there are two things i remember about the Nicolas Cage film Kiss of Death:

1. the weird way that David Caruso holds his gun and waves it around at the start of the final confrontation between him and Nicolas Cage. i don’t actually know if that’s actually a strange way to hold a gun, but it seemed different, to me, from how people in other movies hold their guns, so it stood out to me, and i wondered if David Caruso had made a point to find out the ‘real’ way to hold a gun in people’s faces for his performance. if the internet had been easily within reach, i probably would have followed up and found out quickly, but as it was i just let it go. whenever this piece of whatever has popped back into my head in the years since then, i’ve made a conscious choice not to solve the mystery. it could be legit, or it could just be an example of how everyone in that movie was overacting their ass off. i choose to believe.
2. Nicolas Cage’s character, at one point, mentions that he doesn’t use silverware, because he “doesn’t like the taste of metal in [his] mouth.” it becomes a mild plot point in the film.

the second one is the more important one for me, because i try not to use silverware, myself. i’m not concerned with the taste of metal in my mouth, but i do hate the feeling of silverware (which is hard and often heavy) scraping or (even worse) banging against my teeth. i just don’t like it, and i prefer to avoid it.

this doesn’t mean that i never use silverware. when i’m at a restaurant or someone’s house, i use what i’m given, because i don’t want to be weird and difficult, but if i’m at home i always use plasticware. i hold onto plastic spoons or forks that i like from places, and i’ll grab extras or ask my partner to save hers. when i was growing up and we went to holiday gatherings with close family, it was just known that there needed to be a plastic fork and spoon for me. real knives are fine, because they rarely need to go in  your mouth. (also because you can’t cut nothing with a plastic knife.)

i try to stock up on them any chance i get. you know, because they break. right now, i’m actually out of forks, so i’ve been using chopsticks.

Nicolas Cage’s character in that movie has always stuck with me, because from the moment i heard that line, i became really worried how everyone interpreted my preference for plasticware. would they think it was an affectation? what if they saw Kiss of Death and thought i was copying the villain from this forgotten noir remake? that question actually really bothered me, actually; i worried it would seem really plausible, because the film was a flop and not seen by most people, making it, in theory, a great movie to jack some steez from. i thought maybe i was thinking about this more than anyone else ever would, but i really worried about it. years later, i was having an honest-to-god extended conversation with someone about David Caruso, and i purposely avoided addressing his work in Kiss of Death because i was still so uncomfortable with the metal in the mouth thing. now that i’m thinking about it, it actually still kind of makes me uncomfortable.

i’m not embarrassed that i am a grown man that will only use plastic spoons and forks. i’m not embarrassed that i have a philosophy about which ones are better than others or that i prefer different styles, depending on what i’m eating. but i’m terrified that people might think i stole this characteristic from a movie that most people aren’t even aware exists. i also worry that this distinction says something really unpleasant about me.

one of my partner’s best friends likes to say that i’m just so quirky, “like a character in a novel!” i try to just not worry about it, but it honestly bothers me a lot. i’m probably thinking too much about it and/or taking it in the wrong way, but it feels reductive. like i’m not a real person, you know? like i’m just a collection of offbeat character traits.

i’m not sure exactly how that last paragraph fits with what comes before. obviously, there’s a connection in the fact that the plasticware thing is absolutely the kind of thing that would be defined as a quirk, and there’s some tension between the idea that i want to push against the idea that i’m ‘quirky’ and my concern that people might think that i got it from an outside influence. i guess the thread that connects them is this idea that i seem to be determined to control how others understand me, that what i really don’t like is that someone might think something about me that isn’t whatever my version of ‘accurate’ is. but that’s not something i want to leave off this post with.

when hard, heavy silverware bangs against my teeth, i can’t help imagining them shattering, just breaking apart from the impact like a coffee cup being hit with a hammer. i also hate marbles, because when i see them i can’t stop myself from thinking about how they would similarly destroy my teeth if i put a couple in my mouth and tried to eat them. i guess i would try to chew the marbles, rather than simply swallowing them whole. it’s awful.