LONG WEEKEND...RED-COOKED BEAN CURD & BEER...

Last night my first-line back-up friends came over for more bean curd. As usual, I made way too much and sent them home with leftovers. But in the time in between they asked questions, I got to tell the whole story of coming out to my big brother, including the great follow-up letter he wrote, and generally let my hair down -- what there is left of it. They had comments on the whole coming-out saga that were good enough to post, but mostly they were refreshingly understanding. How do they do it? One thing it reminds me of:
I have wonderful friends, but not too many of them.

Sue is a nominal vegetarian, which means that she eats chicken and fish but is always trying to give them up. That meant no pork for Red-Cooked Beancurd, which is definitely my favorite dish in the whole world. You start out with ginger, garlic, and hot pepper paste, and it gets even better after that: pork, soy sauce, and scallions to top off the good beginning. It all goes to make the bean curd actually taste like something, which is no mean feat. The real achievement, though, is that you can actually taste all the flavors through the hotness. Now, some of this gets lost when you replace pork with chicken, but most of it doesn't, and I overate shamelessly. I had laid in beer, but of course they brought some, too, and you have to drink their beer first, so I now have about a month's worth of beer on hand, and not much more than a month to go through it...

My daughter has made it possible for me to come close to the prescribed fruit-and-veg guidelines newly issued for those who pay the least attention to the government's ideas on what we should eat, by introducing me to banana-blueberry smoothies. I stole the blender from my former home and have been blueberrying myself silly while the rest of the family was off in Maine. But soon I will have to give it back, and that is going to be a grave moral problem.

Otherwise, aside from overeating, my biggest food problem is not eating things fast enough. Not eating too slowly at a meal, but not emptying out the larder on time. Once I had learned that you could turn the refrigerator on, but not turn it up above its lowest setting unless you wanted it to function as a freezer -- an insight that followed on having to toss many dollars worth of lettuce and veg -- I started stocking things with a vengeance. I guess it's some sort of caveman reflex, the same that sends my wife out into the woods to roll in brambles and come home bloodied but with berries enough for a batch of jam. If you have enough food on the shelves, you're safe. You think. The problem here is that I am basically still buying for a large household, but only eating for one. So far my solution has been to eat more, which will obviously not work in the long haul, or at least, not work to my benefit. As it is, I am fatter than the average bear, and wonder if my temporary introductory membership in the gay community may not get yanked for failure to comply with the mandatory gym minimums.

I have plowed through Possible Side Effects and enjoyed myself immensely, but I really have to learn to stop skimming in books I want to last: it's plain old counter-productive. So now it's on to the Deptford Trilogy, which is great, well-written, even profound -- but definitely lacking in bitch-slapping turns of phrase, self-abasement, and absurd situations, in short, all the things that make reading Augusten Burroughs such a delightful guilty pleasure. There are compensating features, of course: there is a plot, things and people are more than a quarter of an inch deep, but I can't shake the feeling that what I really want is more glossy fluff. And LOTS of it.

I am willing to entertain any book that has made you laugh out loud, so post a comment and nominate some. One of these nights I will watch Ruthless People or something similarly elevating, just to take my mind off its own emptiness.

I called up a friend who used to be a stage manager -- and dope dealer -- for one of the classier summer theaters I worked at, a lifetime ago, and he thought he might actually have a job for me. I have no idea what it pays, but it would be something to get me going in a new city, and I am inclined to take it as long as he is willing to contemplate my throwing him over after a couple of months for some suitor with deeper pockets...

Can this marriage be saved?