In Praise of Eating Bowls of Cold Leaves, and Other Bewilderments

At first the only way I could think to ennoble the three pics I feature in this nonet of the desultory stash of Salad Ingredients I recently bought at Key Food on Avenue A (every item chosen because Cheapest) was to feature my mother's framed pen & ink Avon Lake Amityville ducks in back of the two salad stuff on bowl & plate pics - sweet little suggestion of narrative perhaps: look! the duckies are waddling toward the chick peas! In a pinch you can always count on my mother's ducks. 

But it needed more. So I interspersed six views of what I hope you'll agree are elegantly kaleidogrammed leaves and their edgy progenitor into the salad stuff's unprepossessing midsts. I mean, they was some relation: they were plants too. Which is what I'm apparently eating these days.

I'm perversely delighted by it all. First off because I'm fascinated by the tenacity of my reflex to reproduce this Long Island ca. 1966 supermarket idea of what Food is. I am forever marked by Bohack's & the A&P & Stop & Shop. But I acquired these bargain salad commodities and am eating them day after day for a much more joyous reason. And it IS joyous. If just as bewildering.

I don't know how it first noticeably happened, although I do know when - when I had gotten over time significantly porky by about 2011 (up to just under 220 or so, which is a lot on me), somehow, with no fanfare or angst or drama, a dial in me switched to LOSE WEIGHT and I proceeded to do so: lose, in fact, 65 pounds in the next not too long a time. This is not a boast. I can't claim any more responsibility for this than I must deduce by my "duh" observation that it apparently happened as the result of my behavior: what I guess is that the full system of response of me decided to act this way. I find, in fact, I'm less & less able (I know I say this a lot) to suss out 'intention' in anything. All I can see is that you do it. Or you do something else. I mean apart from, you know, when you know you gotta Go to the Bathroom & the like - there's 'intention' you can articulate there.

But prevailingly this losing-weight thing is very much the kind of "something else is doing this not me" sense I feel when I draw or - do anything else in my life these days. Somehow, some jittery hand at the Controls in me relaxed and let go of them, and whatever it is that I more largely am began to do what it wanted. And what it apparently wanted in this instance (I deduce, because it happened) was to lose weight. Buttered noodles and "Happy Birthday" Oreo Cookies had begun to parade in ever-greater number & intensity through my kitchen and into me over the past few months - that too was a 'decision' undergone no more consciously than this sudden shift to eating Key Food salad stuff now. There is no wizard behind the curtain. And there's nobody out here I can point to 'deciding' things either. It's much more interesting than that. Of course I might just be wackadoo. Well, we know I'm that.

Whatever, I'm in awe of people (sometimes I think everybody but me) who have clear takes on why they do what they do. So much of this choice business seems to rest simply for people under the tent of Common Sense.

But I don't find any sense common.

I do like bowls of cold leaves though!

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