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I moved to Chicago in the summer of 1995, during a vicious heat wave that claimed over 700 lives. People slept on the beaches of Lake Michigan seeking respite, and ice cream trucks were used as temporary morgues. I wasn’t there for the worst of it, but when we moved into our apartment on the north side, I noticed how the old folks’ homes and other high rises didn’t all have AC units, some windows did, and some of those were delusional gestures of relief, which meant every other window without was a very hot apartment. This heat wave was the impetus for the creation of cooling centers by the city, places for people to gather where they could be safe, cool, and not have to spend money.

We never had AC on the farm, we just used fans to pull the cross breezes, and at Uncle Kenny’s house we just had a bathtub to bathe in, no shower, you could only fill the tub to be two inches high lest the well run dry. My mom’s house had central air, she’d holler at us “you weren’t raised in a barn, shut the door!” and “I’m not paying to cool (or heat, depending on season) the whole neighborhood!” Statements I file under classic mom things to say, along with “maybe some day I’ll leave and never come back,” opposed to dad things to say, like “I’ll give you something to cry about.”

I never had AC in Chicago, none of us did. What’s the point if you live in a big old warehouse? Most of the bars and venues had the kind in the transom over the door that dripped condensation more than cooled, yet they were still our saviors. Some nights, after a show in some sweaty place, we’d meet at the Oak Street beach downtown, strip down to our underwear, a jump in the lake, get dressed and go home. We were good at being uncomfortable. There was no money for air-conditioning, it was never on the table.

The first summer I lived in Brooklyn I didn’t have that kind of bill money either. That was a very hot summer, with no relief except the local bar I’d take my dog to after service. The bartender was sweet on me, and her, this was right after the smoking ban when bars in Brooklyn would put out plastic cups of water as ashtrays, certain the city wasn’t coming through to ticket. My sister Maggi, horrified and supportive, sent me money to buy an AC unit and my roommate and I went to PC Richards in Astoria, our first excursion into translating space into square feet to buy the right size, and our first time in any kind of store like that. Most of my adult life up until that moment was spent with thrifted and streeted items and hand-me-downs. Buying something this expensive and new was nerve-racking, it still is. We lived above the restaurant, a railroad with little air to encourage, along with our two dogs and a cat. Our freezer was full of dampened sheets to remake our beds before sleeping.2

I carried that unit up the stairs, no patience for assistance. I wanted to get it into the window in time to experience some luxury on my day off, sitting in my rocking chair, watching TV, and drinking beer in the air-conditioning. The television was my nana’s old Sears TV, wood-paneled on the sides with a turn dial I managed to adapt (and adapt and adapt) to whatever DVD player I had and whatever antennae would make free network television a reality.3

My youthful ignorance tossed the AC in the window, believing the weight of the top window pane would be sufficient to keep it in place. And it did, for years after I followed suit, if I even bothered to take the unit out. I’d shove old t-shirts and socks underneath and on the sides for insulation, a few scraps of 2x4 underneath to level it out so it wouldn’t fall on unsuspecting neighbors on the sidewalk.4

Then one summer, I lost that willful stupidity, it left my body and mind. There was no specific event, although it was after the summer after Hurricane Sandy because I asked Pastor Ann, whom I met at Greenpoint Reformed Church where she established a weekly meal and food pantry. I did prepare for that storm, meaning I filled the bathtub with water, and bought some food, a bottle of bourbon, a few tall religious candles, and a two gallons of water.

I wonder where the previous version of me went, if it’s just the passage of time or the years of one failure after another, personally and professionally, if you can call anything I did the to be truly personal or professional. I wasn’t a coddled immature dumbass, but something left me, something wild, a part of me that grasped at straws as I headed towards turning forty, and maybe that’s for the best. That compass had been broken for some time, taking me on wrong turns. I finally knew that air-conditioner could fall out of the window.

One Friday night in Chicago, maybe 1999, the transformer went out on the west side, taking with it both traffic and street lights. All the hydrants were open, the streets chaos. This was my second third floor domicile, moved into after being evicted from the warehouse by the Chicago Fire Department for safety reasons. It was too hot, the brick of the building storing all the prior days’ temperatures. My roommate Geoff and I were spent, lights felt too hot, so I lit a candle, opened a can of Black Label, and played the first Godspeed You Black Emperor album, the slow, slightly apocalyptic weirdness and Morricone-ness desert feelings a perfect soundtrack.

Hit Play.

(I just recorded the first side of the album, the very same LP, here. I don’t want to pay for an app to embed it. Have you heard it? Do you listen to full albums?)

When I left for work the other day, sweaty and stressed out (did I pack the right tools for this job? do I smell, is it the shirt, or the moment?) I told Vince to “order whatever air-conditioners you want.” And he did, complete with the safety bars. This time, we both carried it up the stairs (I respect you, vertebrae!), but since the temperature dropped, we haven’t put them in, still milking the open windows for all they have to offer. I’m not romanticizing summers of yore that were less hot than now and the literal hell where we are headed, but I hope we always have a lake (questionable) to jump into and maybe the ability to pay high energy bills for a few months (most definitely questionable). Hopefully we’ll always have some respite from this heat, like the time the cows busted through the electric fence and headed to the creek in the woods. It took us all afternoon to find them, they were the most unbothered creatures when we did, just sitting in the shade, chewing their cud. We have solid soundtracks for slow hot nights at our fingertips, and I like to think I’ll never know if the soft serve truck has ever moonlit as a morgue. But let’s be honest, we are in the United States of America. Mr. Softie definitely has a second job.

“Conviction.” Alicia answered.

And that’s all I heard. Conviction. And I keep hearing it.

There’s always a reason why someone else has something I don’t. Something I’m not doing. I don’t wake up early enough, I am not disciplined enough, maybe if I took up running I will become that person. Maybe if I could figure out how to outrun whatever from my past trips me up I could get there. Ten years ago, at the hippy bookstore in Woodstock I bought the book about the schedules of successful artists, the only book I could find in a sea of tomes about meditation and spirituality. Just buying the book felt a bit like defeat, but I appreciated looking at the schedules of painters, sculptors, and writers. It’s inspiring to see that art is work, rather than a lightning bolt, that it’s a lot about schedule and saying no.

Over the past few years, I have had to come to accept a few things about myself. I used to be a person who could sleep for two hours or four hours, and function well. That is no longer the case. I can no longer trip the light fantastic the way I used to, I can’t work 10-14 hours in the kitchen and go see a band. (Depending on the band.) I used to be able to close down bars and get locked in and wake up for work in the morning. But now, I require sleep. I think I spent two solid years in a fight with myself, from 2022 to 2024, trying to make what used to work for me still work for me. What can I say? I’m stubborn.

A lot of the things I used to do, don’t do it for me any longer. I’m full up, I’ve been out, I’ve heard a lot of people talk, and now, sometimes, I just want to read the damn book. I want to give my body a chance to recover from a day of cooking. I don’t need to prove to myself that nothing has changed. I know it has, and that’s fine. (See, look at that acceptance.) Getting older means I know the clock is ticking, I feel it more, and I’m lucky for it, that my clock still ticks. I know I need time to work, to read and write. (But please don’t take this as instruction to never invite me anywhere fun, like oh she’s so busy reading that book about all the weapons the US gave Afghanistan in the 80s to come to this party or opening or friends & family.)

This last apartment move brought up things about tomorrow and every day after I hadn’t previously considered. Getting rid of a lot of stuff, books, clothes, records, furniture, felt good for this hoarder soul, although there’s still some pin pricks. I don’t need to hold on to what I was or where I was, not all of it. I don’t need to bring receipts for former lives. What I need to make space for the future. And then make that future.

“Don’t forget what you came in here to do.” Steve Albini said this to the band the Dirty Three when they were having problems when he recorded their album Ocean Sounds at Electrical Audio in 1997. I think of it a lot.

So yeah. Conviction.

I got it.

I watched the TV show Love Story about JFK Jr. and Caroline Bessette like so many other people. Sometimes working on television makes me feel like I am home, because I have always loved TV, even when my grandmother called it the ‘boob tube’, before we used any adjective like ‘prestige’ for it. A babysitter used to bribe me with reruns of Good Times and Three’s Company to get my homework done, during the summer I’d come inside from the beach to watch the Monkees, Addams Family, and Gilligan’s Island. I had ever night’s programming memorized for years, my mom called me the TV Guide.

Working on TV feels like a consuming guilty pleasure in this burning world, one I am lucky to do when the opportunity presents itself. A lot of the food were for scenes in Jackie O’s Central Park apartment, recreated on a soundstage in Brooklyn by the production designer and set decorator, beautifully embodying her WASP chic style, while the set right next to it was Calvin Klein’s offices, capturing a completely opposite aesthetic—sleek, neutral, minimalist, a different kind of chic. The way this show had all the West Village girls edging for a cell phone free existence in 1990s New York City was over the top, eclipsed only by the amount of online content worshipping Caroline Bessette for her style. Yes, the woman was stylish, but it’s no epiphany that a tall, thin, cheek-boned woman with blonde hair who works in fashion is attractive and fashionable. The more striking part of it all is how ubiquitous and casual her cigarette smoking was then.

The only pictures of Jackie O smoking came out after her death, the media had too much respect for her to publish any during her life. I think it was Vanity Fair who published a photo of her smoking, while pregnant, on a boat, after her death. I remember because I showed it to my mother, who exclaimed “We didn’t know back then!”

I didn’t think I’d watch this show about the Kennedys. One night, late on set, missing the last Wu Tang show at Madison Square Garden, I plated a dish for Jackie to be served in bed, a small roulade of fish with five green beans and a sharp lemon wedge. Naomi Watts, playing Jackie O, and killing it, was reading in bed, chain-smoking, when her servant arrives with this immaculate dinner plate on a tray. She enthusiastically digs in. Right at that moment, my interest piqued in watching the show. I think it was the smoking.

Being a smoker is probably the only thing I had in common with Caroline Bessette and Jackie O. I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day for over twenty years, a statement that grossed me out when I realized it, especially since smoking just felt like it was depressing me. This, along with the fact that two friends were dying from cancer at the time, made me consider quitting in earnest for the first time in my life. I stopped by reading Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking. Mr. Carr, a man who used to smoke one hundred cigarettes a day, says there’s nothing to quit, you’re not giving anything up. You can tell who else used the book because we all say stop, not quit. It’s the closest I’ll get to being in a cult.

It stuck for a while, there were entire years I didn’t smoke one cigarette. I couldn’t believe it. Not having a certain amount of money on hand every for cash was a revelation, my skin looked nicer, everything I did wasn’t punctuated by a cigarette, my sense of smell sharpened, something I often regret. I wasn’t controlled anymore. I could afford things other than smoking.

Cigarettes were my therapy, my me time, something to do when I felt insecure in public, or needed purpose, when I needed a break, to calm down and breathe deeply. They were one of few coping mechanisms for the world. I grew up around smokers, before it became shameful. My grandfather used to smoke both a cigarette and a pipe, information that feels like 1974, especially if it’s a soft pack of smokes. Putting my pack of cigarettes in the top left pocket of my jean jacket offered me a sense of security, somehow.

I still smoke. The first time I smoked after stopping was at my friend’s funeral in Baltimore. She hung herself in her garage. My friends and I smoked on her stoop next to it. The cigarettes felt like poison. The whole day did. Then I went back to abstinence. Then, slowly, here and there, after those first cigarette free years, I’d bum one, yes, I became one of those loathsome souls, but I always offered a dollar. Sometimes I buy a pack. There was a period of time I had a pack at my local pizza place, I wrote on it with a Sharpie “Do Not Give Millicent a Cigarette,” which was, of course, a lie. Give it to me. I’ve got a loosie place in Bushwick, I won’t tell you where, and while I don’t love Kools or Marlboro Lights, they’ll scratch the itch.

I like my cigarettes to live in my freezer, along with my copy of my lease and my checkbook. I’m from people who stored things in the freezer, it just makes sense. During shutdown, I smoked after stressful days at work, not every day, my moment of relaxation between the demands at work and the fears at home. I love to use a meaningful matchbook, like one from the Rainbo Club in Chicago, the head shop Sunshine Octopus in Rehoboth Beach, those perfect little Le Veau D’or matchboxes from the restaurant revamp. My Theitsa Tini had a giant glass bowl full of matches from any and everywhere. How can something so simple and little be so perfect and still work for decades?

I don’t love that I smoke again, but usually it is one cigarette a day, if that. It’s just that I had almost eradicated them from my conscience. And yet, still, sometimes, something about a cigarette makes me feel like me. I grew up in a bar full of second hand smoke, so much so that the taxidermied brown bear by the entrance initially was a polar bear. I spent nights in the smoking section of restaurants, trips in the smoking section of the plane and once even the bus. Those are the real lands of make believe. Still, as Jean Genet says, the cigarette is the prisoner’s gentle companion, a quote that could be a bit wrong but is spot on about cigarettes.

I don’t know if one cigarette a day is very harmful, I know it’s not great. It gives me something I need, though, a satisfaction, a contentment, a release, a contemplation. Sometimes I think I’ll re-read the book for a fresh start. The world, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, is challenging. Back when I smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds a day, I used to be pithy with a certainty that cigarettes would kill me. It wasn’t arrogance that said that, but definitely a youthful ignorance. And now, I don’t know, they’re on the table for sure, but so are a lot of other things. It’s not lost on me that the very thing that provides me with comfort might also kill me. And that fact, in and of itself, is one of the reasons I do it, because this world, I try to make sense of it and it won’t have it.

I was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation on Preston Street in Baltimore City. My mother, not the Greek, got married in the church because my father was the man. She grew up going to St. John’s Lutheran Church of Sweet Air in Phoenix, Maryland, which was in the country. It’s not the country anymore, but that church will always be a country church to me, I went to pancake breakfasts and the annual Apple Butter Festival there. My grandfather needlepointed the cushions people kneel on for communion at the altar, yes, they’re called kneelers. These two Christian houses of worship couldn’t be more different for the 22 miles from Baltimore County to Baltimore City between them.

The Greek Orthodox Church of Annunciation’s structure was purchased in 1937 from the Associate Reformed Church, saving the building from a wrecking ball and a future as a gas station. The Greek population of Baltimore was rapidly growing, the church needed more room for congregants. It is a massive corner lot, a giant stone structure with many levels. Some of the stained glass windows are from Tiffanys, or I was told that as a child so I consider it the truth, a fine sentiment in this case and a dangerous one in others. High ceilings, chandeliers, several places to light candles for prayers and the dead. The Orthodox Church can be a bit dramatic, smells and bells is what it’s called, and I know other religions have that too, but I’m biased towards the Greeks. Leading with the word orthodox feels more honest in regards to the misogyny, the failure to recognize same sex marriage or allow women to participate in the priesthood. They’re not a cool church, they’re not about change. At least they’re upfront about it.

We always celebrated two Easters—American Easter and Greek Easter since we weren’t 100% Greek. American Easter is Western Christianity— Lutheran, Catholic, Protestant, Episcopalian, what have you. Greek Easter is also Christianity, but in the great Christianity split of 1054 AD, it is considered Eastern, and this Easter is the Orthodox one, Greek, Russian, Coptic, Ethiopian, what have you. Orthodox Easter follows the Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar, which is 13 days after the Gregorian calendar, followed by Western Christianity. This doesn’t mean Greek Easter is always 13 days after American Easter, the general thought is Easter must be after Passover, Jesus was at Passover. I did just finish watching the second season of Paradise, and I went down a bit of a rabbit hole about the different calendars, so I just don’t have the headspace for what that all means. I do know every few years Easters align, otherwise Orthodox usually follows American.

Midnight mass for Greek Easter meant bundling up and cramming into the cathedral with everyone else, all of us handed a candle with a maybe non-flammable cup around it to catch hot dripping wax. The church is dark except for candles, the priest lights his from the Eternal Flame on the altar, soon enough everyone’s candle is lit. Everyone walks outside to the street, for those of us always in the back of the church, as we inevitably were, we got to watch the flames flicker through the stained glass windows on the second floor as people walk by. Pure romance. The block closed off by saw horses, speakers stacked on the sidewalk, the service is then held outside, in Greek, with lots of singing. It is by no means a short service.

It’s still Saturday night in Baltimore City, there’s still a bus stop on the corner, and people with no sense of Greek Easter walking by, rapt in the spectacle. The entire block is filled with people trying to cross themselves with their white candles, an impossible feat, as the goal is to keep the candle lit, it symbolizes hope and light, the resurrection in the darkness. No pressure. Protecting it at all costs was a child’s focus, this child’s focus, while desperately trying to not let it lick and set aflame any surrounding big hair or fur coats. Every year, the challenge set.

The other challenge of the night, upon entering my YiaYia’s apartment above the bar, was to race my cousins, aunts, and uncles to the bowl of sweetbreads she made every year, a delicacy located on the farthest corner of her dining room table. Up until her death, she hosted this gathering in the early hours of Easter morning and Christmas night, and those were the two times of year the dining room table was used. This small bowl of fried offal was the first to go.

Every egg is dyed the same deep vibrant red, representing the blood of Christ. They are baked into the traditional tsoureki, a yeasted, braided bread and used for tsougrisma, the egg cracking contest. The shell represents the tomb, the cracking is the tomb opening, the Resurrection. The symbolism! Everyone gets one egg, and taps, cracks, smashes it, against the tip of another egg. Every year, another opportunity for the seemingly eternal conversations about technique and method. The unscathed egg moves onto the Sunday afternoon’s feast, where the competition continues. The winner receives good luck for the year. This is serious business, there can only be one uncracked egg, one year of good luck. I didn’t realize just how serious everyone took this game, until the year I found a ceramic egg at a junk shop, it was the right color and size, and I beat everyone, obviously. I was fourteen. I found it amusing. My last opponent was my Uncle John, who used to do business with Aristotle Onassis1. Uncle John was usually a very funny man, I though he’d appreciate the joke. I could not have been more wrong. No one was amused, and that year certainly didn’t feel like it was good luck.

My mother stepped out on her own with a new Easter for me and my sisters to try on after my parents separated in 1983. I don’t recall what we did for the other Easter beforehand, but we starting spending American Easter in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware at Miss Barbara’s house, my mother’s good friend who was a bit older, a headstrong antiques dealer who was quite the grand dame, she had lead a glamorous, storied life.

Miss Barbara knew her way around a leg of lamb, there may have been a Greek husband somewhere in the mix. Her house was a collection of heirloom furniture and baroque portraits, a mural of a political cartoon depicting Nixon’s cabinet during Watergate was painted on the wall of the TV room. She had four daughters, a few ex-husbands, and her only son Scott would visit from New York for the holiday, taking the role of Easter Bunny for Maggi, Molli, and me. Scott was an actor and model who lived in a loft in SoHo, he had a head shot. We saw him once a year, so every year was an astute gay man’s commentary on how we were growing up and who we were becoming. The year he pointed out one of my sister’s breasts she turned as red as any egg dyed to match the blood of Christ.

Maybe he’s why I started reading Interview magazine. He was my pipeline to somewhere interesting, where people were living life. I saw Desperately Seeking Susan in the theater when it came out in 1985, mesmerized by how gritty and cool New York was. I was hungry for a life that wasn’t flattened by suburbia, scrunchy socks and scrunchies, Reagan’s presidency, and the religious right. I’d walk by the Benetton store on Rehoboth Avenue, gazing longingly at clothes I couldn’t afford that probably wouldn’t fit me. The year I showed up to Easter wearing a Keith Haring Swatch watch, Scott and his friends who joined the holy holiday from the city cooed with appreciation.

Scott died from complications from AIDS, in 1987? Could it have been that soon? Maybe 1988 or 1989? Impressions are impressions, regardless of actual time. I feel like we still had more Easters with him. His two cats, Oblio and Lady Di, chic, sleek Siamese cats, moved from SoHo to live with us in Cockeysville, Maryland. They were disappointed. We continued to go to the beach for Miss Barbara’s lamb and beauty, the absence of our Easter Bunny Scott was fairly devastating. My mom and sisters host now, since Miss Barbara passed a few years ago. There is always room at the table.

I see it now, how our beach American Easter was my first foray into the idea of a chosen family. That’s not her language, but my mother picked the people with the most support2 and where she wanted to be and made it happen. Both of these Easter celebrations have a distinct sense of place, time, and of timelessness, part of my appreciation and love for them is in the details. I don’t think about the existence of God, but I do think about the details, often. That’s the good stuff. Orthodox Easter still looms on the horizon, April 12th. There’s sure to be a midnight mass somewhere to crash and a candle to keep lit. Maybe see you there.3

We’re so glad you’re coming to the sixth MAD Symposium, “Mind the Gap”.

The events and social movements of the past year have rocked our trade. Now, more so than ever, we must decide how to build a healthy, creative, and fair restaurant community. This year’s MAD Symposium will pose questions about how to shorten the distance between the current restaurant world and the one we aspire to. Participants will consider the barriers that prevent them and their peers from achieving meaningful lives in the food community. Over the course of two days, we will examine new paths forward through a dozen keynote speeches; dynamic conversations and panels; and 30 focused breakout sessions.

Let’s forge new paths forward—together.

MAD is Danish for food, it is also an organization founded in 2011 by René Redzepi, chef, founder, and the main and public facing stakeholder of the restaurant Noma. Two weeks ago Noma was all over the internet for allegations of past mistreatment of staff, especially the 20-30 unpaid interns they were dependent on for each cycle of their menu. Interns had to make at least a three month commitment to the restaurant and pay their own way and room and board while they were there. If they left early, the threat of being put on a list was not just inferred, it was a part of the contract.

The above email is from spring 2018, I applied for the MAD Symposium 6, a gathering held in Copenhagen with extensive programming. I was excited to be accepted, because who the fuck am I?, but also wary, because people, especially in the restaurant industry, can talk a good game. Here’s the last paragraph of my application:

How is it possible that the culture of food has become so popular, but it feels like we are leaving people behind? The media and atmosphere is increasingly more bourgeoisie and elitist. We need to push harder in how we interact with our neighborhoods and employees in the restaurant world. We need to work harder for equity. I have been in many kitchens where there is a dangerous sameness. It feels like we have created a closed culture of “like-minded” people. As an industry, we need to continue to talk about the hard stuff, about how we can be more inclusive, push through exclusive comfort zones and offer more opportunities. I want to be a part of this discussion.

I paid my way and went to Copenhagen. I marveled at how safe bike riding felt in a city made for it, and in general enjoyed the speakers and was impressed with the scope. I wanted to meet people doing work I respected, people who were more involved in feeding people, working on accessibility for different communities. Really, I just ended up attending the most exclusive restaurant world clique, witnessing them in their habitat. The social aspect of the hospitality industry in ingrained, success intrinsically coupled with who you know, and networking. In 2018, the concept of critical thinking and food writing were worlds apart, at least from what I could see in New York. I needed to find people, and that wasn’t going to happen at any Bon Appetit party I crashed.

While revisiting MAD 6, I can’t get over how delusional all of this is, René Redzepi standing stage left the entire time, hosting an international gathering full of speakers about the inequities and issues of the business. That is a sickness, a dedication to both reputation and institution that completely interferes with an actual ability to change anything about the industry. The idea that the perpetrators of what ails it are the ones to fix it is misguided, their lasting instinct is to protect the institution. Everyday, everyone is in service to the restaurant, to keep it operating. It becomes impossible to understand where the line is between what is valid and what is too far.

The problem with present day service isn’t the continued reliance on Escoffier’s brigade system. The past few decades of food obsession, coupled with the limitless reach of the internet, have created a fucked-up hybrid of respect, omniscience, and worship for restauranteurs and chefs, imbued with a social cachet and status that is also intrinsically linked to boundless access. The amount of attention and interest is outsized. All of this is coupled with expansive, rarely-satiated egos and a continuous need to be relevant. And all of that is bolstered by a certain class of customer, of guest, who can afford to travel to pop-ups and restaurants all in the name of culture, and their own bottomless self-importance pit. The dissonance between founders and figureheads who travel the world and are welcome on their own recognizance versus those in their employ and service is also something I can’t shake off. It’s so disparate I can’t get past it, I just get stuck.

When people say ‘if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,’ there is a litany of things to persevere through and none of them are getting punched. The actual heat, the pace, the discipline of the work, challenging yourself to be better, showing up everyday even when you don’t want to and knowing you’re not there yet. Pushing yourself to be more organized, more prepared, to work cleaner, perfect the brunoise, cook the fish perfectly.

But to repeat this mantra ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’ like a member of a cult, tells me you need to elevate this place, the kitchen, and this act, cooking, traditionally a domestic thing, under the purview of females. But professional kitchens? Don’t even think about questioning anyone’s masculinity. Make it war, and everything is ok. The things we’ve asked men to stop doing over the time, using their physical and social power for control over others, is something that flourished at Noma. It’s baked into greatness though, this violence. Sometimes I think cooking attracts people who think they don’t have to consider other people when they are in the kitchen, that their brilliance is more important than treating others well. Validation for them always comes from the outside, a hard way to live. If treating people well was made as important as what was on the plate, or the atmosphere, or the service, they’d find a way to do it.

When we talk about the abuse, the mistreatment, we walk about moments—a punch, a stab with a fork, ripping an apron. But those moments transform into entire days, weeks, months, and years. A constant vibration of anticipation, of wondering if, when it’s going to happen again. Assault, both verbal and physical, stays inside the body, affecting the nervous system, the blood pressure, the heart. It puts a person at a deficit. It’s nearly impossible to reset the body because the days are long and the work is hard, relentless. Anxiety and fear flourishes inside, fertilized by every single witness doing nothing, by media and customers heaping praise service after service, year after year. You can’t trust yourself because you’re living in this world where everything wrong that is happening is ignored, aggressively.

We keep butting our heads up against the same wall when we talk about restaurants, we know bad things happen, we know the money rarely makes sense, we see owners own a lot of things while the workers barely get by. All this energy for talking about how to fix it. Maybe it can’t be fixed. Maybe you just make the best place you can make, take care of the people who work there, make good food from good people, and that’s it, that’s as good as it gets. Really the solution for how to make the industry better is to stop platforming these fuckers, calling them brilliant, and for gods sake just stop going to them for advice on what to do, or let them have podcasts. If hot air had answers, we’d be fine.

Time does not make apologies. Carefully-crafted statements about personal growth, regret, and doing the work do not offer reparations, or actual change. The fact is, most people do not care who is hurt along the way for their pleasure or success. Legacy is powerful for these people, that’s why they protect the institutions. So fuck it, burn it down. Burn it all down.

A few years of COVID in our apartment brought more in than out. Our apartment was big enough to fill more. But when are we full? I’ve moved the same records from the middle of the country to the left coast, back to the middle and now the east coast, this one is my fourth apartment in New York. I worked in music, I love a vinyl promo, I love a weird esoteric album, give me a reissue, send me your small town’s psychedelic freakout from the guy who works at the gas station. I’ll keep it forever. Is that 7” single actually a puzzle? I’ll buy two.

Something about this move was a cleansing one, we had time, definitely too much, and the apartments on the market have less space. We hired movers, something I did for the first time two moves ago, the great epiphany of my life, that I work to make money to happily pay someone else to move my belongings. Hearing quotes really pushed me to get rid of more. I didn’t want the stuff to dictate where I could live, that we needed a big place to hold it all, and that place would be nowhere near a train. I had conversations with records, wondering if I could live without Joan Jett, we’ve been roommates for decades. I kept her, but I did evict all of the Kiss records, except for the solo albums. I consigned an awesome 8 track collection I was not listening to, filled with of Roxy Music, Nina Simone, David Bowie, Lou Reed. Everything viable went to Deep Cuts Record Store, our local, and every time Brandon posts one of my records, I swoon a bit, that he likes it, that it will find a new home. Farewell At The Drive-In/Sunshine split 12” on pink vinyl.

Nothing I kept and collected was an affectation, it came from an earnest place. The impetus to my koozie collection was seeing a commemorative one from a wedding my sister and mom attended some time in the early 1990s. I was enamored with this very casual, lowbrow takeaway for something that probably cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Koozies are great keepsakes, they’re cheap, they’re light, they’re cheeky or maybe a little classy. For my 30th birthday, I made one to observe the day. My sister, who had wholesale connections, got 210 made for my sidewalk party. That’s where the price break was, she insisted, otherwise the cost per piece went up a lot.

All these things, these interests, the carbon steel American-made knives, the old country and Shaker cookbooks, the koozies, the 8-tracks, the beer signs, the liquor decanters, the heavy metal t-shirts, they represent moments, places I’ve lived, where I am from, people I left, and people and places I’ve lost. They weren’t just kitschy things to bring along, they were my interests, but also a way to signify who I was, what I was interested in.

I felt the tug of parting ways with many items- the Dead Boys 8-track with a note from me on a mailing label to my friend who worked at Reckless Records—Jolene-save for Millicent forever. I tried to prove to myself, just two weeks ago, that I didn’t care about it so I didn’t even take a picture of it.1 Letting go happens in layers, I’m not ready to part with the Aphex Twin 12”/10”/7” on green vinyl packaged in a plastic bag ot Jay-Z’s Grey Album DLP bootleg, but maybe in the future. I have to keep a little in the record bank, if you know what I mean. The framed photograph of a shirtless Ozzy Osbourne holding a machine gun, hiding behind a house plant, I considered keeping, a gift from an old roommate for my 40th birthday.

One of my biggest takeaways from this time is how transactional I can become. This is not positive. My impulse was to sell everything, that the internet has made it easy. We could sell it all to make money for the move, the furniture, the clothes, but then I’d on Facebook, which I haven’t missed in the past decade, or starting an eBay store, something I have no interest in doing. So we gave it away (minus the records), dropping all the various things off to different non-profits. I’m better for it. It’s more fun to put all the weird stuff into the world to be found. There’s a levity to the freedom of not caring.

In her February 6, 2026 essay Attention is a Muscle, Alicia Kennedy writes “I’m making ritual of my attention and by doing so, I’m strengthening it.” I’ve been trying to do the same my entire adult life. That’s why these possessions must go, to help me keep the thread. Moving demands intention, until we’re at the last hour before the movers show up, just putting whatever’s in from to us into a trash bag to bring along. I’m trying to ensure what I pay attention to, now, is also serving me.

There’s something about this specific move that is different from others. I used to move often, jumping from open room to open room every few months in Chicago for years. Part of it is having a partner, another part is making a home, that the idea of home has changed for me. Home used to be a place to run away from, to barely be at. Another factor is my age, how I have changed over the past few years. I’m staring down my future more than I ever have. I understand how I need to read, how I need to write, that I can’t spend my time out as much as I used to. It’s not the clock ticking, it’s not my own mortality, but it’s definitely the passage of time, knowing that we only have so many hours in the day. All these beautiful, strange things that used to make me have done their work. I don’t need them, they’ll go on to do something for someone else. I don’t dismiss them. I commend them. In parting with all of these things, there’s always a pull, a moment where I almost keep it, (Ozzy Osbourne framed photo) but let go. If I listen to all the astrological posts, I’m in a real transformational period, and if I listen to the guy at the moving company, there’s only so much space in the truck.

They’re both right.

The end of January is rough financially for many of us, celebrating and obligations takes it out of us, emotionally and financially. We need a break. If you’re a service worker, you’re in the same boat, except your livelihood is tied to other people going out. Our collective crash in January makes it hard to pay the bills. A few days before the strike, my friend, a bartender at a local, spoke with me about skipping his shift, whether it was worth it to call out. In his own estimation, he’s not one to protest, to take to the streets, but he wanted to participate in the strike. He hoped the bar would close, take part in the action, so he could too. but if he was just going to call out of his shift, if the bar was open, then someone else would just pick up his shift, and he would lose out on the money he needed to make rent.

We talked it through, I didn’t want him to feel nihilistic about the idea of strike if he couldn’t be a part of it. The bar did end up being open, they chose to donate a portion of profits. I don’t think the strike on January 30th will the one and only strike. We need to demonstrate our collective power to the government. People are capable of great things, and sacrifices, it’s big business and politicians who don’t believe that about us, who are cynical. Our greatest power in this time of late capitalism is to say no, period. Partly because the powers that be think we can’t.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and black IG profile pics from spring 2020. Instead of striking, people were encouraged to go out, the last Friday in the long endurance contest called January 2026. A lot of businesses chose to donate the day’s profits to organizations on the ground, working with immigrants. I am sympathetic to small businesses, having grown up in one and always, perpetually working in one. I didn’t expect businesses to shut down on such short notice, January is hard for them too, especially bars. Suddenly, January 30th, the National Strike, turned into a neoliberal dream come true, spend more, send more, complete with customers asking staff where donations were going. The businesses I noticed who did close were mainly ones run by immigrants, people of color, and women.

There will be another call for another strike, and another strike, and another strike, because there is no end to this administration’s cruel authoritarianism. Not for lack of organization from activists, actually it’s the opposite. I think more and more people will be drawn to action because of organizing. This is the time for workers and management to talk about what to do, in anticipation of the next time.

Speaking of workers and management, the Monday after the Super Bad Bunny Bowl, Achilles Heel, a bar and restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn shut down unceremoniously after 13 years in business via an Instagram post. “It is with tremendous sadness that we announce the closure of Achilles Heel. Last night was our final hurrah. The business has faced a protracted period of financial hardship and we’ve reached a point where it is no longer viable to continue operating.”

Achilles was a part of the Marlow Collective, a group of food businesses that started with Diner, which opened in 1999 in Williamsburg by Mark Firth and Andrew Tarlow, who is now the solo founding operator. On the website, the Marlow Collective describes itself as a values-driven organization committed to providing supportive, respectful workplaces; to sourcing seasonally, locally and organically and building longstanding partnerships with our farmers and producers; and to creating meaningful experiences that celebrate and connect the communities we serve.

There was no closing party for Achilles Heel, unlike its sister business Marlow & Sons last spring.1 It wasn’t in business for as long, but Achilles was beloved. An old waterfront bar, it was a great place to watch a sunset. The fireplace in the winter made the small space feel cozy, far away from the city. Sometimes it felt like you were at the end of the world, or the beginning of a new one. The staff was great, with a mixture of knowledge, attention, casualness, and presence in a place with no real kitchen and nowhere to hide. I used to live a block away, my place for congregating, celebrating, and mourning. It was our impromptu headquarters for Diner Journal, central for parties for new issues, I DJ’ed a few times, including a particularly fun New Year’s Eve.

Word got out that the Achilles Heel staff decided to unionize after the announcement.2 Comments were closed on the Achilles closing post. Greenpointers had some intel, Reddit had thoughts, as it does, and a GoFundMe, our country’s leading safety net program, circulated. Sylvia Scahill, who made it, wrote

Fifteen of my coworkers—cooks, servers, bartenders, and porters—recently lost their jobs at Achilles Heel after attempting to unionize. On Friday, February 6th, we announced our intention to unionize to the restaurant’s general manager. Our desire was to bargain in good faith with the Achilles Heel and the Marlow Collective management. Two days later, we were all terminated and the business was permanently closed, both effective immediately.

The initial ask for the fundraising was $14,000 and having met that, has been increased to $16,000. There is a spreadsheet for how the money is being distributed to people, mainly rent and groceries. I’ve made the mistake of reading the comments3 on the few articles and posts, people bemoaning the death of Greenpoint, people disgusted at the Marlow Collective for shutting down the bar in the light of the staff’s decision, and always people who just say that the workers just want more money, that’s all they care about. If this is true, I’d think the ask for 16 people would be much more money.

People unionize to be heard and have power to negotiate with management. These people were punished, they lost their jobs, without notice. Achilles’ last social media post advertised their “3rd Annual Super Bowl Party”, nothing about an impending closure, until it was closed. Apparently being presented with a staff wanting to unionize was the last nail in the coffin for this bar. Unionizing is arduous, consuming work, on top of the arduous, consuming work of, well, working.

The Achilles Heel staff was dismissed, everyone lost their jobs. Just like that. What a strong statement to every other worker in the Marlow Collective (a collection of businesses, not an actual collective). Don’t even try, actually, don’t think about it. I can’t imagine this was the only time the staff tried to talk to management about the issues that motivated them to eventually unionize.

Get another job if you’re not happy, a statement workers hear over and over again. A large part of the success of these niche, aesthetic, and ethical businesses is the investment of the staff. We signal that the management and owners are worthy of our efforts. Customers want to spend their money in a place where the workers are taken care of. To be basic about it, it makes people feel good. We love a staff who go above and beyond. So who leaves their entire staff vulnerable like this, closing suddenly without notice after the workers stand up for themselves?

Archestratus, an incredible cookbook, grocer, and event space, also in Greenpoint, is closing after ten years of business, on April 26th. Paige is a friend, one I’ve made since this strange beautiful shop opened in my then-neighborhood. The first thing I noticed when I met Paige was her enthusiasm, the second that she’s a hugger. What I came to realize is she has great ideas, and a sense of self she trusts to be her guiding light. Archestratus evolved over the years to be a community center, for food nerds, freaks, geeks, and weirdos, serious people, artists, philosophers, intellectuals, dummies, hippies, heshers, and industry people. Her short list of programming includes fantastic book events, some about food, a cookbook club that culminates with a monthly potluck, a Keep Greenpoint Weird initiative, live music, and untold amounts of bake sales to support groups that deal with the untold amount of barbarism our government unleashes.

When the cafe was open, it was one of my favorite places to eat lunch. I was lucky enough to eat great dinners from Olia Hercules, Ken Wiss, Meredith Kurtzman, and Paige herself. I was also fortunate to cook there a few times, including a dinner inspired by writer Jim Harrison, a coq au vin dinner, and I finally got to make crab cakes the way my Nana and mother taught me.4 I’m now just understanding that for me, especially, and maybe for some of you, it’s hard to find a place in an industry where self-importance, unsustainable constant relevance, and celebrity is paramount. Some of us just want to be surrounded by people whose food, writing, and work we respect and admire, who inspire us. We’ll never be rich or famous, nor do we want to be, but we do require a sense of belonging, a place to go, a place to be, to truly be, to keep going.

Paige wrote an intuitively unhinged5 and over-informed missive on the occasion of her store closing, stunning writing that veers from Italian philosophers, to her recently-passed Nonna’s recipes, the impetus for opening her shop, and the reasons behind its closure.

It is my feeling that these past few years have been deeply liminal. The discontinuity between worlds is very real to me. We are in the middle of a larger cultural shift, and, to bring it back to the material, there are things we do in the book and food business that make no sense in the world we live in today. We are expected to act as if 2015 is 2026, as if 2019 is 2026, but it isn’t. Nothing operates as before. Things that were self-evident have now vanished.

I feel this deeply. We’re in denial that change is happening, needs to happen, and is demanding to happen. Are we going to keep doing the things we’ve always done because we’ve always done it that way? Isn’t this the problem, this status quo? When will we cease granting respect, and the benefit of the doubt to figureheads and founders, how do we extricate this impulse from our beings? When is shit going to change if we don’t change it?

Barnyard is an overused word in food and wine, something, rich, lush, deep, rank, earthy, a descriptor loved by many who have never milked a cow, but have been to a natural wine festival, where everyone is fewer than three degrees from a pile of shit. It’s a helpful term to fortify a person for something aggressive, funky, smelly, ripe, more punch, more challenge. The cheese was not dominant in its scent, but simultaneously stopped me and took me somewhere. It makes sense, the von Trapps use crop rotation and planting cover crops to maintain soil health, abstaining from commercial fertilizers and letting the livestock enrich the soil. The air is full of healthy manure. I think cow shit to be so fecund it’s alive, enriching, healthy.

I’ve said the word barnyard to describe something, but I haven’t been in the one I was sent to for a long time, my family’s farm, a place I haven’t been to in decades. My mouth, my nose, my skull, filled with being in that barn, where there is no separation between you, the animals, what they consume, what leaves their bodies. No separation between the body and the bowel on a farm, that’s just a fact. A lot of the ground in pens and beds ends up being layers and layers of stomped upon shit, chilled, hardened, almost cured, layer upon layer, until it becomes a flooring of its own. You get used to it, also a fact, not an allegory.

Whenever I’ve tried to shut down my nose my whole head opens, and this bite gave me a skull full of shit. What a mindfuck. I’m in a kitchen in Brooklyn Heights then I’m milking a cow, pushing grain down the chute, tossing straw bales from the loft, rubbing the water spigot with gloved hands to warm it enough to turn, tossing kibble on Southern States 50 lb bags, calling for the cats to eat, watching my cousin fight. Our olfactory system can be our whole world, all this from a piece of cheese.

I like to bring plates of food up to my nose to inhale them deeply, it does something different than just a bite. I know it might seem a bit pretentious, but I do it in earnest, and the pay-off, the information of what I am about to consume, is worth this moment that might appear performative. I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, my sense of smell has returned since I stopped over ten years ago. I still smoke, here and there or one everyday of late, but it’s not a pack, not even close. Having my sense of smell isn’t always great, it’s a helpful tool, intrinsic to cooking, but sometimes on the train, in the summertime, in New York when it’s all hot trash and urine, it’s rough.

This isn’t the first time a piece of cheese took me to the farm, it happened twenty years ago, a particularly gooey cheese from Bobolink Dairy at Union Square Greenmarket. A taste of this one gave me a flashback to the cows getting in the garlic chives, their milk rife with allium. We’d dump that milk, otherwise it would contaminate the tank, making it unsellable. We weren’t in the business of artisanal cheese-making, just commodity milk-drinking. The first time I handled Anson Mills’ grits, an heirloom, organic grain producer in South Carolina, I’m cleaning the dairy while my uncle grinds corn for grain right outside.

In my friend’s bathroom in college, they lived above the Tap House, the only bar in town. The bathroom floor was the classic pinwheel dot black and white pattern, music from the jukebox wafted up from the first floor, along with cigarette smoke and the din of bar talk. There I was, in my YiaYia’s apartment above the bar, above the jukebox, smokes rising up. That black and white tile always does me in, a personal time machine.

In searching for the right language to describe this, I fail. Words like reminiscent, transforming, evocative, stirring, poignant, they’re all a little light. I’m not talking about wafts, I’m not talking about sense memory, I’m talking about a powerful transfiguration to a place I have been to, where I have lived, where I have worked, the people around me, in this case, family, an experience I am unprepared for taking me over. The words that underwhelm me feel cerebral, a touch melancholy, almost romantic, artistic.

I keep thinking of violence, maybe this sensation exists in a physical world. But violence is pain, and this isn’t pain, but it is powerful. The other words don’t carry that power for me, and that’s a problem, my affiliation of power with violence, but also something transformative. I need more words. Maybe I’m in the wrong language. Perhaps my lack of spirituality is the basis for my lack.

I’ve been writing about rewatching 1995’s film Heat, starring Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Val Kilmer, all the men, and some women to be disappointed by and love them. “All I am is what I’m going after” Al Pacino’s character, the cop, says. Every man only knows how to do one thing, and he is fulfilling his destiny by doing so. It’s all very Greek mythology. Then I thought of Marty Supreme, same thing, Marty can only be Marty, and how I’m bothered that I know Timothée Chalamet wants an Oscar so damn bad, then I consider if Michael B. Jordan was so vocal about his desire for the statue.

But then this damn piece of cheese happened, and it was so much more interesting than the same story about men over and over again.

There’s power and there’s powerful things. The powerful things are way more compelling.

I didn’t know anything about rent-stabilized apartments then, I just knew this place was right above the restaurant we were opening. I am no stranger to living above my work—my father, his sisters and parents lived above the family restaurant growing up, my Yia-Yia lived there for decades after her husband’s passing until her death. I lived above the hardware store next door to the restaurant I worked at in college, I’d bribe the Thursday morning barista with Oreos, he was vegan, and who knew, so are Oreos, to turn the flattop on for me and call when the first order came in.

The proximity in Brooklyn allowed me to take showers in-between shifts, essential during that first fretful hot summer, to change socks and shirts to try to feel new again, and spend time with my dog during 80 hour work weeks. I lived with my friend Cari, who did the books and prepped at the restaurant, our two dogs Trinity and Belly and Matilda the 6-toed cat. Rent-stabilized apartments are sometimes called golden handcuffs, and I don’t know how I feel about that phrase, but I understand what it’s getting at. How people can feel trapped by the rent, which is often less than the going rates since stabilization has its own set of rules that generally protects tenants.

The Rent Guidelines Board votes annually on incremental percentages for one and two year leases on stabilized apartments. There are rules for how much the landlord can raise the rent between tenants, and it is extremely difficult to kick someone out. Listen, this Rent Guidelines Board is no impartial thing, sometimes it’s full of people who love to raise rents, like during Eric Adams’ administration.

Still, stabilized apartments offer renters more security than the free market, which, from what I can tell, is a volatile, predatory place. The more I write this, the more I wonder why the market is treated as such a fair entity. I mean, this notion is a large basis of our economic system, rhetoric that supply and demand, a basic foundation of the free market, evens itself out, that it magically regulates itself. It’s such an outdated idea, it’s laughable. Well, almost laughable. We live in such an outdated notion of the market, we exist in the monopoly.

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about economics, I’m here to talk about hating my landlord for an apartment I haven’t lived in for eight years. I still have the lease for it, I lived there for twelve years, to the point where I figured I would live there forever. It was about a thousand dollars under market when I moved out, as more and more little articles popped up about how cool the neighborhood was, the kiss of death, until people realize they’re living in dilapidated apartments off the G, the only train that doesn’t go into Manhattan.

When I moved out, I figured I could sublet it to make some money, that mythological passive income I’ve heard so much about, and still keep the apartment a bargain for someone. I had the strongest ally anyone looking to spread the word, any word, could have—a friend who bartended in the neighborhood. She connected me with enough inquisitive, interested millennials who loved the location and wondered when the lease would be theirs, and when they could meet the landlord? Never, and no. They were all so well-meaning. Do you think places are cheap because the situation is above board? I just wanted to keep the place under market but assist my dismal cook’s income. Once I understood I was becoming part of the problem, trying to make money off of something that wasn’t mine, that I was pricing out the people who needed a place to live because I thought I was entitled to free money. My friend needed a place to live, and just because the market didn’t offer people like us anything we could afford, I didn’t have to be the market. She ended up living there for eight years, until she moved out of the city a few months ago. I discovered that even with a really easy tenant, being a pretend landlord sucks.

It’s a different game now, the way people with money can move through the world, casually living here and there to see if it’s something that suits them, and those of us who hold on dearly to a place. Rent-stabilized apartments are the closest thing to the security that home-ownership offers. For a lot of people, without stabilized rents, they can’t afford to pay bills, raise their families, they have to live further and further away from work and community. The displacement is detrimental, longer commutes, less time with loved ones, less time to rest, less time to play music, paint, read, write, cook, play. People stay in apartments that some landlords don’t take care of, because they know they can afford to live there. Knowing you can pay your bills is a powerful thing, a certainty hard to fuck with.

My landlord in Greenpoint, who owned the building for 26 years, never maintained this four story structure erected in 1928. I should know, I’ve held the lease for over 20 years, a fact that adds a layer of interest to me that is anything but. I loathe my landlord so much I can’t tell if I want to live in this apartment until I die, so I can impede how much money he can make from #2R, or if I never want to see or deal with him and his incompetency ever again. Some people vehemently believe I am to hold onto this lease until you can pry it from my cold dead fingers, and I understand why. Often, when an older landlord dies, the heirs sell the building. This one was bought for $250,000 in 2000 and is now worth over $3 million. I’m supposed to make a new owner buy me out, but to do so I either have to live in this apartment again, which trust me I’ve considered because what is available out there is grim, or sublet it, an act that forces me to act the role of landlord, just to keep the lease, something that takes considerable effort and time, and eventually is illegal. Also, waiting for someone to die must be like staring at a pot of water to boil. Impossible.

None of this matters right now, the building is under a full vacate order from the city after an electrical board fire in early July, meaning no one can legally inhabit the building until the Department of Buildings deems it safe. So far, it has failed two inspections since the fire, and the landlord is dragging his feet renovating it to push out older tenants, like my upstairs neighbors who pay $80 a month in rent, they’ve lived there for so long. Which, good luck, guy. They’re not going anywhere.

Are you a renter? Do you dream? When you do, do you dream of built-ins? During our apartment search, after I gave an impassioned speech to Vince about the importance of living in a rent-stabilized apartment for security as we age since neither of us are fiscal virtuosos, I saw the most beautiful apartment online, the asking rent below my somewhat arbitrary budget. Three French doors, a small room outfitted as a closet, a goddamn closet, and an entire wall of built-ins, shelves and drawers. Dare to dream. Both ends of the apartment were rounded, like a fairytale castle, and a tiny balcony right off the kitchen had comically charming fake grass. During the open house, I placed my open palms on the double porcelain sink in the kitchen and whispered “I hope we get to live together someday soon.”

The owners chose people who offered considerably more1 than the rent they asked for, they also offered to purchase the pending washer and dryer for the apartment. I imagine they offered $4,000 a month to seal the deal, that’s what word considerable makes me think, and sure I was somewhat disappointed, both with the outcome and that an apartment in Queens so capriciously increased in rent, forever most likely, just because somebody wanted it. The ramifications of their want are greater than just that living in that apartment on Catalpa.

I don’t have ill will for the new tenants of this apartment, I hope they are good stewards of the place. They do have to live above their landlords, who have small children. And the owners of the building, the ones who said yes to more, have to be landlords to people who know they can be bought. Because they have. I’ve let go of my internal dialogue about whether I’d take the money if I owned the building, taking myself to task on a very hypothetical question, would I take the money or the best tenant for a place I don’t own.

We have found an apartment, not on Streeteasy, but through a friend who is moving to look after her mom, a rent-stabilized place that is cared for, both by her and the people who own the building. The difference between care and neglect is a palpable thing. After we didn’t get the beautiful built-ins place, I thought about how we are just not internet real estate people like that, how there is a big portion of the world that is not for us, because it’s not made for people, it’s made for algorithms, it’s made for start-ups, brands, influencers, and optimizers. We’re just people, and we’re lucky to have other people, to have friends, and friends of friends, who think of us when we’re in need. That’s how we do this.

But how are you doing? On this fascist train during an ongoing genocide? In this economy? What an idiot, and then I’d answer “I’m fine but the world is hell,” and the person generally agreed. So far 2026 feels like a no-bid contract our former mayor, Eric Adams, set up for his buddy who runs some company. Why must we always improve, why can’t the upcoming year offer us something, other than some new Pantone cloud white ‘color’?1

“We had whistles. They had guns.” I can’t get these words from Becca Good out of my mind, they’re from her statement about her wife Renee Nicole Good who was murdered point blank by that fucking ICE agent who looks like that wasn’t his first casual kill. These words, even as they reverberate in my brain, do not represent her beautiful statement about Good, but they are the facts of the day. Maybe my fixation on them is a bit cynical, but I won’t do their work for them. More so than cynical, I am stubborn. People, we are stubborn. Our cynicism becomes their power, and I’m not interested in helping anyone this greedy get more. The whistles do beat the guns, for the very fact that there will be more whistles. Don’t mistake me for a pacifist, or one of those who think we’re bringing the violence on ourselves when we show up to exact our rights. We’ve been living in violence for a long time now, whether you’ve been touched by it or not. Now, more of us can see it.

Presently I am depressed, isolated, overwhelmed by the world, underwhelmed by me, and underemployed, a crappy cocktail. Last I checked, this is called January. I try to turn it around by making stock, helping my friends out, and reading the Hélène Cixous interview in the new Paris Review. Reading returns me to my earliest version of myself, and to do so without the internet helps.2

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2051-2072 by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhabi.

I heard co-author Eman Abdelhabi at the Jewish Voices for Peace conference on the Fight to Win: Organizing for Material Change and to Transform Our Conditions panel in Baltimore last spring, I bought this there because I figured I would forget about it. My friend did the cover, Josh MacPhee, an incredible artist and activist who is a part of the Interference Archive and Justseeds artist collective. Josh is one of those people that when he’s in the room, I know I’m in the right place. This book is the shit, a vision of the future after a revolution in New York City, an oral history of how this change happened and what present life (in 2072) looks like from a collection of interviews. And wow, what a fucking vision of an equitable future, an anarchist life. We’re scared of so much right now, everything is terrifying, and unsure. The future isn’t promised. In a best case scenario we end up somewhere here.

Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever.

Laurie Woolever is a friend, and I’ve wondered what her memoir would be about since I found out she was writing it. Assistant to Mario Batali from 1999 to 2002, then assistant and ultimately lieutenant to Anthony Bourdain for almost a decade, up until his death. This could easily be a compilation of salacious tales through experience and proximity, and yes that’s some of that, but these aren’t just cocktail party stories. Woolever captures coming to New York with more dreams than resources, and the jagged little pathways to getting somewhere. The excerpt published by Grub Street before her book came out stands alone as example and answer to anyone who asks “why would you do that? why would you work there?” while answering those questions, whether you like the answers or not. She comes to terms with herself, her personal fucking being, both the one decided by society and the one she felt available to her and she becomes who the fuck she actually is. Her writing proves that.

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abduraqqib

One of my favorite writers, but I never read him quickly. In his last book, A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, his writing, the poetry, and cultural criticism, felt more integrated, and this book, about basketball, being a fan, being a person, family, faith, furthers Abduraqqib’s style. Sometimes I don’t know what I am reading, not in a formalist sense, but just in terms of feelings. Some texts make me realize how I have quarantined myself from emotion, from mine. This is one of them. Just an incredible book.

Aftermath : Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

If I went back to school it would be for political science. Or I’d be a spy. God, I’d be a great spy. This book, about Germany for the decade after World War II, from the moment when they looked at the world and said “look what happened to us!” And the world looked back and said “look at what you did!” to the last bit of rubble being cleared from Dresden in the 1970s. We could be headed for another world war, but maybe those things are more about the world a century ago. When my friend asked why I was reading this, I thought about how wars change borders, change the world. How this was the start of the Cold War, and I’m still trying to find the book where the discussion between the Allies and the Soviet Union on how they decided to not only split up Germany East and West but also Berlin, is documented. I have to be careful to not become History Channel/Anything Nazi dad, but I think this history is still breathing, and as someone who studied Russian and Russian History and spent a little time in the Soviet Union, I’m fascinated by this beast.

The Picnic: A Dream for Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo

Another Eastern Bloc historical hit, my local library is delivering. A picnic where maybe 700? perhaps 1000?3 people defected from communist Hungary to Austria, considered the first brick coming out of the Berlin Wall. An incredible convergence of people and happenings under the Iron Curtain4 that gives me hope.

In response, they sent me a book, Precepts of Mother Ann Lee by The Elders, and a letter outlining what I needed to bring to the table to become a Shaker: a devotion to God and willingness to be celibate, along with no debt and a desire to work hard. My intention then wasn’t to join them. I am a fan of their furniture, spaces, inventions, egalitarianism, and food. I respect the Shakers too much to live with them under a ruse, I didn’t follow up. I’m not a religious person, but the Shakers are definitely a religious group, born from the Quakers in England, called the shaking Quakers for how they danced during prayer. Mother Ann Lee led them, considered to be Christ in female form, they moved to the colonies to fulfill their religious destiny, according to her vision.

Imagine my surprise that there is a film, The Testament of Ann Lee, just released, about the Shaker leader, played by Amanda Seyfried, directed by Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote this musical with creative and personal partner Brady Corbet. A musical! About a religious group! I’ve never been a musical person (except Grease, but I was a child), theatrical and dramatic expressions are not my cup of tea.

What I saw was extraordinary.

Filmed in 70mm, the colors of the movie are a bit dusky, neutral, and rich, like being in the room, on the ship, in the field, nothing is in sharp focus, it’s actually how we see. The story of Ann Lee is narrated by Sister Mary, a very intimate film without the casual bravado that can dictate historical films. We witness Ann Lee’s childhood, her work, her quest for an inspiring faith, her four pregnancies and subsequent deaths of her children, and her imprisonment, during which she has divine revelations, including witnessing Adam and Eve’s ex-communication from the Garden of Eden. She comes to the conclusion that celibacy is essential to the path of salvation.

Usually what everyone touches on with the Shakers is that they were celibate, foolish for a group trying to increase its population. I don’t think we get to choose our paths towards salvation, if salvation is in fact the goal. They did increase their population, through missionary work, adoption, and being open to people willing to participate in their vision of the word.

Watching the worship, the dancing, the rhythmic breathing, singing, movement in the film is watching something sensual and exuberant, there are dizzying heights of collective gestures, inhalations, exhalations, breathing, rapture, elation. Fornication may be off the table, but transcending is not. I know it’s not necessarily historically correct, except for the sense of communion.

Their promise, that hard work and abstaining from sex led to a better life, was something achievable for people, to put your hands to work and your heart to God, they understood their work to be expressive of their devotion, their attention, and beauty a testament to faith.

That’s where this film is astonishing, when Ann Lee says she saw Adam and Eve, I believe her. I think there’s something miraculous about the worshippers and their dance towards the divine, and the attempts to exorcise the unholy, the common and mutual pursuit for a better life. Something about this film makes it all make sense to me. I feel like I was there, it’s not just the retelling of a story, or an aggrandizement of a myth.1

When I was younger, I subscribed to the freaks and geeks, the miscreants, beer drinkers and hell raisers as architects of beauty in our world. Cookie Mueller, my guiding light. Part of that mentality is romanticism, another necessity. But when I learned more about the Shakers, I was surprised that such pious people made such beautiful things, furniture, rooms, food. I’ve come a long way. I’ve even found a role more suitable for me, Friend of the Shakers, a group that supports them, their land, work, and legacy. They send me a Christmas card every year.

My father, Bobby, convinced our mother, his ex-wife, that it was a good idea to take Maggi, Molli, and me to New York City for a long weekend over the holiday season, Thursday through Sunday, a cultural outing. He loved Christmas, carols stayed on the jukebox year round in the family bar, decorations up for months, until a bartender would break and take them down, usually in the springtime, when the sag really set into the garland. He also considered New York City the best city in the world. The weekend culminated with the Christmas Spectacular featuring the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. He rented a car for the trip from Towson, Maryland, his 1973 Cadillac unreliable for the trek and ungainly for parking. Driving out of town with my father meant we left from the bar at night, usually around 9 or 10 pm, in this case Thursday night.

Bobby was a cash guy, no wallet, two different rolls, smaller notes—singles, fives, tens, and twenties in the front pocket, hundreds and two dollar bills, brand new from the bank, in the back pocket. When my father couldn’t decide if he should stay on 95 north, or take the exit into the city, he made the decision a few beats too late and hit the exit ramp with such force the rental car got an flat tire. He opened the door to check it out, right there on the ramp. It was Friday morning, around 1 am, a constant raw rain fell from the sky.

And out flew the money, not the hundreds thank god, but a sizable stack for going out in the New York City, from the front left pocket. It must have fallen out at the last toll, the Lincoln Tunnel, and now the money was taking itself out, on the highway.

“Girls, get the money!” My father exclaimed and we ran across the lanes, picking it up. Luckily, it was stuck just a little to the road. The traffic wasn’t that bad, and by that I mean we survived this mission. I was the youngest, and kind of a daddy’s girl, a terrible phrase I loathe but appropriate for this moment, as I thought nothing of the task and took it to heart, without hesitation.

Then we drove into whatever part of town this was. And how the hell would I know, I was 13 years old. Where were we? For years I have deliberated this, and just through the course of writing this (perhaps the whole reason), I’ve come to the conclusion that we were in Hell’s Kitchen, which makes sense because we drove into the city through the Lincoln, rather than the Holland Tunnel. Entering Manhattan through the southern tunnel makes no sense for where we were going, my dad wasn’t going to hang out in the West or East Village.

My dad pulled over, looking for a phone in a bodega, locking us in the car. The rain was really coming down, everything was black and silver, quite noir. When two men knocked on the car’s window, Maggi, Molli, and I were startled. Then Bobby, unable to find a phone, yelled, “what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ to the men, they replied “sir, we are the police. This is a very bad part of town. You are probably the only person in this neighborhood without a gun.”1 Then the cops changed the tire for us while we waited in the rain.

Somehow, my dad, never known for his sense of direction, found his way to the first hotel we stayed in, a Howard Johnson, in midtown I imagine, but not before double-parking to take a piss between cars. When we heard multiple police sirens, he and I both thought it was curtains for him.

The rest of the weekend was a blur. We went to the Empire State Building, we walked so much, the crowds were nuts. When you live here, you wonder why anyone would come here for a weekend in December. When you don’t know any better as a tourist, you just think this is New York, huh? We threw ourselves into it. On Friday afternoon we checked into the Waldorf Astoria, staying there for two nights, because Bobby liked to live life and was a high roller, one room for the four of us, there was a cot. New York City is the best city in the world! He went out at night and Maggi, Molli, and I watched cable (hence the Beastie Boys time stamp) and ordered room service. Sometimes I wandered the hotel. That first night on the highway took care of any serious wanderlust we might have had for the evening hours.2

We went to the Russian Tea Room, a flex for a man often behind or completely negligent on child support. Molli was sick, probably from retrieving money in the rain, but she still walked around with us everywhere. Our tickets for the Christmas Spectacular were early afternoon on Sunday, we couldn’t find a cab to save our lives so we walked what felt like 30 blocks to the theater. I remember thinking “surely one will stop at some point,” is that hope, or delusion? We lived in the suburbs of Baltimore, our legs had never walked 30 blocks. Afterwards, we found our car in the parking lot to head home, our home base since we checked out of the Waldorf. Sunday afternoon before Christmas in New York City, a really horrible idea.

Made worse by the fact that my dad, a severe diabetic, couldn’t find his insulin in his luggage. It was a rental car, tabula rasa, a clean slate, yet still, no dice. We drove to the Lincoln Tunnel, Billy Ocean’s hit single “Caribbean Queen” on rotation on the radio, another aural marker, this time for bumper to bumper traffic. Maggi and Molli bickered in the back seat about who was invading whose space, eventually both of them fell asleep or the long ride home.

And what a drive home that was. Bobby’s blood sugar crashed repeatedly, we kept the windows down for sobering slaps of cold air, with the heat cranked to balance it out. We stopped often, black coffee for him and soda for me. Who can sleep during such worry? It took 8 hours to get to my mother’s house, and that entire time neither of us thought to call her to tell her we were safe. When we crossed the Maryland state line, my dad declared “I got my second wind,” which still pisses me off to this day, and at the same time endears me. An hour later, he dropped us off at my mother’s house, where she was awake, beyond concerned, and on the verge of calling her lawyer to amend the visitation agreement.

The repercussions from this trip ran deep, my sisters never visited New York again until I lived here, almost twenty years later. Our memories don’t always line up, we each have an eye for different details, but for this trip we are in step with each other moment by moment. I didn’t go to NYU for college, mostly because another school gave me more money, but I also feared my father would drive up some night after closing the bar to surprise me. I don’t understand why people travel at the same time as other people, I don’t understand the willingness to put oneself into crowds and tourists. I try to avoid it all. I do not care for the holidays. These fews days imprinted something wild onto me, an idea that life was like this, this was normal, because sometimes it was.

Since her passing last November, I’ve been revisiting Dorothy Allison’s writing, re-reading her debut novel Bastard Out of Carolina and her essay A Question of Class. I find myself, in the corners and hallways of her work, even though our childhoods are very different. There’s always this sense of leaving, of betraying the people you come from in trying to find who you are and where you belong, repeatedly butting up against the same issues. The spaces that are supposed to be the solutions have their own sets of problems, oftentimes with disregard and some disgust for our origins, our families.

I am always touched by the deep well of love and affection the narrator, Bone, from Bastard Out of Carolina, has for her uncles, regardless of their social and familial standing. It’s something that tracks with me deeply, I notice it because I need to notice it. Allison’s own process of reckoning where and who she is from, these things sticks with me. My father was a flawed human, some people like to call him a character, another phrase I don’t care for. As we head into these relentless celebration/commitment of life, love, family time of year, our families’ influences on us all is largely epic, even as we try to build our own lives that speak to what we need. We can’t leave them, I’ve tried, they’re too foundational for us.

I think of my dad because it’s Christmas, and he loved it. He also passed on Friday, December 13th, an easy date to remember. His death is part of my holiday season. I do wish Bobby was alive now, to come to New York. We could hit up some place where I’d have a hook-up, payback for all those expensive room service cokes. He’s got the cash tip. This time, he’d take the train. I’d definitely take him to Jimmy’s Corner. Maybe he’s been.

There’s something romantic about fucked-up men, I know that for sure, but I also know that is dangerous. We often grant the men, the fuck-ups, the dreamers, the fucked-up dreamers, the dreamy fuck-ups, more forgiveness than we grant other folks and ourselves. When a parent dies when you’re younger, you only have so much to go on, the stories take on their own mythology. But most of us don’t live myths, they’re too taxing, we live in the everyday, the mundane. That’s hard enough. That’s what keeps the lights on.

Here’s to everybody who keeps the lights on, especially the single mothers. December isn’t just about my dad. My mother Sally, a Sagittarius, loves Christmas. She knows when to take the decorations down: in January, early January. She kept us housed and fed, she taught us about work ethics and responsibilities, all while maintaining a hard-fought career. She just turned 80 on December 10th. And she’s never uttered the words “girls, get the money” to us. Never once.

This particular Monday had special guests for the anniversary, Murray Hill, Meah Pace, and Steve Meyers joined the band. The crowd is usually a mixture of regulars and newbies, there are always tourists. There were a few guys with backpacks, people I hold personal vendettas against: men with no sense of spatial relations for others.

It felt like pulling teeth to get the crowd engaged. They didn’t clap, they weren’t exuberant. When Meah came on stage to sing, Vince introduced her, talking about what bands she’s in, the crowd was silent, and I’m still trying to understand what people expect from performers, how they don’t seem to make the connection that they, the audience, also has a responsibility, not just to exist, but to appreciate, to react, to join along. Maybe they didn’t know the guests, but hospitality rules still apply.

I left the show inspired by the performances1, and thinking, once again, how we live in such a disconnect between people who make things and those who consume them. I feel the same way when people take videos of buskers on the subway, but leave no money. Later that week, the statement Commodity Fetish: Erasing the Labor Process, written on a whiteboard, popped up on Rachael Ann Jolie’s IG stories. And I can’t get it out of my mind.

When I get nostalgic and wistful for the past, it’s not just for my youth and revelry and something much much cooler than what’s happening now. It’s for a time when people could make music, live off of it, and be middle-class, whatever that is. When the economy made more sense to me. An independent record label could press LPs and CDs and yeah sure tape cassettes and be in business. This vision is definitely skewed by my time in Chicago working in independent music. Major labels usually rip musicians off.2 You had to buy or subscribe to a magazine to read it, and those people who put it together got paid. Free weeklies could pay people because businesses advertised in them. People pushed to express themselves, because they were moved to do so, not just because they decided upon a lifestyle like picking cards.

There’s a point when your friends and colleagues keep doing what they care about, even when they can’t solely make a living from it. I love these people, their art, their music, their films, their writing, partly because I care for the expression itself, and partly because they keep doing it. They keep showing up so I keep showing up. Just this past month I saw lots of friends play—Vince, Antietam, a band that’s been in existence for over 40 years, they played with Oneida, a band that’s been together for over 25 years. Hell I even saw Tortoise, they’ve been around since the early 90s.

I’m generally disgusted by the good taste more people have in music these days, because it doesn’t tell me where you’ve been or who you are. Before streaming, the music you liked told me a lot about you, and now, it doesn’t. Sometimes there’s no journey, no story, no anguished-over mixtape. It just tells me an algorithm spun itself silly until it delivered you this song. That what it says for most people. It also tells me that most people care about their convenience, their free access, more than the story of the musicians themselves, including a fair exchange of music for livelihood. And that is just consumption.3

With the ease of discovery, comes a larger audience for many people, more subscribers, more listens, more clicks. But not more of a living. There’s a stagnation for people paying for what we produce, even though there appears to be a lot of interest. But dedication is different than interest. Sometimes the interest is just a grazing glance to speak to any topic at the time to appear engaged and smart. People use cultural signifiers repeatedly to build themselves, their egos, their careers. This isn’t just a pet peeve of mine, or an ax to grind, (but, also, yes and yes) this matters because there is money to make based on hierarchical systems we pretend don’t exist.

I think about how taste is weaponized, a lot, as a marker of value. Taste is a part of hidden systems that pretend to function on merit, but rarely do. These days, everyone’s cool. There are no secrets, because the internet can’t keep any. People want to be liked, but also revered and enamored, the attention economy is a cruel mistress. Taste, it’s so special, so violent. Taste is the foundation of so many influencers and personalities, and as they become ubiquitous, their word is law, ending in such an insipid homogeny.

We really only understand domination and subjugation in the US, not the collective effort or how to work together, because we’re all supposed to be special. Taste helps to establish domination. People think taste will tell you how important they are, or how important they should be. What we consume, where, and how tells you if we are worthwhile. So many white women engage in tastemaker life because who knows more about subjugation versus dominance than the people most markedly positioned closest to the group in power: white men. Power adjacent, with access for a few for demonstrative equality.

“The point of owning a painting like this is not what you see in it but rather what other people see in you,” the loathsome character Jules Zablonski, a painter, says in the show Black Rabbit, trying to sell one of his painters to a reticent client. It’s not about you, it’s about what people think of you, a perfect explanation of a terrible way to live, doing and buying things you don’t necessarily like so others see something in you. Is it tacky to quote a TV show I worked on? I thought so, and that’s perfect.

Maybe I’ve been working on too many shows about rich people. I have. Maybe I’ve been in Manhattan too much, I have, and maybe I’ve been looking for apartments where so many places have been chopped up into condos for starter city kids, with brokers looking at me like I live in a dreamland with my budget and desire for space. Facts. Maybe I’m an intense person who holds grudges and has tunnel vision. True. Maybe I’m a Virgo sun, Scorpio moon, Aries rising? Sigh. I am.

Of course we all have folks we trust when it comes to advice on food, sheets, soap, restaurants, what to order, where to go….the people I’m drawn to for these opinions are pretty thoughtful, sometimes nerdy folks. Trustworthy people. Ultimately, I’m not as interested in other people’s tastes as I am how they treat other people. To me, that’s the real marker of who you are. Not what you like, but what you are like.

The Duck, Part Two

Whatever, It’s Quarantine.

I received a partially dry-aged duck the first week of shutdown here in New York City from a non-profit where I volunteered. This organization does great work, making meals from donated restaurant food. When all the restaurants suddenly closed in March they were flooded with perishable donations to organize, distribute, cook and put up. One restaurant, one of the very best restaurants in the world, donated ducks they were dry-aging, a mainstay on their menu. Presently this fine-dining restaurant has pivoted to make meals for people in need.

When I break down a chicken I put the parts skin-up on a quarter-sheet pan with a resting rack and cover it with parchment paper. It lasts much longer this way; plastic bags make meat rot faster. Store meat and fish skin-side up, it protects the flesh and helps to dry out the skin so it gets crispy, which is how you want to eat it. I can place something light on top of the parchment paper like greens if I’m strapped for space and not worry about contamination or crushing the meat.

I treat this duck the same as the chicken, laying it out on the tray. I boil the carcass in hopes to eliminate the sticky grossness inside the cavity, then roast it, cool it and wrap it in one of the old plastic bags I obsessively keep and re-use. I tuck it, okay shove it, in the freezer, for stock. The breasts and legs are rubbed with a mixture of crushed Szechuan peppercorns, fennel and coriander seeds. I didn’t want to roast the whole duck because I wanted to get more out of it, out of every cut. These days I find myself stretching out into every meal, going back to cooking in a restaurant, not in fanciness, although this whole almost dry-aged duck I was given is almost fancy-as-fuck. I want to use every single bit of everything, I want to take myself to the extent of my technique and knowledge. Except for the duck’s head and neck. They were beyond. I take them for a walk to the McDonald’s on Metropolitan and throw it away in their trash.

I confit the legs, a classic preparation, and most importantly one that allows me to preserve the meat. That’s the gift of fat — it seals out light, air and moisture to preserve what’s underneath. I’ve already got duck breasts on our dinner menu for a night, we can eat the legs the following week. I want to slowly cook it over a week or two and intersperse it with other food. This shutdown is a marathon, not a sprint.

Dry-aging the duck transforms it, making the meat more tender and flavorful. But it also takes away one of duck’s most impressive assets, its fat. I can usually get almost a cup of rendered fat from one duck, the neck and armpits are especially fatty spots. In my mind, there’s an equation beginning to form about taking an incredible versatile animal and transforming it into something so rarified and special for fine-dining that it minimizes its uses. I’m still working on that equation. For me, at this moment, I revel in this duck. She’s the last duck, as far as I’m concerned.

To confit anything it must be slowly cooked in fat. Not tossed in fat, but submerged in fat. The temperature is usually 200°, the lower and slower you cook it in the fat the more sumptuous the meat is. If you take it too high, the fat could burn, ruining the entire effort. I lazily wipe off the peppercorns, fennel and coriander, not terribly concerned if some of it remains and salt the legs. Then I turn to the jug.

The jug is partially full container of canola oil, leftover from a last year’s fried soft-shell crab pop-ups I did with a friend. It’s the classic 35-lb jug of fry oil restaurants order to fill their standard fryers. We fried crabs on a Cajun cooker we bought from an online store called Bayou Classics; a heavy-duty burner with a stand that hooks up to a propane tank. It’s safe, if the person operating it knows what she’s doing, and it’s legal to fry on a sidewalk in New York if you don’t get caught. The jug has been sitting in my kitchen, waiting to be called up. I thought we’d use it for this year’s fried crab pop-ups.

To confit meat is luxurious and completely unnecessary. People used to store confited meat in cellars to keep for periods of time. It used to be necessary, to store meat in cellars under caps of fat to keep for days and weeks and months. But these days, nope. We don’t need it, it’s a style of cooking that makes something rich. Duck fat is a luxurious ingredient. But canola oil, not so much. This pandemic brings us different times, unknown futures with no end in sight. The jug, this beautiful jug of neutral oil, comes to the rescue. I set the oven at 200°, cover the legs with canola oil and toss them in the oven for two hours until tender but not falling apart.

An editor I previously worked with emails me, wanting to know people’s shopping and hoarding is affecting the food insecure. The publication wants to discourage people from buying all the toilet paper, all the sanitizer, the paper towels, the masks, but not alienate their readership. I don’t know how to answer her question. I let it sit unanswered for a few days, trying to figure out how to answer it. I am incredibly aware there are people who will capitalize at this moment as voices to be heard, with points of view or amazing recipes. I also know that I will not be one of them.

I work at a soup kitchen and food pantry, the largest emergency food provider in Brooklyn, a borough where nearly 20% of the population are food insecure, well above the national average. This statistic is from before the COVID-19 pandemic started. I’ve been on staff for over two years, and in that time I’ve become more and more aware of how we ask the wrong questions when it comes to poverty and hunger. We put band-aids on situations that require amputation.

What I do know is how the gentrification of Brooklyn has led to people with exorbitant resources to move into neighborhoods without any consideration for anyone except themselves. This pandemic brings forth the vast inequities in our system. I can’t look at another meme about school children who only get their meals from school, so what will happen now. Not because I need to avoid the information, but because whomever made, posted, then re-posted that meme will cease to care about it once they can go on with their lives.

A few days pass and I finally find the right words. Here they are.

“The food hoarding and bulk shopping that is happening now is honestly just an extension of hoarding of all resources that happens and is a massive part of our society. I don’t think people overbuying toilet paper and sanitizer at Whole Foods and on Amazon and at Trader Joe’s and whatever store is closest affects the food insecure, unless suddenly people are going to Dollar Tree. I think our shitty policies about poverty, white supremacist systems, and our capitalist society hurts the poor. We constantly punish poor people and seemingly reward affluent people who admire the wealthy. Then we admonish poor people for hoarding, for taking too much of something when no one knows better than those resources are finite. For them. The New York Times writes articles about how wealthy people just can’t stop making money because it’s compulsive, it’s ok to be rich and hoard money and things, and encourage everyone else to do the same under the guise of ambition.

I do think about this, all the time, and I have thought about it for years, not just under pause.”

I don’t hear back.

I found a pie crust in my freezer door, right by a copy of the lease and a checkbook. When is it from? There’s some freezer burn from a terrible plastic wrap job. Whatever, it’s quarantine. I decide to make duck confit hand-pies, adding sautéed broccoli rabe stems, mushrooms still left from the great kitchen purge of the week before so they’ve seen better days and potatoes. I make a sauce out of old red wine and stock, reducing it down to coat the filling, just to give it a little give. Nothing’s going to dry out in this pie, but a little gravy helps to bring it all together.

It’s important to cool a filling before you put it in raw pie crust. If it’s hot it can melt the fat and make the crust difficult to work with. I cut the crust into two balls so I can make two pies, roll them into circles and pile the filling slightly askance from the middle. I set the bones to the side for stock. I pull off the duck skin and crisp it up, slowly heating it in a cast iron to render the fat and make it a cracker. Success.

This week was heavy. An old friend of Vince’s died from the virus, one of the first musicians he met when he moved here over 20 years ago. My friend’s son also died, after over a year of fighting an aggressive cancer. He was young. Certainly, on his darkest days during his illness he never considered that his couldn’t be a public funeral, or that people wouldn’t be able to hug one another. Vince dwells on how his friend was just a few years older.

I struggle with social media, and yet am consumed by it. I don’t understand how people can flaunt their privilege and wealth so freely and still be in some sort of circle of mine. Maybe they don’t know it’s privilege, or maybe they feel that the blessed hands or the quick “I know I am privileged” qualifier makes it better. It doesn’t. So many people have left the city for their second homes, many people left to live with their parents, and so many food writers have fled the city they claim to love. The very nature of this social-distancing and shutdown create emotional and physical distance for all of us, I get it. The rolling death counts are intense. Most people don’t leave home under the order, so they don’t see the refrigerator trucks showed up at Wyckoff Heights Hospital like I did the other morning on the way to work. We have plenty of ways to escape, we’ve been doing it steadily since Netflix was within our reach at home for years. Humans are capable of complex emotions, that’s essentially what being human is, we can laugh and cry and mourn and it can just be moments. There must be some reality to this shutdown so we can keep the understanding why it is so important. We must know that these egregious inequities in our country exist every day, not just during a pandemic.

I crumple up and throw away the freezer cigarettes, kept for desperate times and stressful days and here they are but it’s a respiratory virus so out they go. I cook as healthy as possible to build our immune systems, brewing tea, consuming raw ginger, putting greens in everything, keeping the broccoli rabe stems because they’ve got to help, right? Over the years I’ve avoided any bone broth situation, out of a childish kneejerk reaction. People who extol it feel pretentious to me. There. I said it. But now, when I make the duck stock, I add a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar to coax the nutrients from the bones. I try to give myself space and forgiveness to sleep more and rest, to mitigate the stress. I stop believing in productivity as a positive. The food pantry gets busier and busier; we need to re-organize to become more efficient for the long haul. I undress in the hallway and shower immediately when I get home from. I wear the same jeans and shirts to work, dreaming of the day I can burn them when this ends. We get serious. We’ve been touched.

When We Hit Pause in New York City

Just before scalding the bones.

I received it as a thank you for volunteering the first Wednesday of the shutdown, a raw, dry-aged duck from one of the best restaurants not only in New York City, but in the world. I took it, we needed protein at home. I am still working at the soup kitchen and food pantry, my exposure to COVID-19 is up, I don’t want to have to go to the grocery store too. But also, I’m a cook, of course I want a free duck that is a signature dish for a fine-dining restaurant. It’s so damn absurd. We are living in a Tale of Two Cities — it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Actually, we’re just living in the worst of times. Every restaurant has closed, all the food donated. So much beautiful food donated, trickling through the various non-profits. Some of it reaches us where I work, we started to get really nice stuff from City Harvest, food that usually goes to other pantries first. We are also in danger of being buried, where I can’t keep up with what is coming in so I spend the week staying vigilant, figuring out how to distribute fresh produce. I go in every day, even though I’m just supposed to be in for 3. I move palettes of food to make space for more palettes of food. I will not be buried.

When I come home after work and make dinner I know something is off in my fridge. You know that feeling, when you start to smell it, but it’s not totally critical yet. You still have time. It’s the duck, I haven’t had the headspace to deal with it but I know my first day off I must. It’s not totally dry-aged, just on the first week of its journey. Saturday I tackle it. A raw duck is a gift, there’s a lot there to work with. The breasts, the legs, the carcass, the fatty neck and back. There’s a spot under the wings that usually yields a nice chunk of fat to render. That’s the beauty of a duck, you can get almost a whole cup of rendered fat from just one bird.

I’m sorry about this picture.

This duck is different. It’s partially dry-aged, a process that involves hanging the bird so air can circulate around it in refrigeration, it still has its head and feet. When meat is dry-aged, it loses water, which means it loses volume. It also becomes more tender over time, and more flavorful. The fat also loses moisture, which makes it easier to crisp up, always an issue with duck breasts. Usually they must be scored to expose more fat to render out. That is not the case here.

I should be excited to work with a piece of meat I’ve never encountered, from such an elite restaurant. Let’s be honest, excitement levels across the board are low, very low. I find myself wishing it was a regular duck, where I know to find the little fat pockets to render, I miss the chunky armpit piece. This is what these times are — to get the most out of everything we have, to maximize every piece of food that comes into our apartment. To use up our pantry. To stay healthy. To build immunity. To consume just enough weed and booze for sanity and comfort but not a drop more because of money and supply and apparently, ibuprofen makes a person more vulnerable to the virus. A soup kitchen is a terrible place for a hangover.

I break the bird down. The back and cavity are kind of gross, verging towards rot. The feet, a great source for collagen for stock, are dry. I take these parts and boil them in hopes of salvaging them for stock. The stink boils off nicely, I roast them to add flavor for the upcoming stock. The long neck and head are on the other side. I can see how excited the dog is by the prospect of the piece, he already has the tag from the duck I accidentally dropped hanging in his mouth. I wrap the head and neck in an old plastic bodega bag and go for a walk to the McDonalds on Metropolitan that is still open. I drop it in the trash can in the parking lot.

I also apologize for the creepiness of this photo.

I crush Szechuan peppercorns, black peppercorns, coriander and fennel seeds together. I rub the breasts and thighs with this mixture cover them with parchment and step away from the project for a day. The roasted carcass goes in the freezer.

The next day I cook the duck breast for dinner, brushing off the seasoning so it doesn’t burn during the sear. I don’t need to score the fat, it’s thin enough to get crispy and render what is there without having an unpleasant layer of subcutaneous fat. I start them in a cold cast iron and let them roll for a bit. This is the fancy meal where I figure the duck should have a notion of its intended life. I serve it with sautéed flowering broccoli rabe and salad mix from Bodhi Tree Farm. I reduce old red wine, finishing it with butter and cognac and deglaze the pan with brunoised shallots and prunes. The duck is tender and delicious. Round one in the books.

We’ve switched to a staggered schedule at the soup kitchen. The nuns are trying to protect us, we move to giving breakfast and lunch outside of the side door, rather than from tables in the garage with coffee and water. There’s no script for this. The systems used for 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy don’t work here. We are our enemy. The pantry is streamlined to premade bags, no more digital choice kiosks. The building is closed to the public, except for people with appointments with the Care for the Homeless medical clinic. For a lot of people this means no bathroom. For a lot of people this is a betrayal, a loss of a place that is always there, where people can congregate and see each other. Where they can matter.

These are the people everyone pretends is not there, on the street, on the sidewalk. We aggressively ignore them in this city so we can more on with our own lives, ambitions, goals, dreams. We move into their neighborhoods without plans to harmoniously co-exist, just looking to live in the place near the train with the cool restaurant and bar and coffee shop. Maybe people think if they don’t pay attention to them nothing bad will happen to them. They’re wrong. No one is immune to life.

I placed another cast iron on top of the breasts to press them down since they had lost so much volume to make sure the skin made contact with the pan.

For many people, this pause, shutdown, quarantine, worldwide pandemic whatever you want to call this, is the first time they’ve lived in crisis, when life is out of their control. It’s also the first time they have lived with actual scarcity, when they have been denied something they want to buy. It shows. I can see your class from here. The people we serve, our guests, they are used to living with crisis daily. They appreciate we are still open, serving food and offering pantry bags, giving out bread and milk and whatever else trickles down from the outside world. Our guests are incredibly strong and resourceful, which isn’t always what comes to mind when we talk about marginalized and vulnerable people. The individuals are strong, it’s the systems of power that create the vulnerability.

When I initially said it was the best of times and the worst of times I meant what a crazy disparity these first moments of the shutdown have brought so many people. Most of my friends were laid off from their jobs, sent home with beautiful food from their jobs. My colleague at the non-profit was eating insanely high-quality, expensive cave-aged cheese that needed to be donated because it was highly perishable. The decadence of the moment, of all of the restaurants closely at once, donating their perishables, was so saturated and confusing. I tried to explain to my co-workers how strange it was, how we were getting bread and vegetables from places previously unheard of. That moment has passed for most of us, except I still have duck stock in the freezer.

I am an heiress, I grew up being financially carried with little understanding of how the engine worked.

Then she discusses that she turned her focus to learning about money. Truth be told, I should have guessed this person had money after saying she spends summers in the south of France. What can I say, sometimes I skim.

I am an heiress.

This stopped me cold. Could I trust anything she has to say? Does an heiress have anything to say to me? She did, before. How could I turn on a dime like this? How is it I can keep falling down the same holes, she spoke to me before, didn’t she? These same pitfalls used over and over to manipulate us, keep us in this reactionary place, the land of knee-jerk. I fall so easily, so quickly, this one, class, my biggest ditch.

I’ve moved past that feeling. Look at me, I’m maturing. I’m still struck by that statement though— I am an heiress. It certainly beats I’ve got a trust fund.

It’s much more fascinating. I know people with money don’t have enough, I know for me there’s not enough. An unknowable future brings unknowable needs. Not having money, actually and imaginary, is a sign of something wrong in this country. This is America, we are about making money. It’s all there, if you work hard enough and want it enough, a phrase I do not care for. How do you know if I want it enough? How theatrical must I be to prove myself?

Not having money has always been a sign of something wrong here. The career is there, if you work hard enough, and want it enough. I’ve always been confused by the phrase “want it enough”, like theatrics are going to seal the deal. Different people express themselves differently. What about the internalizers? The squeakiest wheel is not the most deserving. Except now I realize that it’s not about different, it’s about conformity. Do you want it enough? To erase yourself if necessary for the cash?

There is a strange ailment I suffer from, this idea that there is a monied life for me somewhere, I just need to sell myself out and get it, pick it up, wherever this bizarro world is. I imagine that after that decision lies a land where things are easier, even though everything seems to indicate that is not true. The sun is setting on this notion, both because I am finished with it and I imagine it is finished with me, if it had any beginnings with me.

I know I talk about money and class often. It’s everywhere, and it’s dressed very deceptively. So-called cool people, I’m looking at you. We don’t do it enough, especially since most of us live lives of quiet desperation. The lifestyles of the rich and famous and connected and affluent are ever-present in the media. And the media is ever-present. For some of us, the call is coming from inside the house, people who appear simpatico are not. To witness the vacation or home or car or bag or business, the evening, the lovely evening!, that someone can seemingly casually get while the rest of us work so hard for much less is hard. It’s gaslighting. It’s fucked-up. It’s mind-numbing. It’s enraging.

I’ve always been drawn to the people who aren’t just like me, thank jesus, but who’ve shown me there’s nothing wrong with me. Who understand that just because you lack for something, that doesn’t make you little. There are more of us there there are of us them. We don’t need wars and wildfires to calibrate our lives as lucky. This country tells us that what we make is what we are worth, and that message will be doubled down for the next foreseeable future. We’re staring down an impossible future right now. Our power lies in knowing that is bullshit, and living otherwise.

This week marks the one year anniversary of writer Dorothy Allison’s death, on November 6th. I’ve revisited her writing, re-reading essays and her debut novel Bastard out of Carolina. I’ve been reading this essay on and off for the past year, knowing I can’t and won’t lay claim to any harm and struggle she lived, but also finding myself over and over again in her words. This essay has taken me many places, and while I wish I could say something definitive about it and her and me and the world, I haven’t been able to yet. I have tried, I have definitely tried. But damn. Damn, Dorothy. Damn.

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We love restaurants. We don’t want anything to complicate this fact. We use them to escape and still be present, we drink, we eat, we are seen, we are served. They are vibrant, comfortable, aspirational, haughty, friendly, snobbish, cultured, down and dirty. They are the easy way out to feel like we are fully living life.

One of my beefs with the proliferation of restaurants is the corporatization of them and the creation of the professional managerial class within, a re-creation of corporate America. The problem with a bunch of normies in restaurants is the culture they bring, they just reaffirm an inherent value to white collar work over blue collar work, which is odd, because they are dependent upon physical labor. They also bring a convivial air of subservience to service.

I’ve been reading Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, restauranteur Danny Meyer’s 2006 book about his approach to hospitality. Meyer is the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group, whose restaurant roster includes Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern and the Modern. He also founded Shake Shack, the multi-billion dollar burger business that went public in 2015. Meyer is famous for his approach to service he calls “enlightened hospitality.” In his own words,

It’s about soul-and service without soul, no matter how elegant, is quickly forgotten by the guest.

Understanding the distinction between service and hospitality has been at the foundation of our success. Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes the recipient feel. Service is a monologue-we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards of service. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on the guest’s side requires listening to the person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response, it takes both great service and great hospitality to rise to the top.1

In the chapter “The 51 Percent Solution” where Meyer discusses, at length, the ideal employee is 49% technical ability and 51% “emotional intelligence,” which includes a laundry list of attributes including, but not limited to empathy, optimism, work ethic, integrity, warmth, aspects that establishes a person as a human being and the willingness to giving everything to the job, for a service. All of the explaining of this intelligence strikes me as overkill, until I realize it is business trying to understand people.

Setting the Table is a seminal text for many, this approach to hospitality has become standard operating procedure. I ordered it from Thriftbooks, Meyer is a billionaire and I have yet to make my first million. Many of my contemporaries used it as their guiding light for the places they opened, mostly men. Enlightened hospitality claims to put the staff first, then customers, community, suppliers, and stockholders, in that order. It sounds nice, but the receipts from former employees don’t totally back that up. Also words like enlightened and soul are red flags to me in employment settings. I also don’t have a lot of faith in a staff first declaration from someone who uses the phrase finding the yes in regards to customers’ experiences and expectations and says the important thing in hiring is to find people for whom caring for others is a selfish act.

Can you ruin good hospitality2? Yes, by talking about it for 300 pages. Meyer is very teamwork-oriented, but he’s also so very big business, athleticism, champion, and winning. He discusses his early days at his first restaurant and trying to get personal bests for covers each night.

In my obsession for big numbers, I’d created hideous log jams. But it was oddly exciting to manufacture challenges and then surmount them. In fact, that was, and continues to be, a pattern in the way I work.

Literally only a rich white man would manufacture challenges to overcome. The rest of us have plenty, usually created by and given to us by rich white men.

When Meyer opened his first place, Union Square Cafe, at the age of 27,

The common perception was that restaurants were a shady, cash-driven racket where money was always being passed illicitly and everyone kept two sets of books. This was not the career for which suburban parents sent their kids to college.

“The restaurant business has at last arrived as a legitimate, valid career choice and entrepreneurial pursuit,” Meyer wrote in 2006, and I thought about how when he was just opening Union Square Cafe in 1985, he writes being a restauranteur was “considered blue-collar work not befitting a liberal arts background,” that my family’s business, Souris’ Saloon, nee Restaurant, celebrated its fiftieth year in operation. My Greek grandparents opened it in 1934 after immigrating and landing in Towson, Maryland.

This isn’t a Danny Meyer takedown. His approach has led to great success, and with that, great influence.3 I’m looking at his book to understand why we are at this place, this untenable world where the fewest people have the most wealth and resources, and I’m not just talking about the 1%. His widespread appeal speaks to something that we want and expect when we go out. Our obsession with restaurants and food, the sheer volume of attention, effort, and words dedicated to them feels like we’ve jumped the shark. We have set in motion something I don’t think we can reverse, too much care for too few people.

With Trump in office, and the warp-speed growth of wealth disparity in this city and country, the way we treat people, the way we treat workers, is paramount. Especially those without a union, as restaurant workers typically are. For those who can afford to eat out often, they’re used to having the yes found for them. I’m not convinced they know the difference between service and servants.

As a palate cleanser to our current state of desperately seeking perfection hospitality industry, I recommend watching the 2004 documentary I Like Killing Flies about Shopsin’s, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. You can also check out Kenny Shopsin’s cookbook Eat Me.

Recently we went on vacation to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. I feel like I’m supposed to treat myself, eat out all the time, give myself a break.1 We do, at first, this is the beach town of my youth. I like to walk around, have a drink here and there, get some ice cream, but I don’t want to sit in a restaurant, I want to be outside, ride a bike without fear of imminent death. I don’t necessarily love restaurants, I just love particular ones. The Back Porch Cafe, because it’s weird, funky, older than I am and the closest this town will get to Chez Panisse. The Henlopen City Oyster House, because beyond the oysters, wine, and local food, the chef/owner and one of the bartenders knew my dad, they worked at the Crease around the corner from his bar. They’d visit him and sneak a beer during work. Gus & Gus is the kind of old fluorescent, linoleum-coated diners where everything is fried in peanut oil, the owners work the line, even the one with the very bent back I worry about. It was opened by Greeks a long time ago. Louie’s Pizza is another Greek, he was pals with my dad. Louie still goes in to prep in the morning by himself, his grinders are made of probably the cheapest food possible from Cisco and I don’t care. Fountain birch beer over pebble ice is the nectar of the gods. Lori’s is a cafe whose palate is firmly cemented in the mid-90s, strawberries, pecans, goat cheese, balsamic, and brie are all over that menu.

Cooking’s not a big deal, it’s August in Delaware. Right now there isn’t a real grocery store in town. My goal, after driving here, is to never go to a grocery store on route 1, because if I’m at a supermarket in a strip mall on the highway, then I am not on vacation. The best place for seafood is Copp’s, a family-run place past the highway with local seafood, some produce. The farmer’s market is full of late August classics: tomatoes, corn, peaches, zucchini, eggplant. I’m surprised and delighted by a Japanese farm, I get sudachi, a small green citrus, along with beautiful cucumbers, and shishito peppers. I have seafood and all the vegetables I need, along with a somewhat dismal pantry at home.

From home I bring lemons, olive oil, parsley, a shallot, garlic, ginger, some butter. Whatever is sitting around that might turn. These things offer a little map for where to go. I brought a brief version of my work kit—chef’s knife, serrated knife, paring knife, mandolin, honing steel, and microplane. There’s not a lot to work with in the apartment refrigerator and pantry.

We go out to dinner to celebrate grocery shopping. I only have so much domestic in me. The next morning the red striped bass sits with crushed garlic and ginger, I pan fry it and serve it with blistered and pickled peppers, using harsh white vinegar and stolen packs of white sugar for pickling liquid. Squash is sautéed, cucumbers cut and dressed with sudachi. This kind of eating makes me feel like I am properly on break, taking care of myself, the casually healthy person I know is somewhere inside of me. It’s August, the easiest time of year to make something taste good. One shucked corn of cob and you’re halfway to a meal. I save the scraps and make a stock along with the shrimp shells for shrimp cocktail, served with Duke’s mayonnaise and hot dog relish, a combination stolen from Cafe Kestrel in Red Hook. The remaining shrimp becomes scampi with lemon, parsley, garlic, and shallot from home and spaghetti from the Middle Eastern store.

Ratatouille is both a star and a viable companion for a meal, I like it hot, warm, room temperature, cold, a perfect use for late summer produce. Rockfish, another local fish, joins the ratatouille, along with the rest of Japanese cucumbers, mandolined, tossed in salt, then folded into a vinegar cream mixture. The next morning, the ratatouille is perfect with eggs, the following day, tossed with bowtie pasta.

There will be no turned seafood on my watch. I don’t cook enough of it at home, although I wish I did, and I can’t help but wonder when my vacation life will evolve into my real life, when I swim and ride bikes and cook and eat seafood.

In her essay “Against Delivery,” Devin Pope writes

In an ideal world, I would cook two meals a day. Yes, even if I was a millionaire living in a villa on the French Riviera, I would preside over the kitchen until old age forced me to retire to a comfortable chair nearby.

She goes on to discuss the later delivery of our lives, the same breakfast every day from Starbucks, all the money spent on Instacart, so much DoorDash-

Rather than envy them, I feel they’re being cheated out of something valuable.

Fifteen years ago, I was a plus one at the press table for a James Beard House dinner, accompanying my writer friend who knew the visiting chef from California. A free dinner in February with food from the west coast when I maybe made $11 or $12 an hour. I said yes. The James Beard House is in Greenwich Village, a charming brownstone with a challenging, small kitchen for the kind of events they put on. The dining room is Beard’s old library and bedroom. His bathroom is completely covered in mirrors. That alone is worth the train trip.

A late arrival to our table was a woman who worked for a start-up, she shared how generally every evening she ordered the same thing from the same place on seamless on her car ride home so it could meet her at the door. I’ve never forgotten that, probably because it depresses me. I’m not judging the repetition, I love a uniform, I’ll eat the same meal every day for months. When I had a three train commute to a restaurant in Manhattan, I had seasons of the same song, for a while it was “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel, then “Moonlight Mile” by the Stones, for a spell “Killing Me Softly” by Roberta Flack, all beautiful songs that try to maintain an embryonic state before work. I once listened to Neil Young’s “Helpless” for the entire Megabus from the west side of Manhattan to Owings Mill, Maryland, a very grey time of year. I sat in the front on the second decker.

I don’t believe every meal needs to be epic because life is so short, sometimes I believe some meals need to be somewhat underwhelming and stabilizing because this same life can be so fucking long. Yet the same meal from the same place on the same method home rubbed me the wrong way, especially being told this at the James Beard House. Her pursuit of a completely automated life, to be so efficient, tells me that she doesn’t consider that kind of human interaction to be of anything of import.

An omen of things to come. We have lost a lot for this kind of behavior. We continue to erase and convenience away things that make us people. I hated it because I love restaurants, but I hate the business, and that is all about the business.

We don’t order in that often at home. I always want to make it worth it, the delivery fee and all the other charges, so this path of least resistance becomes something a little more stately, at least in price, rarely in quality. Usually it’s just easier to rummage through the kitchen and figure it out. My kingdom for a pantry, even a half-ass one, and the condiment door of the fridge.

I have come to understand that cooking is a practice, a conversation with myself about what I have to use, the time I have, and who it is for. I look at cooking as problem solving, this is what I have, how do I get to a meal. The cooks and writers I like are languid, sumptuous, their food, their writing, feels like stretching, something fortifying, something inviting.2 They treat it as such, a practice that requires flavor rather than fanfare, a process seeking to be both more creative and pragmatic, a combination I find compelling in the kitchen.