If you are just here for the cookie (and I don’t blame you), you can find the recipe on Smitten Kitchen. Everyone knows the best chocolate chip cookies are crispy and chewy, and that’s exactly what I searched for and exactly what I got.
Of course, these use my gluten-free flour blend, and I used a mix of regular and mini semisweet chips. Also, because I am sheltering in place on my own, I baked half of the batch only. The rest I scooped into individual cookies with an ice cream scoop and am freezing. Pop a cookie onto a baking sheet and bake it up whenever.
For those of you who are here for cookies and the rest of the blog, keep going.
Prompted by our reading of Michael Pollan’s book, I have started re-reading a book by William Powers called 12 x 12: A One-Room Cabin Off The Grid And Beyond The American Dream. It starts with this quote by Franz Kafka:
“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. You need not even wait, just learn to become quiet and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
Followed by this from Paul Éluard: “There is another world, but it is in this one.”
If ever there were a book for our time, it is this one.
We are all (most) of us, sitting, and some of us (like me, now) solitary. I am waiting, I guess, not exactly solitary, and there might be the problem. With our shithead of a president failing to lead (or demonstrate his ability to be anything but the inept moron and terrible person he is), infections and deaths rising in what I believe are falsely deflated numbers, and people feeling the sting of isolation for two weeks (official two weeks isn’t even close here in Maryland – we have only been under stay-at-home orders since March 30), we are still filling up our time and mental space with what we used to do, only now it’s online.
Certainly, we mourn the freedom of movement we used to have, but whenever you get too down in the mouth about that, imagine you are in prison right now, and your prison has just been issued stay-at-home orders for two weeks, and your home is an 8×10 cell that you share with another person who is not of your choosing.
But I digress.
The point is (and for the chocolate chip cookie people who stayed, I know. Sometimes it takes a minute to get to the point. But I usually make it there eventually), once we come out of this, if we have not gotten quiet, and still, and solitary, what will we come out to?
I think one positive part of this (if one could spin anything to be positive) is that the terrible, anti-functional parts of life in the U.S. have been laid bare. Too many people are one paycheck away from disaster.
Consider the fact that many major companies have just decided to stop paying their rent but very few landlords will voluntarily allow tenants to stop paying rent. Sure, eviction proceedings have been banned in some cities, but that doesn’t mean a landlord cannot report this to your creditors, and evictions are not banned for many small businesses.
Consider also the fact that the nation’s public school system had no real plan for educating the nearly 51 million kids they serve outside of the brick-and-mortar building, an estimated 14% of whom require special education services.
Our hospitals are not equipped for large-scale disasters. Our healthcare system essentially ensures that the poor and the brown among us will die from lack of care or be destitute following the minimal care they receive.
The entire country feels this lack – witness, among other things, the rabid clearing of all toilet paper from stores and the hoarding of everything from masks to hand sanitizer to, of all things, flour and yeast. It is a true thing that when our survival is threatened, grasping for things we can hold (e.g., toilet paper) provides us with a feeling of stability.
Someone on Instagram wrote that they thought rationing (as in World War II) would be better because then at least you would be guaranteed your carton of eggs.
We have no guidance, no leadership, no calls for coming together at the federal level (including the laughable federal “stimulus” package that bails out the few large businesses at the expense of the small and of individuals. And the people who pick our vegetables and toil in the fields? They are fucked.). In Baltimore, and in my neighborhood, there are community resources being made available for those who are suffering, and I have seen beautiful examples of people helping each other.
But on the national level, Congress and the Shithead-in-Chief are pointing fingers and worrying about whose fault it is, still propping up big corporations that can absorb the shock better than the little guy, and probably scanning the globe for a war that might pull us out of what looks to be headed in the direction of the Great Depression, part deux.
If we think we can emerge from this pandemic the same as we went in, we are mistaken. We cannot compare this pandemic to the flu in the sense that most of the world had no idea the rest of the world had the flu, too. The name “Spanish flu” was coined by Spain because they thought they were the only ones who had it. With the internet, we are so globally intertwined that it is impossible to ignore the shuddering halt to which we have come and the consequences. I don’t think as many people in the U.S. have ever thought about the term “supply chain” as much in the history of this country.
I don’t want to be the same. I want our whole country to not just stop and be quiet but to listen and be still, to evaluate which parts of the old system are good and valuable and which parts we can discard like so much rubbish.
I think it’s obvious that we have reached late-stage capitalism and that center cannot hold. Note: if you click no other links in this post, click the late-stage capitalism one. Jesus.
I think it’s also obvious that our healthcare system is unutterably broken. We have been looking at this pandemic not as a public health issue with the potential to ravage the country but instead as a drain on resources, the same drain that occurs when uninsured people are forced to avoid going to the doctor until they end up in the emergency room. Healthcare is the privilege of the wealthy; this was clearly illustrated for me when Idris Elba reported receiving a COVID test in the earliest days of the pandemic because he had been in contact with a person who tested positive.
Should he have gotten a test? Of course. But so should every other person who needs one and who does not have access to one. If you are a skeptic, read this story about West Virginia keeping their numbers at zero.
It’s obvious, too, that we are currently functioning better as individual states than as a country “governed” by a president who believes that states should bid against each other for medical supplies and COVID tests. Don’t worry, though: he fucks models. Phew.
Pause here to give props to Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland (I am a raging liberal Democrat who did not vote for him) who saw this coming in January and took some steps to get ready. Not enough, but more than the federal government who knew for sure it was coming and ignored it.
WE CANNOT BE THE SAME COUNTRY COMING OUT OF THIS.
We cannot allow the same inequity to persist. We cannot choose corporations over people. We cannot allow our elected representatives on both sides of the aisle to get away with lip service and pandering this election year.
Personally, I think the changes we need to make to emerge better from this pandemic are too sweeping and too hard for the small-minded people in power to comprehend. States seem to be doing a better job on their own (most of them, except for these nine states, plus Georgia).
I despair of any resolution to this. We are too big to not fail, it seems.
As I write this, I hear a peal of laughter from my neighbors down the street. They do still get together outside but no longer huddle in a close circle with their children ranging ’round. The chairs are there, the kids are out, but they are a studied six feet apart.
The wisdomkeepers might say that things are unfolding as they must – that this is part of the revelation (which, as my book points out, has a curious Latin root word that means “to veil.”
I feel like the world is actually rolling freely, unmasked, at our feet, if not in ecstasy but then certainly with wild abandon. If there is another world in this one, now is the time it will reveal itself, I think. Perhaps we are not quiet or still enough to notice yet. Perhaps we never will be.