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January 31, 2021 - January 18, 2023
If this was a parable, I guess the lesson would be that life isn’t fair but if you complain sometimes you get free things. Useful.
The world outside was troublesome, but the house and the world my parents built for us within it was a bubble. A delicate, permeable utopia.
they told us about the things they couldn’t yet show us. They crafted new spaces inside our minds and our imaginations just waiting to be filled up with details and experiences.
I never forgot the incident, though, never figured out where to put it.
And who wants to live that far from a Costco? You’re so rich you’ve started to inconvenience yourself. Look at your life.
She knew that grief was the thing that had forced her out of her old life, waving from the train platform as she left. And it was the malevolent mystery sending her postcards from the past with the words “Wish you were here” scribbled across the back. Grief had been her first friend in this new world. It made itself known, an apparition, at points throughout her history and her present and, she presumed, her future, too.
It was possible to be authentic and Black and aware and not part of a club, much like it was possible to be constantly hounded by grief, yet funny and charming.
Electra also talked a lot about her mother. She missed her every day, in new ways and old ways, at surprising times and every moment.
So much of what we thought about was still waiting to be filed away in its proper place: the vagaries of emotion, the substance of Blackness, the weight of grief. What we didn’t know was that for some things, there is no permanent place.
But for me it’s not locked away in the past. It’s unresolved, as if there is still a glimmer of possibility somehow. It’s Christmas lights strung across a barn ceiling in anticipation of a magical night, or the release of an album that will change Madonna’s life and ours; it’s dusty books waiting to be put back in order.
I tell this story to get back there, to unwind the ending, despite the realities of life. And of death. When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.
I tell this story because she left before the end and I’m trying to find her in the darkness.
Rosa Parks didn’t sit on that bus for me to go to New York and turn gay.
I love when hot people nod at me; it reminds me that I exist.
I remembered what I looked like and felt the need to shout, “Sorry to bother your eyes with all this. Work in progress!
The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste. It seeps in slowly and easily; it never seems unusual. Isolation presents as an undesired state but nothing serious, nothing permanent, until the lonely nights become lonely months. Community goes from being a distant goal to a forgotten idea.
Small talk is always shouted. “Nice weather we’re having!” Okay, well, the ice caps are melting, so lower your voice, honey. Small talk is purposefully avoiding every interesting thing there is to say.
Oh, that all of life was just strangers floating through murky candlelit rooms, bellies full of home cooking and ears full of classic R&B, occasionally bumping into another stranger and swaying for a moment to the beat.
The idea was intriguing to me but only in the way that television is intriguing to a cat. I was pretty sure I didn’t give a shit about it, but because it was so foreign and yet so close to me, it piqued my interest.
For years, I thought that the way to keep from getting burned was to set myself on fire first or to snuff out my light.
You could never tell a more compelling story about Kanye than the one he was telling about himself.
What’s a red flag and what’s just a weird personal detail that you can spin into a charming anecdote? The line is thinner than you think.
One of my spiritual gifts is the ability to spiral out of control at the smallest provocation,
It’s easy, I guess, to look back now and say that everything turned out okay and Jay has moved on and I’m married and we all lived happily ever after, as if none of the sadness left a mark, as if winter never came, as if now is all that matters. But that place in me that compulsively cried to everyone who would listen is still in me; the bad times don’t go away just because times are good. We say these things build character; they make us who we are. And that’s true. But that doesn’t mean they don’t suck. It doesn’t mean winter isn’t cold.
I kept it because I thought money could buy me happiness and for a while I was right. I kept it because it made me feel warm.
Why can’t life always hover in that perfect space where we feel good, and it doesn’t hurt to walk around, and everything seems possible with a minimum of perspiration?
You’ve got to be always thinking of how you’ll turn life events into #content, and it’s a known fact that engagements, the first baby, some new jobs, winning Big Brother, and photos with celebrities are the gold standards of social media reaction-getters. Squandering such gifts is a scandal and a sin.
It always sounds cliché to say a person has kind eyes, but sometimes clichés are true and that’s a real paradox for a person who is trying to write interesting things.
Some of these people were wearing shorts. Jesus didn’t die on the cross for you to be exposing your knees like it’s Casual Friday, Mark. I love Church. It’s theater, it’s high camp, it’s cabaret. What’s not to love? You get to dress up like you’re going to the Grammys. Literally every word that everyone says in Church is a very compelling story that frequently involves both scandal and magic. There is so much gossip. It’s Pay-What-You-Wish. There is a choir. And musical numbers. And choreography. And when things really get going, people yell, shout, jump up and down, and stop the show. HONEY.
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The Ash Wednesday service debut had gone over just fine; when offered ash I simply replied, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.”
At every meal during Black History Month, they’d set a card up at an empty space at our dining room table and we’d spend the meal talking about the person profiled in a tradition they dubbed “Dinner Guests.”
The conversations always centered around achievement rather than overcoming.
We were just commencing that period of life when the last of us who had been defined in the family system by being children were now undeniably adults, and that kind of thing always takes some getting used to. Roles realign, stories shift, people must reintroduce themselves. So, we were all
strangers for a moment, peacefully making a new world at a table.
As if to say, “This is home and you’re welcome here as you are.” I think it’s important to note that that takes work: family doesn’t just happen; welcome isn’t a neutral state. We have to tend to these things.
Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time.
Set a place for us. We’re hungry, we have so much to talk about, and we’re coming home.
In church, God is our father and Jesus is our brother. Who are our cousins? Does heaven have an eccentric aunt? Do you have an eccentric aunt? I hope you do.
We don’t expect other humans to act sanely or with any sort of grace when they perceive scarcity, so it’s foolish to expect kids to. Perhaps this is where they learn it. Perhaps the yearly tradition of American children tearing across the White House lawn, dodging and diving over their peers, trying to snatch up as much as they can, is a metaphor itself. Or a precursor. I’m just saying, everybody wants candy.
We are both eating and drinking what we are eating and drinking because, after a dark, seemingly endless winter, we have both decided to live. Please hold your applause.
Also, I know that I have a very expressive face that cannot tell a lie, and I have no problem deploying it to project my displeasure in literally any situation. But deep down, I believe in a certain order. I like RSVPs, good service at restaurants, and polite party talk.
Kristen and I were spouses before we were married to either David. I mean work spouses but I’m sure it’s still a legally binding union blessed by God and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Anyway, I tell you all this to say that Kristen and I are two friends who care deeply about each other and a better world full of nice things and people. And so, after a dark winter, we’re sitting in a café, and she is having wine, and I am having tea, because we’ve thought about it, and we’ve decided we’re going to live, today.
I think it’s important to revel in the small things that make us joyful, to indulge when possible and not problematic, to steal laughter and hoard it.
The possibility of changing the present is never so alluring as when it comes about by changing the past. There’s a certain poetry to time travel. In the place of the hard, incremental work of effecting change in reality—calling your senator, voting, drinking detox tea, and then waiting—you get to see your impact appear in an instant, fully formed, functional, for better or worse. You get to find out how it ends. You get to see time unspool before your eyes and then knit itself back together again, hopefully better, hopefully brighter, hopefully overflowing with cheese groves.
I can’t help but think constantly about the end of the world. I don’t want to. I want to prepare cheese platters and drink champagne with friends. I want to live my life. But I cannot escape the end of the world.
We are not going to band together and listen to a bunch of scientists to save humanity like Jake Gyllenhaal in a disaster movie. Sorry. You know how I know? Because a bunch of scientists are telling us how to save the world right now, and half the world isn’t listening to them.
No one is interested in humor during the apocalypse, but I don’t let that stop me. It’s all I have to offer in this scenario. Because I am not end-of-the-world material.
I am definitely not making it through to fight in the resistance if it involves anything more than retweeting things I agree with.
I am here for the baked goods and then basically I’m going to be dead weight. Cut your losses.
