Orange juice. Now being from Florida I was surrounded by orange juice. From the groves around Orlando to the offer of free fresh-squeezed orange juice at every roadside attraction (full of all types of pecan logs, fresh florida honey, gator heads, shark's teeth and 3 for $10 t-shirts), orange juice seems to be part of Florida's identity. Thinking about all of this reminds me how odd it is that the primary place orange juice still holds a lore for me is in my memories of a Cuban/Miami breakfast. Now, as I am not so much an egg man (the smell turns me off), I am generally not prone to love a diner breakfast, so where my true love lies is in the memories of my youth in Miami. See, for awhile there when I was younger my family actually lived in Miami, and then all throughout my youth we kept coming back. Miami really is a beautiful place when you wind up on the beach, or on a boat drinking rum and cokes with key limes watching the sunset over the city. There is even a full community that used to be thriving in Miami bay called "Stiltsville". Born from all of the boaters in the area, Stiltsville was a number of houses and stores and a community that literally lived at sea. Now it seems there is only a bar left kept in business by all of the boating traffic.

However, the Cuban breakfast was one of my most significant memories, but, of course, whenever you are in middle school and get to have fries with breakfast it is hard not to be significant. But Cuban breakfast didn't only have fries, there was the fresh squeezed orange juice, guava and cream cheese pastries, plantains, cuban bread with butter, batidos (milkshakes, with my favorite consisting of cereal grain), and the wonderfully strong cafe con leche.

Now I am back in fresh-squeezed orange juice land; made by hand with my new juicer. Yummy! My stomache is still in the beginning of freak-out mode ("What, you think you can ignore my ass for a week and then I will just let your punk-ass back in?!") and is a littler gurgly, but mostly okay. I guess the intent of the orange juice (and I am still a bit confused by why orange juice specifically) is to start the digestion process extremely solely by first stimulating your previously dormant system with subtle new vitamins and liquids.

Thanks to Tony, I guess I will have to try some grapefruit (which is amazing if sweet, and traumatic if bitter).

Well, poop out!

--daimian

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