The first place I remember eating potatoes was in the McDonald’s located at 20 S Martin Luther King Blvd, in Hamilton, OH. This isn’t the first place I ate potatoes, but I can’t go on a digression in the second fucking sentence of my review, I’ll get to that later. The potatoes were in the form of french fries (big surprise) and I would dip them in the ice cream from my ice cream cone. I remember the way the cold and warm would mix with each other, and how the salty and sweet would mix with each other, to make what I considered at age probably 4-6 a delectable treat.
At some point around the same age, I remember eating french fried potatoes (as Groucho Marx would call them) from Wendy’s, and having some sort of a bad experience with them. Maybe they were cold, or maybe they were soggy, but I decided never to eat them again. When I was a kid, I got very scared of eating something if I ever had a bad experience with it, and I didn’t have a good understanding of why some food was frequently so unpleasant that it would make me gag, immediately and viscerally spit it up, or feel like I was going to vomit. Thenceforth, it was McDonald’s or bust, for me.
The chronological first story I’ve heard about me eating potatoes is a story my mom told me in a mall a few months ago, when I asked her for information about my lifelong dietary issues. She said that she had asked many people for advice, and looked into parenting books, and such similar ideas, and many of them espoused the general idea of “you gotta feed it to your kid until it gets used to it.” She said this idea did not hold up very well for me. She said when I was an infant, she tried feeding me things babies like, like sweet potatoes, or applesauce or something, and I would just throw all of it up. Eventually, I wouldn’t even open my mouth for it, reportedly. The only thing she said she could get me to eat was peas, which apparently all her other children hated. So I guess the potatoes started working out later in my life.
This is where the chronological shape of what I’ve been creating here sort of falls apart, because all my potato memories from that point forward are rather scattered. I’m just going to describe some of them.
When I first started ingesting cannabis alone, by way of an oil cart connected to a 510 thread battery that I had been semi-carefully instructed on how to purchase from a smoke shop, I found myself feeling rather dazed and hungry. I had made my purchase from a very nice girl who helped me through the entire process, and with whom I felt a very strong connection, and against whom I very badly wanted to make some sort of attempt to maintain our connection, however not long after this interaction, the age of legal purchase was raised to 21, and I could no longer purchase a replacement if mine broke, or legally enter that now-for-me-erstwhile place of business. My roommate at the time would frequently order delivery from a nearby Rally’s, and I would ask him to just get me the Fry Lover’s (sic) XL size, and a large Pibb Xtra, out of which I would then use a spoon to dig out the ice, as there wasn’t an option on the delivery app to get No Ice. I would destroy every last french fry, no matter how dry my throat was, and I would watch Trailer Park Boys on a Netflix account for which I did not pay. He never took me up on an offer to pay for the food, probably because he was very in love with me. I was freshly minted into adulthood. I genuinely can not remember how I felt about my life at that time.
When I was 16, I would ask my mom to drop me off at the newish mall near our house, where a sort of new, hip, yuppie burger restaurant had opened, which had a variety of toppings for “flavored” french fries that all cost like $3-5 more than the default variety, which was a massive plate but cost somewhere around S6, and was half price during Happy Hour, which was between 3:00 PM and 6:00 PM. My mom would drop me off, and I would loiter there, reading books in one of their booths, for as long as I was physically allowed. They had good water. It tasted clean. Sometimes I would order a regionally-sourced root beer. Sometimes I would go there with my ex-best-friend, to get away from home, and to get us both something to eat somewhere I could afford, and somewhere to be. Sometimes we would read books together, there. We both looked like teenaged boys, at the time, even if we both look like girls now, and one time I ordered a root beer float and the waitress asked if we wanted two straws. We laughed about it a lot. I don’t know why we brought it up so much, at the time. I think we acted like it was very strange. We kissed very often, and would sleep in the same bed. We don’t talk anymore.
For years, due to my issues with consuming almost any sort of food that’s ever been invented, potatoes of a french fried variety have been a mainstay of my diet in social situations. It’s not unusual for me to be in a Mexican restaurant and order french fries that I know will be mediocre, simply because I know I’ll be able to eat them.
At some point, I tried mashed potatoes, and almost threw up. I tell people now that when I eat something, I need to be able to chew it with my teeth, at least a little bit.
A long time ago, in Amelia, Ohio, I witnessed my then-friend and later-romantic-life-partner Otkaz Hively order french fries from McDonald’s, remove everything from the bag, dump the french fries into the bag, open multiple packets of salt, dump the packets of salt into the bag, close the opening of the bag by twisting it, and then shake the bag vigorously, to distribute the salt. It then offered the french fries to me, to try. I ate them. They were the saltiest french fries I had ever eaten. It burned. It hurt the roof of my mouth. I loved it. To this day, I use the same method to distribute salt (and pepper) on french fries that I get from fast food joints. To this day, it’s the only other person I know who puts their own salt (or pepper) onto french fries that have been ordered from a restaurant. I do it regularly, now. I remember it, every time.
A few weeks ago, I found myself in a position in which I’ve found myself many times, which is to say, at the home of some people I met relatively recently and wanted very badly to make a good impression on, and, unfortunately enough, at dinnertime. I have spent an incredible many of my precious hours on this earth explaining my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual inhibitions around eating. It got pretty boring sometime around age 3. I try to be open with it, despite the possibility that any time I try a new food (or sometimes an old food), I’ll have such an unpleasant physical reaction that I’ll be forced to exit whatever room I was previously comfortably occupying. So when my new friend, whom I thought was incredibly beautiful, offered me some of a baked potato, I rather swiftly agreed to try it, despite some digestive inhibitions, and despite the inside of the potato historically being my least favorite part of the potato, with its softness and mushiness, neither of which I find to be particularly desirable qualities in a foodstuff. I, as I am approximately once for every 30 foods I try, was pleasantly surprised by the quality of this so-called “baked potato,” and took it upon myself to eat the entire vegetable, and to follow up with a second one! I’m sure my friend was stunned by the vigor and force with which I devoured these exotic victuals, which tasted pleasantly of large amounts of salt. I almost brought one of my other friends to laughing tears by repeatedly asking for “baked potato recipes” and saying things like, “so how do you make a baked potato?” in a strange voice.
I sit here and write this in clear view of Ground Zero for my baked potato genesis. I have returned here, and had a pleasant dinner, during which I ate an inimitable 4 full baked potatoes. I don’t know how I got so many in my body. They were very good. I’ve made potato wedges and baked potatoes for myself a few times at home, since I tried that baked potato here and found it so pleasant, but I haven’t been able to quite replicate some of its internal qualities. Well, back to the drawing board, for me, and for nature’s brownest starch.
Here are some stories you can imagine because I did not write about them