Almost No One Makes It Out

I got my first vaccine shot last week on the basketball court at Medgar Evers College, administered to me by a couple of very efficient Air Force medical staff who I could have hugged with joy if touching other people were a thing I did anymore. It was a small step, but one that means everything for me, and it means that the end of this nightmare is in sight.

But we still have a long way to go: Right now, I’m one of the first people rescued from the Titanic, but I’m still in a lifeboat listening to the band play. I still can’t see the shore yet, and I’m watching the chaos around me, and it feels like things could go awry at any minute.

But still, I’m in a lifeboat.

I was trying to explain to someone the other day that I feel like I’ve been a “brain in a jar” for the last year: I’ve spent the vast majority of this time sitting at my computer doing my job, stretching my brain in the ways that it’s used to while pretending nothing was going on outside of me. None of my brain’s daily tasks changed all that much, but my body all but retired. Sure, I take walks, I get on the elliptical, I do things that constitute movement — but all of those things feel like I’ve just been using my carcass to drag my brain around from one room to another for an entire year. It has been a really weird, hard year to have a body that has real agency, and I can barely imagine what it’s going to feel like to care about that body again.

(If any of you have ever seen the excellent dark comedy “Santa Clarita Diet,” picture here the sentient but severed head of Gary, a man who had no body but still managed to do a lot of event planning! Let this also serve as a letter of recommendation not only for that show, but for Timothy Olyphant, one of the funniest men in the known universe.)

There was an article going around not long ago about what chefs make for dinner when they’re too tired to cook, and almost all of the answers involved cooking. Someone suggested risotto, which is how you know that normal people should not ask chefs for suggestions about not cooking! For me, this was a week that wasn’t about cooking. It was a week where on Thursday night, the only thing I really wanted was to be sitting at a bar eating bar food with my friends. So I did just that: I ordered mozzarella sticks, wings, and hummus & veggies from the bar around the corner from my house, made myself a cocktail, and settled in to eat mozzarella sticks while texting my friends about the mozzarella sticks. And you know what? It was great. It was exactly the kind of low-risk, high-reward activity that someone who’s been dragging their rotting carcass from room to room for a year deserves.

Another thing that my rotting carcass — and perhaps yours too — deserves is cake. I woke up on Saturday morning with a craving for a good chocolatey snack cake, but a continued deep desire to avoid cooking anything real for as long as possible. That brings me to this recipe from the New York Times, which is designed to be mixed in the baking pan itself in under five minutes and is the absolute perfect confection for those of us who have given up. It is a delicious snack to eat while you sit in your lifeboat, waiting to be pulled to shore.

Last week, Rebecca quoted an old entry from a blog I’d forgotten I had in which I used the phrase “almost no one makes it out.” It’s a quote from a Magnolia Electric Co. song, a song that is far more prescient than even my blog about the song was:

A new season has to begin.

You’re reading “Soup and Despair,” a weekly newsletter by Sarah Flynn and Rebecca Orchant. It’s about food, feelings, and surviving the dark times. If someone forwarded you this email, it’s because they love you and they want you to eat. You can subscribe to it too!