A Real Email I Sent Today

I was driving down Broadway today after market and a fire truck was coming down behind me.  So, I pulled over into the parking lane where there happened to be a space, so the fire truck could get by.  Then the truck went by, and some guy behind me — we are now at a red light — got out of his dry-cleaning van and started banging on the side of my van with his hands, on my driver’s side door, yelling and screaming in Spanish.  I do nothing.  He gets back in his car and zip around me to get in front of me, then we are stopped at a 2nd light.  He gets out and starts pointing at the back tail light of his van, which is broken “You wouldn’t move, so the fire truck hit me,” he says, over and over, “I’m honking at you, and you won’t move.”  And I am not sure where he thought I should be moving to — onto the sidewalk?  There are thirty cars trying to get out of the way of the firetruck, right?  And I am not really hearing any honks because there is a firetruck going by full blast….  So, then he takes like 20 pictures of my license plate and me sitting in the van, and screaming and what not.  I felt totally calm about it.  I am telling you in case someone ever calls or writes and accuses me of “not moving” and causing the fire truck to break his tail light.

Do Not Go Deep Into the Journals

Do not go deep into the journals,
or scroll back, and back, through the Instagram.
There is seduction, maybe,
and a filter for every feeling.
But the only self
to be found there
is the one you
still are now.

And Then

This got to be a drag, so I stopped for a while.

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A fun thing happened today–I got to tell Collin about Beast Jesus, which he had never heard of, had somehow missed the meme going around a while back.  So I was there for the moment he saw it for the first time.  We laughed and laughed.

Tomorrow is Dolly Parton at the Forest Hills Stadium, so that’s about the only thing worth talking about.

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The chamomile is stressed out.  So says my farmer friend Kellie, when I mentioned that instead of blossoming all over, it sent up two single shoots with a small bouquet of flowers at the top of each–the shoots seemed to have come in a single day, and it’s true, maybe it is stressed out, maybe it wants a bigger pot, or more sun, or not to be crammed in with the nepitella.  Sorry, I say to it.  Maybe it will stay fuzzy after the blooms.  I don’t know, I’ve never grown it before.

I took a break!  As you maybe figured.  No reason, I just felt like not thinking about the blog.  I had two days of market, and a totally lovely birthday dinner at Florian for my friend Witold and his husband Kris on Saturday night–vegetable antipasto then a couple of their thin crust pizza, then two strange desserts–and then on Sunday I flew down to Florida to hang out with my family–the brother, the parents, the nephews, the sister-in-law.

My mom made BLTs and hash browns for lunch–SHIT it was so good.  We ate Father’s Day dinner at the Emmy’s Time Out Tavern, which was super disturbing to me at the get-go, but turned out good.  I could write six posts here about everything that was going on.  There were a couple of incredible Florida ladies–hair and chunky jewelry, sparkly flats and lots of touching–How are you, are you doing okay, welcome, happy to see you, that kind of stuff never ended.  In a good way, ultimately.  Most everyone in the room seemed to be a regular and that always feels nice.

Monday we went to Daytona Beach after bacon and blueberry pancakes and spent money in the arcade, and then had lunch at Sazon, a Cuban restaurant that is so, so good.  Empanadas for the boys, half a cuban for my mom, big chicken soup for my dad. I had rice and beans and a ham and cheese arepa.  Super great, everyone go.  Then we drove home, and then back to the beach again in the evening, to sit and enjoy the breeze and the boys played in the water and we ate sandwiches and Fritos and watermelon and Pellegrino sodas.  It was such a great evening.  My mother and I, we think about the same thing when we go to the beach–maybe everyone thinks about this.  What would it take to look out at the horizon and think, “Let’s get in a boat and just go that way.”  It’s that human thing, I guess, is the answer.  To seek.

The rest of the week has been full of work, and shipping syrup, and driving 200 lbs of maple sugar to Mast Bros, and writing material for next week’s wedding between Nick and Jamie–I am supposed to emcee the toasts.  Not toast, per se, but be charming and hilarious when introducing the toasters.  I can do that.

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On a night when Kip is with his family in Hilton Head, I am eating the biggest best salad that I made for myself.  In terms of sentences my mother never suspected I would write.

165

The Tri-Star Strawberries continue, tasting amazing and sweet and tart and even Elizabeth Faulkner thinks so, she bought a pint–on camera for something she’s working on.  There are a lot of questions about “Are they organic?” or “Do you spray?” or “Do we have to wash them?”  This is actually, if you don’t already know, a very complicated and nuanced question that unless you have the time to listen to the complicated and nuanced answer, well, you shouldn’t really be asking the question.  Lots of organic food is sprayed constantly, on a regular schedule, with things that you would probably find to be horrifying.  Also, some perennial plant stock can be sprayed, injected with stuff, and then the following year you can say your berries or whatever are organic if you don’t “spray” them.  Does the customer want to know this?  We don’t know, because you never stay around long enough to talk about this sort of thing.

There’s so much to talk about.

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Monday night Kip and I went to Great Jones Diner, we had a margarita each, then shared the Popcorn Shrimp sandwich, which was with a red cabbage slaw and chili mayo, fries on the side of course.  Also the blackened catfish with a side of collard greens.  We usually share everything–eat half and then trade plates.  We often make demarkation lines in the food when it initially arrives.  No one ever asks me what the secret to a long relationship is–but eating at the same pace is really really up there at the top if there is a list.  Doing museums at the same pace is also a good thing.  For dessert we had the Key Lime Pie.  Because it seemed the right thing to do.

After, I stopped in Astor Place Wines and bought a bottle of Aperol, and a small bottle of Noilly Prat.  Then we went to Joe’s Pub to see our friend Adrienne Truscott in her fucking fantastic show “Asking For It.”  Which is a comedy show about rape.  She appears nude from the waist down, drinking non-stop, telling jokes about rape whistles, roofies, white men, swimmers, Bill Cosby.  There is so much content in this show–ideas, envelope pushing, fine-line walking, but of course the greatest success is that it exists as a great hour of stand up comedy.  She is so good at embracing and rejecting the audience.  The room was screaming with joy and terror and I am so very glad I got to see it.  We sat in the back row along the bar and I had a not quite perfect martini, but hey.  What a bolstering and inspiring show she has made.

Today I cleaned up the garden a bit–borrowing the broom from the neighbors after realizing that we don’t really have a broom.  How have we made it 6 years in this apartment without a broom?  Then I dug up and moved the one huge Anise Hyssop that has–surprise to me–gotten to be almost 5 feet tall.  I didn’t expect that with our little sun it would do that.  I hope it survives the move.  I only moved it about two feet back.  Closer to the fence.  Say prayers.

For dinner tonight I made sugar snap peas from Samascott, and an improvised BBQ duck flatbread–muenster cheese, basil, scallions, and the duck barbacoa from Hudson Valley Duck.  Spread out, broiled, then folded to make a pocket.  Superb.  Butterhead lettuce from Campo Rosso, with miso-chive dressing, plus a chopped hard boiled egg for luxury.  Small things, people.

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Saturday’s market was brutal–it’s not the onslaught of humanity that makes it difficult, the constant stream of people asking questions, needing you, wanting something that only rarely you can provide.  It’s actually about 12 individuals who are in some way in limbo.  They don’t really have families, they don’t have a community, they are incredibly irritating and have probably driven away all their friends.  They are maybe a little bit mentally ill.  They come by to talk to us not because they are seeking all these things.  They come to talk to us because, we work in a public space on a regular schedule: They know that we cannot leave.

Then I woke up Sunday at about 5am–maybe it’s the sunlight, maybe it’s the anxiety, maybe it’s that I’m usually up at 5am anyway, so what’s another morning even if you don’t have to go to work–to discover that someone had shot up a gay club in Orlando.  At the time they were talking 20 dead, which was unthinkable–but just to show you how conditioned we are–I thought, well, that number is not unthinkably huge.  Then after I went back to bed for an hour and emerged to look at the news again in the late morning it had grown to 50 dead, and more than 50 injured.

I saw somewhere that Orlando hospitals needed lots of blood.  But, of course, gay men are barred from donating blood in this country.  Because we all have AIDS, is the short answer.  So I am thinking about that this morning, now Monday morning–how America has made us an enemy, both by hate-speech and religious zealotry, but also in systemic laws made not really to protect people from anything, but to make us appear as criminals before we have committed any crime.  Don’t give blood.  Don’t go into the bathroom in North Carolina.  See how they are the same?  I spent most of the day yesterday in a fluttery grief, bubbling up at unexpected moments, squeezing out tears here and there, like a statue weeping.

A month or two ago I thought it would be fun to take a big crew of people out to Medieval Times in Lyndhurst, NJ.  You know the one–horses, jousting, knights of different colors, the king and his princess, tearing apart roasted chicken with your hands.  And it didn’t make much sense looking at the afternoon from the morning.  On the day of the largest mass shooting (of recent memory) let’s go to Medieval Times.  But we zipped through the Battery Tunnel, and then the Lincoln Tunnel and then there we were, cheering for the red and yellow knight–eight of us, all adults, with nothing in particular to celebrate.  The waiters and such kept asking us, as if we’d gotten something wrong by coming without something to mark.  The show is how you would imagine–loud, overdone, many many entrances.  But still great.  It felt so good to scream and yell and boo about something that simply didn’t matter.

Remember that the same gun–the AR-15 assault rifle–was used to kill gay people in Orlando, movie-goers in Colorado, students in San Bernadino, and twenty children between the ages of 6 and 7 in Newtown, Massachusetts.  See the problem?