In the mean time, follow me on Twittah for regular dietary updates, and be aware of the fact that that chicken salad sandwich I just tried to eat? I don’t think it was good any more. Yucksy.

1. Assume I will never need food again
2. Eat something anyway, accepting my mild headache as evidence that my body wants sustenance

I will follow the second path, but it is not selfishness that guides me thus. If my hunger disappeared forever, my recent long absences from your sight would become permanent, casting the Internet into a horrible darkness that would make the basement of The Strand seem a paradise in comparison. Have no fear, though, loyal readers! I would never condemn you to such a fate. Even if I had my stomach surgically removed, or stolen by marauders, I would invent meals to tell you of, a careful ruse to keep your faith in humanity from slipping into the mire. (Though for all you know, this has already happened. For all you know, I’ve never eaten at all! For all you know, there’s no such thing as meals!)

Tonight, on my way to class, I’ll visit Le Basket, a deli on 3rd and Broadway that last year served as a haven for myself and a gaggle of writing students brought together by the pleasure of drinking beer outside. Their patio tables, shielded from the city’s law enforcement by an impenetrable force field, allowed us to sit, eat, drink, smoke and (within reason) cavort. For months, in all types of weather, $2 beers were shotgunned and swilled, Dan Akroyd vodka was drunk straight from the bottle, and the NYPD stared on, helpless. Also, we wrote a lot of unpleasant stuff on the bathrooms.

Sometime in the fall, though, the outside tables disappeared, taken away by the owners’ reluctance or inability to renew whatever magical license let us daydrink on Broadway. Whenever asked, the manager promised the tables would be back in “a few weeks, a few weeks,” but that was six months ago and the promise remains unfulfilled. There are tables inside, but if you can’t stare at passing weirdos, where is the fun?

Despite all that heartbreak, they still make pretty good sandwiches. When I leave you, I’ll skip over to 3rd Street and pick up (I think) pastrami on a kaiser. (Inspired by a viewing last night of Comedy Central favorite Delirious, which is currently on Hulu. Apparently it’s the quickest way to acquire the beefy physique of John Candy.) I hope it’s as good as drinking outdoors.

The trouble with writing is that one often has to reread one’s own work. Wading through a self-made linguistic swamp is bad enough, but when the monologues are awash in adjectives like “golden-brown” and “crispy,” and the dialogue mostly concerns smoking hot oil and dumptrucks of cayenne pepper, it sets my stomach off. This is dangerous. It’s hard enough to write this blog while I’m hungry (indeed, that’s why it’s been quiet lately—I’ve been hungry all the time), but to produce a thing as long and theoretically not-sucky as a full play, a full stomach is necessary.

To combat those cravings, I broke out my Wesson oil, infrared thermometer and the fancy fried food drying basket I bought myself for Christmas. (It ensures a crispy crunchy crisp!) But I was frankly too fucking tired to fry chicken. It’s not just the mess and not just the forty some odd minutes standing around getting splattered by hot oil—it’s the concentration. I simply didn’t have it in me to spend all day figuring out what went wrong last time and how I was going to do it right this time. I didn’t want to dump a whole bottle of Tabasco into a bowl and pray that the meat would get the message. I didn’t want to stress; I wanted to eat.

So I fried catfish. You ever fry catfish? It’s easy. Little egg, little corn meal, and about six minutes in the pan. And then you’re eating catfish! I had leftover evil-spice-rub from my last chickening, which I dug out of the fridge to slather over the whitefish. It was hot enough that I got the hiccoughs, the fish was good, and if it hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have mattered.

But the wonderful thing about fried fish, man, is leftovers. And no bones. A left over fish filet, with zero bones in it, is halfway to a sandwich. So yesterday afternoon, in the spirit of laziness, I rummaged in my fridge for things that look like they could go into my no-bones fish sandwich.

Cheese? Fresh out. Lettuce? Nothing. Tomatoes? Nope.

I found mayo, the evil-spice-rub, and a red onion. Piled it on rye toast, which is not exactly po’ boy grade, and chawed through it while catching up on Caprica (a show which, I’m happy to report, took its third episode as an opportunity to stop being lame). The combination of sweet onion and spicy rub cut through the fishy-fishiness that usually makes fried fish sandwiches impossible to finish. It didn’t taste fishy—it was just good.

An evening of catfish-frying was just that, an evening. Not a whole day. Cooking took a half hour, yielding useful leftovers and no mess. Afterwards I was not full to sleepiness. In every way it was a simpler, cleaner, more sensible process than killing myself to cook hot chicken.

But I’m not writing a play about catfish.

“Chicken salad on toast,” I said, and grunted when Mr. Deli Man asked, “White?” But then I changed my mind, and called out, “No! Wheat!” He gave me a look like I’d…well, actually, he didn’t react at all, but I could see shock squirt out of his pores. I waited, thrilled but fearful, while the little brown squares made their journey through to toast-box.

While I quaked, I was unsurprised to hear the two people in line behind me echo my demand for chicken salad—on rye and an everything bagel, respectively. The chicken salad at Shine is not just tasty but well constructed—a complex blend of flavors rather than one mayonnaisey  mush. It is also fresh—crucial, since fresh ingredients allow for that play of flavors and keep me from vomiting them up afterwards.

They also pile the chicken on high, making each sandwich a defiant rebuke to the hegemony of sliced meat. Too often are cold sandwiches, especially those made from prepared spreads, an afterthought, but Shine’s howl: “We are real sandwiches too!”

I could tell that everyone in line behind me was thinking this too. They looked excited, and so was I. On getting back to the office I found my wheat toast cut into triangles—hooray!—and bursting with wheaty flavor. (Note: this is the best kind of flavor.) I had asked for wheat, I realize now, from fear of filling my body with more of the empty nutrients it has relied on lately (dinner’s first course last night was 1/4 of an apple pie), and my gamble paid off. Thanks to Shine deli—and the deactivated elevators that yesterday forced me to climb seven flights to class—I feel healthier than I have in weeks.

Also, they gave me cole slaw. It looks terrible.

[bites]

It’s only mediocre!

[chews]

No, it’s terrible.

Loathsome.

I came to wakefulness with a start at around 5:30 AM—two hours ago—in a fevered state apparently brought on by unremembered unpleasant dreams. It was a relief to berobe myself, drink a glass of water, and pad to and from the bathroom. But when my head again touched pillow I was best by the thousand niggling tasks which are the treasured prize of any modern city dweller. They were not simple worries, either. Nothing in the way of, “I must clean the kitchen,” or “I must remember to deal with my laundry” (although on thinking those things, I must remember to add them to the pile), no. My brain was galloping across a dry barren steppe of irritation and anxiety, looking for every possible detail with which to confound its owner.

Highlights included:

• Fear of joblessness
• Fear of homelessness
• Fear of hairlessness
• Fear of drought

And a thousand other nodes of annoyance so precise, so unimportant, that I struggle to recall them.

After an hour reading and another hour thrashing—to the great delight of the warm, sleepy lady who is so kind as to put up with my long Sunday nights—I realized this half-madness was probably due less to innate personal defects (which are, in the cool light of morning, impossible) than to the shambles my diet has fallen into of late.

It’s something of a negative feedback loop. I am too busy to eat well, and so I eat poorly. When the time comes to sit down and work, I feel lousy, and am ineffective. A good meal would set me right again, but I am too busy to eat well. And so on.

I would have gotten out of bed sooner had I not been afraid of confronting my cupboard. In the last weeks I’ve been too lazy to go to the grocery store, and have run out of bread, meat, cheese, cereal and soup. I’m nearly out of coffee. Lying there, head digging into the pillow, I carried out a mental inventory, and found I owned the following:

• 1/2 cup oatmeal
• 1 egg

And so I turned it into breakfast. Quaker Oats with an over medium egg on top, and my stomach has been set right. A little aspirin should see that my head follows. I’m hoping that this will be enough to keep me full for the rest of the week, but if that doesn’t happen I’m going to need to get my ass into gear. I’m going to need to go shopping.

In the past I have been impressed by the wildlife of Madison Square. Just a few moments earlier, sitting on a bench, a squirrel happened by. “Hello Squirrel,” I intoned. “Say hello to the other squirrels for me.”

(That’s not a joke. I actually did that. I was very hungry, and it seemed important to keep myself amused. I then watched it fall into a trashcan.)

But the birds of the park have proven even more compelling than their earthbound cousins. On my first day at this internship, strolling through the sands of the Square, I noticed some fellow lunchers staring into space. There were too many of them for the whole group to be crazy, so I took the time to tilt back my head. On a higher branch of one of the taller trees—a hawk! (I knew it to be a hawk because one of the people standing next to me said, “I think that’s a hawk.” He seemed very well informed, and so I trust him.) He was perched next to a squirrel, whom I wanted him to kill and eat. He did not, but I took his appearance as a good omen for my time in this office.

And then another time, I saw another bird—not a pigeon!—and it was pretty, with nice colored plumage and other such bird qualities. I cannot speak more eloquently—I am clearly no ornithologist. (Or birdothologist, as they are known in layman’s terms.)

So, back to the recent past. You will recall I was sitting by Shake Shack, greasy burger in hand, when I was set upon by a pigeon! (That’s the part from earlier.) It swooped in laterally, attempting to grab my greasy bun with its fowl talons, then leapt back to the chair from whence it came. I was baffled and humiliated, and the man at the next table had seen it all. He leered. I kicked the chair the bird was on, and it flew away.

I ate the burger anyway—I was so excited about it!—and in retrospect, that may not have been the right idea. I don’t know if the bird actually touched my sandwich, but if it did, are pigeons not airborne agents of germ warfare? I fear that birdiseases are already creeping into my intestines—the more I think about it, the more I can feel them squiggling around in there—and that soon I shall either be dead or converted into some kind of bird superhero.

And not Hawkman or that Nite Owl fellow from Watchmen—I’ll be a pigeon superhero. Blessed with the power to eat discarded pretzels! To hang around on statues! To die on the sidewalk and gross out pedestrians! My only weakness? Being chased around by children. These are dark days ahead, blessed readers.

Oh, and the other interesting things I saw?

1. A delivery van crunched into the driver’s side of an Acura.
2. A three foot piece of particle board floated three stories above 20th Street, battered about by unforgiving wind.

Pigeon Man could have saved it. But he didn’t want to.

It emerges ready-to-eat from the translucent pocket of slippery paper, a different, less stable approach than pedestrian sandwiches, which tend to lie prone, their bread horizontal to the plate. Scornful of gravity, the Shake Shack burger stands on end. It is a vertical lunch, and one meant to be consumed standing, or walking across the sands of Madison Square.

Like a birthday boy who’s had too many free shots, the Shake Shack burger is an embarrassing mess. But when it tells you it loves you, even if it’s slurring, it means it.

For all its haphazard glory, the burger is really just an improvement on the fast food standard, and as such demands no special treatment. The price reflects that—$4.25—even if the wait time does not. To eat Shake Shack in summertime is to massacre your afternoon, to sacrifice prime warm hours so that you can visit an awesome, endless line, where office workers huddle, body-warmth lost to hunger, and shiver in the skyscraper shade. It’s a tourist attraction. It should be in guide books.

But in Winter, though the weather’s worse, the line is manageable. Today—high of 35°—only 15 minutes passed from when I approached to shack to when I was able, gleeful, to fill my maw with meat. 15 minutes and $4.25 for a few hours of grease settling in my stomach. In June, I don’t think it’s worth it. But in January it should keep me warm all day.

I reported in my Twitter yesterday that the new office has, instead of an oldfangled coffee pot, one of those newfangled pod eating contraptions, which accepts a plastic “K Cup” and, in return (to steal from D.A.), dispenses a concoction which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. (Or coffee.) In looking back on the many internships I have held over the years, I am struck by two regrets. First that I have spent so much time working for free, and second that so much of my wasted energy was powered by K Cup or FlavoPod.

No matter. These are not serious regrets—merely the typical musings of one methodically wasting his youth—and they should be put out of mind. I am today in a new office, with new opportunities for goldbricking, and lovely new people before whom I can contort in an attempt to elicit applause.

There is also new caffeine, and this time, I have options. Beside the “K Cup” contraption I discovered a box of Lipton’s tea bags. Plain, reliable, slightly burnt tasting Lipton’s—the most widely sold tea on the planet.

So what’s better? K Cup Earl Grey, or that pathetic old work horse, the tea bag? I have a cup of each to my right, and they both have points. The Lipton’s is hotter, stronger, even burly. It might tolerate a splash of milk if I had the patience to wait in the break room while the bag hangs out in the cup. But at the back of each sip is the familiar bite, which reminds me of airplanes because that is the only time I ever drink it. What’s soothing in the trauma of the air does not necessarily work in the comparative comfort of the ground.

The K Cup Earl Grey is better than one might think. I’ve often found that, confronted by pod machines, it’s best to ignore the fearsome supposition that a single gizmo can produce tea and coffee. As teas go, Earl Grey is a lightweight—the lone flavored tea that can be considered at all respectable—so to run it through such a clumsy, stupid device is only so heinous an act. The bouquet characteristic of the brew—an oil called bergamot—is present in the K Cup variety, and if one doesn’t think to hard, it’s easy to pretend that the beverage is enjoyable. But the “tea,” or whatever you want to call it, has no body. It slides down the tongue and out of the memory, leaving a dry tongue and mildly irritated stomach. If this is the best machine brewed tea can get, I feel very bad indeed for the good Captain Picard:

So which is better? The Lipton, with a bit of milk, might be just the ticket for a tired three o’clock in the office. But the milk is all the way in the kitchen, and I have two rapidly cooling cups—one strong and bitter, one flavorful and weak. Let’s see how they mix.

[splash!]

Huh! A surprise! Together, they are much worse than they were apart. Every good quality seems to have vanished mid-pour. Combined, they taste like lukewarm shower water. Oh well, we’ll try again tomorrow.

More to come sometime around, well, lunch time. For now, I’ll work on this bagel I imported from Park Slope.