Book Description

Think Hell is hot?  Think again, it’s as frigid as Hillary Clinton.  John Milton wrote the literary classic Paradise Lost to give us Satan’s perspective of his predicament and The Fall of humankind.  Dante Aligheri wrote The Inferno, part one of his Divine Comedies, to give us a look at life in Hell.  When you combine the two and set Hell on the North Pole, you get Paradise Frost: Satan as Santa.  Read it to learn how much of a sinner you are.  Read it to be surprised by who is stuck in Hell.  Read it to find out how the deviant Mrs. Clause uses her elves as dildos.  Read it to discover how Santa satisfies his carnal urges with human whores.  Read it to decide if this is a work of blasphemy.  

Introduction 

I’d been writing this book with no intention of publishing it. It was a private project, one of self-reflection.  I wrote this to think about the seven deadly sins — lust, sloth, wrath, gluttony, greed, envy, and the deadliest of them all, vanity — and how I commit them.  

As a published work, this is a story about our Total Depravity and our Original Sin.  The underlying theme is that we are born corrupt and sinful, and we sin in ways we don’t realize.  Our suffering has little to do with external events, it’s the result of the dissonance between how we think of ourselves and who we really are.  

I struggle to understand what is and isn’t a sin. And my intuition tells me that the most dangerous sins are those we don’t recognize as such. To some, the Christian notion of sin is outdated, it’s an atavistic concept.  In other words, morality is relative and “sin” is contingent on cultural standards.  Fine, but keep in mind that I’m not interested in debating about cultural expressions of sin —  Mormon prohibition against alcohol, for instance.  I just want a better understanding about human nature.  Whether or not stoning an adulteress is a sin is irrelevant to me.  I’m only interested in why an adulteress is stoned —  was someone envious of her?  Another example: I put Hitler in Hell for being sentimental (emotional gluttony), and not for mass murder.  Because this is a story about human nature, about how everyone, across all cultures, are tempted by lust, sloth, wrath, gluttony, greed, envy, and vanity.  How someone expresses vanity may vary from culture to culture, and I don’t care about that.  I’m only interested in what vanity  — and the other six deadly sins — does to people.  

This book is Part I of an ongoing series which may never end because there’s so much moral ground to cover and so many people to send to Hell.  The main theme of Part I is that what seem like harmless, benevolent acts, are actually manifestations of our sinful nature.  Is sentimentality a sin?  James Baldwin thought so.  How about self-love, is that a sin, is that narcissism re-branded as a virtue?  What about self-care, is that a euphemism for selfishness?  What’s the hidden meaning behind popular cultural tropes?  My aim here is to desecrate the sacred, also known in the Bible as false idols.  False idols are everywhere and the worship of them is a sign of depravity.  

The title, Paradise Frost, is a play off of John Milton’s literary classic, Paradise Lost, which gives us Satan’s perspective on his predicament and The Fall of humankind.  This book combines the thematic content in Paradise Lost with that of Dante Aligheri’s The Inferno, part I of his Divine Comedies.  Paradise Frost is a story about Satan and those who’ve unexpectedly joined him in Hell.  Biblical stories also figure prominently in Paradise Frost.     

To make reading more fun, I wrote in gratuitous and lascivious sex scenes inspired by some of the more grotesque sex scenes in the Bible.  No need to read deeply into these scenes for hidden meaning.  It’s pornography and it’s in here because sex sells.  

And yes, I’m a Christian and I consider this book an exploration of Christian theology.  

Enjoy!  

Hey Everyone,

Alive Juice Bar has been in business for 10 years!  Thanks for the awesome memories, you’re the best for making this milestone happen.

The Shoreline location will close and move to downtown Everett in September.  To customers who live in Everett, I’ll see you there.  To those who live in Shoreline/Edmonds/Lake Forest Park/Mountlake Terrace, I’ll miss you so much.  I’ll continue to patronize Juicy Power Yoga, I’ll see some of you there.

We’re publishing books — including two Alive Juice Bar cookbooks — as a going away present, love letters really.  You’ll at least have the recipes to make your own Alive Juice Bar drinks and food.

We’re also opening The Soup Nazi Kitchen adjacent to Alive Juice Bar in Everett.  We’ll have a Facebook and Yelp page set up for it when it’s close to opening.

Stay strong, hugs and kisses,

 

 

 

 

Book Description

Wonder what it’s like to start a neighborhood juice bar?  Curious about how the Juice Nazi runs his notorious juice bar?  Can you correctly answer the infamous Alive Juice Bar application test questions?  Will you find the questions funny or mind blowingly offensive?  Read this to find out how to run a juice bar and if the Juice Nazi thinks you’re batshit crazy.  

Introduction

They say the Chinese government is run like a business.  The President is the CEO and the Premier is the COO.  The Politburo are the board of directors and Communist party members are shareholders.  Provincial leaders are district managers and so forth and so on, all the way down to the student interns.  Chinese citizens are the customers.  

Restaurants — businesses in general — are run like the Chinese government.  Juice bars, even more so because unlike most restaurants, my job at my juice bar isn’t solely to entertain customers, but also to guide them about matters of health and diet.  I don’t just cook nutritious drinks and meals that taste good to the customer, I’m expected to nurse sick customers back to health, to prescribe remedies to heal an injury, and to absolve those who’ve committed dietary debauchery.  Which means my job isn’t to give customers what they ask for, my job is to build trust.  That means I treat customers differently from what you’d get at a typical restaurant.  I expect customers who are transparent about what they want and need.  

I might poll customers about their preferences (focus groups) but I don’t let them decide what and how I serve because most of them, like American voters (myself included), don’t know what the fuck is going on on my end business-wise and on their end health and diet-wise.  Want wheatgrass?  Go to Jamba Juice, I’m not serving bullshit shots.  Want an acai bowl?  Go get one at Costco, that shit is a waste of time and resources.  The customer isn’t always right, the customer is usually wrong, ok?  My job is to cut through the bullshit to give my customers not what they want, but what they need to be healthy.   

An employee who makes an excuse gets chewed out.  No, not later when the customers are gone, immediately because otherwise, they’ll forget what happened.  Managers run the store as they want as long as we’re getting good results, and if the results aren’t good, they’re fired.  There’s no states rights or voting.  There’s surveillance.  Employee input and checks and balances, sure, we have those in place, just like how it is in China.  But no more than that because businesses need to be nimble to survive, we don’t have time for long debates and hesitation.  

It’s not my intention to conflate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with the Nazi party, the two parties are nothing alike unless you believe Western — especially American and British — media’s representations of the CCP and China (I don’t).  Rather, the “Juice Nazi” moniker that customers gave me references Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, who is based on a real person.  In any case, I haven’t done anything extraordinary to earn this praise — I’m not at the same level as great chefs like Marco Pierre White, Jiro Ono, and Charlie Trotter, or great athletes like Tom Brady and Michael Jordan.  I’m nowhere as demanding, strict, and disciplined as any of them, which is why I’m nowhere as successful as they are.  

My purpose here is to show readers how to run a juice bar without boring those who aren’t planning to do so.  You can read this book as a behind the scenes reveal of a notorious juice bar, similar to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.  

This book is divided into five parts and thirty eight chapters.  Part I, Mindset, shows you my mindset and the reasons for it when I work.  Part II, Hiring, is mostly a collection of my most controversial application questions and shows how far we go to find the right employee.   

Part III, Employees, has musings about human nature — which you have to understand to run a juice bar and most businesses — considers how employees should be compensated, and reflects on why the labor market is what it is.  Part IV, Customers, explains why I treat customers as I do.  Part V, Nuts and Bolts, shows how Alive Juice Bar is run, from its use of music attract and repel customers to its batshit crazy way of luring new customers.  

This book can be read in whatever order you want.  Feedback and questions are welcomed, send it to foodyap@gmail.com.  Enjoy!  

 

 

Prologue
How it began

Part I — Mindset

Chapter one — Sixty rules I learned about owning a business
Chapter two — Mindset of a bad cook
Chapter three — Your hobby is not your passion
Chapter four — So you want to be a porn star?
Chapter five — Ten worst reasons to open a juice bar
Chapter six — Devil in the Kitchen: Review of Marco Pierre White’s memoir
Chapter seven — Ideas are worthless
Chapter eight — To whom I’d sell Alive Juice Bar
Chapter nine — How the cult of self-esteem produces fuck ups

Part II — Hiring  

Chapter ten — Reader reactions to Juice Nazi application
Chapter eleven — Juice Nazi seeks head of secret police
Chapter twelve — Alive Juice Bar seeking angry people
Chapter thirteen — Alive Juice Bar seeking very very very nice people
Chapter fourteen — Seeking Darth(ette) Vadar to join the Dark Side.
Chapter fifteen — So you want to manage a controversial juice bar
Chapter sixteen — Example of management material
Chapter seventeen — Answer key to

Part III — Employees

Chapter eighteen — On human nature
Chapter nineteen — How to spot bullshit
Chapter twenty — Training employees guidelines
Chapter twenty one — Passage of Seattle $15 minimum wage: notes and predictions
Chapter twenty two — $15/minimum wage: bring it on, motherfuckers
Chapter twenty three — What’s a fair wage?
Chapter twenty four — What’s a living wage?
Chapter twenty five — Who deserves a living wage?
Chapter twenty six — Jobs for all is the dumbfuckingest idea ever
Chapter twenty seven — How schools train students to not be responsible.  

Part IV — Customers

Chapter twenty eight — How to talk to customers
Chapter twenty nine — Obedience versus responsibility
Chapter thirty — What is means to be responsible
Chapter thirty one — Never say “no” to a customer
Chapter thirty two — How not to run a start-up business

Part V — Nuts and Bolts

Chapter thirty three — How to run a juice bar
Chapter thirty four — How to break rules and get away with it
Chapter thirty five — Use of music
Chapter thirty six — Guidelines
Chapter thirty seven — Etiquette
Chapter thirty eight — Are you batshit crazy?