Is it any wonder that my life continues along as a series of odd and unreasonable events?
Take today’s lunch for example. I dined, for my very first time, at a local raw food restaurant, Cafe 118. Needless to say - or maybe I do need to say - it was tasty. It isn’t like any wild and bizarre expectation you may have; the food is scrumptious and tastes a lot like food you would consider ‘usually delicious’. Given the environment associated with Raw Foodism, and the culture of life that surrounds anyone dedicated to not eating animals and not cooking ANYTHING, you’d think I would show a little sympathy toward their cause. And in large measure, I did manage to order off the menu without once mentioning hamburgers, or the venison I had the night before, or my toasted bagel and scrambled eggs for breakfast, or any generally stupid comment that is almost too difficult to avoid, considering the narrow lane one must walk when wandering through such a side street.
I managed to avoid any real embarrassment until I opened my lunch-time reading material, a tremendous book on Florida culture entitled The Tropic of Cracker. It’s a series of essays devoted to the misfits and poets that have made magic in the rural and rough parts of Florida. Until today, it was a book I had opened at least a dozen times at lunch, reading one or two chapters and almost always managing to find myself discussing its prose with another diner or with the waitstaff. Until today, I had suggested this book to everyone that had asked about it - and some that hadn’t - with the caveat that ‘you’ll feel like you barely know this state at all when you’re finished’. I probably still hold to that conviction, as nothing yet in its content has failed to enchant me.
But today, as fate would have it, just as my waitress was delivering a plate of macadamia nut ‘cheese’ and sun-dried cherry tomato-stuffed basil wraps, I became acutely aware that I was reading a story about a rural hog killin’ party, complete with photos of the newly dispatched hog’s severed head, boiling guts, and butchered body. The long, slow, unspoken conversation I had with my server’s wide eyes told me that I should probably enjoy this meal, as I would most assuredly make their ‘do not allow’ list in the immediate future. To make matters worse, I couldn’t help but find the whole thing incredibly funny.
Anyone else would call this an embarrasment, or maybe one of the most idiotic things they have ever done. For me, though, in this Folk-art/Foie Gras life I lead, I simply call it ‘Lunch on Thursday’.