I have lots of opinions. I know. Big surprise! Many of them are shared right here, in RobZerrvations. Others are far more personal, and yet, far more plentiful. It’s about ordinary, day-to-day stuff mostly, about raising children, updating the house, surviving our workaday world. As I said, pretty mundane stuff and not much to write home about, or at least to write about here.
But I learned yesterday that some of this stuff is actually quite useful, at least to Kat. She is the benefactor/victim of my punditry, depending on whether it is fit for consumption or whether it needs to be aged a bit longer or tossed as being past its use date.
Yes, it’s definitely food for thought. These little nuggets are usually fairly consumable, if of questionable taste at times. An observation here, an anecdote there, sprinkled liberally with asides and at times, even innuendo.
There’s never an attempt to force feed this food for thought. Kat’s her own woman and definitely has a mind of her own. And she has given me plenty of digestible tidbits in return about my own life and parental skills, or should I say, attempts to be parental.
The good stuff is ready right then and there. It’s served completely baked, ready to apply to any situation. Love that when it happens, but I readily admit that it is something of a rarity.
Most of the time it could use a little aging and I can see Kat put it into the refrigerator in her mind, or if it’s not going to spoil any time soon, it must go in her pantry-brain instead.
There it lives until it’s needed, either as a standalone food for thought, or as an ingredient for the bigger picture, one where several foods are tossed together in a mental salad.
These ingredients don’t all come from me, of course. As I said, Kat has a mind of her own and she has lots of stuff in the refrigerbrainer already. Some of that stuff could have been there for years or even decades. Some are probably leftovers; others are probably food for thought she thought needed a bit more aging.
That’s where a lot of my own food for thought goes, into various levels of storage in that brain of hers.
But there are times when something will come out of my mouth and she decides it needs to go right into the microwave because it needs to be used right now. I love those moments, but I can’t help but wonder if I served it up as ready to consume. Maybe it too could use a little more time in the ol’ refrigerbrainer.
Such is food for thought. While I’d like to think that all my pearls of wisdom are useful, I know that some will never go down easily. Sometimes I speak total nonsense, other times, vagaries. Some are ready for the disposal from the get-go.
It’s at these times that I think back to a routine that George Carlin did about the refrigerator and how his wife would ask if he was going to eat something in the fridge or if she should just throw it out. His musing was that he was being asked to have something that was just a step away from becoming garbage. During another part of the routine, he talked about those things in the refrigerator that slowly become something else entirely. Where it used to be a leftover, it has since pulled away from the sides of the container and turned an unsettling shade of blue-green. Instead of throwing it away, he would just put it back in the fridge.
That’s how I feel about my own food for thought sometimes. A lot of it never leaves my own refrigerbrainer. It just gets moved into the back some place where I really don’t have to think about it. Occasionally I happen upon it, and wondered why I ever tucked it away to begin with. It was already pulling away from the sides when I put it in there. No one would want to consume that, no matter how hungry they were for an opinion, anyone’s opinion.
I certainly know Kat has that part of her brain. I give her what I really think is terrific food for thought and it just ends up in the back of her refrigerbrainer. I know it will never see the light of day, so I’m not really sure she took that particular food for thought to heart. Maybe she was just being kind.
No, wait! Kat is never that way. She is a terribly genuine. If it wasn’t fit to consume, she’d just give it back to me and tell me to keep it.
I guess I can’t blame her. I’m sure there’s lots in her refrigerbrainer already. It goes with the territory as we grow older. We only have so much space in there, even if we have one of those swanky models with double doors and a freezer down below. Eventually, the thing fills up and we have to be more careful about the leftovers others give us in the guise of being food for thought.
It can be an acquired taste, to be sure. And a lot of my food for thought has been sitting around for a really long time. Me? I’ve acquired a taste for it. Yes, it’s a little stale and perhaps past its prime, but I can still muscle it down the old gullet, now and again.
As for Kat’s own food for thought? I’ve really found that it agrees with me. It’s always served up with a ton of love and is seasoned generally with a lifetime of experience that is never distasteful. These gems can be few and far between, however, because unlike me, her food for thought is gourmet, cooked to order fare, not the fast food slop I serve up in my own place.
In the Emerald City, getting hungry after writing this,
– Robb