"The law always wins," -- retired FBI agent Steve Moore, not square enough not to know better.
If we grantt sufficient levels of cognitive awareness behind the assertion, all humans have coping mechanisms for those compartments lacking in emotional fulfillment, and my relationship to the family who ran the Golden Lake Chinese take-out on the cross grid at 20th and Market Streets was one of those, though points of reference are clandestine and otherwise relatively infinitesimal, as thin as gruel; clandestine because it often involved the envelope of darkness in the depth of night, sometimes barreling my mobility device in a rush of motor parsing our fortuitous lower atmosphere, with its prevalence of nitrogen and the lesser one twentieth amount of oxygen most complex organisms need to keep hemoglobin enriched and flowing; Infinitesimal because I was simply a responsible customer not truly overtaken by culinary aesthetics one might find in a late eighties avant garde parable like Tampopo, a niche film, forever endeared to me, but let us condemn the impatience which never gave Juzo Itami enough credit for the absolute joy of life she embodies, whether it be through gangsters in their last moments discussing pigs guts or saving an old man choking to death at a noodle counter. Golden Lake was more hit or miss with indulgent carbs than a true gateway into the glass encased globe of cultural diversity. The restaurant was nothing more than a ground floor conversion of Philadelphia’s industrial era row homes, as you can see from the photo, and as is usual for powerchair dependence, braving the one step up with a left turn to enter into the well trafficked linoleum was a hazard, so the children met me at the partitioned glass door, or their mother, less often the men, men whom would not tolerate my queries to them in American English, always for the sake of an article, in this case something along the lines of an assimilation antithesis given the sinews and reticent, warded off nature of Chinese and Korean social groupings within American urban environments. Egg foo young, indifferent or enthusiastic, we have transposed it into generic expectation, kilograms of steamed rice which hold their shape, a nearly rubbery omelet entrapping pork, shrimp, onion rims, perhaps caramelized, the type of takeout which threatens the poor into a stoic acceptance of nutritious cardboard. We’ve all been in one place too long if these are the threadbare locomotions we’ve left to mourn.
