Eating Pho In Restaurants Alone

Inspired by Tao Lin

Dining alone at Than Brothers on the Ave is a depressing experience. First of all, you're alone. Just you and your food. You're often fine with this, but not when you're eating Pho. It's such a slow food. You have to wait for it to cool before you can really do anything to it, and try and hack away at the mash of noodles that lies on the bottom. Perhaps you stare at your pho a bit and think about where it was from. It's probably drenched in fossil fuels, you think, and Michael Pollan would likely go ape on your ass. Then you think about how you missed the last farmer's market. You listen to the music playing in the restaurant. It's Kiss106.1 and it's that new Rilo Cirey song where she gets very angry about something someone said to her on the set of high school musical. This might make you sad, because it is sad when people in Disney franchises can't even sing songs without getting angry. Perhaps you make your soup murky by adding some hot sauce, and some plum sauce squeezed from a bottle. The plum sauce hangs, distended in the water like a little umbilical cord. A boy across the restaurant looks at you, and you try and make snap judgements about whether or not he's a homosexualist. But you try to do this within the time span of a millisecond because people in Seattle start to think things if you stare at them for too long, and sometimes you want them to think things but usually you don't and today, right now, at this very moment, you definitely don't. A boy outside the window went to school with you. His name is Ryan. He's looking across the street for something or someone, and he seems so happy you want to whip out the word jolly to explain his current expression. Joyful. Radiating with peace and love. You sort of hate Ryan for this, and you also hate that you hate Ryan because oof! sheesh! what a strong emotional reaction to such a nice boy, what are you, some kind of jerk? If anything, the contrast between your emotions and his is quite striking, and you think about how contrasts make for interesting funny stories and it's a shame because you can't think of anything funny to say. You start to eat a spring roll when an urge strikes you to get up and leave the city, run away from all these high school kids you thought you were done with, and its kind of just beginning to rain which is totally unsurprising and absolutely fitting, but it's also kind of sunny and some irritatingly buddhified part of your brain wants to make the analogy that "just like weather, so do our moods change" and you hate this voice, the voice of Pema Chodron, even though you know she's probably right. You get up and pay your bill, which is slightly more because you used your debit card and were to lazy to use the ATM across the street. You leave the restaurant and look for your bus stop, along with the throngs of street kids. The bus takes forever to arrive, so you go inside Buffalo Exchange and lazily look through t-shirts in a way that it's obvious you're not going to actually buy anything and you're just inside because it's just so goddamn cold outside. The guy at the counter is another kid you went to high school with. You ask him "what's up?" and try and make a joke about wanting to sell the clothes you're wearing and he kind of laughs and says he, as a buyer, can't buy clothes from friends. This is a bit of a conversation killer, which is probably a good thing since you didn't really want to talk to him for very long because there's a voice telling you you're not on your "A Game" today. You question this "A Game," and what personality exactly you're waiting for before you decide to talk to someone. You decide you're not going to put any effort into conversations until you've mastered cool detachment, and thus you can't talk to people when you're upset about anything, even a little bit, because that's not cool detachment. You realize that might make you a very lonely guy but you'd rather be lonely than boring, at least today. You finally see your bus outside and decide to run out and meet it. You flash your bus card but the bus driver says "on the way out", meaning you're not supposed to show your bus card until you leave. The bus driver says this in a way that seems so earnest and personable and you wonder how some bus drivers manage to be earnest and personable with people day in and day out and you think about how if you were the bus driver, you'd be too busy wanting to write everything down and you'd probably crash while daydreaming about all the scripts you want to write about your passengers. Then you wonder if that thought was a cliche. Then you pronounce cliches to be insurmountable, and decide you'd rather just write for "Highlights" magazine than be constantly wondering whether or not the ideas inside your head were cliche or not. A woman is standing in front of you. Her backpack lightly hits you in your head and the woman next to you kind of laughs and you feel connected to her. There's a boy picking his nose next to you, and you unconciously start to pick at your nose as well. Not the inside, just the outside. Then you realize what you're doing. Regrettably, you have a short preschool flashback where you're picking your nose and Becca Weedman is making fun of you. You feel shame. A teenage boy nods his head at you and you look away. Not now, you haven't mastered cool detachment. An irritating thought, "This is Seattle" passes through your brain. It's not a birds-eye moment, but its trying to be. You wish you could just have moments without trying to ascribe some kind of significance to them, but it seems unlikely. The bus finally makes it to 65th and 15th; your stop. You get out of the bus. You flash your card the way you're supposed to. It's kinda rainy outside but not too bad anymore. You walk home. You walk up the stairs. You're home