2009-06-03 - 11:46 a.m.
My mom visited this weekend. She ate sushi for the first time. We took her to a storytelling thing. I think she really liked it.
I told her that I was finishing the chapter about Cresaptown, which was where we lived for three years when I was in elementary school. I was asking her about a bike she'd got for me. It was a great bike, very fast and well made, but it was clearly from a previous generation of kids. It had a banana seat and very wide-set handlebars. Other kids teased me about it, but I liked it. "I don't remember," she said. "I've blocked out a lot of memories from those years."
Trivia last night in Fells Point. Big, giant glasses of beer. The night ended with petting a stray cat, and finding out that the girl had slept with the trivia guy, about a year before we got together. She didn't mean any harm by the way she told me.
Realization: Life would be a little simpler if girls weren't so attractive, so compelling, and fun to talk to, to flirt with. I'm talking about this: Summertime, at a show, crowded, with everyone packed in close. There's a girl next to you. You met her two weeks ago. She's a friend of a friend. She's very smart, in med school. Pretty, of course. And funny, quick to laugh. Funny and quick to laugh go a long, long way. She's wearing a sleeveless shirt. Her upper arm rubs up against your forearm. Her skin is very smooth and a little cool, because of the air conditioning. This happens for a half-hour, this intermittent rubbing. It drives you crazy.
So, sex metaphors, talk of ripeness. Today in fruit: You can't really beat the feeling you get when you're raising an apple to your mouth, and you're not sure if it's a crisp apple or a soft apple, and you take that first big bite, almost too big for your mouth, and the apple snaps, and your mouth's filled with crisp sweet tartness, and you know the whole apple will be just like that bite. That's probably a corny metaphor for something. Also, almost every time I eat a good piece of fruit (a plum, an apple, some berries), I think of that scene in Goodbye, Columbus, where the Philip Roth-narrator guy describes the fruit he ate, with his girlfriend, in her parents' basement. David Foster Wallace, in his thing about the cruise-ship industry, talks about eating huge quantities of fruit, how he produced piles of peels and skins that he let sit on his bed or on the nightstand. Fruit's pretty cool, is what I'm saying.
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