Nervous

The girl chewed her nails.
She was nervous, but not scared.
Just a bit jumpy.

As In "Soda"

When I was a kid,
Rule was: no restaurant pop.
Waters all around.

Candy

I’m eating candy.
Not because I am hungry.
Because it is there.

Arrowhead

He nibbled all day
until the almond looked like
an old arrowhead.

Potato Prep

A baked potato
requires some preparation.
It's not last-minute.

Crab

The tough little crab
crawled out from under the rock.
A heron ate it.

Bacon

The whole apartment
reeks with the stench of bacon.
No, turkey bacon.

Rotten

It's not bad to hear,
"Last one in's a rotten egg!"
Until you've smelled one.

Tea and Ice

Tea on a hot day
is about as refreshing
as ice in winter.

Tomato

On the windowsill
a small tomato rotted.
No one would eat it.

Popsicle

When it's hot outside,
the best thing a kid can eat
is a Popsicle.

Nutrición

“Nutrition Facts” is
“Datos de Nutrición”
south of the border.

Actually, I Wasn't Having a Bad Day...

I stepped out of the pizza place holding my second slice on a paper plate and chewing the crust from my first. Immediately a dude approached and said, "Sorry to bother you. I know you're probably having a bad day. But could you give me a quarter? I need to make a phone call."

He was late 40s, jeans and a t-shirt, not homeless-looking or anything. Still, I didn't buy it.

"I don't buy it," I said. I walked away.

A few questions came to mind as I bit into slice number two. Was he telling the truth? Perhaps he was. Perhaps he truly needed to make a phone call, but he didn't have a cell phone. There were a number of plausible scenarios that could have driven him to ask me for two bits.

Maybe he dropped his phone on the subway tracks and instead of jumping down and trying to retrieve it before the next train came, he wisely decided it was safer to tell the attendant at the booth that he dropped it. Except when he got there, the booth was empty. No problem, he thought, I'll just go above ground and call the MTA from a pay phone. But when this responsible citizen reached the nearest pay phone bank, he fished through his pockets only to find that he was twenty-five cents short. He only had a dime! Undeterred, our intrepid commuter decided to take a page from Blanche DuBois's book; he would depend on the kindness of strangers. This probably hurt his pride a little, but he knew this was no time for emotions to get the better of him. Of course he would be polite. He would put others' feelings ahead of his own and not assume that his misfortunes were worse than whatever they were going through. For all he knew, the next person he asked for a quarter was on the way to a funeral, or had just been fired and didn't know how he would provide for his family now. And he wouldn't judge people if they didn't believe his need was genuine. I probably wouldn't believe it either, he likely told himself as I strolled away, happy with a pocket full of quarters.

Or maybe he had a phone in his pocket, but he had a pre-paid plan and he was only three minutes away from exceeding it. Any minute now he was expecting a phone call from his son-in-law, telling him that the delivery had gone swimmingly and he was a grandfather! He knew that that phone call would eat up his minutes, so he would be unable to call his drinking buddy, Amos, and tell him the good news. Well, good for him. Bad for Amos, because Amos had picked next week as the baby's due date in the office pool, and that meant he would lose upwards of fifty bucks. Oh, to hear the regret in Amos's voice. What satisfaction! He'd finally get Amos back for the time he lost that Superbowl bet. But how could he hear it if he couldn't call Amos? Hence the quarter.

Then again, the quarter might not have had anything to do with telecommunication. Maybe, like me, he had just eaten a slice or two of pizza. The blind date he was meeting in five minutes around the corner at the bar (just drinks, casual) wouldn't like it too much if he spent two hours breathing garlic breath at her. He found the answer, of course, at a deli two doors down: a gumball machine! Only problem was he only had credit cards on him, no cash at all (why hadn't he gone to the ATM?). He couldn't ask the clerk to change a bill he didn't have. He'd have to beg for money. But he couldn't tell the truth - that would seem weird. He decided a little white lie couldn't hurt. Enter pizza-munching Steve, a man who surely could spare a quarter. Here was a way to turn an evening of garlic words into a night of passion-fruit flavored passion. Except I kept walking.

But probably he wanted money because he was just 25 cents away from a cool fifth of Mad Dog 20/20.

Bear/Pear

A bear met a pear
while lumbering down the road.
He ate it at once.

Tea

Frank finished his tea
even though he was certain
it had been poisoned.

Caffeine

Can you overdose
(I mean overdose and die)
on too much caffeine?

Foreign Food Roundup (3 of 3): McAdventures

Vincent Vega wasn’t just a-whistling Dixie when he expounded upon the virtues of a trip to another country’s McDonald's. But sometimes those little differences at De Gouden Bogen take a back seat to the bigger ones.

I’ll start little and work my way up.

1.

That big fella in the middle there is the NYCrispy, native to Spain. The crispy part comes from fried onion bits in the sandwich, fried onion specks on the bun, fried bacon strips in the sandwich, and tiny fried bacon cubes on the bun. What does the NYCrispy have to do with New York? I have no idea. But it doesn’t matter. Any time you can find a way to double-bacon your sandwich, you get a pass on what you name it. It could have been called the NYCrystalmeth for all I cared.

2.

This is a McFarm. Nestled snugly on a bed of soft bun and under a blanket of lettuce, tomato, onion, and cheese was a delicious patty of...meat. Because I don’t speak Greek (we found this edible mystery in Athens), I don’t know if what I ate was pig, lamb, goat, sheep, cow, chicken, or some unholy combination thereof. But anything goes well with fries (how are McDonald's fries so consistent everywhere?) and Coke, and if I could speak Greek I’d only have asked about the animal out of curiosity. It did what all McDonald's food is supposed to do: fill you with empty sustenance and a mild sense of regret.

3.

Forget retail marijuana and storefront prostitution. What Amsterdam should really start regulating is these crazy deep fried balls. What are they filled with? Sausage and gravy? Cheese and mushrooms? Some sort of snail? No one knows! Actually, I'm sure many people know what's in them. It's not hard to learn. All you have to do is speak or read Dutch. Which I don't. Sigh. That’s what I get for growing up in a giant country where you only need to speak one language.

Spanish.

Adios, amigos!

Foreign Food Roundup (2 of 3): Pulpo

We ordered this to be adventurous. Sort of like a dare. We didn’t expect it to be good. Grilled, the outside is like crispy chicken skin. The inside is firm, kind of like swordfish. I can't believe we ate the whole thing.









Next: McFarm and the NYCrispy