Unsure about what to insert in my stomach at breakfast time—very important because it provides an excuse to drink coffee—I ate a big bowl of apple sauce. It takes an act of Congress to make that stuff spoil. It’s basically predigested as is. The trouble with apple sauce, though, is that there is no less filling food. It’s the fruit equivalent of Taco Bell cinnamon twists. (Only 20% fat, according to the website!) Eating apple sauce is like eating more hunger. Though it distracted me for a moment, I’m now at a loss.

Perhaps you’re unconvinced. As evidence of my state, I will tell you briefly of a dream my unconscious spat up last night. As I am somewhat less than an absolute narcissus, I will keep the telling brief. I dreamt that my uptown barbarian friend threw himself a birthday party, laying out $50,000 in cash to entertain his closest hundred or so friends. There is much fun to be had with such a bankroll, you would think, when the unconscious is allowed to run wild. What scenes of lavish, fantastic, mind-altering decadence did my brain come up with?

An open bar. And a long buffet.

In fairness, it was some smorgasbord: 100 yards long, and overflowing with Indian food, Southern breakfast, steaks, fall-off-the-bone chicken and Kansas City ribs. No matter how many people grazed, the chefs refilled it. My brick-fisted buddy was clearly determined to get his money’s worth.

On waking I was as disappointed as Little Nemo to find nothing in my kitchen but questionable eggs. Perhaps it is time to start yelling at my landlord.

The decor, as you might expect from someplace I’m writing about, is negligible. The only chair is in the window display case, in front of a small table covered in flowers—the owner’s idea of what vegetarians eat for lunch. The owner fixes the coffee herself, leaving room, if you like, for milk or cream, which you must find for yourself in the massive fridge that sits beside the front door. She seems to sell nothing but coffee and various things wrapped in filo dough.

(Phyllo? Filo? I don’t know which I prefer. Phyllo is obviously more fun but a bit pretentious. After all, I had to look it up to know how to spell it—it’s not like I have some kind of ancient Greek ancestry that demands I spell Greek things correctly. I’m just an intermittently hungry guy.)

The pastries aren’t bad. Yesterday I purchased an apricot-in-phyllo-or-filo-wrap. The owner asked if I wanted powdered sugar. In a fit of fancydom, I nodded. On taking the first bite, powdered sugar rained down on my pants like cake flour raining down on a pair of long shorts. The sugar was a mistake, but the pastry was not. Flaky, intelligent, dignified—it was all a pastry should hope to be.

Poseidon isn’t astonishing, and that’s the point. It’s a homey place with tasty pastries and a modicum of charm, but if I had my way it wouldn’t be worth remarking on. Were I given the go ahead to remake the city, I would do it in Poseidon’s image. Hole in the wall coffeeshops would line our streets, their lunch counters packed, their greastraps full to overflowing. It’s a shame that I’m writing about Poseidon. If the city’s restaurants had character, I wouldn’t have to.

Nashville boasts a small chain of sandwich shops which gave me much joy in my high school days. I won’t give their name because, well, you’ll see. But before I criticize, let me praise. Actually, before I do anything, let me heat up some Indian leftovers. I’m too hungry to tell this sad, sad tale.

A Few Minutes Pass…

Naan. Yum!

As I was backstorying, I spent many afternoons at one of these three sandwich shops stuffing my face with sammich or soup. At $8 or $9, the place was expensive for Nashville, but as a teen, these eight dollarwiches were revelatory. Piles of meat stacked on fresh bread, adorned with veggie sprig and lively sauce—they mindblew every time. Best of all was the roast beef—O, how pink was that beef!—served with a side of peerless tomato soup. The modern decor suited what was a thoroughly modern meal. It was a cutting edge brunch.

But as they say, you can’t go home again and eat a really good roast beef sandwich. Embarking on a Nashville to Asheville road trip this past week, my thoughts turned to proper road food. Rather than scarf a further Hardee’s cheeseburger—those suck, I had learned a few days earlier—I decided to revisit the sandwich shop of my halcyon days. Attempting to save time, I called in my order—a bizarre operation involving conversation with a woman at a phonebank who demanded my email address so she could send me an order confirmation. Before leaving with the food, I was forced to wait to sign an a contract stipulating that I had requested my roast beef—nullifying the usefulness of ordering ahead but providing a strange window into the Deli of Tomorrow.

No matter. I had sandwich in hand. All was fine until I began to chew. The bread was as fresh as ever, and the sauce just as crisp, but as I sped down I-40 at 80 miles per hour—girlfriend behind the wheel—I felt no fireworks. Love had died. The rose colored beef of my memory was a melancholy brown.

I redact the sandwich shop’s name because I don’t mean to rag on them. They make good food. They sell bread bowls. They have an incredibly complicated system for ordering by phone. All this deserves commendation. But good is all they are. When I was seventeen, they sold the finest sandwiches in the world. Now they are only ordinary. As the first person on earth to suffer this wistfulness, let me say this: roast beef doesn’t keep. Not for three days, and certainly not for ten years.

1. Bagels
2. Donuts
3. Italian heros
4. Polish food

Total cost, with tip: $11

• I need to do my laundry. I have exhausted my supply of t-shirts and normal socks, and for the last week have been wearing fancy shirts and the mismatched pseudostockings that have somehow infested my top drawer.
• I am hungry, and there is little food here.

Until the last year, I was never one for delivered food. I am an intrepid eater, and never minded a stroll if there was a sandwich at the end of it. I would occasionally glom on to someone else’s delivery order so long as they were the one tipping the messenger, and would eat my food with the sly smirk of someone who has saved a few bucks. (Do not try to visualize this—there is nothing as unattractive as a man who smirks with a packed gullet.)

But then someone pointed out that having food brought to one’s house, even with the added gratuity for the poor fellow who carried it, is no more expensive than eating at a restaurant. And after an hour or so’s wait, it becomes very easy to minimize the tip and feel justified doing it. There are no fellow diners to shame one into hewing to the Law of 20 Percent.

What’s more, you don’t have to take off your bathrobe.

The only danger is the delivery minimum. I am not one to spend $15 lightly, and usually eschew appetizers and side dishes when dining out, but sometimes a few extra dollars are needed to make weight, and hunger makes it okay to throw a few extra items on the pile. Suddenly, in addition to your humble burrito, you have also ordered nachos, chicken tortilla soup and a flan sampler—all of which will be cold by the time they reach your greedy mitts—and signed away dozens of dollars just to keep from having to navigate pants.

And this is the beauty of Kam Sing. With a practically non-existent delivery minimum, it is possible to order a Chinese feast for one and have it delivered to your door. This is my scheme. I will take advantage of their bounteous lunch special—$5.50 for all manner of Eastern delights, plus 50¢ for fried rice—to let me spend the whole day indoors and full. To make up the $8 minimum, I’ll add on an order of scallion pancakes, or a pair of egg rolls. If a spirit of adventure strikes me, as it so often does when I am wearing fuzzy pants, I’ll request an order of what Menupages calls “French files.”

The deliveryman I will tip well, as thanks for fighting through the frozen wasteland so that I don’t have to see the sky today. And I will toast the indoors with a steaming cup of wonton soup!

Sheet, n: A most wondrous place for a young man to engage in the above pastime. Works best in pairs, which should be washed at least once every six months, lest they become unsavory, and drive away potential partners with whom to practice the object’s use.

Ah. And there we have two of the loveliest words in the English language. The highlight of my day—of many of the days since a duvet of frost descended on Brooklyn-Town—was performing that verb inside that noun. My room is drafty, making it difficult to perform the Very Important Work That I Do (this week: proofreading reissues of The Boxcar Children), but the steady 55° temperature makes my cave a perfect place to stay in bed. Sleeping in sheets…it’s a wonderful thing to do.

Before nodding off last night, I did as responsible young men often do, and inspected the next day’s weather. The Internet Weather Service promised a “light wintry mix,” and on that I went to bed happy, expecting to rise the next day to a delightful outdoor medley of caroling, presents and assorted nogs. That wintry mix turned out to be an illusion, and I suffered the crushing realization that the Internet had misled me. The weather report in the Times proved to be more accurate:

Today, snow, ice, then rain, some heavy, watch for flooding. High 38.

In other words, hell on ice.

My musings on the loveliness of sleep and sheet at the top of this post were not merely the idle fantasies of a man who misses his bed. Rather, I want to know how it could be that two such ideal words, when combined, make something horrible. I don’t mean sheep—although they are nasty beasts—but sleet.

Neither rain nor snow, but with the negatives of each, it is the meteorological equivalent of stepping out of the bathroom to find an unexpected trickle of withheld piss making its way down your pant leg. I suppose it is the perfection of sleep and sheet that make sleet so unbearable—not just the agony of suffering God’s spit when you could be in bed, hiding from His expectorating presence, but the fact that two perfect parents seldom make a perfect child. Sleet is a rebellious little cad, and no matter how I try to discipline he will not hear. Sleet will redouble his childish fit, feeding off my discomfort.

Sleet beat New York City today. But tomorrow? “dry, windy, high 42.” From the Times, a simple forecast. A springtime forecast. We shall escape this slick trap soon enough, buddies.

There’s a place on Manhattan Avenue—which because it is not on Manhattan is about ten minutes from my apartment—named Peter Pan Donuts. I know I am not the first man to discover this establishment, for if I were they would not have stayed in business long enough for me to wander in, but just as Neil Armstrong’s exploration of the moon was more important than that of the space-vikings who discovered it centuries earlier, I am the most important man to know about Peter Pan.

And that is because right now I really want a donut.

I have never actually bought a donut from the shop, a modest bakery cum coffee-counter with white, bare walls. I stepped into it once last month, drawn by the spectacle of orange and black Halloweeny pastries, but was in too much of a hurry to bear the line. A few days later my roommate, a donut-enthusiast who works not far from the store, ventured out on a Saturday morning and returned with a dozen of Peter’s finest and an eclair, which he ate himself as a reward for nearly getting killed trying to carry donuts and bicycle contemporarily.

They were all impressive, but none more so than the cream filled donut, which is what I intend to buy myself today. Rather than the crusted orb usually marketed as a Boston cream filled, whose over-sugared cream explodes pantside at the first bite, Peter Pan’s creamy concoctions do not disguise their insides. Rather, the cream is smeared on top and into the donut hole in an arrangement that is far more honest, if tawdry-sounding. A single bite does not cause a cream explosion—my, we’re getting quite tawdry here—because the elegant construction allows it to stay put. More importantly, the filling is not too sweet. After gobs and gobs of it, my teeth still did not hurt.

It is a serious donut, and today I am a serious fellow. I am going to a Business Type Meeting, and I require a Business Type Donut. I’ll report back if there are any mishaps.

*** UPDATE ***

According to Google Maps, I’ll be walking .2 miles out of my way for this little  treat. Let’s hope it’s worth it. If nothing else, the .2 miles should take care of donut eating’s supposed ill health effects.

As I write this, my roommate’s cat has climbed into the sink to eyeball a forest of glassware currently drying on a field of paper towels. She wants very badly to jump toward it and, because she is an unaccomplished jumper, slip on the towels and bring the whole thing crashing down upon her. I have work to do today, and work is rarely abetted by broken glass and a bloodied cat. I must move her.

Now, as I was saying—shit, she’s looking at the glasses again. If I don’t put them away I’ll never be able to relax. Damn it. I hate when that cat pushes me around.

Now. AS I WAS SAYING!—Having completed that feline-forced task, my coffee is room temperature and my toast is too cold to butter easily. I’m going to have to tear it apart to get any on there at all. It’s the little things that make life unnavigable.

All right. And so. I was never intending to write a three paragraph dissertation on the hellish difficulty of living with a sneaky cat.

Say—the toast wasn’t as cold as I thought. I just realized, though, that I’m eating the end piece. Oh well.

Those asides weren’t meant to be cute. They simply intruded, unwanted, into my train of thought, which was designed originally to tell the story of how, last week, I broke the sink that THE FUCKING CAT has climbed back into again. Whatever. There’s nothing in there she can break.

Unless, of course, she is as stupid as me.

I was preparing to fix dinner last week—green bean casserole and Greek zucchini fritters—when I noticed that my sink was full. I set upon them quickly, because it was already 7:30, and slowly the sink began to fill with water. I plunged my hand through the opaque dish-slime to clear the drain blindly, but failed. The problem went deeper. There is a chamber underneath the grate but above the actual drain where food has gotten lodged before. I decided to wait until the sink had drained—slowly over the course of the meal—before attempting to clear that space.

As my fritters fritted and green beans casseroled, mess consumed the kitchen. I surrounded myself with dirty dishes until they formed a nearly full circle, making me feel like a greasier, less talented Neil Peart. And still the sink did not drain. Finally more afraid of a messy kitchen than suspicious dishwater, I dipped a screwdriver into the abyss, hoping to remove the drain’s cap, fish out whatever was in there, and let the water flow out.

I succeeded. Sort of. As it happens, what I had imaged as the “drain’s cap” is actually the “strainer body.” From what I understand—and if this post has taught you anything it should be that I understand everything about sinks—by loosening the body I did the same to the locknut, which would not be a problem except that between the two lie the rubber gasket that performs the vital task of making sure that three or four gallons of muck never run out of my sink and on to my floor.

But as the water gushed out, a wonderful thing occurred. No one—not even me—realized it was my fault. My roommate and I squealed like teenagers, rushing for towels and cursing the bastards who installed our sink. All we knew was that it had been broken all night. This new nightmare was only an extension of the old non-draining brokenness.

We spent twelve hours the next day waiting for the plumber, my Neil Peart dish-museum still spread around our living space. With a few turns of the screwdriver he corrected my blunder, and tottered back out into the world.

Even then no one suspected me, but I owned up, too amused by my own stupidity to keep it to myself. I’m just a good guy like that.

Incidentally, we’re looking for someone to house sit our cat over Thanksgiving.

And then, if fortune smiles, a pinkie sized portion of paste spurts out! And like the dust bowl farmer whose humble prayers yield rain, he dances for joy. For another night he will have toothpaste! And tomorrow, he will not forget again. Tomorrow, he will replenish his stock.

Of course, he forgets. And this can go on for weeks.

I have been that man before, and for a week or so last month, I was him again. But for once I recognized the pattern, and the foolishness of my stubborn insistence that there’s got to be more in that fucking tube, and decided to save myself.

I bought more toothpaste at the toothpaste store, and I brought it home in my bag. As always, the trip out of my apartment left me exhausted, and I discharged my burdens in the first convenient place, leaving my bag—Colgate and all—in a pile somewhere in the recesses of my room. Still, there was no risk. When I next needed to brush my teeth, I would simply bring the tube with me.

This is when chaos took over.

On the first night, I forgot about the new tube until I saw the wrinkled mess that my old one had become. Rather than pace unnecessarily the frigid floor of my drafty apartment, I cracked my knuckles and squeezed a little more paste out. It was easy—there was more in that tube—and I went to bed happy.

Repeat above the following night. And the following. And again, for a fourth night in a row. By the end my hands were bloody, my lungs heaving, and all for the effort of scrounging toothpaste when I had a hoard in the next room. All because I couldn’t bear to walk the twenty feet to my bedroom and repeat the dreaded crawl to brush my teeth. For four nights I was more beast than man.

Until finally, on the fifth night, I asserted myself. I pelted the tortuous old tube towards the trash, and marched proudly back to my bedroom, to recover the fresh one. And the toothpaste flowed and flowed, and has ever since.

This one should last me forever.