Dug out of a larger container, plastic because I don’t remember glass jars, eaten straight off the spoon.  Snickers bars frozen, taken from the freezer for 5 minutes before eating so your teeth can bite through to the frosty wax of the chocolate.

Why do I have these cravings?  Where did they come from?  Last night, licking peanut butter off a spoon I realized that I had strayed from my mission with this blog.  The peanut butter brought back a memory.  I had been out of the hospital for a couple of years, living in the North when my friend Ray came for a visit.

He stayed with me in my tiny New York Apartment.  We had been watching some bad western when I went to the kitchen to get a spoon full of peanut butter.  When I came back out, Ray looked at me, dumbfounded.

“What?  You said you didn’t want anything.”

“No but what do ya’ got there?”

“Peanut butter.”

“Man, you are such a redneck.”

“What do you mean?”

“I never knew anyone else who ate peanut butter off a spoon.  Such a white trash thing to do.  Where’d you pick up that habit?”

I thought a moment but came up blank.

“Frozen snickers?”

“What?” Ray asked.

“You ever put Snickers in the freezer?”

“No.”

“I do.”

“Is it good?”

I thought a moment and then replied, “Yeah.  Very good.”

Ray let me stand there.  He could tell I was thinking something through.  After rummaging about my mind and coming up blank, I spoke.

“You know something?  I don’t know why I like these things.  I just do”

We spent the rest of the night just talking, rambled from one topic to the next.  Ray saw I was struggling with this idea of likes and dislikes.  After a while of chewing the fat as he’d say, Ray got this serious look on his face.

“Moses, someone likes things because their people liked them.  Their parents, grandparents, you know.  Like me and my gum.  You don’t have that, man.  You’re just a bunch of impulses without meaning.”

“That scares me, Ray.”

“Shit, don’t be fearful of the unknown.  That’s a blessing.  Knowing ain’t everything and surprise has its own pleasures.  But you are an analytical one and need reasons, don’t ya’?”

“Reasons?”

“Yeah.   Like why you like Jiffy on a spoon.  Or why you dress like some derelict walking the yellow line down Main Street.”

Or something like that dialogue occurred.  It’s been years and that’s what my feeble mind can cobble together about our conversation.  Reasons.  I need rationale for who or what I am.

This blog has begun to veer off into my speculative fantasies.  While that is what most blogs tend to be, that was not my intention.  More important, my mission, intuitive or learned, why I like frozen candy bars and peanut butter on a spoon.