Looking Down from a Hotel Room (Hungry)

When I was five years old I ate duck, and that was an adventure. My five-year-old daughter used to regularly eat dried squid, but after moving continents she won't get near the stuff.

I used to flee from the dinner table if the steak my father cooked leaked the littlest amount of "juice," and kids in Southeast Asia eat bugs on the regular.

I've become fond, in my old age, of eating chicken anuses with liquor.

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When it comes to food, the familiar and the unknown entice. Conversely, they bore/repulse.

Replace those previous four paragraphs about food with various human counterparts (chicken anuses = drunk salarymen), and consider how tolerable each is.

Anthony Bourdain wrote in his terrific book, Kitchen Confidential, that when he was a young lad he tasted oysters for the first time and his culinary world widened. As far as human beings go, my world also expanded when I made friends with an Indian kid at the age of four and, later, my high school friends started doing hard drugs.

Foods, good and bad. People, too.

Leave it up to the reader.

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I'm willing to bet, however, that a select few people knew Dana Crawford, in my opinion the most fascinating woman...no, human being, alive.

And the fact that she ate a bicycle is the icing on the cake.

For me, she proved a point I wanted to make but never could.

What it was we can only guess.

I have my theories, though.