SINGLE

last night i got home, exhausted to the last bone, but could not hit the sack for my life depended on it. life, of course, was a full tummy, and if i threw away all cautions to the wind, my neighboring unit might think i was playing tom tom in the middle of the night with all unknowing that the tribal percussion sound was generated by an empty stomach screaming, feed me!

the good thing is i know how to cook, and i know how to cook the dishes i love to eat. and this is way easy because i love to eat anything, including ice if all else fails.

i played a food game in my mind by imagining the part of the world i was in. key west. hmmm, so, seafood. fish sandwich! i wanted to have fish sandwich!

i opened the ref and searched the kitchen to check the provisions. mayonnaise, check. iceberg lettuce, check. vine-ripe tomatoes, check. tuscan boule, check. what else? hmmm, fish, where's the fish?, incheck, wakanga, no fish.

so i ran to the nearest fish market to find out the freshest fish they've got. as soon as i got in, the thick fillets of king clip caught my attention - they were immaculately white and succulent and fleshy and so, like the fish itself, i was hooked. kingclip also happened to resemble sea bass very closely, and because sea bass was $19.00/lb, there was no fishy way i was going to buy dat!

(q: name a food you will eat when somebody else is paying? a: chilean sea bass!!)

next thing i knew, anlansa ng amoy ng kitchen ko, phew! i deep fried the two fillets in olive oil, put some pepper and salt, nothing fancy, and when it was golden brown i garnished it with some rosemary and rested it on the waiting arms of the newly-toasted ecce panis bread. i opened a bottle of merlot, meridian from california which i got on sale from publix ($5.oo for .750 ml!!) and marched my way to the sala carrying the plate and wine glass to watch my favorite local program on plum tv (miami beach channel) while gorging on fish like your friendly neighborhood cat named gregory feck or something.

then i remembered the song by rufus wainright where he was singing a litany of "i'm a one man guy and a one man show" and people were thinking of him as sick because, after all those years, he was still single. (freude said he was gay, but that's neither here nor there, which kinda sounded befitting.)

the song, somehow, out of the blue, got to me because, well, i was single (and happy, which is synonymous with gay, but i'd rather use happy) and i had my share of hearing from people that i, too, was sick because i was still single after all these years. truth is, i would be really sick if i got married to somebody i did not like a hundred per cent, and the taste of my king clip sandwich would not have been as fully enjoyed if i had to share it with a wife who i had nothing in common except for that miserable king clip sandwich.

let's get a little personal here. when i was in the philippines, i walked out of an engagement because the girl happened to be strongly challenged by diction and kept on pronouncing p as f, love, i-edit mo naman ang term fafer ko flease. At first I thought I was going to tolerate it, but I realized there is such as thing as language strangulation, and before I find myself dead by mispronunciation, I bravely told her, uhrm, er, vreak na tayo.

me, sick? 'scuse me, kingclip sandwich and merlot and plum tv had never been better.