Wherein I play with my Food, because there was no one to pinch my ear lobe...

Pinching my ear lobe was my mom's favorite punishment. What E.R. doctor checks the ear lobes for signs of abuse? So I was quickly trained to not play with my food. Of course, like all of you, it was one of my heart's desires. While I had to sit and dolefully eat my crab cakes, I could only imagine the fun the rest of you were having with them... It turned my meals into gall and wormwood, figuratively speaking. It was only the Wednesday T-bone steak cookouts that gave me any relief: I was allowed to gnaw the bone (as in gnawledge, as in telling a woman I wanted to get to gnow her, so I could say I gnew her when...). Gnawing the Bone should have become part of the psycho-sexual vocabulary long ago, but alas, the phrase just never caught on.

So there I was last night, alone at dinner time, in Huntington Park, south and east of downtown Los Angeles. The town is 137% Latino, when you factor in the number of illegals aliens, or as they are referred to in the popular press, undocumented Americans of illegal heritage, which in verbal shorthand is Illegal-Americans.

I'd already hit the snooze button on my body's alarm clock a couple of times, because I was taking my time, looking for just the right place to stop and eat. I thought it would have been too outré to avail myself of Mexican food in the heart of a Mexican Barrio, so that limited me. Subway seemed to be an over-reaction in the other direction. Yoshinoya would have been okay as would have KFC. But I finally settled on King's Buffet, at Florence and Pacific. A Chinese run, all you can eat buffet featuring Asian food, with a bit of an emphasis on sushi. Plus it had the delightful added benefit of a Spanish-language tele-novela playing on multiple big screens, with nothing but Latinos in the place, of which the female portion's eyes were all glued to the closest flat screen. It was a weird bit of Americana.

Apparently Latinos don't tip all that well because my waitress wanted to come home with me when I tipped her 20%.

All I had was sushi, some fruit and three big glasses of Diet Coke™. And since I had time on my hands, along with all the food I could possibly eat, I took my time and played with my food. I kept looking over my shoulder... It's sad what a life time of conditioning does to a person's spontaneity.