been the maligned subject of much water-cooler giggling, but so outrageous is her premise that it has spurred a full-tilt parody: Who Moved My Secret? by Jim Gerrard. Let’s give Jim the Golden Spatula Award for his witty treatise. It’s a hell of a lot more useful than the book it skewers. Why? Because it makes us laugh at ourselves! The sub-title made me laugh out loud in a bookstore: The Ancient Wisdom that Tells You it’s Okay to be Greedy.
Now, let’s look at a slightly more irrefutable law of the universe, one not so easily debunked as the law of attraction: balance. It’s there. It exists in every second of every life. Go ahead, challenge it. Disprove it. You will find:

Balance is everywhere and always.

The scales tip one way, and one second later they have the proclivity to tip the other way, sometimes a full tip, sometimes a partial tip, but balance exist in perpetuity. Think about it. When are all factions of life in total harmony and stay that way?
The law of attraction doesn’t fit with the law of balance. The nature and structure of human relationships, especially between couples, proves this.
In her introduction to The Secret, Byrne claims that her negative circumstances made her a magnet for negative circumstances. She says that her dumpster was filled with the death of her father (parents usually die before we do), problems at work (oh, no, an imperfect job!) and negative relationships with colleagues and family (get the noose!). A mere piffle, I say. She has yet to discover the bottom of the universe. It gets worse. I’ve been there and not for one second do I believe I cannot go lower than my previous lowest point; there’s always a lower place. Just try not to visit.
Excuse my pessimism, but it’s the bran cereal in your breakfast; forget the sugary doughnut.
Byrne has probably made millions from the despair of others. She has capitalized on that fallen soufflé of yours. Eat it anyway. A flat soufflé tastes as good as a tall fluffy one, it just doesn’t look as pretty. So what.
Let’s dig out our tools and slice and dice the basics (make that basic, in the singular) of The Secret, and mix them up to make the perfect (humble) piecrust; maybe our filling could be crow and we can feed it to those who have fed us garbage for so long. It’s okay to spit it out. It’s never too late to spit it out, either. Perfect your aim and fire away!
I have already put her law of attraction on the spit and burnt it beyond recognition, but what about the handful of other ridiculous claims made in this tiny tome of Tinkerbell turds?
She says that, shades of Hill-speak, “Your thoughts become things”. Oh, pudding! No, they do not! If I think I’m going to win the lottery, or be granted that job as editor of Failure magazine, I can think myself dead and it won’t happen. Oh, it might, but it likely won’t.
What my thoughts are and what your thoughts are comprise many things, among them: privacy, freedom (you can think anything you want, just be judicious about what you say and do to that effect), silent expressions of emotions, intellect, ideas, and a myriad of other concepts. For, dear reader, understand this:

Thoughts are concepts. They are not even real, but live in the realm of the abstract.

Another of her claims is that, “If you want to change anything in your life, change the frequency by changing your thoughts”.
Change is hard. People resist it because the familiar, even when it’s negative, possesses some sense of comfort; fear lies in the unknown. What we know, bad as it may be, we know.
And what is not addressed in this foolhardy claim is that:

Change when enacted does not always yield positive results, rarely yields the anticipated results, and sometimes totally back-fires.

After my mother died, I needed a change, preferably for the better. I had seen Stratford, Ontario, my home of 12 years, slip into a recession thanks to a multitude of factors. After doing research, I chose the village of Elora, Ontario, one hour away; while it’s a bucolic location, it gave me colic. Badly. My one year in Elora was so toxic that I’m not sure if the poison will ever leave my system. Oh, I got change all right.
Byrne claims this law of attraction she touts is ancient wisdom, dating back to those wise and industrious folks in the greater Babylon area (GBA), who must have been geniuses because they got a Wonder of the World plaque. This gal needs to do her homework. These were not a bunch of gentle philosophers and chefs de cuisine who made pretty gardens slung into macramé hangers and loafed back with a decaf latté admiring their work and spouting poetry. They were too busy being at war, being conquerors, rapists and murderers. Nice bunch.
One other spoonful of gruel that Byrne tries to feed her readers is this: “It is impossible to feel bad and at the same time have good thoughts”. Where’s my crockpot? At my very worst state, feeling suicidal and like there was no hope for my future whatsoever, I could still look into the eyes of my dog or cats and feel intense and incredibly positive love. They became my reason for living more than once. They always will be.
You can feel bad because external circumstances have been thrust upon you, perhaps out of your own control (in which case you feel, understandably, victimized) or directly due to some action you took that yielded bad results (in which case you feel, or ought to, understandably, guilty and responsible), but still have positive thoughts, thoughts of hope, of the love that you receive from your friends and family, of the bar of 70% cocoa dark European chocolate you have in the fridge and how nice that “crack!” will sound when you break it into lovely mouth-sized bits and eat it all.
Is there a true secret? Is there a pat answer to life that only a select few know? And if so, why doesn’t everyone know? Because nobody has published a book or made a film about it? Nah!
There’s no such secret, except maybe for piecrust. And guess what? Even then the results don’t always turn out exactly the same. And no, it did not fail on any given day because your thoughts were negative. Here’s a basic non-secret for you to chew on:

There is no secret to life. There is only the living of it in the best way we know how. Oh, and until somebody comes back from the dead and writes a book about it, life, in and of itself, is a secret.

Robbins Egg on Your Face

Let’s de-feather Tony Robbins. He “wrote” books, at least one of them with the word “Giant” in the title. Have you ever seen this guy? He’s a human skyscraper, so it’s easy for him to wake the giant that lives within him; it happens by default every morning.
Yes, I attended one of his sessions; no, I didn’t buy his books and tapes. In a room that seats maybe 3,000 people, I could barely see (I was with my late cousin — excuse me — with my cousin who arrived late — and we ended up near the back). A few seconds into the session, Robbins had his pack of sheep standing up, punching their fists into the air (Che Guvera would have been proud, until he discovered why they were doing this), and shouting, “Yes!”
I like “yes”; it’s mostly a good word. When a bank manager says, “No, I’m sorry, but we cannot extend your operating line of credit by 30 million,” then “no” is a secretly good word hiding in two letters. You don’t want to be that far in debt, even if you’re The Donald. The market is good, you borrow lots, the market turns down, you’re dead in the water. Dear Bank Manager, thank you for saying no.
Back to “yes” for a moment. “Yes” is wonderful when that woman you have had your eye on for years has been separated from her husband long enough and is now ready to date, and when you ask her, she says the magical “yes”. Oh, and yes, that expression, be careful what you ask for, applies; that woman could be the bitch from hell!
“Yes” is not always as good as it pretends to be. A case in point. When my employer approached me in the winter of 2006 and said, “My wife and I have bought a house in Mexico. I want to retire. You are the only person on staff with enough assets and money [huh?] to buy the business. If you don’t, I’ll just shut it down. Do you want to buy the restaurant?”
“Yes,” I said, after due consideration. “No,” is what I should have said, regardless of any consideration. I ended up shutting her down myself ten months later.
So, Tony Robbins, take your “yes”, and punch a hole not in the air, but in your own face. “Yes” isn’t always positive. Be careful what the question was when the answer is an enthusiastic “yes!”
Let’s take a match to Robbins’ “firewalk”. He claims that if you are focussed enough, unwilling to let anything into your mind but the power of concentration that you possess (to say nothing of fear!), you can walk across a bed of hot coals in your bare tootsies and come out unscathed. More than that, maybe because of that, you come out successful! Those scars on Robbins’ feet? He sure as heck didn’t get burned on a firewalk, not our Tony! His mind is more powerful than any matter he encounters. No matter.
I know a guy who did the firewalk. He believed so strongly in his own ability to separate mind from soul (soles?) that he took on this challenge at what might be loosely classified as an “advanced” Robbins seminar. Well, guess what? He burnt his feet. (Physics is a science, dear reader.) Now he’s more inclined to walk on water, and his kids think he does, but he might drown.
Attending a motivational seminar like those staged by Tony Robbins is perhaps the most impersonal thing I have ever experienced. To me, personal achievement is developed through a series of focussed efforts undertaken over time and with a lot of thought and rethinking; it’s not about jumping up and down (there are trampolines for that), group screaming, and hugging somebody you never met and who is wearing a button that reads: 10 million terrorists don’t want George Bush re-elected.
A Tony Robbins seminar (misnomer; it’s a rally) means packing as many people into a stadium as can fit within municipal by-laws, trying to deafen them with loud rock music (which I happen to like, but in the right circumstances, like at a rock concert), and then making them holler like a bunch of blended banshees in a single war-cry.
From there it goes downhill.
The microphone crackles, the acoustics aren’t made for one man using his speaking voice, and if you’re in the back rows, you get the message like the seven-second delay on live radio, by which time the people in the front row are yelling “Yes!” to the next point raised.
The promotion for the books and tapes on sale in the lobby reverberates and it’s time to battle five thousand people for a place in line at the lunch counter; forget about using the loo, unless you want to drive to the next State. The afternoon starts the same way with music blasting out even louder in case you’re slipping into the afternoon doldrums.
One musician that was played a great deal at these motivational rallies, including many multi-level marketing meetings I regrettably attended, was Australia’s John Farnham, whose songs boasted lines that supported their ideals (and maybe their pockets). The strongest of these is called, in the great tradition of guru-speak axioms, I Can Do Anything:

“So, what do you see
Just an ordinary man
What sets us apart, is this fire in my heart
That says, I can do anything.”

Made to measure. Ka-ching!
Rock music aside, Robbins’ rah-rah rally left me bereft, deaf and broke. Did I come away with any sense of my power within? No, just my ability to sit down and be a lady of some dignity when thousands of other people stood up and made asses of themselves; I had a bruise on my left ear, delivered from somebody’s elbow, as my badge of courage.
Robbins continues to draw the flocks to his costly and crowded sessions. And I know real people, talented and intelligent, who travel fair distances to pay for this, to, in my (anonymous, to protect him) friend’s words, “Infuse and empower our dreams.” Oh, why, dear reader, can we not do this in our own quiet, inexpensive ways? This man I refer to is a brilliant performing artist, yet he will stand in a pack of 5,000 people and be led by one man who spews regurgitated Napoleon Hill at them and doesn’t even hand out wet-naps.
L’est we forget, too, that even if a Robbins rally serves your purpose, to get you motivated, three lunches later, same old baloney, you’re sliding back into that processed mustard habit, bypassing the grainy Dijon that fired your taste buds so recently. Nap time.
Here’s a story, attributable to nobody (but with thanks to my friend, Linda Lane), the scourge of the internet (not Linda; random stories with no proclaimed authors):

One day a farmer’s donkey fell into a well. The animal cried piteously. The farmer decided that the donkey was old; it just wasn’t worth it to retrieve the donkey. He invited his neighbours to help him. They began to shovel dirt into the well. The donkey became quiet. A few shovel loads later, the farmer looked into the well, astonished at what he saw. With each load of dirt that hit his back, the donkey had shaken it off and climbed up on it, taking a step up. Pretty soon the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off.

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick of getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a stepping-stone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, by never giving up.

A few lines down, the e-mail caught us being trapped by motivational-mangia-cake-fried baloney on white bread…

Enough of the crap. The donkey came back later and bit the farmer who had tried to bury him. The gash from the bite got infected and the farmer eventually died in agony from septic shock. The moral from this lesson? When you do something wrong and try to cover your ass, it always comes back to bite you.

Here’s to you, Mr. Robbinsegg… Koo-koo-ka-ching.

Bob Proctor Needs a Doctor

Is this guy still alive? Googled him. Nope. Born (one of his booked was entitled “You Were Born Rich”) in 1934 in (mea culpa) Canada, and died in 2022. There’s your one light in the tunnel: Nobody lives forever.
For years I subscribed to Bob Proctor’s Insight of the Day, a seemingly innocuous e-mail service. In this series, Proctor doesn’t attempt to impart his own theories (he evidently saves making a fool of himself by writing nonsense in other people’s books, like The Secret), but sends out quotations from a range of “sage” people. These messages came Monday to Thursday, and there was a story on Friday; I mostly skipped the stories because I’m not interested in basketball stories where the underdogs win.
The quotations sometimes were uplifting and a reminder of our frailties and possibilities. Sometimes they made me start my day really, really angry. Here are two quotes by pretty opposite people that were included in Insight of the Day:

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” — Bill Cosby, Actor and Comedian (makes you kind of gag, doesn’t it?)

“It doesn’t matter how strong your opinions are. If you don’t use your power for positive change, you are, indeed, part of the problem.” — Coretta Scott King, Reformer

The words of Bill Cosby are universal laws. I think old Bill has tried and maybe failed to please altogether too many women.
Coretta Scott King? I wish she were still alive to be the next American president. Can you imagine? I get goosebumps just thinking of it.
For me, Proctor went from being a neutral figure who delivered pleasant little quotes made by people wiser than he is to a preacher of borderline crazy statements (in The Secret).
In one edition of Insight of the Day was a — brace yourself — “Special Announcement”. Yes, you too can earn up to $160 per hour without having to leave the comfort of your home. You can — even though you have no medical training whatsoever, are not a neurosurgeon, a doctor of any kind, a nurse, or even a medical receptionist — immediately make money as a professional health coach. Hwaet?
Dear reader, the next time you’re at your doctor’s office, carefully read those framed certificates of accreditation; there’s no such thing as The Bob Proctor University of Medical Sciences.
Part of the problem for citizens of, for example, Ontario, Canada, is that there is no governmental regulation as to who hangs out a tile and claims to be a coach or therapist. Other than qualified psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, anybody can rent an office, buy a couple of comfy chairs and a few used books (probably from the Goodwill where I’ve donated my entire collection of motivational mangia-cake junk) and dish out therapy.
This is supposedly about to change as the Ontario government is planning to legislate some regulations, but it’s government, the slow train to anywhere. Now, as a bit of a rebel, I would normally resist government intervention in anything, but this is long overdue, and I believe should extend to motivational speakers and writers. Unless they’re willing to pay for the massive personal losses (results, no doubt, unintended) inspired by their half-baked and foolish “wisdom”, eaten up by cooks who‘ve run out of ingredients, dented their cookware and lost their spatulas.
Proctor, retire the grey pinstripes and go on permanent vacation. We need a holiday from your be-bafflement, even if you don’t.

Barbecued Phoenix (not Arizona)

Brian Tracy used to run (maybe he still does; I avoid these things now) a “session” called The Phoenix Seminar. Actually, not a bad title. This was maybe 30 years ago. I admit, on the first day, I learned a few things, and a few on the last day (nothing earth-shattering, mind you; stuff I could have figured out for myself or found in a book for about 1/90th of the cost). But when he was wrapping up, he said something along the lines of this (I’m not quoting verbatim, because it was so long ago, but this is near enough to drive home my point):

“The world is comprised mostly of Christians. There are more of us than anyone else. We shall now go forward and use the techniques taught to you in my Phoenix Seminar in the name of God and Jesus Christ. Thank you for coming.”

Did I mention that Tracy was just a video on a television set? Not a sign of him in person. He was probably cooling his jets poolside Miami with a bunch of neo-Pagans.
First off, and I actually said this to the stranger sitting next to me (no, I didn’t hug him): there are not more Christians in the world than Muslims or other religions. So, that grave error in fact, for me, eradicated any small thing he had said in the previous two days that made sense. Silly man. He might get his facts straight, and he might, in a city like Toronto — a multi-cultural soup — figure that not everyone in the audience was Christian. Next.

My Habit is to Hit Dan the Man with a Pan on his Can

For all that these motivational mangia-cakes spout “focus!”, Dan Robey has got to be the king of diversity. He can’t focus for more than a couple of e-mail lines and he’s off on another topic. Not only that, he delves into areas of expertise that are not in his bailiwick, unless he is a doctor, lawyer, nutritionist, cancer specialist, psychiatrist, book reviewer, physical education teacher, and biologist (when I first input that word, I went too fast and typed “bilgeologist”; think about it). This guy has got to be the oldest man alive to have so many degrees as that, n‘est-ce pas? Right there we have maybe 75 years of education. When does this guy eat?
Every single one of his “the power of positive habits” e-mail issuances encourages you to buy something. They aren’t designed to help you, dear reader; they’re his marketing tools, and in these e-mails, he makes false promises and claims expertise he cannot possibly have. When this man knocks on your kitchen door, lock it and heat the handle from your side with the blowtorch you bought to make crème brulée. Burn his fingers, not yours.
One of his items for sale is an e-book called “Fit Over 40”. Now, I have to assume he means the age of 40, as opposed to, perhaps, 40 storeys tall. He lists physical accomplishments (in the interest of selling this book, of course) that sound like headlines for a freak show at the circus, for example: “77-year-old grandmother competes in body-building with her 48-year-old daughter!” What is any self-respecting 48-year-old woman doing this for anyway! It’s not nice to compete with your grandmother. And what’s wrong with knitting?
Of course, there are rare individuals who do amazing things, and good on them. But the truth is we age. It’s a biological fact that cannot (as yet, maybe save for cryogenics) be altered. These ridiculous extremes don’t set good examples for any of us.
If you’re a man in his mid-forties with the usual stresses of life (work, family, retirement planning and a mindful eye to dodging wayward merde), your plate is pretty darn full. To aspire to these extreme Robey-esque states will leave that magical ingredient out of your life: balance. Isn’t it enough just to eat a balanced (there it is again!) diet, get a reasonable amount of exercise and simply take care of yourself?
These tales of extreme fitness may or may not be true, but they’re unrealistic for the vast majority; one even claims to have been cured of Multiple Sclerosis! It’s a miracle! Why was this not on the front page of the Globe and Mail? (For my foreign readers, Canada’s national newspaper.)
Such dedicated pastimes are fine for the few who don’t have to earn an income, and have nothing better to do than raise muscles while the rest of us raise families or raze our careers.
Me? I have no intention of quitting my gig as a writer so that I can go pump iron with my daughter (who happens to be a real dog; she’s attractive, but she’s a collie), but I walk her every day. I watch what I eat (as little packaged stuff as possible), never smoked, drink wine for my good health (okay, so that’s one reason), and for my age, I’m trim and fairly fit. In my sixties, and with a sedentary job, I weigh only about two kilos (for my American readers, under five pounds) more than I did when I was twenty-one and a complete carpenter’s dream.
Here’s another blow-me-down-with-a-baby-bokchoy Robey-ism: keep a journal! Since the age of four I’ve kept a journal. Yes, four. In it I write of my day, my hopes, ideas, innermost thoughts, my joys and sorrows, sometimes poems, sometimes I even draw little sketches. I also write down my dreams and I don’t mean the ones I hope to achieve, I mean the ones I dream when asleep at night, the ones that sometimes haunt me.
Unlike the “diaries” my mother kept, which I inherited upon her death, and fortunately contained no recipes, I write more than: “good weather, went to the bank, wore my blue dress, letter from Christine in Madagascar, made shepherd’s pie [again] for dinner.” Has this resulted in success for me? No, but I’ve let off steam, and someday I might just read them. Maybe not. Could be embarrassing.
The other journal I’ve kept is what I call an appreciation journal. It’s a smaller book, and in it I occasionally write things I appreciate about the world around me; the beauty of a perfect rose, or the immense love shown to me by my pets, or just the clarity of the sky after an early summer rain shower. Small but important things that form the collage of positive things in my life. I go back to those when I’m blue or stressed, or worse, angry and doubting. They help a little.
The other things that go into my appreciation journal are the little aspects of my character that I like. Unless we’re ego-maniacs, narcissists or motivational mangia-cakes, we tend to focus on our faults, and when we’re in a negative state, that focus only exacerbates said state, but if we can consciously acknowledge and record the good things about ourselves, and they’re right there in our own handwriting when we need to feel better about ourselves, this is a source of comfort, often even able to solicit a smile on a day that has otherwise been full of unsolicited merde.
That journal is invaluable, but has it made me a success? Sorry, Robey. It’s given me a laugh and a little boost, but no great big gobs of success. It’s a good habit, and like most good habits, it helps me handle life and whatever merde gets tossed in my frypan on a day-to-day basis.
Robey evidently busies himself with making utterly ludicrous statements that are so far out of his bailiwick he should be charged for disseminating false information, put in the stocks on Parliament Hill (for my American readers, where Canadians go to protest anything at all and listen to the Bare Naked Ladies on Canada Day, sort of like the Fourth of July, but earlier and with banal music) and be subjected to wayward words and raw eggs. And I’m not even referring to his totally appalling spelling and grammar; for that he should be shot, point blank with a gnu (typo intended; picture it). He’s not a doctor, but he tells people exactly what to do to reduce their risk of breast cancer by 50%!
This motivational mangia-cake/merde-man also claims that instead of listening to the radio when we are in our cars, we should play motivational tapes and CDs (does he happen to sell such items? You betcha! Ka-ching!). I find it hard enough to pay attention to the road and listen to the radio.
Imagine it: you’re driving along the Toronto portion of the 401 (for my overseas readers, a really wide highway system (12 lanes in some places) where everyone drives way too fast all the time) listening to Tony Robbins’ motivational CDs. Do you flip the latch on your seatbelt, leap up and shout, “Yes!!!”? No! No, no, no! Sit down and stop that. Put the radio back on, calm down, listen to a classical station, preferably Dvorak, something soothing, and ignore Tony. Drive straight to the nearest autobody shop and have that hole in your car roof repaired, then go to the hospital and have that hole in your head repaired. Yes, the big one.
Quietly and calmly, and unmotivatedly; that’s the way to drive. Focus on the damn road.
In a nutshell, then, what Robey advocates is two things: 1. buy my stuff; and 2. positive habits equal positive results. Hogwash! Horse manure! Codswallop! Mashed turnips! I suffered a distinct rise in blood pressure when I read his e-mails. Ah, the joy of spam filters. Where’s my chocolate?

Good Guy/Bad Guy

Guy Finley is a different kettle of fish. Yes, he’s a middle-class, middle-aged, white American male, but he looks more like a rumpled philosophy professor than a motivational mangia-cake; not a good suit to be found anywhere. Not a suit to be found anywhere. Polyester-void zone. Can you imagine?
His organization is called Life of Learning Foundation, and it’s a great title, providing that’s what it really is: a life of learning and not a life of listening to some misdirected preacher tell you what to cook when God and his twelve pals are popping in for a late supper.
His mantra is more like cooking organically, regionally and seasonally in a traditional kitchen, no microwaves or food processors in sight. Barnes & Noble says: “Guy Finley has helped millions live fuller, more peaceable lives.” So far, so good. Then again, Barnes & Noble is in the business of selling books, some of them by Guy Finley. Biased? Maybe…
Finley disseminates some information through his books, like Let Go and Live in the Now: Awaken the Peace, Power, and Happiness in Your Heart.
Diversion: How can anyone not live in the now? If you are presently alive, and not dead, you are in the now by default. Rant done.
He also provides an e-mail service, which he personalizes with your name, and through which he promotes his books and seminars. Like the rest of them, he’s earning a living (no law against that), but he doesn’t have the same get-rich-quick slick trick. There’s a sense of: I just want you to start living in better harmony. There’s also a distinct sense of preaching. Yes, Guy lost me, too, when every e-mail I received named God as the source of my potential happiness.
Despite this, Finley has a few worthwhile things to share, and if the bellicose leaders of the world and their big-gun buddies, took the time to listen to his pacifistic notions, wars might lessen.
Finley has the success quotient in his approach, but he presents it as a small part of the fully realized human. He says that without an “inner evolution” we cannot realize a “direct and personal relationship with success”. He’s not crazy; he just looks crazy, kind of like Jimmy Buffet (foodie alert: Jimmy Buffet, if pronounced in French, is boo-fay; all-you-can-eat?) on a bad hair day, right down to the shirt. The central theme of his mandate is that we need to become “conscious of ourselves in the present moment”. I would take that one step further or shorter, depending upon how you view it (or truncate it):

Be conscious of ourselves and others, and the effect we have upon others, always.

Part of what Finley advocates is what I believe, only he and I don’t quite phrase it the same way; my version, you’ll get a chance to ponder in the chapter called “Dinner at My House”, but here’s Finley’s essential five-part recipe (extremely summarized) for letting go and as he puts it, “living in the now”:

“1. Detect and reject all the useless thoughts and feelings that undermine our higher possibilities.

2. How others react is not our responsibility.

3. Make impersonal the times and places when we stumble and fall.

4. Never give up.

5. Start from where you are.”

You know I have something of my own to add, don’t you? His first point is valid. We’re all guilty of letting flotsam and jetsam colour our thoughts and impede our progress, at least block our path. The jumble of noise and confusion we hear is enough to stop a truckload of turnips, never mind make us stop what we’re doing and let fly a primal scream. The whole thing, yet again, though, is balance. How do we serve our own needs without being selfish?
I’m not a fan of flying (well, not in airplanes), but I like the bit where the flight attendant gives the passengers the same old recorded routine about seat belts, floating seat cushions, and where to write to complain about airline food. It’s a reminder about life, a metaphor. Part of that says (roughly):

In the unlikely event of low cabin pressure, oxygen masks will appear before your very eyes. Welcome to Magic Airlines. Position your own mask on first, breathe normally, and then assist others.

Brilliant advice and the only reason I condescend to fly anywhere except for the fact that Europe is a very long swim and the water is rather chilly. At least there are only man-eating sharks in the Atlantic, and not motivational mangia-cakes!
The tendency, especially among we nurture-driven females, is to help everybody else and find ourselves drained and resentful because there’s nothing left for or of us.
This is, in my view, the trick of balance. Healthy boundaries. A hard thing to strike, but necessary for us to feel okay. To create a base from which our decisions are sound and well thought-out, where we’re acting in a spirit of comfort, not one of anger or struggle. Or resentment. Balance.
How often have you found a zit on the left side of your face and then about a day later, one appears in the same place on the right side? See? Even your skin knows.
I take exception to Finley’s second point. No, you cannot control what people think or feel, or how they react, but what you can do — must do — is consider the land of your words and actions upon those to whom you direct them before you open your yap or flinch an inch. You affect others, and even though you cannot influence their reaction, you can make your delivery in such a way as to temper what they might do or feel.
For example, if I had gone to one of my chefs at the restaurant and said, “This soup tastes like dirty dishwater from three days ago,” then I can pretty well anticipate his reaction, n’est-ce pas? I better grab my spatula and get the hell out of the kitchen.
The reverse is true if I word it differently: “I’m not sure if the patrons will agree, but today’s soup seems a tad bland. That soup you made yesterday was so incredible that you have to live up to that! I’m sure you can.” The reaction will be quite different, but the same issue has been addressed.
There were people who used to come to our house for dinner when I was a child and actually compliment my mother on her cooking, her dry roast beef, her lumpy gravy and mushy green beans, her burnt Yorkshire puddings; she did an okay job of lemon meringue pie, but the top always slid off the bottom. I called it, “lemon meringue pile”.
Because of the accolades, she’d think she’d made a great meal and do it again, and invite the same people who probably wished they’d just uttered a polite, “Thanks for dinner, Pat”. Had they been brutally honest, my mother (a delightful person, just a terrible cook) would have been very hurt. Because they lied, she had no realistic feedback, and thought she was good to go. And do it again and again. Pepto Bismal, anyone?
Back to Finley. His third point is a double-edged sword. If you make impersonal your failure, can you truly absorb the lessons therein? Yes, making it impersonal helps you slough it off and move forward, not dwell on what went wrong, and focus on (hopefully) bettering the path ahead. But divorcing your personal involvement from something in which you were personally involved is akin to placing blame elsewhere and refuting your own culpability in it.
And his fourth point? If you don’t know by now how I feel about quitting, give this book to somebody else and call Paul Godfrey. Who? A man who entered politics at the age of 25, and became mayor of Toronto, the publisher at The Toronto Sun, and then the Blue Jays baseball team’s general manager, Paul Godfrey says that he listened to his mother’s advice when growing up, and was surprised and amused by the path his work life took. He also quotes her wisdom: “Quitting a job two years early is better than quitting one two days late.” Bingo!
Why then do I even slightly support Finley? Mostly because of the wisdom in his point number five: start from where you are. This borders on being a universal truth. My version:

Releasing the past, after gracefully learning from it, and accepting the now for all that it is and is not, clears the way for you to walk into your future with hope and a sense of direction. The resources we have are the only gift we own.

But what about fate? Destiny? While I’m not sure any of us actually has the ability to change our destinies, perhaps we do have some influence on the outcomes.
The premise of Finley’s whole approach is (in his words, although he forgot the necessary hyphen): “self-transformation through the power of the present moment”. Since there is no other moment, in reality, than the one at hand, this is wise.
What irks me about it (you knew something would) is the word “transformation”. The dictionary defines “transform” as: to change markedly the form or appearance of. Yet in this word “transformation” there exists an underlying hurriedness, a sense that David Copperfield is going to wave a magic wand and poof, you’re transformed (but that’s another book). Here’s an observation worth its salt:

Any transformation or in-depth change or growth I have ever undergone myself or have witnessed in others was slow, sometimes deliberate, almost always inspired by a tragedy or major life-lesson.

And here it is, phrased poignantly by contemporary poet, Samuel Decker Thompson:

“We are all just
a car crash,
a diagnosis,
an unexpected phone call,
a newfound love,
or a broken heart
away from
being a completely different person.
How beautifully fragile are we that
so many things can take but a moment
to alter who we are forever?”

Writers. We matter. We see the light and share it with our words; these are the books to buy.
Still, if you want to learn more about yourself as a human being and pace your way towards internal change, Finley may be able to help in guiding you. Maybe. That’s enough of a plug for Finely. He wants you to buy his books and seminars, too.

Avocado is Healthy; No, it’s Fattening

Nuts are good for you, too, but not the kind that are zoomed with internet posts entitled, “7 Hilariously Batshit Things He Believes”. Call me crazy. No, call him crazy. Is he a motivational guru? It depends on your existential parking spot at the diner. David “Avocado” Wolfe has crossed boundaries, like those hee-haw country songs that claim to be pop. Make that poop.
Evidently, the Wolfeman is a flat-earth kind of guy who claims that, “Chocolate is an octave of energy.” Well, okay, Dave; I buy that, but would add, “It’s a god.” I need to justify my habit, okay?
David Avocado Wolfe has slipped in, on greased parchment paper, to the motivational guru group, but like certain “abstainers”, claims immunity from common sense. So, why the hell is he all over Facebook? And being quoted? I mean, seriously? He, like all the others, wants you to buy his stuff, mostly nuts. Known as the rock star of “superfoods” (not by me, I might add), he liberally quotes the Persian philosopher and poet, Rumi, who must roll over in his urn each time such things are said by people who think they “get” him.
My love of chocolate aside, this guy adds the nuts without adding actual nuts. He says I should never eat ginger. I say I should. Ginger calms my tummy when it’s upset and it smells nice. Had a bath lately, buddy? What time is it, Mr. Wolfe? Avocado time.
Earth to David Wolfe: The world is round. Mary had a little lamb, she also had a duck, she put them on the mantelpiece, to see if they would f…all off.
Duly note that on Wikipedia, he is identified as an — oh no! — “entrepreneur”. Stop following people like this. Unfollow, unlike. There is no such thing as a superfood, not even 70% dark chocolate. Not even 85%. Formulate your own thoughts. Sit in a quiet place and for 10 minutes a day, you can be above the “matter” that forms people like David Avocado Wolfe. Or just run. Take the guacamole with you. Buy nothing.

Too-amazing Grace

Grace Cirocco (a Sirocco is a wind; perhaps she would just like to blow away?): here is the one female motivational mangia-cake who seems to be swimming with the sharks, if not quite breaking the waves. And she’s Canadian (mea culpa); Proctor moved to the U.S.A. and became an American (wonder if he tried to find out how fast he could move back to here after the 2016 election?). But she has that clean-cut, middle-aged conservative-dresser look down pat. Nice dye job.
Her book, Take the Step, the Bridge will be There, is titled such that anyone with half a brain or any knowledge of physics will run. How about this instead:

Make sure the bridge is there and then take a small step to test it.

Anyone who has read the book The Wages of Fear or saw it on film as Sorcerer, knows what I mean. Bridges can collapse. Count on it to happen when you’re crossing one in an ancient, beat-up truck, in the middle of the jungle, with a load of nitro.
Taking steps is all very well and fine, as long as there is no steep cliff lurking outside your kitchen door. But taking a step in the blind belief that some sort of bridge, symbolic or otherwise, will materialize is suicide. When Grace comes to your door selling unbreakable string, test it first and don’t buy it anyway. Macramé hangers, anyone?

Nutritional Mea Culpa

There are hundreds of organizations like the Franklin Covey group and Harold Taylor (more on him later), to name but two, that are a different breed and should not be confused with motivational mangia-cakes; they are primarily engaged in effective time management skills, and corporate training and workshops. Some may venture into the hinterlands of motivational mayhem when they train, for example, corporate sales forces, but I would not throw them in the same crockpots (maybe that’s another book!). There: now my lawyer is smiling again.

Flocks of Chickens Headed for Slaughter

Leaders cannot lead unless they have their counterparts: followers. Forgive me if I take an extreme case as my proof of point, but I have already thrown his name into my personal crockpot: Hitler. I’m sure we would all like to believe that we’re too smart to fall for such vile people, but I’m willing to bet that the German people believed that, too.
Obviously, I’m not painting motivational mangia-cakes with the same brush, just a few similar bristles. The Fuhrer whipped the citizenry into a furor, and thereby demanded their loyalty. How? I mean other than repeatedly telling lies (right, Trump?). Invasion of the psyche. Motivational mangia-cakes invade the same way, preying upon weakness, and knowing damn well we are mostly sheep. Baaaaaa.
There’s another element, present today, that appears not to have existed in the past. Sure, back in the bad old days, toilets hadn’t been invented and food was what you caught with a spear, and heaven knows, those two factors could have filled an appointment book for the day. But today we’re brought to our knees by this massive feeling of being overwhelmed. We’re inundated with e-mails, texts, phone calls and obligations, scheduled to the teeth with little free time, and for all the “stuff” we covet, we need money, lots of it, and so we work our asses off.
Motivational mangia-cakes see you running around like a chicken with its head cut off, as the expression goes, and they have the salvation bait all ready, cleaver in hand, chasing the most vulnerable chicken around the coop. Didn’t your mother tell you never to run with a cleaver? Everything is always such fun until a weak chicken gets his throat cut by a motivational mangia-cake who is little more than default chef du jour because the real one went to Tuscany to learn new cooking techniques the old way.
Dear reader, I am asking you not to be that chicken, to go free-range and stay the hell out of the henhouse, not to get your throat cut, and end up plastered with parsley, orzo, and too much salt in a greasy soup curing someone’s chest-cold. Make it your goal not to allow this to happen to you, and make it your dream never to chickenize yourself.

The Palate Cleanser

Before we get to the sample recipes conjured up by these motivational mangia-cakes, I would like to offer you one of my recipes. Literally. And yes, for a palate cleanser. Like good minestrone, this needs a full day of infusing itself to be as delicious as you deserve. (For my readers on both sides of the longest natural undefended (so far) border in the world, and on all sides of all the salty ponds, I’ve used both imperial and metric measurements.)

Armagnac Tarragon Ice

2-1/2 cups (625 ml) water plus 1/3 cup (75 ml)
1 cup (250 ml) granulated sugar
3 tbsp (25 ml) fresh tarragon, 2/3 of it chopped
1/3 cup (75 ml) Armagnac*
1 tbsp (15 ml) freshly squeezed lemon juice

In a medium saucepan/pot bring the 2-1/2 cups water, 2 tbsp of chopped tarragon and sugar to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly until sugar is dissolved. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat, cover and cool to room temperature. Refrigerate overnight.
The following morning, strain the syrup, add the remaining ingredients and the 1/3 cup of water. Freeze in an ice cream machine following the manufacturer’s directions or freeze it in an all-metal saucepan/pot, and poke/mash/bash it every few hours until it looks rather like slush. After that, it can be stored in a plastic container. Consume within one week; keep frozen. The ice, not you.

Yield: approximately 1 quart/litre

* Armagnac is a member of the cognac family only smoother. Buy a whole bottle, use the 1/3 cup in the recipe and sip the rest; you’ll be glad you did!

This will cleanse your palate and relax you better than a therapeutic massage.
The very civilized tradition of palate cleansing exists to divide one set of flavours from another, to rest your tastebuds and shift them to clean. In a sense, we are bracing our mouths for what comes next, and hopefully it won’t be contradictory euphemisms spewed by motivational mangia-cakes. Ah, wishful thinking!
Now that you have done your basic preparation, it’s time we turned on all the burners in the kitchen of life and whipped up a few goodies. They won’t be fattening, just enlightening. But it might get messy!

III — THE MAIN COURSE

Did you wait the 24 hours to sample the Armagnac ice? Me neither. We are weak. We are human. Wasn’t it delicious?
Now that we are aware of the ingredients, cooking techniques and bait the motivational mangia-cakes have used to lure us into their crockpots, we’re going to test their recipes. Spatulas poised? Let’s visit their kitchens…

Burnt Offerings: Motivational Myths Fried to a Crisp

Remember that motivational mangia-cakes concoct this junk not because they’re benevolent chefs de cuisine engaged in their quest for the sake of starving humanity, but because they know there are millions of people who’ll pay them a hefty fee to be fed fat-free, taste-free mashed turnips with a side of codswallop, topped with pure baloney.
I’ve structured this examination in a kind of recipe-like thing, vaguely resembling the ambiguous nutritional labels on processed food products.

1. I state the claim of the motivational mangia-cake (Recipe)
2. admit what of it is true (Nutrients)
3. blaspheme — I like that part — what of it is false (Toxins)
4. issue a caution or warning; if you’re going to play, know who you’re playing with (Hidden Ingredients)
5. and defy the poison of the recipe (Antidote).

Here’s the first one, a simple motivational tenet, used to distraction (maybe distortion) that will get you cooking:

Recipe: You must take action.

Nutrients: Yes, it’s true that if your dream is to write the Great Canadian/American/British/Australian/Malagasy novel and you never put a word to paper, take some form of action, it’ll never happen. And unless you’re Ian McEwan, maybe that’s a good thing. Don’t move an inch!

Toxins: There are no actual falsities here, but there are many…

Hidden Ingredients: Your action will inspire a reaction. If, for example, you don’t change the cat litter and instead spend time writing your novel, the cat will poop on the floor. Choose carefully what gets set aside in your quest.

Antidote: Make a strategy (not a goal, a strategy) regarding what action you could take that might lead you towards a certain goal or dream. No matter how powerful that dream, it may not come to fruition; then go back to chopping celery, carrots and onions for your mirepoix.
Let’s say your dream is to become an actor, but you studied auto mechanics in school and now you are, quelle surprise, an auto mechanic! Still, this acting dream follows you around the garage, leaves scratch marks in your jumpsuit, and when you pick up a wrench you pretend it’s Ophelia and wax poetic to her, um, it. Don’t quit your day job.
Read lots of plays, see as many theatrical productions as you can afford, stand in front of a mirror and read the best play dialogue out loud. Join an amateur theatre group. Audition or volunteer to help out backstage. Maybe one day when you get that part as Henry Higgins there will be a director from Stratford in the audience and he’ll sign you on the spot, or not. Or get part-time work as a film extra, if you live in a city where such opportunity presents itself. One thing is absolute: if you do nothing about this dream, nothing will happen. You just have to take some action and understand that the odds are against you being the next Johnny Depp.
Hey, and it’s really okay to spend your working life as a respected, trusted good car mechanic. Not everybody can be Johnny Depp. And you know what? Not everybody wants to be, either. Some of us are content to just watch.
That damn axiom keeps ringing in my ears: life is what happens when you’re making other plans. I’d go one step further:

Life is what happens (and slips by) when you’re not paying attention.

Develop a sense of awareness; this is the greatest gift you can “learn”. Be aware of all that surrounds you so when things or people are out of kilter, you notice before it’s too late. Just pay attention.

———————————————

Recipe: Do what you love and the money will follow.

Nutrients: None. Return it to the manufacturer post haste. However, if you happen to be a concert pianist, studied from the age of four, have buckets of talent, and got a masters degree in music, have unconditionally wealthy parents, and you also happen to love playing piano, this can be true for you. But there are thousands of people who, for example, love knitting. Can they make a career out of it? Can they even eek out a meagre living from it? Unlikely to definitely not.

Toxins: Go on a diet.

Hidden Ingredients: Don’t even bother to read the package.

Antidote: Do what you love as a hobby and keep your day job (how I loathe repetition, but sometimes it’s necessary). If it’s knitting, then be happy to occasionally sell a baby layette to the hospital gift shop or make Christmas gifts for your friends. Knitting isn’t a way to earn a living unless you invest in a slew of knitting machines a start your own garment company. Risk alert!
But let’s say you’re an aspiring writer; can you earn a living from it? Yes and no. The majority of writers (I’m using Canadian statistics here) who actually get paid for their work earn less than $15,000.00 a year, a paltry sum. Sure, the Atwoods and McEwans of the world probably make more than that, but is your writing capable of making it big? Write every minute that you can spare. Hire someone to clean your house if you must use that four hours to write, but maintain your regular income.

——————————————

Recipe: Quitters never win (or: the first step to failure is when you stop trying).

Nutrients: Part of what they allude to here is true: if you don’t buy a lottery ticket you will not win the lottery. But if the twenty bucks you were going to use to buy a (odds-greatly-against) lottery ticket would instead buy a week’s worth of cat food, then buy peace. And that comes in cans; lottery tickets don’t.

Toxins: Quitting can be the first and essential step to winning. It’s okay to say, “I’ve had enough.”
It’s also okay, when a project or business is failing after numerous attempts to turn it around, to say, “I gave it my best, my bank account’s empty; I’m going to stop the bleeding now.” Remember the advice from Paul Godfrey’s mother!

Hidden Ingredients: There will always be fallout to quitting. If what you’re quitting is your job, there will be fallout, like maybe not being able to pay your mortgage, but if this job has given you an ulcer, there’s a price for that, too.

Antidote: Do your homework. If you’re employed and want a new job, research the job market, figure out what you’re qualified to do (or take a course and get qualified), and apply for a new job, even a new career path. But prepare yourself!
If you’re in business and want out, talk to your accountant and lawyer, and ask the government help line to tell you about the ramifications of business dissolution; will you have any personal liabilities if you dissolve an insolvent (or unprofitable) corporation?
Consider the price of staying at your present job or in your current business venture versus the cost of getting out.
Ask yourself how your decision will likely (you’re not psychic, so make intelligent conjectures) affect you in your immediate future (example: no paycheque), in the next three months (example: you’re still paying off the federal government for taxes you collected while in business), and in the next year (example: you no longer have to pay staff when you couldn’t even pay yourself). You might want to go even further and consider the ramifications of your decision three years down the road, or ten.
The bottom line: carefully and diligently examine the pros and cons of leaving your job or closing your business, get expert advice (much of which is “free”; your tax dollars at work), and when you’re sure you know as much as possible about the probable outcome, take action.
And do not apologize for your actions. You’re entitled to do what is right for you. Try to make the effect minimal for others, but they’ll find their own strength to carry on in the wake of your decision. Be considerate to their needs, and above all, be honest and fair.

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Recipe: If you want to succeed you have to fail more.

Nutrients: Can you hear me screaming? Get me a bar of 70% cocoa dark chocolate and get it now! This claim might ring true if you’re a six-year-old graduating to a two-wheeler from your trike. But in adult-world terms, this is right up there with saying, “Um, pardon me, but would you be so kind as to jump off that cliff again? You didn’t quite die the first time.”

Toxins: Just about every calorie of it. Where’s that chocolate?

Hidden Ingredients: Failure costs money and emotions, sometimes beyond the point of recovery. And no, you don’t always learn a valuable lesson from it. If your propensity is to blame, then you’ll learn the square root of a mashed turnip.
Here’s a dictionary definition for you to chew on:

Failure. (FALE-yur) 1. the condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends.

Here’s my version:

Failure is the inability to forgive yourself; to discard yourself as inherently useless or bad when you have not managed to “succeed”, when your best intention was brought into focus, and your best efforts were made, but you were unable to meet your basic will.

Antidote: Try not to fail! Plan not to fail, even though plans can be precarious. “Plan” is the operative word. Plan, plan and plan again. But also remember that the best laid plans of mice and men… So, if your plan is not fool-proof (name one that is!), be prepared to fail. Have a Plan B, or even better, an escape hatch. And always stash a good bar of dark chocolate in the butter keeper in your fridge; wrap it in tin foil so the kids will think it’s butter.
Citing cases like Thomas Edison making dozens of attempts at inventing the light bulb, and failing until he finally got it right, are not apples-versus-apples comparisons; the motivational mangia-cakes use them freely and wrongly. Spending your time (providing your rent is paid and your family is fed) tinkering with an invention is a choice you can make that will affect few people, including yourself, if you never make it work. And if you do, bonus!
Repeatedly failing in business is a ticket to financial ruin. That will affect you and a lot of other people. Speaking from experience here is my axiom to that effect:

If you want to succeed, fail less.

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Recipe: There is a good or positive side to everything.

Nutrients: Sometimes there’s a silver lining to a grey cloud, but not always. Sometimes when a door closes another one opens up; other times the door is locked, sealed with caulking that smells really bad and stays that way. This mostly happens when you’re on the side of the door that you don’t want to be on, as in, outside in sub-zero January.

Toxins: There’s not always good to be found in bad situations. Some things are just plain negative. Period. The motivational mangia-cakes claim it’s how you perceive or react to a negative that enables you to find good in it. I say, rubbish! There are some situations that just suck the joint out. All you need to be able to do is distinguish between those that are lessons disguised as crap and those that are just crap. Consult the oracle: your intuition.

Hidden Ingredients: Don’t look too hard for the good in a bad situation because if you don’t find dollar coins wrapped in wax paper in your birthday cake, you’ll likely be even more upset than you already are by the bad situation itself.

Antidote: Leaky clouds make rain. That’s why there are umbrellas; most of them are not merde-proof, but that’s another book.

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Recipe: You can depend upon miracles.

Nutrients: No! You cannot depend upon miracles! Yes, they (or some serendipity akin to “miracles”) do happen, and when they do they feel like pure magic, but they cannot be depended upon for they are based outside of your control. If they happen, say, “Wow! What great timing! Thank you, universe.” But never ever believe they are waiting around the corner just for you.
I’ve had days when I wondered how I’d provide for my family, and on that very day my $58.00 HST refund (for my foreign readers, this is a tax that Canadians pay on goods and services) has turned up in my bank account. Voila! This wasn’t a miracle. This was the 5th of October when the government makes these deposits. If it had been perhaps $58,000.00, a big government boo-boo, well, there would be a miracle. Actually, the miracle would be if they didn’t realize their mistake. There’s one other sure thing besides death and taxes: a federal government audit.

Toxins: Almost too many to list. Eat fat-free ice cream and call me in the morning.

Hidden Ingredients: I knew someone who regularly got her back to the wall and when I asked her how she planned to get out of her pickle du jour, she would always reply, “Something will happen; it always does.” It did. She’s dead.

Antidote: Do not in your wildest dreams depend upon miracles, or serendipity, or any other form of chance. Your mother told you and now I’m telling you. That’s your miracle for the day.

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Recipe: “Vision” is the art of seeing invisible things.

Nutrients: Like Butch Cassidy said (with thanks to William Goldman), “I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” Now you see it, now you don’t.
This type of “vision” isn’t like the one we have to see things (like pleasant dogs who actually eat what their mother feeds them, refrigerators full of dark chocolate, moveable type); it’s that je n’est-ce quoi, that intangible tangible. It’s a concept, so it can’t really be true or false. It happens to us sometimes and sometimes we can make it happen, just by being ultra-observant, but it’s still a conceptual thing. It’s false, but it’s true, too. Depends.

Toxins: You can’t always believe what you see, even if it isn’t seeing in the traditional sense. I know people who see the invisible and they’re very happy in the asylum, thank you.

I’m going to break the standard recipe here for a moment to introduce a similar ingredient: visualization. This isn’t exactly like the sort of vision we are seeing (pun intended) here. It’s the technique of closing your eyes and picturing something, which is all very well and fine until somebody gets their eye poked out. I return to the words of The Daily Guru, for a detailed quote:

“Visualize what you want… [then there’s lots of stuff about blueprints, imagination, and construction, and then]… See the things you want as already yours. Think of them as yours as belonging to you, as already in your possession [enough already; we get the damn point!]. Picture yourself as already having achieved your goal.”

Okay, well. Where to start? After I went to the Brian Tracy seminar where Brian Tracy wasn’t, and I was full with unrealistic anticipation of what my future surely would hold, I bought a copy of Road & Track and cut out a glossy colour picture of a car I badly wanted. In accordance with Tracy’s goal-setting formula, I tacked it to the corkboard right smack in front of my desk so that I could see it every day.
But you know what happens when something is on your wall; eventually it morphs into wallpaper and you no longer see it!
I opened a new, separate bank account, and I drew a car on the front cover of the passbook (stay with me; this was in the dark ages) and put $20.00 in the account. I spent the last moments of each and every day visualizing that car, right before I went to sleep; once I even dreamed about it. Fifteen years later, I had to pay the bank $65.79 to close the account.
I see it this way now:

Visualization can give clarity to your goals and dreams, but it cannot make them happen.

If there’s something you want that badly, you won’t have to visualize it, believe me; it will haunt you! Now back to the recipe we were undoing…

Hidden Ingredients: Not everyone has vision and not everyone wants it.

Antidote: What you see you can’t always have. Including my bar of dark chocolate.

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Recipe: Eighty per cent of success is in showing up.

Nutrients: If you don’t buy the lottery ticket you can’t win the lottery. Do I hear an echo?

Toxins: If you do show up, you could get hit by a bus.

Hidden Ingredients: Show up wearing your best suit of armour and watch out for wayward public transit vehicles.

Antidote: Don’t believe everything you read. Have the courage to begin, but wear your armour every day as instructed on the package.

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Recipe: You can have and/or achieve anything that you want; only the mind sets limits.

Nutrients: Ahhhhh! The mind does set limits and thank heavens it does! Otherwise, like lemmings to the sea all of us would march and drown en masse. This is one of the biggest lies you’re ever going to read or hear spoken. It’s 100% codswallop!

Toxins: Every stinking calorie of it. The other way this recipe is often phrased is even more irksome: pursue what you want and you’ll get it. This is utter baloney, not even pretending to be wrapped in a package, and it’s gone mouldy.

Hidden Ingredients: I want to be an opera singer. I love those costumes and would have had Verdi’s children had I been alive when he was. I’m determined and I believe in myself. Never mind if I’m built like a waif and not a busty soprano. Never mind that I can’t carry a tune and get claustrophobic in a wig. I can do anything!

Antidote: You might be able to have what you are capable of doing and achieving if you apply yourself carefully and thoroughly, accept your limits, make a reasonable plan, go one step at a time, expect obstacles, and realize that life can be unfair. No guarantee. Sorry.

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Recipe: Choose your associates carefully.

Nutrients: This is pretty sage advice, also pretty common sense. The Golden Spatula Award to your grandmother.

Toxins: Sometimes your associates choose you!

Hidden Ingredients: Do a credit check and criminal profile. People are how they behave, not what they say.

Culinary Caveat: I know lots of famous people. I’ve worked in major-league motorsports, theatre, films and music. I hang out with people who are artists, actors, and wealthy business people, but their magic doesn’t fall off them like so much pixie dust. I can’t grab a handful and rub it on me. And guess what? Some days even their magic is not magical; some days the tomato slips out of their club sandwich and lands on their white dress pants.

Antidote: Make lots and lots of friends and then by default one or two of them is bound to be a good match.

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Recipe: Ignore the naysayers.

Nutrients: Encouragement can be good. My beloved gramps, Wee Willy Wictor (a.k.a. William Victor Gillgan), encouraged me in many aspects of my young life, and when he died when I was 21 a major positive force in my life vanished. His was a creative mind and he saw echoes of himself in me, which he supported by sharing his poetry with me and inspiring me to try my hand. Without his encouragement, I might never have become a writer. Thanks, Gramps! I think…

Toxins: Biographical case in point: in 1978. I got married to a nice-enough, good-looking enough fellow who had a job. Thereby ends all of what we had in common. Dozens of naysayers tried to talk me out of it, until one naysayer — me — failed to say, “I don’t.” I divorced him at great cost three very unhappy years later.

Hidden Ingredients: Consider, aghast, that the naysayers might just be right! They might just care so much about you that they don’t want you to jump off the cliff a second time and end up quite dead.

Antidote: Just don’t leave the stove when you’re stirring the custard. Even if the phone rings. Even if the fire alarm goes off. Learn to say “no” and like it.

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Recipe: You must believe in something for it to happen.

Nutrients: When I think of one truth, one believable fragment, one sliver of pumpkin without seasonings that tastes like anything but bland pulp about this, I’ll e-mail Peter Pan at neverlandnevermind.com and let him know.

Toxins: As of now, your arteries are totally clogged; get the Draino. Better yet, a bottle of red wine; make mine Italian.
Think about this: millions of people believe in one God, a chap named Jesus and an entity called the Holy Ghost (with apologies to Christians, this always makes me think of what I’d say if I actually encountered a ghost!); millions of others believe in Allah and his sidekick, the prophet Mohammed; millions believe in a deity of elephantine shape that wears earrings, Krishna. Not one of these people has ever personally seen these deities, or for that matter, Jimmy Hoffa. Correct me if I’m wrong (yes, I expect letters from this one). Believing something does not make it real. Sorry to stick a pin in your balloon, but you saw it coming. Bang!

Hidden Ingredients: There aren’t any (check the label); all the baloney is on the outside of the package.

Antidote: Believe in nothing other than yourself. And even then… No guarantees.

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Nota bene: this particular recipe is mixed by just about all motivational mangia-cakes, but with varied wording. Since Og Mandino is dead, I’ll use his version (hoping he didn’t leave seek-and-destroy instructions in his will with my address attached; did I mention that I am moving? To Wawa?).

Recipe: The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting goals and achieving them. Even the most tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through each day convinced that every task, no matter how menial or boring, brings you closer to achieving your dreams.

Nutrients: Good, forward-moving habits are good and forward-moving. Yes, you must take steps toward baking that cake because it won’t bake itself, unless you’re Merlin’s apprentice.

Toxins: Parade? Parade! Please. Setting goals may be a habit, but achieving them is another matter. Permit my rephrasing of this:

You have the power to set goals; you may not have equal power in achieving them.

Not all goals are achieved; I’m willing to bet that most aren’t. New Year’s resolutions. I rest my case.
Let’s say I have the goal (pun intended) of being a goalie for the Maple Leafs (for my British readers, the Toronto ice hockey team that never wins the (Lord) Stanley Cup). I line up my ducks, I mean, pucks, so that I’m able to achieve this goal, never mind that they don’t let pint-sized, middle-aged females play. I do all my tedious chores, like painting my face blue, buying skates and tying those really long shin-pads around my neck. But these chores aren’t boring, no siree! They’re exciting because they’re bringing me closer to my dreams. But what if they don’t? Were those tasks a waste of my time? Read: a waste of my life?
If I am convinced that every task brings me closer to my dreams, then I’m swimming with sharks, and I don’t mean the ones from San Jose.

Hidden Ingredients: I love a parade as much as the next guy, but this parade is marching too far ahead for me to see both ends. And what the hell is “success” anyway? Your definition might be a clean soup ladle. Mine might be a bar of dark chocolate. Mandino’s might be a Ferrari (how about a Dino for Mandino, eh?). It’s all relative. And by the way, when you die, like Og did, you can’t take a Ferrari with you. They don’t burn or bury well at all, but you may feel free to will yours to me. Thank you kindly.

Antidote: Make sure every task you do, every chore you undertake, every tuna casserole you cook you do for the thrill of being alive. That’s right. Do what you do in the now because you can; you’ll be dead one day, and dead people can’t cook. Sorry, Mummy, but I really hope that’s true.

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Recipe: You must give in order to get.

Nutrients: Who cares? Just give. It’s good for your blood pressure and has no cholesterol, and it tastes good, too.

Toxins: Motivational mangia-cakes claim that giving before getting is not only a universal law, but that said law works such that you get more than you sow. What about reaping what you sow? What version of The Bible are these guys reading, anyway? The Noah’s multiply-by-two, easy-math edition?
I agree that giving is crucial, but it has no relationship whatsoever to getting.
When I had my last (and I mean last) restaurant business, two female servers in their early 40s were greedy little brats. Another of about the same age and gender was not. The two greedy gals took all the tables they thought they could handle, and not fairly sharing when patrons came in to be seated. What inevitably happened was that the two greedy gals were run off their feet trying to serve too many tables, not doing a good job of any of them, and being tipped accordingly. The other woman served fewer tables and made twice the tips. Poetic justice.

Hidden Ingredients: I’m a giver. Have I received anything remotely close to what I have given? No, but guess what? I don’t keep track. Giving is about giving, selflessly, freely and with no ulterior motive. Otherwise, karma bites you on your flank steak.

Antidote: Give what you’re able, be it of yourself, your time, your money, whatever. Take food to those who have none, but understand that it doesn’t mean that when you have no food, they’ll come over to your house and drop off a basket of groceries at the exact moment you ran out of good-quality dark chocolate.

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Recipe: The concentration of power. This is one reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus, concentrate our power; we major in minor things (attributed to Tony Robbins).

Nutrients: Yes, we need focus as part of our strategy if we’re going to make that perfect terrine. Focus, plus the right tools, and the right ingredients. A soupçon of luck wouldn’t hurt either.

Toxins: Life is a muddle of small details. That’s a fact, more now that it was in my grandparents’ day. The very technology that was supposed to set us free complicates our lives.
There was a book published in recent years entitled Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, written by Jack Canfield. While I get that this infers we should concentrate on the things that matter, just try ignoring the small stuff if only for a couple of weeks. Go ahead. Little things add up to be bigger things than the big things. Then they eat you.

Hidden Ingredients: Other than a frightfully male-intoned statement, there’s nothing much hiding in this recipe.

Antidote: The fridge is full of things. Toss out the science projects (penicillin has been discovered). Ditch the stuff you bought that’s healthy, but you know you’ll never eat (do that before it becomes a science project). Reorganize the entire thing so you can see clearly what is in there. Then zero in on that bar of dark chocolate.
Most of us want more than one thing in our lives. If you’ve ever been to a psychic, you know what I mean; they break down their prognostications into general categories: love, family, work, money and health. It stands to reason, then, that they do this because it’s what we want to know about when our fear of the future drives us to someone who may or may not be able to afford us a glimpse forward.
For the sake of argument, let’s say these five categories are the stuff of our lives. Then upon which one do we focus? Our focus will be automatically drawn to the one that most commands our attention at the moment:

• When my mother was dying, my focus was family.
• When I got food poisoning, my focus became health.
• When I closed the restaurant, my focus was money.

Focus is integral to making headway on any goal or dream you might have. But expect distractions. Lots of them. Life is full of them. Plan for them. But never lose emotional focus on your dream or goal, providing it is feasible, and that your life will not be wasted if the dream or goal in question never comes to fruition.

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And now from our synonyms and substitutions file…

Recipe: Your greatest power is in making choices and decisions/You always have a choice/Being successful is a choice you make. In other words, if you let others make decisions for you, you have no control.

Nutrients: Yes, we almost all are capable of making choices and therefore, decisions. I say almost because there exist human beings so damaged mentally that this capability is not in their capacity.
You can choose where to buy your groceries and which pot to cook them in, which TV chef to watch (or not), who you eat with, but if you have a family, well, you’re stuck eating with them at least sometimes.
You always have some degree of choice, but it’s virtually always restricted by conditions, some deriving from other people (your boss, your parents, the past-president of your local Girl Guides chapter) in a position of authority over you, and some from your immediate circumstances.

Toxins: There are a few. The fattiest of them is that you are not going to be successful just because you choose to be. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of factors outside of your control that can burn your piecrust. Being successful is no more a choice than being a failure is a choice.
Let’s say, just for a lark, my choosing to write this book was because I made a choice to be successful. Okay, so if it becomes a national best-seller, does that mean I made the right choice? And was that a conscious choice to be successful, or the outcome of a conscious choice to write a book that was dear to my heart, but that had a 50/50 chance of ever getting published? And really, dear reader, does anyone (sane) make a choice to fail (except for income-tax-deduction purposes)?
What I promise you here and now, is that if this book is successful (by whose measure? mine? the publisher’s?) I will not go on the talk-show circuit and say I planned this to be a success. If it happens, it happens. I’m writing it with hope, yes, but with a success formula? Not really; the only formula here is the format and that is so the damn thing has structure because I tend to digress. Where was I?
Yes, the latter part of that recipe… Sometimes you’re in a position where you must allow others to make decisions for you. The obvious examples are when you’re a child, not wise enough to make your own decisions (except, perhaps, for which candy to buy, and even then, your mother knows best; just ask her), and if you’re incapacitated mentally or physically. But there are other less extreme situations.
The owners of the company where you work have decided to relocate to Come-by-Chance, Newfoundland. Stay with me; this is hypothetical. You have a great job, so, C-B-C it is. It would never have been your choice, but you’re too old to start over with a new firm (besides, how many companies these days manufacture spats?), so you go with it by default.

Hidden Ingredients: You may be the boss of the company and the head of your family, the president of the local Escoffier society, but like Bob Dylan said, you’ve got to serve somebody.

Antidote: Accept what is within your sphere of control, always taking into account flying merde, do a metric tonne of research before you pull the trigger, and be open to whatever the outcome might be, good or bad. Analyze your risk quotient. No, I’m not going to get you to fill in a multiple-choice questionnaire, assign points to each of your answers, and then slot you into a category with all those other cooks who are exactly like you. This is not Cosmo. Your risk quotient is fairly easy for you to figure out yourself. Here’s my theoretical formula (yours will vary because, lucky you, you are not me, not even theoretically):

Cat’s Risk Quotient (Theoretical Data Only)

Income: slightly more than $15,000 a year; $500 from the annual garage sale; $20 from the annual dog-biscuit bake sale

Security of income: stinks; the free-lance life is fraught with peaks and valleys, mostly valleys

Assets: house, car, house contents, one pleasant dog, five wicked proofreading cats, lots of books, pens and paper, Gilles Villeneuve autograph, fab kitchen knives, good cheekbones

Financial back-up: none; no wealthy parents hiding in Come-by-Chance or anywhere else, no spouse with pockets full of gold, no grateful children that I know of

Bank savings: about three months’ worth of basic monthly expenses (okay, two months)

Insurance: like most people, I’m worth a lot more dead

Debts: mortgage, one credit card, my agent and my publisher (so they keep reminding me)

Expenses: utilities, insurance, cat food, dog food, people food, wine supply, dark chocolate, pens and paper, addiction to theatre tickets, mascara, Armagnac, spatulas (or is that spatulae?)

It might appear that I have a low risk quotient, that my financial life is orderly. I don’t carry a lot of debt, but neither do I have a huge income; it varies a great deal and comes with zero security. The biggie here, however, is back-up. I have only three (yeah, yeah, two) months to live without income before my well runs dry, providing there are no emergencies bigger than running out of cat food, and I have nobody upon whom I can rely if the bottom falls out of my financial life.
Out comes my pessimist to stir the pot! Someone approaches me with an investment opportunity. Its returns will be far more than the 2% I earn from my savings account. It doesn’t cost much to get involved. There are several investors, so the risk is spread around. And life, after all, dear reader, is not without its inherent risks (see previous comment regarding public transit buses). But my risk quotient isn’t great, and Murphy has that bothersome law. What to do?
I have three choices: stay out, get in, or ask if I can get in with perhaps less capital or some sort of guarantee from the wealthier members of the group. Don’t laugh! If the other investors really need my input, then they may be motivated to offer some sort of guarantee to me; it might cost them less up front to use my money than breaking into their own savings or secured investments.

Antidote: Determine what success means to you before you decide that you can choose to be successful.
If you are in the throes of making choices — I don’t mean corn flakes versus wheat squares — significant choices that will have more profound outcomes than are the direct result of fibre intake, don’t make them quickly. If you’re under pressure, if there’s an armed robber in front of you telling you it’s your cheesecake or your life, give him the cheesecake; your thighs will thank you. Otherwise, go as slowly as possible with all decisions and choices you make, and never assume any of them will have the intended results.

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Recipe: You have unlimited potential and can do anything.

Nutrients: By all means, encourage people to stick their necks under the carving knife; they can do it!

Toxins: This is lunacy. It’s what keeps the motivational mangia-cakes’ coffers lined. If they said, “Your potential is limited to what you can reasonably afford, how intelligent you actually are, and how talented you actually are not,” do you think people would flock to their seminars?

Hidden Ingredients: Your capacity, level of ability, predisposition, and other aspects of the real you don’t serve to limit your ability, they serve to enhance (maybe limit!) what’s doable for you as an individual.
This is another element of the motivational mangia-cakes’ grip: they address the masses. Well, they’re not the pope. The masses may go to mass, but they’re individual beings with entirely different sets of life issues, backgrounds, circumstances. You can call it Puttanesca sauce, and it may have the requisite ingredients (don’t forget the olives and capers), but you’ll make it a bit differently from the way I do, and our results will not only be different, they’ll be ours.

Antidote: Do not hand over your car for servicing at a bakery.

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Recipe: Success is a state of mind. The barrier between you and success is not something that exists in the real world. You are what you believe yourself to be.

Nutrients: So, is depression; where’s my dark chocolate?

Toxins: You cannot feed chocolate to dogs. There is not one julienned carrot of fact here. The barrier between me and success or you and success is planted firmly in the real world.

Hidden Ingredients: None; it’s 100% cocoa, not once ounce of sugar.

Antidote: You don’t need to think of yourself as successful or even believe that you are, but just to go about doing your level best every day in your life, except for your occasional mental health days when you give yourself permission to look and feel like merde. It’s okay.

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I turned off my computer, and my brain, took a mental health day. I ate a lot of good-quality dark chocolate, and had a sip of Armagnac, and I’m planning to make that a habit.

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Recipe: You are what you repeatedly and habitually do.

Nutrients: Habits when performed on a (excuse me for this) habitual basis form a pattern. That pattern won’t change unless the habit changes. Habits can be good or bad, yield positive outcomes or negative ones (sometimes positive habits yield negative outcomes; remember that the next time you’re jogging for good health and break your ankle stepping into a rabbit burrow). Changing a habit requires constant repetition on a conscious level until it becomes a habit and requires no thought on a conscious level.

Toxins: Motivational mangia-cakes say the same damn things over and over again. That’s a bad habit. If you do the same thing the same way, odds are you will get the same results.

Hidden Ingredients: I am not what I do and neither are you. I live with the results and outcomes of my regular habits, and they affect me, but I am not them.
If you change your habits, you might, probably will, get different results; note the word “different” and recognize that its definition does not mean ”better”.

Antidote: In his version of this recipe, Steingart says, “First you make your habits and then your habits make you.” Does that make sense? Let’s say you’re a smoker. You started the habit and now you’re a smoker. You can quit, you know. That’s not a habit, that’s a decision.

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Recipe: Expectation comes before achievement and/or opportunity is all around you.

Nutrients: Eat cardboard; it has more.

Toxins: When opportunity knocks, don’t answer the door right away. Leave it locked for a while, maybe days. Opportunity is sometimes catastrophe in a nice suit. Opportunity is always perceived as being something positive. What if I told you that you had an opportunity to pour hot grease down the front of your apron; would you do it? If you answered yes, you’re reading the wrong book. The one you want is by the Marquis de Sade.
Expectation is one of the most dangerous soups you are ever going to concoct in your cauldron. It is full of poisonous ingredients, like entitlement, self-righteousness, greed, conceit, and it completely lacks sensitivity. To boot, you’ll often, if not mostly, be disappointed by how bad it tastes and it doesn’t get better when you add salt and cooking sherry. Drink the sherry instead and don’t expect it to taste like anything but sherry.

Hidden Ingredients: Lots of things come before achievement, like maybe earnestness rather than expectation; or how about modesty? If you expect something, you’re begging to be let down. Sure, opportunity exists all around you, but that doesn’t mean you have to eat that chiffon pie; it means you have the option to, but it might be an idea to consider the likely consequences if you do.

Antidote: Expect nothing, hope for the best, be ready for the worst, and keep a good bottle of sherry on hand for the day the merde lands in your personal cauldron and misses everyone else in the room. Don’t kid yourself that expecting something is the precursor to achievement. You’ll achieve that which you put effort into, providing lady luck is with you, you have the recipe correctly written down, the temperature in your oven is precise, and all your ducks assembled in that row don’t get picked off by a deranged hunter. If one does, cook him and have him for dinner. The hunter, not the duck. Oops, that would be cannibalism, but that’s another book.
Opportunity exists in perpetuity, but it is not an equal-opportunity opportunity. Still with me? You have found the perfect house, what an opportunity! The dragon in the basement also sees this as an opportunity: to have you for dinner.

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Recipe: You cannot achieve success unless you have a goal.

Nutrients: Goals help you focus on hoped-for outcomes.

Toxins: You can have success without a goal. The merde that lands on your head might just be made of solid gold. People do now and then actually win lotteries, long-lost aunts do occasionally leave a fortune to a certain nephew because she liked his freckles when he was a kid, and that house you bought with the man-eating dragon in the basement? Well, that dragon is guarding a fruit cellar full of cash. Were any of these your goals? Nah. Success can just happen. Or not.

Hidden Ingredients: You can fail even if you do have a goal. And I don’t just mean fail a bunch of times on the path towards your goal. I mean flunk out entirely.

Antidote: Try making strategies, not goals, per se. Strategies tend to be more constructive, more compartmentalized, and therefore, more possible. It still doesn’t guarantee the desired results, but it helps.
Let’s say your goal was to make a pineapple upside-down cake. It really doesn’t matter that you promised to take one over to your mother-in-law’s place on Sunday or that your mouth is watering at the thought; if you don’t put a strategy in place, no cake with magically materialize. Goals tend to be on the XXL end of the rack, but strategies are the XS, S, M, L and XL part. Plan your steps, adjust each one so that it aligns with the overall goal, adjust again as you proceed and find that everything isn’t quite as you’d expected, and know when to quit if you’re being met with such resistance, the message is clear. Goals are not enough.
And there’s nothing wrong with pineapple-inside-out pudding, either. Tasty.

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Recipe: You have to think big to achieve big.

Nutrients: Excuse me while I go cough up a furball.

Toxins: Ah, that’s better. That nagging gagging feeling is for the birds and so is this recipe! One of the subtexts to this recipe is often “if you don’t have a dream, how can you make it come true?” Um, well, if you don’t have a dream to begin with, you don’t have a need to make it — that which you do not have — come true. Clear as my mother’s lumpy gravy? People who don’t have dreams at least have reality.

Hidden Ingredients: Major achievements don’t always come from lofty goals. Some come via serendipity, even luck. Like the teenager sitting in a coffee shop, noticed by a model agency executive, and a year later this girl (or guy) is a supermodel. Maybe she or he had planned to be a neurosurgeon, and only realized that she or he had brains (pun intended), but not looks.
And the reverse is true, too. Making the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s longest submarine sandwich is a big goal (hey, and a big honking sandwich, too), but if you run out of that bland faux cheese stuff, you’re toast. So to speak.

Antidote: I know a guy who is in his late 50s, an alcoholic, dependent, and arrogant, but he can sing (better when he’s not drunk, which is for about ten minutes on any given day). He still believes he’s going to be a major pop star. Okay fine. Because he has talent, this fame and fortune is owed to him, plain and simple.
Find goals that fit within the largest saucepan in your collection, no bigger than that. If that goal is reasonable, your odds are better of achieving it; if it’s huge, your odds stink like gorgonzola.

Of course, there are dozens of other crazy and sometimes ridiculous recipes that these motivational mangia-cakes conjure up, but the ones I have included here cover most of the basic ones they feed you. Or try to. Motivational mangia-cakes cook up these liberally, repeatedly repeating one another, leaving out critical ingredients, and making claims that if spoken under oath would result in a lengthy jail term and years of bland cafeteria food. They are word-thieves and phrase-murderers.
Speaking of words, someone who could think them beautifully and write them with equal panache was Bertrand Russell (1872 to 1970), the British philosopher, logician, writer and social reform advocate who championed humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought. Here is one of my favourite Russell quotes:

“We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which all good life springs.”

Chew on that a little. It doesn’t even need salt and pepper. But not all motivational mangia-cakes are cooked in the same broth, so let’s have a look at an especially juicy specimen. Got your serrated knifes at the ready?

Toasting Marshmallows: Spiritual Spinners on a Spit

For better or for (mostly) worse, some motivational mangia-cakes cook in more esoteric kitchens (gadzooks; could they be lacking in motivation?). Their kitchens are different, and yet the same. The tiles may be a different colour (more Zen), the pots and pans don’t always match, and the tea towels have the odd hole in them, but the food is essentially the same fare, the menus only varied by typographical errors and red wine stains.
As dangerous as it is to cook with motivational mangia-cakes’ recipes, their spiritual counterparts may seem more banal, but that’s only frosting; the cake underneath is as hard as, well, my mother’s scones. Don’t take a bite! At least save your teeth if your soul is beyond redemption.
Motivational gruel sugar-coated to look and taste like gentle food for your misguided soul will still put your wallet on a diet and lead you down the kitchen path. It’s disturbing that these guys (yes, the same basic profile, only some of them have full, grey beards and spectacles) either touch on or outright thieve the wisdom of ancient (and modern) philosophers and somehow manage to weave it on a different loom so that it comes out the other end as a bad wig.
Because of this tendency, I’ve organized the shelves in this section of the kitchen of your life differently from the “Burnt Offerings” department:

• I issue the statements made as “Raw”
• question them in “Blanched”
• offer a few alternative ideas or revisions of the
statements in “Cooked”
• and apply a reasonable rewording in “Reheated”.

Let’s get cooking in the kinder, gentler kitchen where the sustainably caught sharks are filleted with a humane knife, fried in single-orchard extra-virgin olive oil, and served with organic wasabi, but they still burn your tongue raw, or should, anyway.

Raw: I have everything I need now.

Blanched: If you have it all now, why set a goal to have more? You might have all the dishes you need to feed your family and guests in a civil if not regal manner, but what about that earthquake, eh? It broke every dish you own and now you need more. Eating directly off the table is not only bad manners, it’s not exactly healthy.

Cooked: I have everything I want in this moment, but I reserve the right to change my mind about that later. If we’re too comfortable with what we do or have, we’re not motivated to do anything, and we stagnate.

Reheated: Be thankful for what’s good in your life and about yourself, and don’t belabour what’s bad, but don’t ignore it either; take small steps to make it and you better on your own agenda and considering your current position, not by the guidelines of what others expect of you.

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Raw: I am what I choose to be.

Blanched: I am what I am, which is likely the combined outcome of my parents (genetics and upbringing), my environment, my circle of influence (rowdy versus geeky friends), my diet or lack thereof, my personal experiences, and the decisions I’ve made throughout my tenure thus far on this planet.

Cooked: Even though I am what I am, there’s still the possibility that I might be what I might be, or could be what I am not right now. I may become what I choose to be, or not. And I mean that to include choosing (outwardly) to be a writer as well as choosing to be (inwardly) a kind person (except when dealing with motivational mangia-cakes; sorry). Clear as seafood chowder?
People can and do change and evolve, but they don’t see themselves as others see them. (Isn’t it a shock when you think you’re a really nice person and someone says to you, “Oh, you can be so prickly at times!”)
One of my grandfather’s axioms was:

“As they age, people do not change, but become more like themselves.”

Reheated: Allow yourself to be who you are at this moment, to grow and be other things as you become them. Be the sum of the whole, not just the parts. Choose to not be overly consumed by your choices and find out how liberating that can be.

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Personal note: The following is a spiritual guru standard. The first time I heard it was in the aftermath of my closest friend’s death in 1972; he was 19 and killed by a drunk driver. This statement, intended as some form of comfort, didn’t faze me then any more than it does now because I believe, from my life experiences, that there are three distinct levels of human reaction…

Raw: We cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we react, if we can summon sanity within chaos and crisis.

Blanched: To some degree mankind is programmed with the fight-or-flight instinct. This is best illustrated by my version of the three distinct levels of reaction, in ascending order:

Level One. When a caveman felt the earth move under his feet, he didn’t assume he was in love and listening to a pop song. He didn’t stand there like a prehistoric dork and pontificate, “Shall I fight or shall I flee? It is to be or not to be?” (Memories of Gilligan’s Island, anyone?) He took off like a scared gazelle to get the hell out of the way of tumbling boulders and great big fissures in the earth. In case you hadn’t guessed, this is the flight mechanism, and it’s hard-wired into us.

Level Two. Our caveman has been out hunting with his mates and, rough justice and all, a woolly mammoth comes up to them with a shotgun and blows away Mr. Caveman’s best friend, Rock. The prehistoric PETA people applaud from the bushes. Our caveman is instantly in the throes of the stages of grief, but when he gets to the “anger” stage, he fires his bow (the fight part of the fight-or-flight thing) at the mammoth, who pulls the primitive arrow out from between his toenails and saunters off into the twilight of the swamp using the arrow as a giant toothpick. Still, our poor caveman is sad about his buddy; he’s now in a blended state of gut reaction and rationalizing the awful thing that’s occurred. For now, it’s more visceral grief, but that will evolve into considered sorrow.

Level Three. A week later, the poor sod catches his woman in the sack (literally; this is not the era of box springs and mattresses) with another, maybe (gasp!) more evolved, cave-dude. He grabs his club, glares at them glaring back at him (his timing stinks), and takes a deep breath, raises his club… And goes outside to think things over. He takes the time to consider his various options: kill her; kill him; kill them both; go get counselling; go play a round of golf with Fred and Barney; take a self-improvement course; pig-out on a brontosaurus burger with extra yak cheese; kill himself.

Cooked: Depending upon what happens to us, we may find ourselves beside ourselves, reacting from instinct, or being able to rationalize the situation. We can derive some solace from the fact that as time passes our odds go up of enacting a rational rather than an instinctual reaction, hopefully being more sensible and sensitive. We can, however, forgive ourselves for our initial reactions to almost anything. Shock changes ideology and good manners. They do come back. Like a beer belch.
We need to make ourselves aware that we are complex beings capable of many things, from violent crimes of passion to pre-meditated murder (instinct to rationalization) and various things in between, including selecting not to murder anyone that cannot be used in the stew pot for dinner.

Reheated: You will react when something happens to you. You might think you know how you would react to something, but until it happens, you really have no idea.
What about the guy, abundant in braggadocio, who claims he isn’t worried about home invasions! He has a gun in his nightstand drawer, and he’s been working out at the gym. Then the night that a pack of thugs breaks into his house, he lies in bed with the covers up over his trembling face and his wife, all 100 pounds of her, sprays her Swiffer wet-jet in their eyes and they bolt, leaving her stash of good-quality dark chocolate in the fridge where it belongs. Not that such a thing ever happened to me…
Such complicated critters, people are. That is why grand statements of “fact” are foolish. It’s not that difficult to use words that pose possibilities rather than treat as fact things that are volatile or mutable.

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Raw: Positive affirmations [repetitions of mantra-like statements] will help you reach your goals by simply believing in them and repeating them.

Blanched: If that were true, I would be a champion racehorse now because I ate oats, apples and carrots for three weeks, repeated my belief that I am the second coming of Secretariat every day in the mirror (is that my hair or a mane, dyed carrot-red, that is growing down my back?), and neighed my mantra at least 20 times a day.
I repeat: believing something is not enough. Part of the path toward attaining something? Probably, maybe even. But not enough on its own. Neither is the repeating of affirmations. These are the same motivational mangia-cakes who told you to not just stand there and instead to take action. I wish they’d make up their minds. Either they want to you move your behind or affirm repeatedly that you have one. Oh, sit on it.

Cooked: Positive input is crucial, whether it is from your own mouth or the mouths of others (hopefully those who like and respect you).
Self-reinforcement is fine, as long as it is tempered liberally with reality. And remember, objectivity is a hard one to achieve. If you stand in front of your bathroom mirror every day for the rest of your life and tell yourself you are the best basketball player in the world, and repeat it a million times, not only will you be late for your job as a chef, but unless you grow at least seventeen inches in the next half hour or so, you’re not quite on the case.

Reheated: We all have days when our dreams feel like they’ve fallen to the bottom of the crockpots of our lives. On those days, we may need to reassure ourselves by reminding ourselves that just because today our dreams seem far away doesn’t mean they are; it’s our negative feelings that sent them into hiding and it’s temporary. For my female readers, that’s the day to get together with your BFF and tell her how you feel, and when she says, “Don’t be silly, you’re brilliant and this is just a bump on your road,” agree with her. For my male readers, go kick the crap out of a football.

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Raw: Life does not happen to us, it happens from us (attributed to Mike Wickett).

Blanched: A few things in life actually happen to us, bolt-from-the-blue, and are not associated with anything we did, other than innocently deciding to play golf when that thunder and lightning storm hit in less than three seconds.
One could argue that by saying, when the rock fell off the mountain and smashed into our car that we were in charge of, placing our car in that position at that moment in time, but I think you get what I mean. Shit happens. Having said that, and on a more day-to-day-normal scale, we’re creating our own experiences from the decisions we make, the choices we make, and the intervention of our characters in what we say and do. The good part about that is that we can make different decisions if the ones we just made are not producing the results we want. But there’s a price to be paid for wrong decisions. And right ones, too.

Cooked: Living consciously makes a huge difference. If you’re simply passing through, knocking things over as you go, what’s happening from you is a sort of spiritual belligerence. (Hint: this is not good.) Stopping yourself and taking a deep breath before you do or say anything, and centring your awareness (especially your impact on others) in the front of your mind, may just give you a better position, and what comes from you will start from a better place.

Reheated: This one is still warm, but when you scarf it down, add your own salt and pepper to taste.

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Raw: The responsibility for both the present and the future is in our own hands. If we live right today, then tomorrow has to be right (attributed to Eknath Easwaran).

Blanched: Where is my blowtorch? This ludicrous statement suggests that if we are good, good will find us. Yeah, right. How many good people can you think of who have been burnt by the flame of disfavour? Pious people, for example, who died cruel deaths? Joan of Arc. I rest my case.

Cooked: If I live right today, that’s a really good idea. Living aware and with consideration for others should be mandatory equipment, built in at the factory. But no matter how you live today, tomorrow will have only marginal bearing on it (well, okay, unless you go out and murder somebody, and then get caught, which means eating jail food for the next 30 years or so).
I know a very self-centred woman. Throughout her life she has taken extreme advantage of the people around her. Has this wicked behaviour affected her? Not in the slightest. Have all the days she has lived this way resulted in a karmic picture that punishes her? No; her horseshoes are firmly planted in her back pocket, evidently. And therein lies the problem:

The sun shines on the good and the bad alike.

People know that they can behave badly and not suffer the consequences, or at the very least, suffer mild rashes and not instant, horrible death by drowning in a crockpot of my mother’s lumpy gravy.

Reheated: This one needs to be peeled, washed, diced and cooked from scratch. If the responsibility for the present and future is in our hands, then why leave the past out of this trite and silly claim? We need to assume culpability, even complicity, in virtually all things that occur in our lives. I say virtually, because merde has its own agenda and you don’t know what it is. If you live right today, you can go to bed tonight and sleep well, but it in no way means that you get a gold star and cookie tomorrow. You will get what comes your way, some of which you triggered, maybe yesterday, maybe 20 years ago, and some of which had nothing to do with you, except perhaps being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time.

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Raw: Forgiveness brings joy and peace.

Blanched: Not always. Maybe you have an agenda for your forgiveness and maybe the person you’re going to forgive won’t share that agenda. The effect of forgiveness depends entirely on the kitchen, the chef, the ingredients and the cooking methods. Sometimes you just need to toss that rotten turnip in the rubbish bin (trash can for my American readers) or composter and walk away. Wave to the garbage man, use the compost to fertilize your veggie garden next spring, but stop stirring in that pot.

Cooked: I’m not suggesting that you stop forgiving, but some acts are quite literally unforgivable. In those cases, what I’m advocating is extreme forgetfulness.
One of the people who spent considerable time and effort wounding me wouldn’t give a rat’s behind if I said to him, “I forgive you.” I guarantee in spades his response would be, “For what?” If he’s so steeled to his own truth, my truth won’t free him. Or me. Because his callous reaction to my olive branch will hurt me even more. What I need to do, then, is forgive myself for my feelings towards this person.

Reheated: By forgiving yourself for negative feelings towards those who have hurt and wounded you, you free yourself to move forward; you free yourself by understanding that some people and some actions do not lie within civil bounds of forgiveness. Clinging to them is the problem.

ZZZZZZZZZ

Raw: Truly living life to the fullest means living it through love.

Blanched: No, people, love is not all you need. It’s a big, delicious slice of it, but it’s not all you need, and what is it anyway? I love my dog and my cats; in fact, I’d sacrifice my life for their well-being. Yes, that’s deep and unfailing (maternal) love. Some people would say that’s deep and unfailing insanity. I care not. Do the motivational and spiritual mangia-cakes mean passionate love? Parental love? Platonic love? Love of dark chocolate? What? What??

Cooked: Love in its many forms can enhance our lives or rip them apart. Love is far too broad a category and too impossible to define to make this spiritual axiom mean anything in a sense that will apply to the one-size-fits-all scope of motivational and spiritual mangia-cakes.

Reheated: Love, in one of its many manifestations, may well serve to guide us in our actions, and when we hold love in our hearts, our decisions will be made from a place of caring, not greed, desperation, manipulation, control, or (gasp) the realization of our goals at any expense.

ZZZZZZZZZ

Raw: “More than ever before, Americans [read: westerners] are suffering from back problems: back taxes, back rent, back auto payments.” (attributed to Robert Orben).

Blanched: Sad but true. Pass the cyanide.

Cooked: Yes, odds are you are cooked because most of us fall into this grouping.

Reheated: There is no sense in reheating that which is served up hot and fresh. Just don’t eat this too quickly; chew on it slowly, swallow it carefully, and get a financial chiropractor to straighten you out.

IV — HAVE RECIPE WILL YIELD

No matter what you cook or bake, the result is you’ll have something to eat; hopefully it’s also edible. The point is any action will get results of some kind or another. Mostly, in my experience, another.

How Did I End Up in This Damn Kitchen?

Think back for a moment, dear reader, to any results that you have achieved in your life. Go ahead, close your eyes and really think; I’ll be waiting. Let’s say a result (applicable to the majority of adults) is that you find yourself married. This is a result, but is it precisely what you had planned? The exact person you had in mind? Are your wedded circumstances just as you’d hoped and believed they’d be? It’s okay if they’re not, because almost nothing ever turns out to the nth degree how we envisioned it would.
I love this quote from George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans 1819-90) who wrote Silas Marner:

“Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.”

Please open your eyes; you’re about to bump into my drinks tray.
Motivational mangia-cakes feed you rehashed garbage, labelling it as salvation, they feed it to you when you are most hungry, they charge you through the nose for it, and then they do not guarantee the results. That’s your problem. Maybe your regret.
And here, dear reader, a selection of my regrets, now lessons, and the foolish dictums that got me there:

• Had I listened to my own intuition, I’d never have bought the second restaurant business (one door closed and an opportunity presented itself!).

• Had I listened to my own intuition, when it became obvious that the business was not anywhere near as lucrative as had been presented to me, I might have restructured the deal (before it was too late) or sold the business during its peak season (ah, but I chose persistence!).

• Had I listened to my own intuition when the business was failing beyond recovery, I’d have walked away then instead of restructuring when it was already too late (quitters never win!).

I won’t name the motivational mangia-cake whose advice I directly consumed because I refuse to assign “blame” per se. I accept my culpability in this; I decided to bury my face in his false “wisdom” and useless “habits”, and believe in what proved to be an impossible situation to save. Blame? No. It’s my fault. I’m paying and will pay for years, perhaps the rest of my life, the price for the fallout, but let’s just say, he was wrong. It nearly cost me my life and it did cost every cent that I had accumulated in hope of not dying in abject poverty in my retirement.
When we’re not cooking to our usual standards and permit motivational mangia-cakes to enter our kitchens, they douse us with flour to blind us, refrigerate our souls, and stir up such sickeningly poisonous, sugar-coated concoctions that we don’t know what it is we’ve swallowed. Tastes okay on the way down, not so yummy on the way back up.
When they’re through, they don’t help with the clean-up, they don’t pay for all those gadgets and foodstuffs; they go to someone else’s kitchen and do it all over again. Those results, that yield, will always be the same. Why? Ka-ching!

Please Do Not Play with Your Food!

Stacking and interspersing layers of giant portabella mushrooms, field-fresh tomatoes, perfect leaves of basil, and gleaming white slices of soft mozzarella doesn’t just give you an insalate Caprese with mushers, it gives you a food pyramid. Knock it over now, and eat it before it asks you to get friends and family to join on the bottom row. The climb, if it happens at all, is arduous, and if they ever get to the top, it’s slippery up there and somebody’s going to slide off and get hurt right in the wallet.
What do dicey things like multi-level marketing (MLM) organizations and cash pyramid schemes have to do with motivational mangia-cakes? Glad you asked. I was getting indigestion holding it all inside me…
These aforementioned “groups” not only advocate such mouldy, toxic babble, they count on it to get your money (ka-ching!) just like their psycho-preachers do.
One way to fast-track your goals is to make lots of money quickly at somebody else’s expense (pun intended). Enter schemes or companies that use the shape of a pyramid to vault one lucky person to the top of the riches heap. One. Lucky. Person.
Just as common in the motivational mangia-cake demographic of white middle-aged men is the preponderance of women of all stripes and ages who join pyramids. This is yet another example of preying upon the weak, bullying, and yes, lying your face off to friends and family because if you don’t they won’t join. And then they must lie to theirs.
Pyramid gals euphemize what they are doing by calling them “recipe swaps” or “cookie clubs”, and it doesn’t matter whether they serve wine or tea, the meetings are hotbeds for mandatory lies.
I believe that women join these things for three main reasons:

1. They’d like to have some income that their spouses do not know about and therefore cannot try to tell them what to do with it.

2. They’re making significantly less income in the workplace than their male counterparts and they want more.

3. Of course, there is that general reason that has no marital or gender slant: greed.

Other than the necessary breeding of lies, pyramids are high-risk; they’re illegal, and only a select few who get in at the beginning make any money because the supply of money for these structured systems (structured the wrong way around) is finite. These schemes are destined to fail because there aren’t enough people in the universe to ensure they perpetuate. It’s a mathematical fact that’s blatantly ignored in the name of “success”.
I mention these, and their legal brethren, MLMs, because the rallying cries of the motivational mangia-cakes set people up to join things like this, and they cannot win, with very, very few exceptions.
Let’s say your best girlfriend invites you to a meeting of the cookie club on Tuesday night. Can’t hurt, right? Bunch of gals getting together for a glass of wine and, um, some cookies. And you just started a business removing tight lids from pickle jars, so it’s a good networking opportunity for you.
But if this is such a fun thing, why are you instructed not to tell your spouse? Why is your girlfriend insisting she pick you up (you have a car; oh, and a car loan, too, which you’d love to pay off), and when you get there, why does she park two blocks away? Risk alert!
When you get inside, the place is packed with women drinking cheap white wine from plastic cups and not a platter of cookies in sight. Lucky for you that you have good instincts, and immediately look for the emergency exit door.
Once the place is marinated in sardines, you’re asked to take a seat and the hostess gets up to gush her brand of the necessary-lie package. The motivational guru-speak begins with the audience being told how clever they are because eighty per cent of success is in showing up, and there you are.
Because you’re open-minded, ambitious and would like to have fun money all your own, you listen. In the room are planted, I mean, included, several women who have made $35,000 in the last week or two doing this. They are sporting their new diamond rings and tans from their luxury vacations. Tempting! Neither of these items is in your present vernacular because you just started your own business, and gave up the tedium, but regular (albeit moderate) income, of your job as a prep cook.
Now the hostess parrots what her favourite motivational mangia-cake had her repeat as her mantra (it works for her; she has “gone over” five times in a month and made $195,000): “Honey, dream big and get big!” Did I mention that this woman weighs 300 pounds? She dreamt really big.
At the end of the “speech”, your girlfriend asks if you want to join for only $5,000. You choke and politely say, “Look girlfriend, I just don’t have that kind of money to invest. You join. I’ll watch.”
But she has already joined, and that’s the point. She’s risked her $5,000, and now in order to ensure she doesn’t lose that, she’s forced to lie to you, to entice you to join the group so it will grow enough to push her to the top where she can recover her initial investment, and the “profit” to which she is surely entitled. So, she must take her motivational mangia-cake directive and counter the obstacles; in this case, that’s you. She’s learned from the motivational mangia-cakes all too well: obstacles are just bumps in the road to success. You used to be her friend; now you’re a bump. Congratulations.
Her first salvo goes like this, “But you have room on your Visa; just get a cash advance and use that.”
You reply, “But my spouse will find out because he does the monthly bill payments, and besides, I don’t have enough room on my Visa.”
“So, up your limit. Quitters never win and you’re quitting before you even join!”
“I don’t know anybody I could get to join. That woman who explained the system, she said that it’s as important to know two people you can get to join as it is to have the money to invest; I have neither.”
“You’re losing sight of the objective here. You have to believe in it for it to happen, and your mind is now setting limits. You can do anything.”
“I suppose, if I set my mind to it, but upping my Visa isn’t possible. It was just raised and they won’t do another increase for six months.”
“How about I spot you in on my bottom line? I can put you in for free, once I’m on top and you can pay me back when you go over.”
You’re more apt to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. But you’re stuck, probably one of those two people she had to identify as someone she could get to join, and you’re maybe 50 kilometres (90 miles or so) away from home and don’t have your own car. The ride home could be pretty quiet. What’s a girl to do?
Ditch the Manolo Blahniks and walk if you have to. Hail a taxi, hitch-hike if you must. Just go. Don’t look back. Find another girlfriend. Nota bene:

A pyramid scheme (or series thereof) brought down the government of Albania in March of 1997 and plunged the country into total chaos. Shortly after its emergence from being a communist state, Albania was experimenting with democratic reforms, navigating its way through new and unknown waters (like no other country had ever done this before, so there was no frame of reference…): free-market economics. The government more or less sanctioned cash pyramid schemes, and within the first few months of the year, five of them had collapsed (mathematically they all must collapse due to finite numbers) costing citizens about $1.2 billion in lost savings. What ensued was not girlfriends pulling each other’s hair, but widespread riots and anarchy. Crime gangs assumed control of the country and the entire infrastructure collapsed, with the government deposed.

People I know who are involved in MLM schemes won’t like it (tough) when I lump their income stream in the same crockpot as pyramids, but the lumps are still potatoes and the carrots are still over-cooked. The structure of MLMs and pyramids follows the same essential more-on-the-bottom, less-on-the-top configuration and the rewards run from nil to low at the bottom to higher at the top.
MLMs deal in commodities, and pyramids in cash, making one lie (good word, eh…) within the boundaries of law and the other far outside it. But how often do you run out of, say, dish detergent, and say to yourself, “Gee, I better call my friendly local Melaluca or Amway representative so I can spend way too much money on products that are no better than the ones at the local supermarket, and have to add a lot of other stuff so I meet the minimum order for shipping and wait ten days for delivery which will happen when I’m at work so that I have to wait until the following Saturday to go to the post office and pick it up, unless it’s too heavy and I have to wait for a weightlifter to offer his services”? Get your shoes on and walk over to the store and buy some soap.

There’s a Dog in My Crockpot!

Oh, settle down. I’m a vegetarian, and my dog is my child; I would never cook her, but I do worship her. Why? Because dog is god spelled backwards and pretty well every dog on the planet knows it. Every dog has its day, 24/7/365 if you happen to be my dog. My god!
God is not just in the details, but in the cash register. The odd time I’ve seen a televangelist on the tube, I’ve witnessed not just a well-staged theatrical performance and dubious use of Armani suits, but an eerily similar show to those put on by motivational mangia-cakes. There’s the mandatory hand-waving, loud rock music (or gospel; depends on the preacher du jour), a guy hollering something and a flock of sheep in cheaper suits and floral-print dresses way past their best-before dates responding with, “Yes!”
People with intestinal fortitude, calm sensibility, and focus are far more likely to spot a raging evangelist with the donations plate in hand and a motivational mangia-cake with a DVD for sale, both dressed in the same uniform, ready to bilk, I mean, milk, their vulnerability.
If you’re unmotivated, depressed, stressed, or otherwise living in any negative state, pinch yourself and don’t fall prey. (And never confuse prey with pray.) God and Tony Robbins can’t save you; a dog might.

PART THREE

The Solutions

Spatula rebellion, usurping kitchens, conjuring personal recipes, getting it, cooking 101, weight loss attained, sweating small monks, and a deeply grave matter.

Chapter I — DINNER AT MY HOUSE

Has my life changed since I committed to accepting my mistakes? You bet your spatula it has, especially my priorities. Am I going to share my secret recipe with you? I thought we quashed that silly addiction, dear reader. No secrets. No lies. But sure, I’m good to swap a few recipes.
In our busy kitchens, it’s easy to feel the heat, to have the chicken cooked to black before the broccoli’s ready. Now and again (read: often) when I feel overwhelmed, I turn to baking bread or reading philosophy to lower my blood pressure.
The poet, Maya Angelou, is often credited with the following quote, but others have said it in slightly different ways:

“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”

Well said. When all I can hear is the din, all I can see is chaos, I do my undoubtedly world-famous one-second exercise:

I yell, “Stop!”

Sometimes in my head or out loud; it depends if I’m in my own kitchen or someone else’s. Then, for exactly one minute (yes, I time it) I close my eyes and don’t move or speak.
I let the patterns of light on the insides of my eyelids be all that I see as I count out 60 seconds, breathing deeply. My exercise (exorcize) shifts the whole mess in one little minute. It works every single time; it’s never failed me. No, it doesn’t always last long enough for my needs and, yes, sometimes I have to do it again as soon as five or ten minutes later. Something similar might also work for you.
If you don’t like the Holly Hobby wallpaper in your kitchen, get out the steamer and stripping knife. If the person who applied it used Krazy Glue, learn to like Holly Hobby. Or sell the house and move.

Cook Like a Monk

Another thing that helps to quiet my noise and confusion is to simply stop allowing it a berth in my mind. No, problems don’t vanish because I’ve put them on the back burner, but this exercise buys me time to find possible solutions within a calm space in my mind.
I have to clear a spot first in the kitchen of my life. That’s not easy to accomplish, but it can be done; for those of you who find meditation impossible, here’s a simpler method:

Just shut up.

Yes, you read that correctly: shut up.
I learned how to do this when I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. I read litres of information on hyper-tension, what causes it, what exacerbates it, what you can do to lower it without medication, and outside of the usual (depressing) lower-your-salt-intake advice, the thing I found astonishing was that talking, even happy discourse, raises blood pressure.
We females work out our issues and problems by talking with our girlfriends. Wine helps quite nicely. All we need is to vent, be heard and understood, not fixed, and the problem often dissipates. I thought talking was a good thing, so much so that I spent tons of time talking to myself (until they brought the paddy wagon and straightjacket).
If you think about it, this makes sense. When you’re actively engaged in conversation, you become animated, effusive, and are rapt in focussed behaviour. You can almost feel your blood pressure go up. There’s healing power in silence; you can actually make time and its passage an ally by using it to listen to your own silence.
Now when I feel my internal pressure cooker’s lid starting to rattle, I just shut up. Of course, this is much easier when I’m at home alone, but it can be done anywhere. The ideal time frame for this monk-like silence is two to three hours (no joke), but even five minutes will make a difference. When I do it at home, and so that the dog and cats don’t feel hurt because Mummy isn’t speaking to them, I use my hands to communicate with them, stroking them and hugging them. And guess what? That also lowers my blood pressure! Ouch; those exclamation points make it go up a tad…
If I find the need to engage in my shut-up time when I’m, say, at the grocery store, I just smile if someone acknowledges me, and limit the time I spend in silence to whatever length I can get away with; it all helps toward internal calm and lower BP. What enhances this shut-up period is deep breathing, only don’t do it for so long that you pass out, especially in the detergents and cleansers aisle.

Sweating the Small Stuff

Nothing ever happens because of one little “thing”; situations, like decisions, are almost always part and parcel of a series of incidents — small, medium and large — often intrinsically linked, that together can make the cake in the oven explode. That’s why you need to pay attention to the small stuff. I know that fellow told you, dear reader, not to sweat the small stuff, but I’m here to tell you that it piles up like last month’s dirty laundry if you don’t acknowledge it and what it is doing to your life in the now. And it reeks!
If you pay attention to details, then when your cake is completely baked and iced and ready to slice, you won’t have to ask yourself, “Gee, did I remember to put butter in the batter?”
When I made the decision to close the second restaurant that I owned, it was the result of a series of things, some of which had been present for some time before I pulled the trigger. The deal I had struck with the former owner was doomed before the ink dried (for reasons of privacy, I will not divulge the details of that, but trust me when I say this couldn’t have worked under the terms of the agreement because it was so lopsided in favour of the vendor, there was no tomorrow). I had massive staffing problems from the get-go and the cost of replacing those who quit or were fired, and hiring and training new staff, was more than the coffers could handle. My efforts to improve revenue by improving the business were for naught largely because, unbeknownst to me, the business had already hit a plateau.
Then, one cold day at the end of February, the day before a major winter storm hit, the building’s furnace broke down; the repair company told me it could be days, maybe a week, possibly more before it could be fixed. An hour later, my real estate agent e-mailed me to tell me that two chefs who had been keenly interested in buying the business had decided to purchase one in a different town. All of these factors, and more, contributed to my decision.
When I made my decision and executed it, I knew there was going to be fallout; I also knew the bleeding had to stop. I also knew that in throwing in my apron, there would be — in time, if not immediately — a sense of relief.
How did the motivational mangia-cakes influence me?

• Had I managed to conquer my desire to invest and make big bucks so that I could in five years (another delay in my soul’s work, writing) sell the investment, I could have avoided a costly mistake, one that had the directly opposite effect on my financial situation.

• Had I not had faith in the former owner/vendor and myself, I would have just said, “I quit” when he told me he was going to close the place if I didn’t purchase it.

• Had I not believed that this was going to work, that the problems were surmountable, I would have cut out much earlier and saved myself agony and stress, and financial ruin.

• Had I not owned the specialized knowledge of the restaurant business from past experience, I would most likely have said to myself, “Restaurants ‘successfully’ fail more than many other businesses, and just because you did this before, and it was a start-up, but this one is established, doesn’t mean you can do it any better this time.”

• Had I had not allowed my imagination to dream of what this place would be like if I owned it, if I had control of it, then I would have been spared the pain of seeing the wonderful restaurant I had brought from okay to savvy die.

• Had I not utilized my inherent skills of organized planning then, yes, chaos would have reigned supreme, but I would have allowed myself to see this in a macrocosm, not an orderly and logical microcosm; by missing the big picture, I missed the gravy-boat.

• Had I made one different decision — not to buy the place — I would be far better off.

• Had I not persisted when the writing was on the wall, I might have survived this mess. Because I persisted, I lost probably ten times what I might have had I honoured my intuition, and my horse sense.

• Had I not used one of my best assets, my brain power, and instead used my instincts, I would have bolted. I over-logicked. Over-analyzed and did not listen to the sense within me that was screaming “No!” as opposed to the Robbins-esque “Yes!”

I cannot help but wonder, given the price I’ve paid for following their dictums, and by multiplying that by the number of people who ate up this “advice” and then threw up, just how many billions of dollars have been burned to a crisp and how many lives cooked (perhaps even lost).
I was ripe for the motivational mangia-cakes’ picking, precisely the candidate they were and are targeting. Insecure, low self-esteem, a desire to have lots of money (thanks largely to being raised on materialism and not love; oh, have I learned what’s important!), and a childhood filled not just with naysayers, but hard-nosed critics of every one of my dreams (one of which was, yes, to be a writer) that set me up for these bloodhounds.
They don’t pursue (or appeal to) people who are sure of themselves, people who have had a healthy upbringing and believe in their worth, who are already flush, who are making the best damn minestrone in the world.
If you’re happy with your minestrone, then quotes like this, as written by H. Jackson Brown in his book (this title makes me gag), Life’s Little Instruction Book, will make you laugh. If you’re vulnerable, doubting yourself, and fearing that your life may not measure up (or that you might not), you might be rendered fool enough to believe it:

“In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins — not through strength but by perseverance.”

So, explain to me what dams do.
I‘ve been beaten so low emotionally that I would have once told you that Brown is correct. Now I know differently. Water may indeed wear stones down over a million years or so, but guess what? You don’t have a million years to wait for the water to round off the sharp edges of the stones that are cutting you now.
From a graphic design, typesetting and printing company, to an international motorsports management firm, to a restaurant in Stratford (but that’s another book, and yes, it was published in 1997), to a theatre company (do what you love and the money won’t necessarily follow, except while exiting your bank account), to this last (and I mean last) venture owning a restaurant in Elora, I followed the habits and dictums of the motivational mangia-cakes to the letter. Here’s what’s sad:

What I did not do was follow my soul’s true path because I was afraid to.

Had I spent all the time and money that I lost in big-bang business ventures pursuing my writing career I’d perhaps be richer than Atwood now. I would at least be a happier person with more money in the bank.
You and I are not psychic. Therefore, we cannot know what obstacles we’ll encounter in order to plan around defeating them. But I was in motivational mangia-cake victim profile; I did as I was told and held on to that like a lobster holds your finger right before you throw him (or her) in a pot of boiling, properly herb-infused, sea-salt water.
During the height of my motivational mangia-cake addiction, I set goals galore. I wrote down my details with missionary zeal, actually at one point telling myself I was doing what I love most: writing. Oy.
One of my many goals was to travel to Scotland to distribute my mother’s ashes in the country where she enjoyed the best years of her life. Let’s just say she has yet to become airborne, either in a plane or in the winds of the highlands. But I did find a perfect cove on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia (new Scotland) with a black beach, red cliffs a waterfall and a natural rock bridge (yes, gorgeous!) and there, as the tide was waning, I released her ashes and those of two dogs and five cats. It is now my sacred place. Since then, more ashes have been delivered to the tides: my adopted son, my last two dogs, and one more cat. I will be there one day, as ashes, too.
When the restaurant business collapsed, I was still clinging to these goals and their formulas for success. Having these goals and not coming even close to attaining them set me up for a far, far worse disappointment than the fallout from closing my restaurant business.
Believe what you will, dear reader, but know only one thing: you are who you are and who you are right now — right this very second — is colouring your beliefs.
So, should we just throw down our spatulas, drink the rest of our Armagnac, toss out our doughnuts, and marry a neurosurgeon? No, dear reader, no. Well, drink the Armagnac and maybe munch on a bit of dark chocolate, but don’t set fire to your kitchen, not just yet. Keep that in reserve for a really bad day, and use cooking sherry, not smooth, delicious Armagnac for ignition.

Cooking with Cat

No, no, that’s not what I mean. You keep forgetting I’m a vegetarian. Cats are for petting not for potting.
By now you’re likely wondering what I’ve done, other than fashion myself a noose for future reference, to counter the damage, the leftovers from my follies as I ran into the foray waving my motivational mangia-cakes banner, tripped over it and did a face-plant (several times in a row). I have thus far left my recipes (other than that delicious palate cleanser) out because I haven’t written this book to replace motivational mangia-cakes with something equally inane.
Still, I’m willing to share what I’ve done to begin to change this pattern, to consciously try to make my life less of a rollercoaster, and to find peace as I walk more softly through this life to what I hope will be more of a final awakening than death, per se. But in sharing what’s working for me, I am not, I repeat, I am not telling you to do what I do. Clear as consommé?
I hope you might read it and use it for the sole purpose of creating a launch pad from which you develop your own techniques. I don’t want to influence you, or make you think that because this works for me, it must work for you. Are you me? No, lucky you. Still, we’re part of this strange collective called human beings, so we have things in common.
One last thing before I risk imparting this information: do not spend one cent doing any of these things. This is material for thought and not all thought becomes action!!! Some thought should be unthunk and chucked in the garburetor of life.
Here, then, are a few of the ideas, routines, and philosophies that I’ve adopted, that help me live in peace with myself, outside of motivational mangia-cake addictionville, and “achieve” a few of the things I need to make my life feel fulfilled, and so attain what is, to me, success. (By the by, I still have a long way to go.)

• I look for win/win/win situations in which no one person suffers for the greater good of another.

• I recognize that others, too, make their choices, some of those in reaction to my decisions and actions, and while I’m careful to act considerately I cannot control them.

• I accept that not everybody likes me. After all, I’m imperfect and I don’t like all of them because they are imperfect, too, and maybe just not the right fit (too much cake).

• I’ve stopped fighting the universe. When it throws obstacles at me, I question them, certainly, and sometimes take a second try at hopping over them, but I also accept that they may have been placed in my path to stop me.

• I’ve forced myself to let go of all sorts of things, like old habits that never worked and never will, material possessions that don’t add to either the smooth running of my life (I kept my Paderno pots, but got rid of my stone garden gargoyle), the enhancement of my occupation, or give me incredible and utter pleasure on an on-going basis (original art falls into this category). What I’ve come to understand is that we are not owners of anything anyway. Go to an estate auction and you’ll know what I mean.

• I’ve learned to forgive. To forgive myself. Because if I don’t, nothing else is forgivable. When I forgive myself, I’m admitting that I’m flawed, and guess what? I am. And so are you, dear and perfect reader.

• I accept that words matter and when spoken, cannot be retracted, no matter how many times I say, “I’m so sorry; I really didn’t mean that, but it just slipped out like caviar off damp crackers.”

• I’m working on this one: I don’t make decisions quickly, unless perhaps a public transit bus is bearing down on me. I’ve developed a dandy little rule. If my decision involves anything under $100.00 (this can mean cost as well as risk potential, or loss), I’ll give myself ten minutes to decide upon it. Anything over $100.00, but less than $5,000.00, I sleep on it overnight; if it’s not mine to be had the next morning, it wasn’t mine in the first place. Over $5,000.00 and I take an absolute minimum of three days and consult with three people: one financial, one legal and one personal. And then I spend an hour with my intuition. And I listen.

• In every day of my life, I spend at least one hour in complete total and utter silence (sleeping does not count).

• My mandate is to always treat others with respect, or if they don’t deserve my respect, at the very least with tolerance.

• I may see somebody dressed like a clown walking down the street, and it may give me a little giggle, but that’s as far as my judgment is allowed to pass. Maybe that person is a clown on the way to a professional gig. I don’t know the circumstances of other people and I’m not their judge and jury. Except for motivational mangia-cakes. Mea culpa with extra cheese.

• Just about anything that I must do is tolerable for a period of one year. Yes, there are exceptions.

• Optimism is the playground of fools. Sorry, if that sounds negative, but it was meant to. If I’m feeling optimistic about something, then I’ve either not done my due diligence, not done my due diligence diligently enough, or have put pink icing on my cupcakes. Again.

• Trust must be earned or proven (by actions, not just words), not given away like a batch of scones.

• I’m committed to being absolutely truthful with myself, even if I do occasionally tell white lies so as not to hurt someone else.

• I still believe there’s probably a reason for most things that happen, but if the reason isn’t obvious, I don’t waste my valuable, limited time searching for it; if I’m meant to know what it is, it’ll show up in time.

• When I identify a dream or a goal that I believe I want to achieve, I work it out on my arrow chart (more about arrow charts later) to see what’s probably involved in attaining it and try to make a reasonable estimate of the costs (financial, physical, emotional, etc.) of achieving it, and determining as best I can if it’s worth that price.
I ask myself to honestly answer these questions, in no particular order (note that none of these involves timelines, obstacles, or people and organizations that can help me barge my way to my goal with no regard for others along the way!):

• Is this goal genuinely what I want?

• Where does it fit, if it fits at all, in the parameters of the rest of my life (balance, dear reader, balance)?

• Is it likely to be good for me and my loved ones?

• Why do I want it? Is there an agenda behind it? Like jealousy, principle, revenge?

• Do I have the means (money, skills and talent) to actually achieve this goal? If I don’t, am I able to obtain these without sacrificing my soul or losing my means of sustaining my life?

• Am I in the suitable position in my life to be considering such a goal (taking into account my age, physical capacity, metal capacity, financial security, health, etcetera)?

• What will I likely do and feel if this goal does not come to fruition no matter well I plan, how hard I work, or how determined I am?

• What might go wrong? How might (will) Murphy’s law apply?

• Do I have a Plan B?

• What if I fail completely?

• What’s for dinner?

I take days, more often weeks, sometimes months, to answer these (except the last one; a girl has to eat, you know), and I kill a lot of trees in the process (yes, I recycle all my paper products; relax). I write the answers and rewrite them, and rewrite them again. I do this because:

It’s a process, not a decision.

Once this process has been beaten, whipped and frothed long enough in the blender of my life, then I may set about taking the steps toward my goal, one at a time, carefully and without detours, but understanding that deviations from the path, small or large adjustments, might be required if I discover that one of my assumptions was wrong.
And here’s the big one, dear reader:

I do not do any of it at the expense of my existing life.

I may die tomorrow and if all I‘ve done is focus on a goal (the future), then I haven’t lived in the moment that is today, a day that I will never see again. Today is my gift. I will not squander it.
Before steps are taken toward achieving my goal, once I am reasonably sure I know all that is involved, I perform yet another test. It’s rather like playing question-and-answer hopscotch, landing progressively on one space and then another. I call this my “stairway to seven” (with apologies to Led Zeppelin):

1. Where have I been?
2. Where am I now?
3. What’s in my old kit bag?
4. What am I able to acquire to make it my new kit bag?
5. How can I combine what I am and what I know?
6. Do I have a good road map?
7. Where am I going?

Life is full of compromises and so are goals. I know an “aspiring” writer who has written a really, really terrible novel. It’s laced with clichés, trite, badly spelled, plotless, gormless, populated with weak characters, and finally, slaughtered by poor sentence structure, pathetic grammar and punctuation. It’s awful. She’s a good person, but a supremely rotten writer. Luckily, she has a day job that she quite enjoys.
This gal attended a Tony Robbins seminar, something to do with “life on your terms”. Ah, if it were only that easy! She takes literally (pun intended, although this poor soul doesn’t know literate from mashed turnips) that each rejection slip she receives from a publisher or agent means she is one step closer to success. The only step she truly needs to take is to slam her foot down hard on the peddle of a garbage can and toss the entire manuscript in there. She may accumulate 40,000 rejection slips, she may find them to be suitable dining room wallpaper, but she is never going to get a letter of acceptance for this novel because it’s crap. Not just so-so, mediocre writing that could one day find itself in the enviable position of hitting a trend. When you get enough rejection letters, take the hint. Maybe take up playing pinochle.

Cooking Our Lives in the Kitchen of the Universe

Am I a success? It depends who you ask; to me, I am. With the help of a fine doctor, I’ve come to understand what psychological factors sent me off on high-risk paths, and I no longer have any need to walk those roadmaps to failure. I do what I must to ensure the security (shelter, food, warmth) of my family; I’m a good mother to my four-footed children. I’ve been successful, mostly, at forgiving myself, and where I still feel guilt on some level, I trust that time will assuage it.
Am I a zillionaire or even a great chef? No. But I have survived — more than survived, come out of extreme suffering intact and able to move forward — more downturns than a ski slope, and I’m here, doing what I love, and maybe some highly intelligent publisher will buy this book and I will earn a couple of bucks. The motivational mangia-cakes don’t have any sort of grip on me anymore: I am holding my spatula, not them.
I’ve adopted the following axiom as mine, the age-old gem from Horace (which usually gets shortened so that the meaningful bit gets left out, but here it is in full):

Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.

Key is to remember the whole thing, not just “seize the day”. For those of you who don’t read Latin, here it is fully translated:

Seize the day and put as little trust as you can in the morrow.

I’m not here to tell you how to run the kitchen of your life. I can share some of my cooking tips and techniques and perhaps they’ll work for you, providing you’re baking at the same elevation above sea-level. I apply this daily, and I apply it to my future, too:

Plan for the worst, hope for the best, deal with what happens which will almost always be neither what you hoped for or planned for, and don’t waste one moment complaining about what is not.

Does this mean I’m constantly taking action? No, sometimes seizing the day means being still and doing nothing but being quiet and in the moment for a few hours; sometimes it means getting up early, making a to-do list and buzzing around until it is to-done. Being in tune with all your ingredients means knowing what spice to use when. Or if any spice at all is required. It’s your recipe; play with it.
Here are my personal rules (some of these are original and some I adopted and/or adapted from other sources) for day-to-day living, and for long-term planning (I use that word very loosely). Remember, these are mine and not yours. You get to write your own version. That’s your only homework assignment.

1. I will not waste this day. I’ll use it to try my best to better my life and the lives of those I love, even the lives of those I simply encounter. Time is precious; I refuse to allow what little time I have to be contaminated by self-pity, anxiety or boredom. I’ll not let my past failures haunt me. Even though my life is scarred with mistakes, I refuse to rummage through my trash heap of failures.

2. Today I will make a difference.

3. I will not let downturns unhinge me, but I’ll accept what is laid before me, put at my disposal or sent to challenge me. I will not fight that which I cannot control, and instead be gracious in my acceptance of it in my life.

4. I will strive for the greater good, but if the lesser good, or the downright evil, cross my path, I’ll acknowledge them, and cope with them. I will walk softly on this earth and among its creatures.

Now that you have some idea of the revised way in which I approach life, I’ll volunteer one more sliver of information that helped set me in forward motion with less peaks and valleys and more of a gently undulating pathway:

I forgave myself for my stance on my past, for my current negative thoughts (outside of the realm of grief, that it), and for my understandable and universal fear of what is to come; as previously noted, we cannot fear the past.

Sharing Recipes

One superb way in which I started to extricate myself from the claws of the motivational mangia-cakes and reclaim my kitchen was to observe what was working for my friends. Well, to make that consommé and not chowder, the friends whom I respected, and believed had kitchens that were for the most part in good working order. Of course, they still burn the custard now and then, but you get my drift.
I have one habit, introduced to me by a sensitive and wise psychotherapist, named Muriel Percy, to whom I was referred after a serious car accident in 2004. Her mandate was to help me work through the emotional trauma that resulted. Muriel suggested (I do this daily, unless I’m so under-slept that I can’t bear to face my bare face in the mirror) that first thing in the morning I look myself straight in the eye in the mirror and ask, “Cat, what do you need to do, have or achieve on this day in your life?”
The answer, not surprisingly, ranges from, “I need to buy cat food or there’ll be a rebellion,” to “I need half an hour to sit quietly, stare out the window and just think”. Whatever it is I state, I do, barring flood or earthquake or burnt scones.
What this habit has taught me is many-fold. I realize that buying cat food and finding inner peace carry equal weight in my life. (Well, if I don’t buy the cat food, there will be no peace of any kind.) It’s shown me that I don’t have to earn a million bucks one day to feel like I’ve given myself what I need. And that getting one small thing done that I need to do (rather than purely want to do) is amazingly satisfying. Just thought I’d share that. You might want to give it a shot. Painless, unless you look like hell in the morning.

The Order of Ingredients

In a good recipe, the order of ingredients is crucial. In life, this translates as priorities. Those, in turn, are based on what is or ought to be most important to us. But so many of us feel overwhelmed by daily responsibilities, so backlogged and clogged that our time is claimed and we cannot offer it to those who deserve it most. We’re cooking not just without recipes, but without all the requisite ingredients. What we get is my mother’s piecrust that was otherwise useful for binding documents and acted very much like a thick elastic band (until she added the from-the-jar lemon curd).
So, how are we able to pursue our dreams when our day-timers are filled with to-do things? How can we become that writer, musician or artist if our lives are too full already? That comprises much of our pain when we feel that our dreams don’t stand a chance. Inside of you pulses the great American novel, the next phase of Group of Seven landscapes, the symphony of the Hebrides, but reality dictates that your life is made up of commitments that you cannot avoid. Do you sell your children to the local grocery store? Have your spouse declared insane and put in an institution so that you have the house to yourself? No, no. Have a spoonful of Armagnac Ice and chill out.
We structure our lives by means of business-centric details. You have an appointment with your boss on Tuesday at 2:00, but when do you book an appointment with your wife? A whole day to work on that novel, paint that landscape, master that guitar chord? A play hour with your kids and dog?
Today, I worked on this book. Yesterday, I did housework and laundry and gardening and grocery shopping, went to the bank and the dry cleaner, and no, I did not finish all my chores; I am one person. But today I wrote. The housework will be completed on another day. The place is not a dump. The kitchen is useable and I can make dinner in there without sifting through dirty dishes. But today I wrote. I wrote not just because I had something I wanted to get down on paper, but because I know this to be 100% true:

The time you spend doing what you do is also your life slipping away.

How scary is that? How scary is that! Every second you spend doing something that doesn’t either pay your costs of living, further your relationships with those you love, or enhance to the dreams you most cherish, is a second wasted.
Does this mean you have to be in motion always? No. Stillness is often peace and from that comes wisdom. Wisdom has never in the history of mankind shown its face in chaos.
While he’s far from a motivational anything, Harold Taylor, a time management expert and author of, Making Time Work for You, has a fine grasp on the abstract concept of time, and he distils that into practical applications. For example, his day-timers include full days for Saturdays and Sundays, not just weekdays, underscoring the importance of time that is not spent at the workplace.
If you view your time as your life, then you’ll prioritize naturally. You’ll understand that the stain in the sink doesn’t matter as much as the scrape on your child’s knee. Cook with love, not speed. Why?

Because time will pass at the same rate no matter which
you choose.

Rules of the Kitchen

Some things are irrefutable. No way around them. By accepting that, you’re letting a balance exist between effort and fate. If you acknowledge that which you cannot change and gracefully abide by it, your efforts will be less of a struggle. Ask any salmon that has swum upstream and lived to talk about it before being made into sandwiches. Based on keen observation, these are the things that you simply cannot change; they are universal laws that govern not just your kitchen, but your soul:

1. Cause and effect. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Some people take this too literally. Read between the lines, dear reader: all actions incite reactions. If you do nothing, nothing is apt to happen (although, arguably, nothing is something). If you do something, there will, for sure, be a reaction.
If you don’t pay your phone bill, the phone company will cut off your service. If you add too much water to the beef stew, you get consommé with lumps that look vaguely like vegetables: cause and effect.

2. Reality is the only thing that is real, but things are not always as they seem. This is a tough one because we all perceive things differently, based on our frame of reference. We often fail to see reality, but amazingly enough other people don’t suffer from this affliction! The best way to see your reality is to ask someone else to point it out to you, especially someone who’s not overly fond of you (please avoid your mother; she’s biased).
So, how to see reality as is… I hate to say this because it sounds negative, but be negative, maybe even pessimistic at times. I like to try to be positive. People like positive people, but people don’t like to prop you up when you’ve failed, so better take a negative tack to start with, and be positively happy later that you did not go forward with something that might have worked, but didn’t.
It’s hard to nail reality on the meat tenderizer when some things are not as they appear to be. This requires sensitivity and perception, which, I hope, we all have at least a little of, excepting, perhaps the psychopaths among us. They are why we have chest freezers, but that’s another book, and I think it’s already a novel. Silent lamb stew, anyone?
So, dear reader, smash the rose-coloured glasses! Pulverize them into powdered glass, mix with strawberry Quick, and swallow it: reality is the only thing that is real.

3. Everything has a price. No discounts. No exceptions. If you eat that triple chocolate éclair, the price will be not what you paid for it, but what you weigh and how fast your skin breaks out. Absolutely everything has a price. Try to refute this. You can’t. You pay now or you pay later, but you pay. You get to decide if the price is worth it, but you must pay something for everything. For this free advice, your cheque (for my American readers, check) is in the post (for my American readers, mail).
If you buy a cheap saucepan with a plastic handle that’s screwed on, the handle will fall off, land on the hot burner and melt, thereby ruining the stove burner, too, and you’ll have to go back to the store to buy a new burner as well as a Paderno saucepan with a welded-on handle; had you spent the $70 in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened, and you’d have spent less in the long run, especially when you take into account your valuable time in going to the store twice, the gasoline, and the dog’s nervous breakdown as a result of your meltdown, and the ensuing vet bills: everything has a price (no discounts for any of my readers).

4. Persistence does not always conquer resistance.
That gal with the terrible novel? Yup, she’s still sending it to agents and publishers. I bet every publisher, editor and agent in the world has sent out an APB with her name and book title, and a fair warning. Has she ever lifted her head long enough to wonder if it’s not just a matter of time, but that the book might actually reek like a rotten turnip? Nah; she’s a persistence addict. Her day job has bought her thousands of envelopes and stamps. I only fear what she will do when she retires and has even more time on her hands. Yikes!
If you keep adding salt to the soup because it tastes flat, eventually the soup will not taste flat, it will taste like the Atlantic Ocean: persistence does not always conquer resistance.

5. Some clouds have no lining at all, and they leak.
The wonderful and wise Bruce Cockburn penned this lyric:

“But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”

That’s pessimism at its best! I wonder if Bruce would like to go on the motivational mangia-cake cooking circuit?
You followed the recipe for the chocolate lava cake to the letter. When you plunge your fork into the dark brown mound, there’s a volcanic eruption and the “lava” spews all over your white silk shirt, and now you look like a snowman over which a flock of Canada geese have just flown after eating 100% bran cereal with prunes, and your “beloved” mother-in-law will be over in ten minutes and the dry-cleaner is closed for two weeks’ holidays, and lava cake was what you had planned to serve as the main course and you have no chocolate left in the kitchen cupboard; do you scrape it off your shirt and reuse it? No: some clouds have no lining at all, and they leak. Alternative? Take her to lunch, or just politely postpone. You don’t need an excuse; ask any introvert.

6. What you perceive you will likely believe, no matter
the hard evidence to the contrary, and believing in something does not make it so.
Sad but true. And there’s a sub-law to this one: you don’t remember things anywhere near as correctly as you think you do. Individual perception and its influence over personal belief can account for roughly 99% of all court cases. He said/she said. Each person is right, right? Perception is also the root of misunderstanding, argument, and likely divorce. Because perception involves judgment.
I want that job. I applied for it because I am the most qualified person on earth that I can think of for that specific job: managing editor of the magazine, Failure. I believe I’ll get that job because I’m the best person for it and more than that, I deserve it; it’s my turn and I’m going to step up to the plate and take it. Oh, yeah, and I need the money, too.
I can believe this and believe in myself until I’m blue in the face, but if I don’t get this job, I’ll be red in the face. What I know is true is this:

It does not matter one soupçon what I believe, because what is going to happen is going to happen regardless.

I better allow for that in every single wish, dream, hope or Pavlova with gooseberries that I conjure up, or I’m going to be wickedly disappointed every single second of my life.
Even though you know for certain (friends will assuredly corroborate) that your home-made apple pie is the world’s best, Magda Slagheap, from the royal kitchens of the former Cookistan, now just a tiny principality known as Chefbeware-ickstan, just won first prize at the annual International Apple Pie Bake-off or Back Off Contest, and you weren’t even graced with an honourable forklift: what you perceive you will likely believe, no matter the hard evidence to the contrary, and believing in something does not make it so.

7. This, also, shall pass.
I used to think this only applied to nasty things, but, pardon the pessimist in me, the good stuff also passes whether you like it or not.
If you don’t like the weather, wait 20 minutes. If your bread is perfect and ready to come out of the oven, do not answer that ringing phone right now: this, also, shall pass.

8. Bullshit floats to the surface of the cesspool of life.
No matter what, lies eventually catch up with you. Real lies, I mean, not giving your seat on the bus to a little old lady and saying that you’re not pregnant, just grossly fat, and need to stand up for exercise. By the way, bullshit also floats to the surface of the bathtub-full-of-bubbles of life.
Learn to be honest; not mean, honest. I’ve never told my aforementioned friend that her novel reeks like blue cheese, but neither have I said it was edible: bullshit floats to the surface of the cesspool of life.

9. Nothing can be other than it is. With thanks to Carl Jung and James Hillman. Take a moment right now to consider this philosophy and/or law. Sit in a comfortable chair and remove all possible distractions. No music, no voices, just the one inside yourself. Repeat it:

Nothing can be other than it is.

This, if adopted as the new Canadian national anthem, would eliminate Canada as the belly-aching capital of the universe. Life has no place for regrets; get over it already. The future may be other than you think, and the past is almost definitely not what you perceived it to be, but the now?
Hillman, in his book, The Soul’s Code, goes one step further by suggesting that things are perfect as they are. There are moments in my life where I would beg to disagree; in the dumps, there is nothing that feels perfect, but you can force your way out of the blues by accepting, even embracing it. Personally, I find it difficult to do that at times, but if you are able to, you see only that each moment exists in its own state of divinity, that there is something in it worth knowing and living, no matter how painful it feels. But that’s big philosophy and not what this little book is about. I deeply admire Hillman; his wise writing has brought me back from the abyss more than once. He taught me this:

You can’t recapture what is gone and done; this is now. There is genuine peace in accepting that.

You forgot the cream of tartar in your meringue mixture and it’s a dull yellow instead of bright white; eat it anyway: nothing can be other than it is.

10. Life is not fair, but it looks better with make-up.
Why should life be fair as is? It’s not a sale item at Holt Renfrew (for my American readers, Lord & Taylor; for my British readers, Harrods). It’s life. What about it suggests that it has some moral obligation to be even, fair, just and benevolent?
You can buy the best cookware, the best ingredients, and the best ovens and refrigerators, the best dinnerware and glassware, and your dinner party can still be a flop. But… But if you have a gourmet frozen item tucked away in the freezer, and you add a few extra dashes of herbs, who will know? And if you buy the best bottle of wine you can afford, your guests will be so impressed they’ll overlook the packaged lasagne on their plates; at least you made the salad. Well, you took it out of that plastic container and put it in a bowl.
Stiff upper bra-strap, girls. Stiff lower, well, stiff, um… Chin up, lads. If life is looking unfair, then add a little mascara and lipstick, throw on a kilt, and dance.
When the Bundt cake burns, and the cat ate some of it while it cooled on the kitchen counter, cut out the eaten part, shove the edges together, and plaster it with icing thick enough to clog a sink: life is not fair, but it looks better with make-up.

11. You can’t always get what you want (and be careful what you ask for, just in case you get what you think you want).
With deepest thanks to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. I think you all know the rest of the lyric:

“But if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.”

The operative word there, rolling folks, is “might”. Notice that our lads, perhaps the most successful band in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, chose to use “might” and not “can”. I’m going to mail them the Success Sucks! Golden Spatula of honour.
You can stand on your head and spit fiddlehead greens and you might not get the Oscar for best actor just because you want it. You might get what you need — a smack on the ass and handed a broom to clean up your mess: you can’t always get what you want. Oh, yes, and be careful what you wish for.

Cat, not Catastrophe!

Before we go to your kitchen and count your bananas, there’s one last thing I’m prepared to share: my life isn’t perfect. It’s better than it used to be because inside my mind and my soul, I’m better. I’m weaning myself off the behaviours ingrained by my believing in the flotsam and jetsam that spewed out of the mouths and computers of motivational mangia-cakes.
Remember how I spoke about the importance of balance (I’m not just talking a balanced diet here)? The most important element, to me in my life, of balance is having the patience and willingness to make certain plans and take careful steps towards those plans, while being fully open to intervention of all sorts and from all directions, even soaring merde.
There have been many lessons on my washed-out, rutted path:

Balance and focus are two extremely crucial elements to the realization of a rich and fulfilling life.

This I know. Even more crucial is applying these elements. Should you let your dreams die because odds are they won’t come true? Balance and focus.
Time to visit your kitchen. What’s for dinner?

Chapter II — DINNER AT YOUR HOUSE

The trick with cooking your own life is effectively juggling all the eggs and tomatoes that get thrown at you (or making a tasty and nutritious omelette), knowing what seasonings work best (and being open-minded enough to try different ones), and understanding that your best recipes may yield positively negative results.
If you’re able to remain calm while the boil pots over, the baby rings and the phone cries, you’re already one step ahead.
If you’re baking carrot muffins and what you get as a result of your efforts is carrot — not blueberry — muffins, that, dear reader, is success; so what if the carrot shavings stick out the top and it looks like an orange chia pet! Grab your spatula and flatten those wayward carrot tendrils with lovely butter-cream icing. Some things can be fixed!
Even with the best will in the world, a goal and a recipe, a plan or strategy to realize said goal and feed the masses (at least your family), all the right tools and ingredients, and moving from thought to action, you might still get lumpy gravy. Is lumpy gravy still edible? Yes, but try to figure out where those lumps came from and not give them berth the next time. Stir and learn.

Clarified Butter

The butter you get to dip your lobster into is clarified. Just like you.
This is like seeing someone naked for the first time; it’s always a bit of a shock, even if they happen to have a great body. Like the chicken with its feathers plucked. But what next? You have your lobster cooked and ready to eat, a ramekin of clarified butter, and a great big bib, but is this your dream lobster? Is that crusty red shell your obstacle? Then just get out your nutcracker, dear reader! You’ve got to start somewhere!
Is your life destined to be a boxed mac-and-cheese lunch (all those chemicals, food dyes and salt!) because you’re now afraid to dream or have goals? Of course not! Would I do that to you? I just had to sift you down into the flour sack of reality so I could have you properly grounded before gently kneading you into something that might just one day rise and bake and become the bread — the sustenance and perhaps even the basis of nourishment — for your life. If it doesn’t do that, at least you’ll have something to eat.
We’re in your kitchen now, not in a hotel seminar room with 2,999 real estate agents who think that if they do feng shui to a client’s house it will directly result in a bidding war. You have me as your sous-chef, and all I bring to your kitchen table is a rather tired spatula and a lifetime of experience gained by my foolish dedication to the machinations of motivational mangia-cakes. Who you gonna trust, eh?
So, how can we prove that success does not suck, but that it can be meaningful, even attainable and accessible in some form or degree to absolutely everybody?
Do you have to set a goal? You’ll grow and change because shit happens by default, and cause and effect will sneak in there. Why? Simple: because time passes. Nothing stays the same forever. The world around you will evolve and change even if you vow to never move a fraction of an inch for the rest of time. Time will move you.
Tony Robbins says, “If you don’t have a plan for your life, someone else does.” This implies that someone else gives enough of a rat’s behind about you that they want to plan your life and not their own. Right. Time is the constant in our reality that will force movement. Time. Too much of it on our hands? Too much to do, not enough of it? Time.
So, what is your personal definition of success? Do you know? If you don’t, then keep asking yourself. And even if you do, this definition will change, yes, with time, so ask it over and over again as long as you live.
You might want to test your answer for honesty and reality by running it by a few people who love you unconditionally, and, even better, a few who really don’t. But once you have the truest possible version of your answer available to you, from there you can start to develop feasible goals that fall within the parameters of your capacity (even if you have to stretch your capacity just a little, but not too much, or the old rubber-band theory will prove itself). Boing!
Some of your dreams are never going to be fulfilled. Now, don’t take that as your cue to run off and drink a vial of rat poison. Life itself can be your dream, if you let it.

Life can be your dream, if you let it.

Just don’t let dreams be your whole life. Be here, be present.

A Culinary Quiz

We all like to eat (well, I guess I didn’t until I was about 16 because before that all I ate was bacon and Brussels sprouts), but we seldom want to plan ahead, which is why we often end up eating convenience foods and junk. Part of the problem is not being able to decide what we really want, and so just devouring what’s available. This does not a healthy meal make, dear reader. Making a dinner that serves your health, your appetite, your mind and body, and your senses takes planning and execution; passion helps.
But there goes the phone again, you have to be at the parent/teacher meeting in half an hour and the dog has to be walked. Now. This is no time to focus on a proper meal plan. Wait until the dog has been walked, the meeting is over and do not answer the phone (that’s what call-answer is for). Find a moment of peace, and then ask yourself about this meal you would like to eat, the one that could feed your life. Allow deep contemplation. Do it in silence and allow your thoughts free range, but don’t let them go to places that you’re incapable of travelling with them. Be honest and realistic. Because you cannot have absolutely anything that you want, but you probably can have something that you deeply desire and need, and that’s within your range of achieving.
I’ve whipped up this culinary quiz for you to help you (not tell you) how to define what is feasible for you to achieve, considering a number of factors. Please don’t fill in the answers. This is not Cosmo, this is not a multiple-choice type of quiz. Besides, if you can answer these questions in the space left between them on the page or screen, you’re still stuck in the motivational mangia-cake land of quick fixes and unrealistic expectations. Take the time to think these over. Take the time to write down your answers, to add details as you think of them, to adjust them as reality becomes clearer. Time. Yes, and balance.
Here are the questions I am asking you to ask of yourself:

1. What is my definition of success, and do I have more than one? (For example, what, to me is personal success? business success? monetary success? spiritual success?)

2. What is my present reality?

3. What is my risk quotient? Can I achieve a particular dream without compromising my health, wealth, sanity, family and responsibilities?

4. What would I like to have or to achieve in my life before I die?

5. If I knew that I was about to die, but was still capable of making my own last meal, what would it be?

Now, here is the one (not a question, but an assignment of sorts) that I believe everyone must do at some point in life, even if you’re not a great writer, and even if it makes your toes curl like a corpse:

Write your own obituary.

Seriously. Just do it. If this little exercise doesn’t wake you up to your own life, then go eat canned spaghetti and don’t call me in the mourning (typo/pun intended).

A Schematic Recipe

Here’s a method I’ve found particularly useful (I got this from a friend, who got it from a friend, so if somebody out there has this under copyright, I’m sure they’ll let me know). To me, it’s common sense (check with grandma). I’ve made numerous changes to it since it was first shown to me, and I believe these changes make it more feasible.
Get a large blank sheet of white paper (11×17 is big enough) and a pencil, not a pen, with a decent eraser. On the paper, draw this diagram (or photocopy it at about 200% larger).

[insert diagram here]

Now, of all the meals you might like to cook, and no doubt there are gobs, what is the one you would have for dinner if you knew this was the last night of your life? Write that at the dot, briefly, but be specific enough to make it clear; this is consommé, dear reader, not puree.
When I did this, mine read: to write full-time and get paid for it. If I’d written only “write full-time”, I might have died in poverty, had I actually achieved my goal! What does yours read? Think this through thoroughly before you write it in. Your last meal ever. And with the caveat that makes it cookable and edible.
Let’s say you wrote in: papered chef working as executive chef at The Windsor Arms in Toronto making $100,000 a year. This is not crazy. An executive chef does make that kind of money and as far as I know the old Windsor Arms reopened a few years ago. But I would be inclined to be more moderate, and not set an exact salary unless, of course, you would feel that this goal was not worthy at a salary less than this amount. If you attach too specific a dollar value to your goal or dream, then you’re a slave to numbers, not to what will serve your heart and soul well.
Let’s say that right now you’re a grade two teacher, and you’re 38 years old. Is it still feasible? Probably. How big is your mortgage? Do you have a spouse who could support you for a year? Do you have some savings you could fall back on if you are not working while you get those papers?
What if you’re 50, a lawyer for 25-odd years, but you believe your true soul’s work is to be a veterinarian? Are you too old to go back to university for four to seven years? Is your mind still functioning at a higher level? Are your kids adults and living their own lives? Can they support you? You have that bad knee, so standing isn’t a great thing, and the arthritis in your right index finger? It might interfere with effective surgical techniques. And that B.A. you got before you went to law school, it was almost all arts and humanities; now you’ll have to go back and get science credits.
It’s still not out of the question, and there are solutions to most problems, but that’s what our arrow chart is about, demonstrating what sort of odds you’re facing. In effect, it tries to be what you are not: psychic. You remembered! Golden spatula for you!
It attempts to project into the future, by starting at the finish and then working backwards to see if what you’re after can be done, or if you’re apt to get half way there and realize it’s a mistake. It cannot prevent all mistakes, but if you perform this exercise with complete honesty, then you’re removing a considerable amount of risk.
Let’s fill this in as though you are the 50-year-old man whose heart’s desire is to be a vet. The dot at the end says something like: working full-time as a vet in my own small-animal practice in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada.
What will go in on the top line that would be directly involved in getting to the big dot? The obvious answer is getting a D.V.M. degree. But there are steps to that, so write those in. Quitting your job, or reducing it to part-time. Going back to university: there’s one. Taking biology courses. Moving to Guelph, because that is where the Ontario Veterinary College is. Those all count as directly related activities.
What will go in the bottom line? Perhaps trying glucosamine-sulphate to see if it helps the arthritis in that finger. See an orthopaedic surgeon about your knee or try wearing a tensor bandage and see if that helps. Stop playing hockey; you’re too old! Maybe you need to read all of James Herriot’s books again.
Fill both of those lines up with every detail you can imagine. Do this for a week or more and carry the chart with you wherever you go, so that when a thought comes to you, the chart is right there for you to insert what you need to add.
The third line. This is the hard part. On it (write sideways so you have lots of room for entries) write all the reasons why this is a dumb idea. Yes, this is going to hurt. Take a week to compose this line alone.
Try to ensure you list at least 30 things on each of your three lines, because, yes, life is that complicated.
The two boxes. Take another week to add things to these. “The Now” should be loaded with what is working and also what is not about your life at the present time. Odds are that some of what’s not working has to do with what your goal is and why it exists. “Plan B” is your back-up plan. If you’re this lawyer who wants to be a vet, your “Plan B” box might be filled with alternative ideas, such as:

• shift my legal specialty to veterinary medical cases

• buy a country property and start breeding collies as charming and lovely as that cute little Skye who belongs to that writer Cat something, but keep working as a lawyer

• see if PETA needs a lawyer to volunteer now and again

• advocate getting an office cat that could double as a paperweight

You should have been at this for better than a month by now, so it’s time to hand it over. Give it to someone who knows you well, but can remain objective. Not your mother because she always wanted her son to be a lawyer and she’s allergic to cats. Maybe not your wife because she might worry about all that lost income and not playing bridge with the wives of the other partners in the law firm; don’t give it to someone who will inject their personal bias. This part of the exercise is absolutely crucial for people who aren’t espoused. What you decide, in that case, may affect only you, but you’ll be alone to face the outcome, too.
Now that you’ve written your part, and received your outside input, it’s time to rewrite the whole damn thing. That’s correct: redo it. Fresh page, sharp pencil, and now…
When you write your chart this time, consider what you wrote on your first draft and what your outside input told you. Let’s assume that your brother was your feedback person. And let’s say he added to your “Directly” line: “renting a premises for your vet practice”. On your “Indirectly” line he daringly included “switching from Bordeaux to Valpolicella”. On your line of negatives, he had the audacity to write: “your age”. In “The Now”, he wrote “ideal lifestyle, nice wife; don’t want to lose her”, and in “Plan B” he wrote “keep your day job; get a goldfish”.
Make sure all your items are included on your chart, and so are his. You’re not quite done yet. Remember, this is a big decision and you don’t want to make it flippantly or too quickly.
You’re going to hate me for this, but then hungry mosquitoes love me, so I don’t care. Take a fresh page and rewrite the whole enchilada in chronological order, as much as you’re able. Start at the dot and work backward.
This should work fairly cleanly for this particular example, because you did your homework and found out that you’ll need to go back to university for six years and you can’t start until September, plus you’ll be wise to work for another vet hospital until you get the hang of the business before you open your own practice; let’s take a stab at ten years from now is where your big dot lands. You’ll be 60. If you’re healthy, this may not bother you, but it just might be what sets you on the path to becoming a veterinary legal specialist. But don’t decide just yet. Write in all your data, and then fold this up and stick it in the bottom drawer of your dresser in a sealed envelope and wait 30 days.
A month later open the envelope and read the chart; now decide. Is your dream or goal doable and do you still want to do it? What’s the price? Is it worth it? Or is Plan B looking better all the time? “The Now” might be much more appealing than it used to be.
This is realism, an honest, paced approach to addressing and evaluating dreams and/or goals. It’s okay to not go after them. It’s okay to say, “The now is good enough for me, and I’ll just read If Only They Could Talk one more time. It’s okay to adapt, okay to pick Plan B.”
It’s also okay to say: “The now is all I need; I’m a lucky guy. I don’t need to awaken the giant within; I want him to stay asleep. I choose my activity to be inactivity and I’m okay with that, totally. I could have been a vet, sure, but I’m a lawyer, and I’m just fine with that.”
Goals and dreams are not for the faint of heart, or for those who are afraid to use their kitchens for anything more than frying an egg and making toast. They’re elusive, conceptual, and often stuffed with hidden mashed turnips, but they’re not always impossible. Where’s my Armagnac?

Making a Roux

Whether it’s a sauce or a soup, one of the essentials of great cuisine and basic cooking is the ability to make a roux. It’s from this simple blend of just two ingredients — flour and butter — that some of the greatest creations in culinary arts were born. If you doubt it, sample a little Béchamel sauce or Vichyssoise and get back to me. What’s critical, though, is that the butter and flour are in virtually equal amounts and that they’re whisked together thoroughly; otherwise you’ll get lumps and your life will look like my mother’s gravy.
You cannot make a roux with either butter or flour, and there should never be substitutions. For example, if you substitute powdered cement for the flour and margarine for the butter, you’ll get yellow cement shoes. And they’ll smell funny a few days later, even if you’re at the bottom of Lake Superior (coldest and deepest of the five Great Lakes).
Butter and flour make a roux like plan and serendipity make a life. Like self-honesty and universal balance carve a base for living genuinely and dreaming realistically. Now that you’ve made a roux, let’s build a velvety Vichyssoise! Then have a nice lunch.

If You Can’t Take the Heat…

Your dreams and goals are not to be sneezed at, unless you’ve dusted them with loose flour. Finding a dream to call your own, or establishing a goal that’s worthy specifically for you can be intimidating for many people.
There are days when the odds of making a perfect piecrust are not on your side. So, make soup instead. You’ve got to eat. If cooking at all is too much for you on this or any or all days, get out of the kitchen. Take your spatula, dip it in paint and apply it to canvas; that’s what Jackson Pollock did (or so it appears).
Nobody asked you if you wanted to come into this kitchen; you got dragged in here! It’s sometimes terribly hot. In the refrigerator it’s damn chilly and there are science experiments, too. Are they man-eating? Sometimes, so try to coat yourself in a spice that’s a tad bitter. The floor’s slippery and you will, guaranteed, fall on your ass, likely when you have a steaming bowl of lumpy gravy in your hands. There are toxins in your kitchen and — think about this — they are mostly in the food you buy and in the products you use to clean your kitchen. Ka-chunk!
But there also may be attractive, single and available well-meaning, fully dressed Italian neurosurgeons in your kitchen, each with a tray of delicious and nutritious doughnuts, and not a drop of merde on the horizon; not yet, anyway… Keep the extra cheese on hand, just in case.
Since you weren’t given the liberty of saying, “No thanks, I really don’t want to cook up a life,” but you’re here anyhow, surrender yourself to the rest of the elements of life over which you have precious little control and enjoy the ride, but (I’m asking you to promise this to me) don’t forget to observe as you go before you go. What clever quip did Dr. Samuel Johnson leave us with when he took leave of his kitchen? Johnson’s final words even include his view on success:

“I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave; and success and miscarriage are empty sounds.”

So, dear reader, you’re there in that kitchen. You might as well cook until you stop. Like my mother did. Only try not to poison anybody.

Chapter III — THE DESSERT COURSE

Life is unpredictable: eat dessert first.
At the beginning of Think & Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill writes:

“The secret was brought to my attention by Andrew Carnegie, more than half a century ago. The canny, lovable old Scotsman carelessly tossed it into my mind, when I was but a boy. Then he sat back in a chair, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, and watched carefully to see if I had brains enough to understand the full significance of what he had said to me.
When he saw that I had grasped the idea, he asked if I would be willing to spend twenty years or more preparing myself to take it to the world…”

Better he had prepared himself by getting stuffed and trussed, plopped in Dutch oven and cooked at 350º Fahrenheit for four hours; that way we all might have been spared! Here’s what I believe Carnegie really imparted to Hill:

If you can make every idiot out there believe that he can skip eating his or her veggies, go straight for dessert, with no effort, and never gain an ounce, you are going to be the richest goomba in the universe, right after me.

Ka-ching!

Les Digestifs

So, dear reader, the question at hand would appear to be, will this book become a success story? And if it does, does that make me one of “them” by default?
Here’s how I see this little-book-that-perhaps-just-maybe-could-but-won’t-necessarily, certainly not because I’m thoughtful person and a good parent to my cats and dog: if Success Sucks! succeeds it will be because I’m a decent writer, and wrote a timely book; because my definition of success isn’t making zillions, but saving just one person from the claws of the motivational mangia-cakes; because my topic and timing happened to gel; because no motivational mangia-cakes shoved me in their crockpots; and because merde missed me for the entire time I was hiding in my merde-proof bunker writing this book, but it did make a hell of a mess on the roof and now that I’m done writing, excuse me because I have to go outside and clean it up.
The main reason if this little book “succeeds” — be it monetarily, artistically (stop laughing) or just by making me happy and you, dear reader (okay, now laugh) — it will be because I left home at 16 and stopped eating my mother’s cooking. I lived long enough to write it! Concrete scone, anyone?
But there remains that “other” question: How do I get motivated? Why do we have such trouble getting motivated that we lean on pseudo preachers to tell us how? (Part of the problem is, of course, that because we’re human beings with undulating lives, when we are motivated, we can be sure that at some point we won’t be.)

We have difficulty getting and staying motivated.

Is it because we’ve become lazy with all these gadgets and thingamajigs to do our work for us? Or that the fascination of television and video games has distracted us from our purpose? That it’s become illegal (in most countries) to chop heads off for fun and profit? Or because we now think soup grows in cans? What? What??
Somewhere along the line, as mankind (sort of) evolved, we lost our chutzpah, our drive, and evidently our wallets. But we didn’t lose our ability to dream, our desire for something different, preferably better.

The Cure (with apologies to The Cure)

Do you lack motivation, dear reader? Well, I do, too. Some days, anyway, but not many. Not any more.
Why do I have so few days when I cannot get my sorry ass in gear? Dear reader:

I have found the cure for lack of motivation.

As odd as this will seem (once you find out what it is), it cures depression, mostly, too. It’s free and fast and easy. No guarantees, but excellent odds (it works for me without fail; I hope it does for you), no tapes or books to borrow or buy, no sharing of a room with thousands of people hollering “yes!” (this much I will guarantee, and you’ll see why…), no workshops or seminars to expose and embarrass yourself, no e-mails, car-crashes; none of that codswallop.
Can you handle this knowledge, dear reader? Are you strong enough, spatula poised to clean one smear of sensible frosting out of the bowl? Are you sure? Okay. But read what follows at your own risk. Here’s cure for the de-motivated millions (egg roll please! drum rolls are inedible):

Tour your local graveyard and read the inscriptions on the tombstones.

“Hwaet!” You say. Well, hwaet to you, too. Stop cooking. Just do it. This is the most sound advice you’ll ever get, I kid thee not.
One silent (remember your blood pressure, dear reader) walk through a graveyard will kick your ass better than any motivational mangia-cake ever will and guess what? On top of that, it’s historically educational, interesting, peaceful, art-oriented (some of the reliefs on tombstones are so beautiful that I’ve done pencil rubbings worthy of framing, and I’ve photographed many a stunning statue), healthy (walking) and it’s going to make you get your proverbial shit together mighty quick. Here’s how:

Really read those inscriptions!

Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, life was so short and so precious that the age was recorded thus: aged 49 years, five months and 29 days. No, not: he left this earth in 1897.
You are going to die and so am I. If that’s not sufficient motivation to get up off Lord Chesterfield and do something, I don’t know what is!
Get your spatula and rebel! You cannot beat death (you need a really good hand mixer for that!), but you can do something that will leave more than a damn tombstone as your marker.
I walk Skye in the graveyard. She understands, I swear. When we walk there, she’s quiet, never urinates on the graves, and adopts a more serene demeanour, leaving her normal goofy little self at the big wrought-iron gate. We’ve entered the realm of the dead, a place we shall all go some day — even cute, happy, tail-wagging dogs — and respect is in order. Even a collie knows that.
When you read the inscriptions of tombstones you’ll (unless you still happen to be in diapers, and I don’t mean Depends) notice something time and again. The people in there, many of them, died at right about the age you are now. What else do you need? What? What??
Run home, hug your spouse, kiss your kids, play with your pets, and get your sorry ass in gear, because one day, and it could be today, your carcass will be six feet under. Put that in your oven and cook it.
Well, not literally.
Graveyards can lift depression, contrary to the obvious probability that they might exacerbate it. Why? Simple:

The inmates are dead and you are alive.

Translation: they have lost the chance and you still have it. Carpe diem, dear reader. Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.
Something even more profound occurred to me one day when I walked in the Old Burying Ground of the town in Nova Scotia where I live. Some of the graves date back to the mid-1700s and over the centuries the inscriptions have worn off. What does this mean to me when I need to get motivated? When I die and someone carves the basic data of my coming and going in stone, it will be meaningless if I haven’t left behind me a human and humanitarian legacy. Making a true difference intrinsically: this can never erode, not with time. Never.

There. You’re motivated.

Will you stay that way? No. It’ll wax and wane. When it comes, grab it, make it the norm, and then the odd days when it refuses to appear as the wind at your back, take a day off or go for a walk in the cemetery (reading obituaries in the newspaper doesn’t have the same impact, but if it’s raining or snowing and you don’t want to go out and play in the graveyard, they’ll do in a pinch). Just don’t take too many days off because your days, and mine, dear reader, are numbered.
The motivational mangia-cakes know that you keep conveniently forgetting you are mortal.
You’ve taken the first step already. By reading this book? Nah, by laughing at yourself. Well done. And I don’t mean laughing at how badly you scorched your last flank steak while dodging merde, emptying crockpots, correcting typos on menus, leading gnus to the composter and making them drink Armagnac, mashing turnips for well-meaning, fully dressed neurosurgeons, tossing extra cheese on my mother’s lumpy gravy-covered tatty scones, and juggling doughnuts to impress my American, British and Australian readers. But that, dear reader, is another book.

The Motivational Junk-food Detox Diet

DON’T EAT THAT! As of now, you’re on a strict diet. No more motivational-guru junk food! No more:

• formulaic books with zero nutritional value
• rah-rah-rah tapes that are empty calories and come with a
“small parts may cause asphyxiation” warning label
• sheep-to-the-slaughter seminars, cooked beyond well-done, and not even served with mint sauce
• self-expository workshops that show more lily-liver than
you knew you had; do not cook in glass kitchens
• inspirational/promotional e-mails with no proof in their
pudding, just self-contained viruses
• guaranteed-results DVDs that unpuff your pastry and give
you a wicked case of financial giardia
• crash-your-car CDs with no culinary disaster insurance
• walking on hot coals, well, unless you plan on serving
barbequed feet for dinner; ick.

Now, put your wallet back in your pocket and your brain back in your toque (for my non-Canadian readers, your ugly hat). Just quitting that menu of post-motivational-addiction no-nos will put an immediate stop to your get-rich-quick-and-easy-guaranteed-now indigestion!
So, do you feel a pound of flesh lighter? What I sincerely hope is that you feel even more motivated by engaging in the Success Sucks! de-motivational diet with a serving of detox on the side. Motivated to be yourself and to never feed the sharks again, not unless you’re wearing armour and your minestrone has just won an award.
Make this a diet to last. When your kitchen falls into chaos, go for a cemetery tour, be silent for an hour, find that balance and focus again.
Desperate? Not motivated? This, dear reader, just like you and I, shall pass.

PART FOUR

The Clean-up

Thank-you notes, wiping countertops, crediting the recipe authors, emptying the dishwasher (unless that’s a person), putting away the dishes, and pots and pans, for next time, assuming the next time isn’t another damn book on the same subject (cured, not recovering).

Chapter I — USEFUL INGREDIENTS

Thank-you mints go to my friends who have helped me through various crises, given unsolicited advice and reviews on the food I have cooked for them, loved me for all it’s worth, and provided valuable input to this book. They are, in no special order of ingredients: Robert Wittig; Lee-Ann MacKenzie; the late Christopher Stokes, the late Michael Mercer and Jeani Read; the late Leon Pownall; Nadine Rayner; Christine Ford; Ted Nasmith; Ray Montford; Muriel Percy; Janet Booth; Joe Compta; Linda Lane and Dave Sharp; Kevin Goldner; Mary Luczak; the Long family at Western Diazo in Calgary; Elaine Charal; the late Marc Desormeaux; Doreen Lloyd; the late Jim Davis; Barbara Anderson and Ed Kuffert; the late May and Roger Pocock; Dr. Laurel Moore; Dr. Thomas Verny; Darlene, Dan, Jacob and Drew Glazier; Dr. Don McLean and Dr. Bill Hanson at Aurora Animal Clinic; the late Betty Izzard; Angela Argento; and Fiona (my dog who died shortly after I wrote this), my dog, Skye; and Jack Sparrow, Salonge, Esmée, Smudge and Holly, my cats. And to the rest of you who think you should be on this list, I used my phone book to compose it and I am behind on making entries (too busy cooking, I guess), so thanks to you, too.

Nota bene: a lot of people and animas both on this list and not on it fall into the “late”, and I don’t mean tardy, category. Ahem. I rest my case.