Another One

(*This draft has been on my mind and in an open tab since the beginning of this year. When I sat down to write to you this week, I realized I still meant it, so bear with me.)

It’s a new year again, friends, and I have to tell you that I have been staring at this blank page since last year trying to figure out what to say. Are you guys okay? Am I okay? Are any of us okay? Will we ever be again? Were we ever? 

I promise that it’s not quite as apoplectic in my mind as this introduction makes it seem, but I want to be realistic because I care about you – it fucking sucks out here. 

I am afforded the tremendous privilege to be in the quietest time of my year. There is no work to be done, no commute to trudge through, only self-imposed deadlines to be met. My house is warm, I have leftovers for days from the cooking projects I cannot keep myself from working through, and we’ve been lucky enough to have been left unscathed by the recent rash of storms that have plagued our spit of land so far this winter in America. It is very hard to feel badly for yourself or your loved ones when there is a genocide being livestreamed every day for 101 days (so far). My head and heart explode several times every day just reading and thinking about it. 

Because the world is enormous and particularly cruel, our personal challenges don’t get put on hold, even when the world’s challenges at large feel like more than enough to bear. There has been much loss around me over the last few months, and an incredible amount of illness. So many of us are sick, in ways both large and small, commonplace and catastrophic – it’s hard not to look at it quantitatively as really fucking scary. A lot of us are definitely not okay. 

For a while, it felt like the first few years of the pandemic gave us good practice taking care of our immediate communities. We had soup delivery schedules down, we gave each other grace for canceled plans and other scheduling hiccups, we realized (some of us quickly, some of us on a time-release) that we were the only ones who were going to take care of each other. I’ve never seen more commitment to direct action or mutual aid in my life. 

Things feel less organized now, like our empathy and capacity to care for each other comes scattershot, even to the ones who are ordinarily very good at it. Are we all just really burnt out? Have we come up against the edge of our ability to support one another in the absence of any infrastructural support for society at large? Do we actually have less patience or less sympathy? Is this the dreaded compassion fatigue?

At Thanksgiving, my little brother lent me a book, The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert. She starts the book with a Susan Sontag quotation that struck me like I was standing inside a cathedral bell:

“With the inflation of apocalyptic rhetoric has come the increasing unreality of the apocalypse. A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms… and it doesn’t occur. And still it looms.”

I… wrote that on January 30th, y’all. It took me hours. And I’ve been trying to figure out what to say every week since. And here we are, in May. It’s, clearly, still not fully formed.

The truth, of course, is that the Gabbert quotation above is only partially true — there are plenty of places and people for whom the apocalypse has come, in Palestine and beyond, and we are lucky and privileged beyond measure not to feel the scale of that disaster firsthand.

Over the last few weeks, college students across the United States have occupied quad lawns and campus buildings in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, and university administrations and police forces across the United States have responded with a brutally familiar level of cruelty and violence. American politicians, with respect to the ones I know personally, are some of the most craven and calculating creatures on earth, and the fact that only a handful of them can manage to find themselves on the right side of this issue during an election year is such stunning proof positive of how insidious the tendrils of capitalism and violence really are. A sitting Democrat President can barely contain his disdain for peaceful protestors being stomped on by militarized police on college campuses they pay to attend, while they stand in solidarity against a genocide our government is almost single-handedly funding and outfitting with our tax dollars, while his competition is That Other Guy? I think we might be fucked.

These are the only things I can think of when I sit down to write lately. As Casey Dienel said in her recent, wonderful newsletter about gardening and writing love songs, “Who cares about tulips during a genocide?” Her point, to indelicately summarize it, being that the tulips and the love songs have to exist for life to be worth it. That the freedom to feel joy and love are the reasons we fight for liberation for everyone.

It was in this spirit that I sat down to write an article for The Provincetown Independent about spring, and green things, and Passover. Disaster brain absolutely got the better of that gentle idea, but it hit on something important for me when it comes to why we are like this: It felt deeply inappropriate to me to celebrate Passover, the story of a people’s liberation from oppression, as if the humanitarian disaster in Gaza wasn’t unfolding at the the same. It felt awkward to address this in a column about fucking salad, but it speaks to how pervasive our disgust for this unending violence should be — we should find reminders everywhere.

Eat a vegetable in the meantime, and stay strong.

Here’s Some Music For Your Ears: “Pollinators” on Apple Music

A BIG GREEN SALAD WITH HORSERADISH RANCH DRESSING

For the dressing
½ tsp. dried tarragon, crumbled
2 Tbsp. fresh dill, chopped
1 Tbsp. fresh chives, chopped
1 garlic clove, finely grated
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
3 tsp. prepared horseradish
1 Tbsp. mayonnaise
2 Tbsp. sour cream
½ cup well-shaken buttermilk
Salt and black pepper, to taste

Add all ingredients to a mason jar or any small container with a tight-fitting lid and shake like hell. Taste for salt and pepper (I needed more salt than I expected). You can make this up to three days in advance, keeping in mind that the horseradish and the garlic flavors will intensify as it sits.

For the salad
1 bunch asparagus, blanched and cut into bite-size pieces
1 cup frozen (and, later in the season, fresh) peas, blanched
1 head bibb lettuce, torn up a little
1 head Belgian endive, cut into chunks
2 oz. pea shoots
½ bunch flat-leaf parsley, picked
⅓ bunch cilantro, picked
2-3 mint sprigs, picked and torn up a little
Garnish with halves of soft-boiled egg, perhaps

Toss everything together in a big bowl, then divide onto four plates, making sure everyone gets some of everything. Drizzle the dressing over at the very last minute so everyone stays crunchy.