Michael Ondaatje has a poem — the sixth in a series of nine — which goes like this:
Five poems without mentioning the river prawn.
In the seventh poem, he mentions it. I could love a man who knows something about river prawns. I’m none too seafood savvy myself. Once at dinner with a friend I said “Order the shrimp! Shrimp is the chicken of the sea!” Brief pause as we blinked at each other. “Oh, no,” I corrected myself. “Tuna. Tuna is the chicken.”
So it’s now officially summer. I can tell because now I’ve gotten drunk with the whole crew. Another summer, another keg, same people I went to high school with still trying to get into each others’ pants. Y’know, it’s been eight years since we started all this fumbling — shouldn’t at least one of us have gotten laid by now? Eight years. At this point it’s like making a pass at your stepbrother. And we’re all just marrying each other, so you kinda feel like you want to pair up early, if only to get a good crack at decent genes for your pool. Luckily, three of the guys went frolicking around naked for awhile, as if giving us a little taste of what’s on the menu. Well, why buy the cow, boys? Why buy the cow.