My dinner with nobody

As I said downthread, through circumstances mostly outside of my control, I am currently homeless, and find myself surfing some of the finer couches and davenports in the Sacramento area. Fortunately, I landed that most choice of couch surfer gigs, the house sitting arrangement, through the weekend. Ah, the life of O'Reilly is mine. Time to go to the local supermarket and pick up some most excellent microwavable Dinty Moore, as in beef stew. Don't all bums just love that hot steaming mug of beef stew? I sure do.

Last night, I was in one of those funks you find yourself in when you've just sat in an AA meeting for an hour listening mostly to people whose problems are pretty mundane, and you'd neglected to eat din-din between the end of work and the beginning of the meeting, so by the time the meeting was over, when you hop in your car and start driving around, you hope the right dinner will occur to you. Jimboy's? Nah. Willie's? Double nah. Especially when your stomach feels all jinky from ongoing marital discord, or ongoing end-of-marriage discord, and you're sleeping on couches and wearing clothes permeated with the accumulated funk of several days, and you have that vaguely "Is this the onset of like the flu, or is it just that I've suddenly gone from living comfortably in a house for years to begging friends for a spot on their couches and my stomach is kinda gnarly?"-style rough patch that we of the hobo profession sometimes get.

I drove around past Taco Bell and some of this burg's other stellar drive-thru Ralston Purina outlets and ended up on Stockton Boulevard at Pho King 3, which turned out to be pho king awesome (sorry, never can resist a bad pho-related pun) as it was the first time I went, which was Christmas night with my now-estranged wife. In retrospect, she seemed kind of estranged then, too, but that's neither here nor there.

As for me last night, I wondered if I was some kind of raging sentimentalist for going there. Yeah, I am, kinda, but not really last night; I just needed a hearty bowl of soup, and Edokko on Broadway with its infamous Stamina Ramen, which would kill any virus or bacteria (but make your sweat smell like the loo in a Korean restaurant, which could incite homicide from whoever your're sleeping with, so its beneficial effects were somewhat negligible) is no longer there.

The pho was even better this time than it was at Christmas. To the broth, which was swirling with complex and enticing flavors, and the pieces of beef and thin, clear noodles, I added fresh basil leaves, chili peppers, mung bean sprouts, squeezes of lime, and squirts of plum and chili sauce. Then, the ritual of eating. Man, if you want something that will pull you right out of a bad funk, this pho will do the trick.

Not having a dinner companion kinda sucked, but that's the life of a solitary man, as I've already given up the idea of turning into some kind of ladies' ninja or middle-aged babe magnet (if you saw me with my Shaggy from Scooby Doo haircut and snaggle teeth and shambling Viking in the woodshed hillbilly lurch, you'd know what I was talking about). So next time, I'll bring a good magazine. And next time will be real soon.

Pho yeah.