"you could tie up a lot of girls with 100 feet of rope"

Some people always annoy you. Some people always misunderstand you. Some people always comfort you, like a hug or my awesome ikea blanket. Some always tease you, or you let them tease you. Some inspire, are good for a few beers, make you act protective, make you act girly, some are only better in times of crisis, some are better on the road.

Some, like my buddy Brandon, mostly sit around in restaurants with you and talk about gambling and women. This is most of our relationship, coupled with a search for good fried chicken. When we're not sitting around some restaurant before or after a shift, we're doing random things like kidnapping me to Davis. Driving me out here. Duct-taping the plastic cover underneath my car back onto my car so it doesn't drag on the street. He picks me up on street corners: Embarcadero, pier 3. Fulton and Park Presidio. Church St. Safeway parking lot. 24th and Mission.

Almost a year ago to the day, we pulled up to Oakland together and he left me in a strange house for what I thought would be a temporary adventure.

Almost a year later, we picked up a mattress in Noe Valley, strapped it to the roof of my rental car with a tarp and 100 feet of rope, and drove back to Ingleside where I now live. Because he was convinced this was illegal in California (and it may be, I don't know, but on the east coast it's simply what you do and one time I even moved a mattress and box spring by myself on top of the car, from Somerville through Cambridge and into Boston proper. So, Brandon had never done this and was entirely convinced that 1)I was crazy and 2)it was bound to fall, so 3)we'd better take side streets. We snaked through parts of SF I've never seen, arrived at my house, dragged up the mattress, deflated the world's largest air mattress, hefted up the dresser I scored it Redwood City and now I have a lot of unpacking to do.

This is not really about food, no. It's about how we fall into patterns with people, how we seek out certain people for certain things. This one for friendship, this one for refuge, this one for desire, this one for adventure. My buddy might not be the most attentive boyfriend, but he is always a perfect gentleman to me. I've known him for almost six years and though it's possible that we'll start playing tennis together or cook dinner together, we probably won't really do anything other than sit around and talk about women and life, which is comforting in its own way.