RACE WITH THE DEVIL, AND CHICKEN WINGS

A couple years ago, I was living with my brother in Cambridge, MA. I had just started using a cane. This had been a big step for me, the cane. Weeks before, when the time had come for me to get one (read: when my friend Jay kindly bought me one) I had chosen one of those four-pronged stroke canes (I just asked the internet and google told me it was a "Quad Cane"), as it looked more stable. Otherwise it didn't look very good -- people with broken ankles, or under 100 years old, don't use stroke canes. It's the equivalent of a walker with tennis balls instead of wheels. The thing screams "handicapped and probably in some kind of assisted living" -- but my friend Lila painted it gold so it looked kind of cool. This was back when I still cared about my appearance.

Anyway, I was walking back from Central Sq. in the daytime and an elderly couple and I entered a crosswalk at the same time. These were old people: white hair, shuffling. You know how when you're in a crosswalk with old people, or anyone really, you decide that you need to pass them so as to avoid being stuck behind them on the other side, or any awkwardness as you go in separate directions? I have always done this, we all do, it takes one second. So I picked up the pace and started to pass them. I noticed that I wasn't passing the old guy. Then I realized we had the same idea, and HE was trying to pass ME. Then I realized we were RACING! We were racing, and I was losing! I was losing a crosswalk race to an old dude!

I let them go ahead of me and luckily they peeled off and went to a parked car before there was any uncomfortable shuffle-dancing at the curb. It wasn't til later that I realized I had raced with, and lost said race to, a guy like 30-plus years my senior.

Another funny thing happened in a bar, here in San Francisco where I live. For some stupid reason I got chicken wings. Pretty much everyone I know has heard me describe eating as like something out of a Jerry Lewis movie. There's a lot of flailing, the spoonful of food falling back into the bowl literally a centimeter from my mouth multiple times, somehow getting pasta on my eyebrows  -- all kinds of slapstick comedy -- so fighting with bone-in chicken wings in public is NOT gonna go well. But I got them for some reason. I did my best to not make a scene, luckily the pretty girl next to me had her back turned and I basically only had a carpet of chicken skin and meat within my personal space. But once, as -- horror of horrors -- I watched a pretty big chunk of chicken meat fly through the air and bounce off her back, I got the idea that it'd be a pretty funny scene in a movie if I was sitting at a bar, struggling with the wings and talking to my friend when the camera angle slowly widens to reveal the girl next to me and the back of her pricey sweater is just carpeted in wing-detritus -- skin, meat, bones -- but none of us are aware of it, with the attendant double- or spit-take when I DO notice it. I think this'd be goddamn funny.