October 3, 2003

• I remember I used to pretend that I couldn’t cook so she would cook for me. I only did it twice, and strictly speaking I didn’t know how to cook what she ended up preparing, but it’s still shameful.
  
  A tiny, miniscule, infinitesimally small shame. The kind of shame you look at and say, “Awww, isn’t that cute?”
  
  The first time, she put a whole chicken in a cast iron dutch oven, and stuck it in the gas-fired oven, and we watched TV while it cooked. The second time, I think it was some kind of stir fry type thing, maybe with some salmon in it, if I remember correctly. I didn’t know how to do the salmon.
  
  She gave me a cookbook, too. The Tassajara Cookbook, which is all-vegitarian, and isn’t so much full of recipies as general instructions on how to do things involving food. Like, it teaches you how to chop properly, and how to blanche things. I still like that book a lot. It’s in a box in storage, because I thought I’d only live here for three months. But it’s a good one.
  
  I keep having the experience where the food I eat doesn’t nourish me. Like, when I wake up in the morning and, if I’m not bleary, then I’m full of this strange morning-person energy that has me dancing around the house talking to myself in strange accents. Until I drink some coffee, at which point I turn into someone who isn’t a morning-person. Or when I go to the burger drive-through and ten minutes later it’s like I didn’t eat anything.
  
  There’s no nourishment around me. Everything seems like empty calories. And this isn’t about depression, it’s about being driven by the autopilot desires that keep me in a groove. All the food tastes the same because it is the same. My world has no distinguishing characteristics because I’ve worked really hard to make it that way. Even though that's not what I want. But it obviously is what I want.
  
  These are the autopilot desires that kept me in a very, very tight groove when I lived in Berkeley, where I pretended not to be able to cook so I would have a reason to spend time with her. And that’s part of what I’m going through now: I want a reason to engage the world. I need a cosmic come-on. Or one from the mere material plane, perhaps. Or even just your everyday flirtatious come-on from someone would be nice.
  
  I’m thinking about all this because she sent me an email. She’s in Britain with her husband, trying to get on their feet. She sent the email totally out of the blue, and it was a total delight to get it, and that nourished me.
  
  Also made me think about how I totally dropped that opportunity. Apparently, though, it’s my fate to drop opportunities like that, so I should just get the hell over it.
  
  And since she reads this thing... Yes, I still have this book. Maybe one day I'll get the fame and mystique to go along with the Salinger-like lifestyle I already have.
  
  

  • 8:02 am
  • 5 Comments