leftovers

So I'm eating leftover Etheopian food I managed to swindle yesterday from Ras Kasas, which is ran by the sweetest and smallest women you shall ever meet. I went there for a Perl Monger special meeting. The Perl Mongers being a bunch of people that code in Perl all day. Randal Schwartz was there. If you know him, you know Perl, and now you know about Randal and I. Somehow our massive group of 6 plus Randal were able to make a bill of over two hundred and thirty dollars, and using our epic brain power, we came to the conclusion that everyone can pay 30 bucks and we should cover the meal. I, being not one who had thirty bucks let alone twenty bucks let alone fourteen bucks (more like thirteen) silently panicked. I slipped in the thirteen I had, and someone counted the money. We were over, so of course I, who had no spirits to drink, was allowed to take some money out of the pot, knowing full well that even my meal hadn't been covered by what I had put in. Then I got the leftovers that I'm eating and dirtying my keyboard with right at this moment.

Etheopian food starts out on a big plate, on the top of flat bread that's moist and spongy and the meal is dollopped in great scoops in pleasing plops and eating with the fringes of the bread, which are torn off, unrolled and used to scoop up the food. Tear, unrool, plop onto food, scoop out food hunk, shove into salivating mouth. Eat. Repeat. Yum.

I'm eating the leftovers with a spoon since the once elastic bread seems to have gone a bit flacid, and is now just part of the entire concoction of lentils, peas, sweet potatos, a hell of a lot of spicy peppers and some unknown little yellow things that look like pilaf experiencing a hangover; although I don't think pilaf is at all Afrikan. All the flavors have grouped together, slightly fermented and have since multipyed in volume in the elestric nuking machine so what was once an almost delicate balance of different spices, textures, colors and aromas are now just short of brown porrage with Texan hot sauce shaken generously on the whole. I can see the red pepper from everything else, but that's about it. I was looking real hard too. (Swallowing)

Etheopian food in itself is filling; since the bread actually expands into your stomach like a bathroom sponge and one doesn't understand this quality until one indulges too heavily and is more than satiated with the main course to quite understand what irreversable act has just been done. It takes only about a half hour after the last, tear filled bite can be smudged into your face, regretfully swallowed till the bread's hibernation or culmination from being a bit of bread into being a refuge of anything that is moist. Think of the chick in Willy Wonka that turned purple. Yeah, you got it now. Tone down the purple just a bit.

This quality isn't really there in leftover Etheopian food. What bread is left has already taken in any watery neighbors, which themselves are filled with all the hot hot spicies. You literally have hot sauce embedded bread which isn't that appealing. What is now esentially a messy stew, has a similar consistency to porrage, albeit one more exotic in color. You definetly should not have leftover Etheopian for Breakfeast, it will destroy any good things living in your stomach and you'll have problems through the entire human system.

There isn't actually any other food that makes a better leftover though. All food that sits in a refridgerator goes through some metamorphosis, easily seen in foods with cheese on top, like pizza. You will never have that same taste after you reheat pizza. The magic, as they say, is gone. Leftover Barbeque loses its carnal lust after a visit in the ice box, although it used to be a favorite before I gave up all meat, if not for the fact that I can have 'uga meat that uga taste like mammal be dead recently' right from the ice box. Leftover Etheopian food tastes like the special sex in the morning after the amazing sex the previous night, It's raw; you know, you haven't brushed your teeth and there's smells from different places and it doesn't take as long to finish, but if there's anything left in either of you, it's going to be exhausted before either one of you get's up from the actual bed for good. The flavors and intensities are not as sharp, but much more all over, not focused, but maybe it's unique that for me, since I do not have my contacts on in the morning.

I've finished the Etheopian food and now every exhale feels like I just finished a stick of red pepper gum, I can kill tiny insects with my breath; I can play Godzilla and my Tokyo is the ants that are mysteriously entering my room from that tiny crack. Thank god, we don't have cockroaches. It's winter and most those tiny insects are dead anyways. My stomach is heavy from it all and I feel sleepy even though I just had coffee. It occours to me that I drink too much of that shit, I feel like something's missing if I don't drink any some days. Just the other day, I was in line at a Buchannan's on The Hill where a girl poked me and asked where she knew me from. I had no idea where she was from, but had the male jerk reaction that yes, indeed, I'd want to have sex with her, and we looked each other over, not fearfully, but quizzically, where she finally decided that she's seen me at another coffee shop; Bookends, on Pearl, in the morning, like that very morning, where gee whiz - I was.

I drink coffee at around 10 pm and read and then go home and take up another book or two or three and read some more, until I kind of just stop and then the next thing I know is that it's 9:45 am and I need to be at work across town at 10 and my arm's asleep because it was being used as a pillow over my head and I can't feel it and I don't know if it's there or even that it's mine but it's not really on my mind, since I can't breathe because there's a book in my mouth and Oh God, I've been sleeping on the floor in the clothes I went to work with - which weren't put on a showered body since I was late for work from drinking too much coffee the night before that and I'm, I'm late for work! but I get some coffee again, cause hey, what else is going to wake me up?