3 fucking avocados
[Day 46: the fuck goes in the title]
There are three fucking avocados on my kitchen countertop.
They’re in this adorable fucking container. It looks like a cardboard blueberry crate but it’s ceramic? You know it. You registered for it at Crate + Barrel too.
I don’t know what kind of avocados they are. (I never know what kind of avocados they are). Small. Ovular. The kind that currently cost $00.88 each at the Sprouts. You know them. You spent ten minutes sweating through your mask as you tried to figure out how unripe to buy them too.
The answer was not the same degree of unripeness. OF COURSE.
The answer was varying stage of unripe so that they would each arrive at a readiness for consumption on different days. OF COURSE.
I’ve lived in California for almost a decade. That’s a Malcolm Gladwell masters in avocados.
And yet there are now three fucking avocados on my kitchen counter - and they’re all ripe at once.
So ripe - according to my minute-to-minute touch-check - that if we don’t eat them within the next 24 hours they will - I can barely even type this - go. to. waste.
And if. they. do… If I fuck up My Quarantine to the point of three discarded food items of the highest food item value. There’s no telling what’s beyond that darkness…
What’s the problem, you’re thinking. Eat them all today. A breakfast, lunch and dinner avocado-fest. You could call it Avo-cardio. Avo-control. Guac-around-the-clock.
(I know. Just let me have my joy)
First, avocados are ingestible pleasure and all pleasure must be spread out among as many days as possible. Last week I made my favorite KIND bar flavor (coconut almond, obviously) span four breakfast bites.
Second - the bigger problem. There are, by my approximation, 53,000 different ways I can eat these avocados-that-must-be-eaten-today, maybe tomorrow before 11am:
-among a pile of nachos
-in a vegan baked good
-on a piece of bread
-over a salad
-throughout a smoothie
-upon a taco
-plus a chip
-with a salad dressing
-off a spoon after I give up, dump salt on them and eat while sobbing into the void
(memorizing the propositions is worth it!)
This doesn’t take into account the varying recipes per style of consumption. Do you know how many “easy dinner tacos” there are on Pinterest? Infinity.
But the real hell is determining how avocado ripeness matches up with vegetable freshness? See we’ve got kale and we’ve got spinach (#covidbrag). My (unreasonable amount of) research indicates that spinach spoils faster than kale so if we go over a salad it should be a spinach salad and not a kale salad. But - surprise! - there’s a half-chunk of goat cheese in the fridge that’s threatening to grow mold. The goat cheese is for a kale and shallot galette that I’ve been dreaming of baking since I decided I bake (Day 37). So if I go avo + spinach I might be sacrificing kale + goat.
Next come the breads and their varying degrees of staleness. Then the meats and how long they’ve each been in the freezer. And I’ll stop here before I start mapping this out on the front of my fridge, full BEAUTIFUL MIND style. I don’t have string, but I can use the gray hairs I’ve grown since I started writing this post.
But what will really happen if the avocados go bad?
That’s not you talking, it’s my therapist in my head. One of her many skills is asking me the question that leads to the truth that’s buried under myself. Or in this case under My Quarantine.
What do I think will happen? And how do I figure that out?
I write these posts in real-time thought - like - I guess - exercise classes for my psyche? Just now I did one of my signature moves: the scroll from the top to try to get to the bottom of it. It’s painful. Like burpees painful. But it usually leads to some kind of breakthrough. Like I-think-I-have-a-visible-ab breakthrough.
Aahh. Found it.
Ouch.
If I fuck up My Quarantine to the point of three discarded food items of the highest food item value. There’s no telling what’s beyond that darkness…
I think this means spoiled food = failure. I know failure (for me) = loss of control. And right now any (additional) loss of control = (additional) fear.
Which probably means my three fucking avocados aren’t really three fucking avocados.
They’re three fucking metaphors.
Well that makes them far less appetizing.
In fact, I think I’d prefer if R just ate them all.
So. (Very bizarre) mission accomplished?
Honestly, avo-fucking-know…
