Ftrain, by Paul Ford

I had this craving for General Tso's all week. So I planned it. Made it nice. Went to a movie, rode my bike to 7th Ave. Humid as it could be, so I was sweating volcanically as I sat down and had my ice water and my tea, alone at my table for two, hoping no one saw as I patted my soaked forehead with an enflowered paper napkin. I read a science-fiction novel, ordered, waited. And it came, just as I remember it. I asked for extra spicy, but it was simply fried.

I don't want to get huffy like a foreign exchange student back from her time in France, complaining about the quality of American food, our awful wine, etc. But as I ate, well--it just wasn't the experience I was after. After a few weeks away, it seems, the fried is less a reason to live. Also a caloric nuclear bomb.

I bicycled home in a kind of coma and went to sleep. This used to be--with variations--every Saturday.

Of course I also want to be cut off from that experience. That's part of the project.

So I wonder how much of the flat affect is a desire for flat affect, a desire to have changed, to no longer love the thing that rounded me off so? And how much is a genuine diminishment in my pleasure in the deeply fried and salted and glautamated Chinese that I loved for so many decades now, because of behavior change and new habits? I did, of course, clean my plate. But I doubt I'll go back without another month or two in between.