I Was a Berkeley Foodie
by Steed Dropout
Jan. 10, 2014
CHEAP EATS
Let’s say you eat on Telegraph for the same reason you live in a nearby cheap student apartment. But let’s say you’re still a foodie (on the cheap, of course) and you find yourself an economic captive in the student ghetto and that you sometimes worry about how your life (on the cheap, of course) has turned out–that you’ve been spoiled by your forty-year extended student sojourn and that you may awake some morning when the good cheap food goes away, like Buddy Holly. You still have Holden Caulfield, though, and Dustin Hoffman playing an “outside agitator” in “The Graduate.” You recall how you first identified with “The Graduate,” especially when you lived in rooming houses near campus. The outside agitator meme could only take you so far. You are maybe agitated but you’re no agitator. You know real agitators. You love these agitators, but you are not like them, preferring self-absorption. You long ago ran ran out of excuses for living here, entrapped. Only the mirror can undo you, revealing that you are an old perv. But then you live among pervs and their one underlying principle is opposition. If you have oppositional tendencies in youth (I did), you cannot expect to just grow out of it, although oppositional personality disorder applies mostly to adolescents. What happens when these oppositionals grow up? They move to Berkeley where oppositional personality disorder is a Berkeley trope and you die an old hippy.
These views may be catching, but they are mine alone.
