9/29, 7pm—Austin TX, Burnet Rd.

I took a few days between meals. I hadn’t intended to, but that’s how it worked out. Thursday was an awful day, truly terrible for just about everyone I know, and a visit to the Olive Garden just wasn’t in the cards, especially not by myself. It would have felt like a grim duty, and watching the Kavanaugh hearing was grim and dutiful enough. There was nothing to celebrate that day, and I knew that whatever I ate would turn to ashes in my mouth soon enough. Friday, ultimately, was little better. I’d have barely had the strength to microwave a can of Spaghetti-O’s. I walked the dog to the pizza place in the neighborhood, bought a slice, and ate it on the curb while it drizzled. It felt appropriate.

I slept late today, and woke up feeling a little better. I stayed off of social media and mostly spent the day running errands and walking the dog and watching episodes of Preacher. Around 6 o’clock, I was hungry, and I felt like I could handle being out in the world.

So, too, could everyone else. I tend to eat at odd times—3pm on a Monday, 9:30pm on a Wednesday. A Saturday night at 7 o’clock is when everyone goes out to eat. Accordingly, the wait at the Olive Garden was long; families sitting outside the doors awaiting a table had an hour or more to kill before they’d be seated. Even the bar section was full, with nary an open table in sight. Fortunately, I was alone, and didn’t require a table. I pulled out a seat at the bar itself and greeted Tracy, the bartender, who asked if I was waiting on a table or a to-go order, or if I had a pasta pass. She’d seen my kind before. I informed her that it was the latter, and she asked me if I already knew what I wanted.

I did, in fact. I had given it some thought before I arrived. I told her that I wanted rigatoni with meat sauce and Italian sausage. She nodded, and returned moments later with salad and breadsticks. I had spent a large portion of the day looking at a screen, so I brought a paper copy of a magazine—the latest GQ, with Paul McCartney on the cover, which had come in the mail earlier in the day—and opened it, careful not to intrude on the space next to me in the event that another patron wanted to sit at the crowded bar. Tracy brought an exasperated woman sitting at the end two large paper bags to fulfill her to-go order, and she urged her to take enough chocolate mints for the party awaiting her as she prepared to leave. “Oh, I forgot that you had those,” the woman told her. Hospitaliano, indeed.

I read about whatever crap they had in that issue—luxury watches and the guy from Crazy Rich Asians, then a long profile of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin by Jason Zengerle, which ends on a devastating kicker that makes the senator look like the biggest sucker in all of politics. My meal was delivered promptly by a food runner whogave the cheese grater a couple of extra cranks after I said “that’s good,” because he understood that the world is hard and sometimes we say we have enough cheese before that’s true. The sausage was served as a pair of links, sitting neatly atop the pasta and just barely covered by the meat sauce. I’ll order it again, I suspect, because there will be many servings of pasta in my near-future, but were I paying out-of-pocket for each meal, I don’t suspect that this particular combination would be one I’d revisit frequently.

Tracy was busy. There were to-go orders to prepare, drinks to pour—two guys at the end of the bar ordered champagne—and an entire bar section to serve with minimal help on a busy night. As someone who is uncomfortable demanding much attention from strangers, I was grateful that she was busy, and that I could rest as a low-maintenance guest, needing little more than some more water and, eventually, a refill order—spaghetti, marinara, and meatballs—that I could put into a to-go box. She swiped my card, I retrieved another three one-dollar bills from my wallet, tucked the magazine under my arm, and by the time I returned to my car, night had fallen upon another day in pre-apocalyptic America.