Cherry Pie and Liverwurst

Recovery from surgery is a very weird thing.  Even if it's a minor surgery, like mine was, you still lose blood and you still have this weird full-body assault to recover from having to do with being put under.  So apparently what you need is sour cherry pie.  Which I just had a little while ago at the Park View.  I didn't go out of the house to get and eat cherry pie, but that's just what kind of happened.

I actually went out of the house to get liverwurst.  There are a couple of reasons you go out of the house at 9 PM on a Saturday to get liverwurst. Since I'm not pregnant, and I'm not German, then I must have iron poor blood resulting from recent surgery.  Thank God I like liverwurst, or I would have been wasting my time.  And the reason I know I have iron poor blood?  Dr. Oz.  Very helpful, that Dr. Oz.

I like watching Dr. Oz because he's always snuggling on fat ladies and making them squeal.  He's a pleasant change from Dr. Phil, who looks like a child molester.  Also, he's very earthy, is Dr. Oz.  If some lady asks what she can do about her excessively smelly feet, he gets down on the floor, takes her shoes off, and smells them.  I'm pretty sure that's how he ended up bonding with Oprah.  Anyway, I'm watching Dr. Oz and this chick is saying how her mother's anemic, so Dr. Oz does his usual Dr. Oz thing and starts pinching on this chick's mother's face to see if she's anemic for real and, duh, she is.  How can he tell?  Her lower eyelids are pink instead of red.  As I normally do when I watch Dr. Oz, I file this away in my brain for future reference.

Then last night I'm out with Robby and Julio watching "Newsical" (http://www.newsicalthemusical.net/Newsical/HOME.html) which, by the way, I totally recommend, it's really funny, and as I'm sitting there doing absolutely nothing, sitting in the dark, watching Newsical, I get really woozy.  Later on when I saw myself in the bathroom mirror at the Galaxy, I looked like Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula.  Almost fell asleep in the cab on the way home, which is not like me after diner food and caffeine.

This morning I felt better so I started running some errands and realized that woozy was kind of what I was going to be dealing with until further notice.  That's probably because I had this very weird trifecta of blood loss this week - surgery on Monday, bleeding hemorrhoids on Wednesday from the vicodin on Tuesday, and my period on Thursday that I wasn't expecting until Saturday.  So how anemic was I, if I was, in fact, anemic?  I made it home and did the Dr. Oz turn your lower eyelids inside-out test.  My lower eyelids were actually neither red NOR pink.  They were, and still kind of are, the exact color of a manila folder.  I had some really ancient One-A-Day multiple vitamins that happened to have some iron in them, so I took a couple of those.  Then I took a nap hoping that I would feel better when I woke up.  Then, when I woke up, it was nighttime.

I fucking hate when this happens.  I need a weekend nap, and I take one, and then a lazy afternoon suddenly becomes a pitch-black evening where I'm wide awake, yet I'm too tired to do anything much.  And then the craving hit me - I could use some liverwurst.  Liverwurst has iron in it.  Lots of iron in it.  Iron poor blood needs iron in it.  Gotta get to the Fine Fare and score some liverwurst.

In the dark, Inwood looks a lot like a Dominican version of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks."  Especially in the bitter cold, when there are few people milling around.  You have the supermarket, Patrick's Bar, and Albert's Mofongo House which is, according to the Village Voice, the best mofongo in the city, if you like mofongo.  But I didn't need mofongo, nor did I need the "Free Hookah" that Albert's was advertising which I pray to God is not another famous Inwood misspelling.  No.  I needed some liverwurst.  Until I got out in the fresh air where I hadn't been for six or eight hours, and then I decided I needed to sit in the Park View and maybe have some dessert and tea.  Warm sour cherry pie, cold strawberry ice cream, hot tea and the last bitter cold night in January - as I sat and wrote in my journal I felt, for just a little while, like I was in that painting, one of life's loners collecting her thoughts - instead of an anemic loser who's alone on Saturday night shopping for liverwurst.

Came home with a half-pound of the liverwurst, some pickled herring in sour cream, and some candy corn.  I'm not going to eat the candy corn.  Nobody eats candy corn.  I kind of bought it because I like the colors.  And then I lay down on the couch for a while and yapped with Kelvin, who was coming out of the gym in Teaneck.

It's 18 degrees out there right now in the hood, and I wonder what's happening out there on Broadway while I sit in here in my overheated one-bedroom trying to decide if "The Hangover" is actually worth watching, or if I should just download "Inglourious Basterds" and watch that again.  Everybody I know is probably asleep.  Brenda is asleep in London, Ange is asleep in L.A., Wan and the kids are asleep up in Maine.  Aine's probably asleep in the air, coming in from Dublin in a few hours time.

I'm starting to feel the woozy thing again, despite having scarfed a couple of slices of the old l.w.  Time to stretch out on the couch, grab the remote, and maybe just surf for a while.  Tomorrow might be sunny.