Thanksgiving salmon - Thursday November 23 2000    

I slept, etc., until nearly noon. Like most days in Los Angeles, it was a beautiful day for Thanksgiving. My housemate John and I had plans to do our feasting over at his sister Maria's apartment, which is less than a mile to the east on Rochester Ave. Being that it was such a nice day, we decided to walk. First we went up to Ralph's to get a bottle of wine and another of whiskey. I'm not used to stores being open on Thanksgiving day, and apparently Ralph's was one of the few that was. It was mayhem, of course, but by the standards of mayhems I have known, it was not all that bad.
Because John is a fish-eating vegetarian, Maria was preparing salmon steaks and sweet potatoes. She was in full-on mom mode and wanted to do all the cooking and place-setting herself and leave us to sip wine and nibble on bread and caper sauce before the meal. "What is a caper?" I asked, and no one seemed to know. Maria looked at the label on the caper container and all it said was that it contained "capers."
John and Maria have an entertaining brother-sister relationship. They're obviously very close, yet his part of their dialogues consist almost entirely of jokes (some of them familial in-jokes) strung together relentlessly toe-to-heel. Meanwhile she plays the role of comedic straight person, occasionally tossing out the odd sarcastic retort.
Ours wasn't, it turned out, a huge feast by the standards of Thanksgivings I have known, but it completely erased my hunger.
After we were done eating, John and I retired to the couches and immediately began reading newspapers and magazines. Maria was washing dishes at the time and at one point she shouted at us, "Could you guys keep it down in there!" Yes, we were being pretty fucking boring. In a desperate attempt to cut the silence, eventually Maria flipped on the teevee.
After a certain point we put on one of the three DVDs in Maria's DVD collection, Apollo 13. As we watched, we all quickly came to agreement on the fact that this was perhaps one of the slowest space movies ever made.
John set off on a mission to get coffee before it began, so Maria and I watched the "making of the movie" feature you get with a DVD. I was astounded to learn the film had required 600 of those parabolic zero-G airplane flights for the making of the weightless scenes. When John returned, he asked Maria if she and I had been making out while he was away.

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