The Different People Who Feed Me the Same Thing Over and Over Again, Day In and Day Out
by Ian F. King
I buy my breakfast every weekday morning from one of three different sidewalk carts between the subway station and the office where I work in Midtown. I get different things from each one, but all of them know exactly what I’m going to ask for. Perhaps needless to say, I’ve been at the same job for some time now. They all stopped asking what I’m having a long time ago, and 
all of them start putting my order together at the mere sight of me walking up the sidewalk towards them. Whenever I skip a day at the stand where I get the sesame bagel, the friendly man who took it over from another equally friendly man a couple months back always reminds me that he didn’t see me the day before, in a voice that always strikes a chord of half concern, half accusation. Two years ago when the girlfriend I was living with at the time was breaking up with me, she cited the fact that I would sometimes go on a ramble about my bagel guy as something I did that was frustratingly boring. Two years ago, it was a totally different bagel guy.
Two months ago I woke up on a Monday morning feeling indefinably polluted mentally and physically. I decided the only way to handle it was to purify my diet as much as was reasonable. For three days in a row, I ate the same chicken soup for lunch, and the same pint of steamed white rice for dinner. The idea of eating just rice came from an old friend I had seen back in Seattle months before, a wisp of a girl, who claimed that nearly everything she consumed upset her, and mostly ate white rice. The guy at the Chinese take-out place two blocks from my apartment now also calls my order to the kitchen at the sight of me walking through the front door, because I’ve continued to have a pint of steamed rice for dinner two to three nights a week since then, like I did tonight. I bring the same little red and white cardboard container home, and pour enough sodium-laden soy sauce on the rice to give myself an early heart condition, and enough hot sauce on it to burn the entire inside of my mouth half-way through finishing, which helps me forget that it’s not actually a filling dinner.
Sometimes when I’m coming home very late at night on the weekends—and by that, I mean very early in the morning—and I’m tired and desperate for something solid in my system, I stop by the twenty-four hour deli a block up the street from the subway stop. I don’t always get the same thing, but more often than not, flying on autopilot, it’s easier to give the order I’m most familiar with than to worry about whether variety is truly the spice of life. The young guy behind the counter always shows me patience, and I try my best not to ever test it. Two weekends ago, after a night that included a big meal with some friends, I was lurching home up the block and crossed the street towards the deli. The guy was outside smoking and talking to someone, but when I got halfway across the road he tossed his half-finished cigarette to the ground and went back inside the deli, right before I turned left to head towards my apartment.
