We’ve must’ve had hundreds of these fancy-restaurant lunches and dinners. But with a kid on the way, the last few dates taste more robust in our last-chance savouring. We happily realize that it might be a while before this again.
Of course a lot these dates has to happen in the morning, since we just spent Friday night working in our night shifts. Dates in the morning almost feel like a dream: nice post-work meals with high-noon cocktails (for the soon-to- be-daddy) in near-empty restaurants and no crowds to compete with. I even get to write and read.
This one’s a Japanese-inspired place with a catchy name: John and Yoko.
We started with a seaweed-filled miso soup, especially since seaweed should cover a lot of D.’s calcium requirements. No raw fish or wagyu beef, but definitely a lot of vodka cocktails for Daddy.
I’m comparing the cocktails I ordered and the lychee vodka is a whole world better than the lime vodka. It’s the balanced, fruity sweetness that seem to lick the taste clean without necessarily killing the alcohol. The waitresses who take the orders are wearing skirts that make their assess look shapely as 747 airplanes. The service water washed its hands with cucumber. The music’s very lounge-y, and it matches the cosmopolitan feel that the all-over pink and purple of this place is attempting.
Since we never go out dancing, and D. couldn’t drink, we explore different entertainments. Mommy turns the chopsticks-wrapper into an armband. Origami! And we had a few laughs.
Obviously, nobody reads me because I write for myself. And now, I write for you too, my child. Someday, you will understand, and maybe even appreciate.
After the meal, mommy decides to check out a nice maternity shop around Greenbelt 5. We are not very wealthy. Actually, we are not wealthy at all, but we want to give you the best we can afford.
While Mommy shops, Daddy stays on for another vodka cocktail while reading and writing. “Naked Lunch” by William Borroughs whizzes me away as I glue my eyes on the sick output that is the glorious work of Uncle Bill as a junky. It’s like reading through someone’s vomit, hysteria and delirium which complements the alcohol perfectly. In reading Naked Lunch, and seeing in that frozen moment, what’s at the end of every fork, I understand why some things are written so you never have to go through them yourself.
Like a lot of beat-generation literature, it's an adventurous expansion of experience, the "explosion of consciousness" and to put it in Burroughs' words, the "unlocking of the word hoard." It's going through that unexplored territory, and nearly writing everything as-is, rendering the metaphors and philosophical concepts pure.
Again, in Burroughs' words:
"Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book... Black insect lusts open into vast other-planet landscapes... Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow down to a black turd or a pair of aging cojones...
How-To extended levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall... Doors that only open in Silence..."
Yes it's like how the editor, Davd Ulin, describes this read as "T.S. Eliot on heroin."
I barely would have understood any of it (if I did at all), if not for the afterword, editors’ notes, annexes and introductions that made up half this edition.
Between sips of vodka and these words swimming through my eyes I wandered in a dream logic.
But wow, in the sense that I’m doing my favorite things: reading, writing, dating D., this really is a dream.
Three or four rounds, I’m not even sure. There are no windows but I know its high noon and I’m slightly- drunk-silly now.
I look around. The place is no longer nearly-empty since and some brunch/lunch-going guests have settled on the tables. Across ours, there are four girlfriends on Saturday brunch. I manage to observe them discreetly. They’re in fashionable clothes from a summer collection: beautiful fabric, nice cuts, prints, and colors that make the complicated seem simple. Or perhaps it’s really just skimpy clothing or my slightly-drunk-silliness that makes me imagine they’re the Sex and the City bunch.
In my all-too-vivid-mind, I imagine that they’re talking about me. With hushed gasps of breath they’re saying “What a handsome man with a pa-intellectual effect writing in his little Moleskine notebook.” Now here comes the part of the movie when they all stare at me, the Sex-and-the-City bunch eyeing the hunk, only to see my beautiful, pregnant wife kiss me when she arrives. And they go on talking about why they aren’t married.
Daddy will sober up by the time we do the groceries at the Landmark across Greenbelt 5. (And maybe drink some more later tonight).
