Moodswing - It’s your day

Did you ever have one of those days when you go to a really nice restaurant to celebrate a special day — like your birthday or your I-kicked-my-painkiller-habit day or whatever — but it’s your day? Your day to feel great, and this is a fabboMUNDO restaurant, the BEST restaurant in Atlanta, with intimate lighting, minimalist decor and dead flower buds on the bar. Ooh, that’s a daring detail, dead flowers. Don’t think they didn’t do that on purpose, because at this restaurant, it’s the details that are important, every single itty bitty damn detail.

And looky here, you think to yourself as you repress the urge to itch something, they have a prix fixe menu, and the fixed price of this particular restaurant for a party of four amounts to half your house payment. But no matter. It’s your day.

Then you get the bill, and you just stop. You stop reveling, stop talking, stop breathing as you look at it. You try not to think of how you could have used this money to actually — and this is not an exaggeration — fly round-trip to Paris and eat at a cafe on the Champs Elysees for less than the figure you are looking at right now in your hand. And now you’ve forgotten all those great details for which the place is famous — like how the sliced lamb is arrayed in a fan pattern and how they filet the sole tableside, extracting a totally intact fish skeleton like the kind cartoon cats eat — because you’re too busy trying to keep your corneas from cremating at the sight of the bill.

Then you notice the $10 “cheese supplement” added on before the bar tab that didn’t even include a bottle of wine. How lame, you think, as one of the white-coated waitroids takes your credit card. They charged us extra because someone chose cheese for the salad course. And that’s all you think about it at first: How lame. But “thoughts grow,” as your friend Gary likes to say, and he’s right, because by the time you get to your car, you are furious about the cheese tariff.

“Ten extra dollars for four pieces of cheese the size of Chicklets?” you snarl. “I can’t believe that!”

By the next morning, you’re even more mad, because you’ve had time to consider the details, like how, with a prix fixe menu, you’ve figured there’s probably already $15 allocated for the salad course, so it’s grown from just $10 for the cheese to $25, and by now you’re blurting out to friends at the coffee house who inquire after your well-being, “TWENTY-FIVE dollars for cheese!” and they have to sit and listen to you recreate the entire trauma.

“I swear, they were not this big,” you say of the cheese pieces, indicating the tip of your thumb, “and you should have heard the stories that went with them.” You don’t really remember the stories that went with the cheeses, so you make some up in a snooty accent: This cheese is from Tasmania, where it was buried under dried mudlands and dug up 20 years later in a tribal ceremony. And there was another story, about a woman in Arkansas with 10 goats and no phone, and you’re kind of shrieking by now: “Fixed price means fixed price, why would they dick you with this extra charge?” And you hate that place, hate it, hate it, hate it, because by now this cheese tariff has become everything that’s wrong with the world.

Then over the radio comes the voice of a mother whose soldier son has just been dispatched to Pakistan. “We are prepared to lose our son,” she says to the talk-show host, “if that’s what it takes to end terrorism.”

At her words, you stop again. You think how you tried to be laudable after the massacre of 9/11 — giving to charities, slapping magnetized flags on the outside of your car, weeping for humanity with big, bladder-sized tears every day up until one day when you realized it was all so out of your control, the world. You don’t want that mother to lose her son, you don’t want any more innocent people to die, you don’t want the world to tumble into a disharmonious, hellish pit where everybody hates each other.

You don’t want any of that, but you don’t know how to stop it, either. You don’t know how to find a path through this despair, so you fall back to framing things within the limits of your own experience, and the point creeps up on you that, rather than continuing to try and fathom what has become of the world, you went back to bitching about details you felt better equipped to control, every single itty bitty damn detail. Even now, when a friend asks after your well-being, you still blurt, “$25 for cheese,” but the vehemence is gone. So at least there is that.??