eating out by oneself

So yesterday I'm minding my lunch at my daily diner

Eating alone in a restaurant. Not everyone can do it. (obviously everyone can do it under circumstances where they are actually hungry and they have to eat and that's where the food is)

But to do it and enjoy being there, by yourself, is not something that most people are fond of. Such ordeal, such rite-of-passage, was featured in Sopranos Season 6, when Tony went out to Las Vegas. Tony was a little awkward but he "leaned in" and got his food.

Can you sit there in a restaurant by yourself and get a meal and not be awkward?

I used to do that not long ago, once in awhile in country style diners, in my younger, travelling years. It was a thing to do, like Jack Kerouac wrote about it and stuff. He would get big peach pies in Iowa. I don't think peaches grow locally there, but they probably do now, some varietals. (peach trees can be grown anywhere, they just won't yield.) Kerouac was awkward to the point of being paralysed with schizo anxiety. That's a basic fact of his bio, but it wasn't a selling point for his book, nor the cult of personality that (briefly) built up around him. There's a recent movie called On The Road I was going to watch but the trailer is unappealing. And it makes it look like they really miss, who those guys were. To call them tragic heroes is charitable.

In any case I am not comfortable sitting at a diner, among locals whom I don't know. Pre-covid, post-covid, now, whenever.

I took a trip with my father ten years ago (God bless his resting soul) to our own version of the Dirty South, and we stopped at this diner and I got the most excellent Southern fried meal — literally chicken fried steak — and I thought it was an authentic local diner "that we discovered" and I suppose it was, but it turned out to be something akin to Huddle House. Right. A couple years ago Huddle House was in the news for having one of their waitstaff murdered, on the job and in cold blood, and then - wait for it - not having the good grace to close for the remainder of the business day. Levels of insensitivity that shouldn't even be possible.