Food for Thought

Once upon a time this is how I cooked: look in fridge, see all the colors vegging – red green yellow pep, translucent white onions, sunset tomato, garlic (also white ish), earthy orange carrots, more green broccoli and of course pale root potato – chop it all up into rainbow dice, throw it in tortilla wrap with lunch meat, or a quesadilla (basically the same but cooked and folded rather than raw rolled), sauce on the outside over lettuce bed, salsa rice side dish instead of chips or fries and the point is everything went in all at once and always with cheese because why not?

Whatever it was, breakfast lunch or dinner it all went in – I said it’s healthy, keeps my colors nice and crisp and lucid like the nuclear reactor my brother saw at Indiana University, a small cube two feet all around submerged in a deep circle well and the water is the cleanest around and it vibrates – that’s how I picture my mind after a meal with all the vitamins present and glowing and I don’t eat enough as it is – got no time to coordinate ingredients into cohesive meal, all it is is protein, veg, fruit, grain and alcohol, five groups, mostly grain and booze, so when there’s room for one veg everyone tags along and I developed a blanket veg taste in everything I ate and I stopped enjoying food. Call me picky but life is just too short to eat the same taste for every meal, to take a thing like food and make it consistent and I thought of the movie Wall-E and how they drink food out of straws and that’s the least of their problems.

And it’s not just about food, if I can’t enjoy a simple meal and have to rush to get it down and on to this or that, then what else is flying over my head, under the radar? And if not I then who’s there to enjoy anything little and sparkling and insignificant anymore, and I see my future self in a dream never being impressed with visions and sounds and strange tastes and sooner or later I am on the edge of the grand canyon and I’m trying to locate the exact spot where a high resolution digital photograph I saw on the internet was taken and there it is and I’m seeing it with my own eyes and I am disappointed – I can’t zoom in or sit down and it’s hot out and I wish I had stayed home and known this place strictly through the laptop window, and it’s all been seen and lost its shimmering newness. And I wake up and wish future Josh had walked off the edge of that cliff.

Back to food, I had thoughts of how there are words between lines on pages, there’s music in the silent bars of a classical symphony or wild bop ride, and there are knives hanging from strings off of the end stops of poems stacked in my bookshelf, there is color and beautiful silence in the shy spots of a painting or the empty white of a fresh canvas – this applies to food because if everyone cooked everything together for every meal we would all be eating the same rainbow mush from a blender (for convenience) and our tongues would devolve and forget about how things taste better next to other things like colors and words vibing and rhyming and rolling off the tongue and eyes just right and you can tell – it’s cooking as a process of elimination, what not to cook, that’s the real question and it’s really what not to see and I ask myself all the time when I’m walking around outside and looking down at all the little colored stones in the sidewalk and my portion control is much better these days. I probably still don’t eat enough but I’m enjoying meals and sticks and puddles and little tricks of light in windows at dusk and passing moments with strangers and smiles and I think what a shame it would be if I threw these things into a blender and ate them all at once.