Category: COVID

Men Behaving Badly, Subtitled: A Day That Ends In “y”

A sheer slope of peanut buttery excellence.

Sigh.

For your edification, shock, and awe, a few links today. Take what you need, want, or like, and leave all the rest.

Start with the execrable Ernest Hemingway who spent a quarantined summer with his wife, his mistress, a sick toddler, and a nanny.

Take a break with Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter’s novel about the 1918 Spanish flu.

Keep going with Luy Irvine’s memoir Castaway (here’s just a sample) or E.M Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” about a society where people live underground in individual cells and communicate only by screens. Written in 1909.

Console yourself with this one-bowl chocolate sheet cake with fluffy peanut butter frosting (pictured above). CAUTION: This cake requires more than a 9″ x 13″ pan. It overflowed my entire oven and required many minutes of frantic fanning to avoid setting off the smoke detector. The dip in the middle indicates this interrupted baking time (you cannot open the oven mid-bake without consequences), but we are none of us perfect.

But it was, in the end, slathered with frosting and FUCKING DELICIOUS. I made changes, of course. I used my gluten-free flour blend, and the frosting was one stick of butter (really soft), 1/2 cup of peanut butter, a splash of vanilla, some salt, and enough powdered sugar, added a cup at a time. Really, you could use any cake and just add the frosting. Jesus. So good.

And also, before you go, listen to this lovely little song: “I Wish You Love.” The singer might surprise you.

Anyway. Today is Friday, in a long string of what have now become meaningless name markers of days.

What was interesting, infuriating, or rather lovely about your week?

And Still Life Goes On

Lovemaking, circa Pandemic 2020.

It’s Monday, and I am taking a breaking between laundry detergent delivery and a FaceTime conversation that was a little fraught.

My day job is a freelance writer, and this morning I got back to what I refer to as my mercenary writing (the stuff I actually get paid for). It’s time; a few deadlines for April are approaching, and I like to get my stuff in a couple of weeks (at least) ahead of time.

Today’s first topic was 2,000 words on testicular pain, and this afternoon’s topic is breast pain.

I could not figure out a way to work this in to the actual article, but I have decided to open a new sports bar after Pandemic 2020 and call it The Twisted Testicle (TM). Then I will coin phrases like, “Don’t get your testicles in a twist,” which is quite a bit more serious than panties in a wad and so forth.

And then I submitted the first article to my editor and realized how strange it is to be writing anything about anything except COVID.

And then I realized that what we might need now more than ever is anything about anything EXCEPT for COVID.

Or not. I guess we all deal with things differently.

When I log on to the Netflix or the Hulu or the Amazon at night, I am looking for frothy, stupid comedy or cooking shows that stop just short of making me feel like a total moron, but the movie Outbreak was #9 across the country when Khristian Weeks and I watched it last Thursday, so it seems I might be one of the few who functions that way.

I haven’t checked lately, but I would be willing to bet that apocalypse programming is doing pretty well, even this week as Baltimore stops justshort of a shelter-in-place order to help save idiots (and their families) from themselves.

So what to do, how to think, how to feel, what to watch? How strange is it write about breast and testicular pain, except that there are still people with painful boobs and balls, and they need information, too, right?

This blog is the mental ramble that rainy cold weather prevented me from physically taking today.

So let’s make a list: what are you watching/reading/listening to as we continue with our social distancing?

Wash Your Face In Dirty Water

Dinner of champions. In bed, by 8 pm. Beef stick not pictured.

The title is a reference to a lil’ childhood ditty that I am not sure everyone (anyone?) knows:

Teeter totter, bread and water, wash your face in dirty water.

I think one of the most challenging parts of Pandemic 2020 is the up-and-down nature of it.

How easy it is to be laughing at an episode of Seinfeld or out walking on a gorgeous day and forget for a moment what’s going on in the world before it all comes crashing back in.

Or to wake up feeling mentally/emotionally terrible, have a little boost mid-day, feel once again like shit, then fall asleep thinking that maybe things will be made clearer in the morning.

It’s like the entire world is a 15-year-old and our hormones are out of control. I’d like to see a data visualization of the posts on social media – I would be willing to bet that there is some correspondence to the general mood of the world/nation that follows this fluctuation.

That’s all. I am writing this post from bed Sunday night, eating my dinner, as pictured above, minus the beef stick that I ate because protein, people.

Many people have been fretting about what to eat, what to watch, and what to do. Here are 45 things to do that don’t involve a screen, and new movies streaming from Universal Pictures if you just want to veg for a bit (since the movie theaters are closed anyway). Monday I am going to make kumquat ice cream with almond brittle, and maybe finally recipe test two recipes I have been developing since February.

Some mornings I wake up rarin’ to go do allofthethings, and then that goes out the window and I sloth around the house for a couple hours.

How’s your up-and-down?

Someday I’ll Love by Ocean Vuong

Five Layers, 2019

This is all you need today – the sudden beauty of a simple poem.

After Frank O’Hara / After Roger Reeves

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.

What The World Needs Now…

Just in time for allergy season, a little opportunistic horseweed on the balcony. Nature is wise.

Now back at home from Casa Weeks, alone in my studio with the kitty and the inexplicable hum of 83, which has heretofore been mostly silent, the one thing I keep coming back to is nature.

I have the deepest urge to plant something. It’s a deeply hopeful act – shoving a tiny seed into wet, dark soil, believing that it will rise its face to the sun over weeks or months.

Meister Eckhart said, “What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.”

This dovetails nicely with yesterday’s urge to slow down, be still, reflect.

So I will head to Falkenhan’s in Hampden to pick up some spinach and mixed greens, maybe radish, which I don’t love but which comes up very quickly and gives nearly instant gratification – a comfort always but especially right now.

What are you planting these days – literally or metaphorically?