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2002-01-22 | 1:03 p.m.

Leo is in the East Bay this week so we drove down and visited with him. We all met at Frank's. Leo lives in Europe but must return at least once a year for his annual physical exam. If you see him before the exam, he looks worried, drawn, openly dreading the event. He despairs over what his test results might be. I told him yesterday that he ought to write a story in which his character avoids first the doctor, then the office building, then friends who see the same doctor, then the street the doctor's office is on, restaurants the doctor is known to frequent, the neighborhood, the district, the city, and so on. In other words, dread radiating away from the doctor's office as if it were an injury that only gets worse. He said it was a good idea, but he doesn't like to write autobiographical stories.

After he left we went out to dinner with Frank and Fiona. They took us to an Ethiopian place in Oakland called Cafe Colluci. Frank wouldn't be satisfied until I had tried the raw beef dish he ordered. I realize it isn't terribly sophisticated of me but I had zero desire to eat raw beef. But I did finally take a bite rather than listen to him impugn my character for the rest of the night. I learned that while the Ethiopians may prize raw meat, it's nothing I can't live without. I'm not saying it tasted bad----it tasted fine, actually----I'm just saying I didn't want it any more afterward than I had before.

Frankly, I felt a little superstitious about tasting it, because I had just seen Leo and in my mind Leo stands for all the forces of anti-beef awareness. He spent literally weeks trying to talk me out of eating beef because of the threat of Mad Cow disease. Even though I still eat and enjoy beef, and even though I don't feel particularly threatened by Mad Cow disease here in California, and even though----as Fiona pointed out with maddeningly dispassionate logic----one is no more susceptible to Mad Cow disease from raw beef than cooked beef, I still felt that it was tempting fate or the gods of irony to eat raw beef only minutes after seeing Leo. But nobody had any sympathy for my position.

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