The worlds we are

I am interested in the concept of a passive revolution. This is how all revolutions begin. It is the seed germinating under our trash. It is the scent that concentrates in the morning sun. Discontent begins internally and violently. It is fascinating to me how such a dramatic shift goes virtually unnoticed over the course of weeks which may be months or years. This is the passive part. We are all like the days, we count, we gather in groups and we make the tide turn, we wait our turn, we miss our ride, we are in the right place, we know the wrong people, the hands of the clock are pointing outside the cycle hinting with an arrow that there must be another way to go around.

The best part of sobriety, or not drinking alcohol, is the predictability. The crispness of mental clarity gives one a false sense of power and control. More commonly, however, the doldrums of routine feel poignantly pointless rendering most powerless and ready for a stiff drink. The power to deny ourselves may not be a life-saving choice. When meaning escapes me, I have learned not to replace this vacancy with alcohol by volume or other similar chemical costumes.  Despite the encouragement of concerned citizens,  I remain naked and exposed, sober and certain. Meaning finds me making room and making up the bed for a long term guest. 

I was going to make chicken again for dinner. I no longer believe that a Revolution is simply having too much idle time with our hands, it is because we have never really gotten to the seed of the need for revolt. Confidently, I am able to predict that at 5 p.m. I will be standing at the kitchen counter. Maybe I will make eggs instead.

Have you ever asked someone if they were hungry and the first thing they did was check the time? Almost everyone does that. 

My stomach is not on my wrist or inside my smartphone. 

Wouldn't we know if we were hungry? Shouldn't we know what the body needs?

What do you say when someone asks you, “How are you doing (today)?” Usually, we have a loaded standard response we return like an echo, sometimes we only hear the end. 

I think the question is framed in a way that is impossible to answer depending upon the emphasis. There is statistical evidence that comparison praise is detrimental to performance and self-esteem. I do not know How am I doing it, I don’t really know which thing I am currently doing, can we say we do not know without seeming dismissive or dumb? You probably don’t care about what you seem to be (doing) to others nor should you consider how.

I am doing great. That is a great response. I agree. 

My daughter, a college student, just purchased a pencil pouch that has an illustrated headstone which reads “R.I.P. C.O.D. (Cause of Death) Small Talk”. It is comforting to be common-enough-to have your opinion on a zippered pouch. Her name is not common so she was never able to get the once-popular name pencils, license plate frames and Cokes. Do they still make those? Pencils?

I have a couple thousand weeks left in total to do what I need to do. 

I don’t think I have ever finished a To-Do list entirely in a day without any carry-over. Ambitious. 

It drives me crazy. When you sit that still, you can actually hear the second hand move across your spine. The seconds it takes to change a mood, the seconds it takes for the sun to set under the horizon line, the seconds it takes for the light of a falling star to disappear...There are no seconds. There are only firsts. Nothing has been done before. Exactly.

He comes home. Drinks. Eats. Gets on his phone. Talks about youthful memories and aggravating work. He worries about his workload tomorrow. I wonder about escape velocity and payloads. He wishes there was more time in a day-to get all of the work done. He is always doing things until they are done.

He is not doing so great.

We sit on the Goldilocks planet porch, there is only a table between us. He sips his scotch, I crunch ice cubes and the worlds spins its yarns.

Our lives revolve around holding each other a safe distance a part and passively ever after,

thinking of the thick atmosphere and ways to escape without incineration. 

Painting by Walter Dendy Sadler, 'Married' c. 1896 in [Public domain].

Hungry, Hungry Hypo

Hunger is rampant, even in fat America.

Empty calories do not nourish.  I can imagine licking the wallpaper glue like they had to do in Russia during the 90-day siege of Leningrad.

When I put sweetener in my coffee I often think it could easily be arsenic or sugar. A spoonful of sugar IS the poison going down. 

How many of us were given the moral ultimatum about cleaning our plates at the dinner table (clean-plate club or no dessert-dessert has two s's because you want a second scoop) and yet this seems like feeding torture to kids-why must we eat more than we are hungry for? 

Almost 100 years ago, around 1920 a woman named Kitty Marion was imprisoned in London at Halloway prison for giving a gentleman who had come to her troubled about his pregnant wife, and his too big of a household already- with his not enough to go around, and what to do dilemma-she gave him a pamphlet on this new concept called 'birth control'.  For providing her voice she lost her throat. The gentleman turned her into the authorities and while imprisoned she was forcibly fed 233 times, permanently causing severe throat damage (a record of some sort). Stubbornly consumed with her cause of not biting off more than one can chew, she was arrested 9 times in 10 years for her advocacy of birth control, a suffering suffragette. 

I was born when my mother was on birth control.

I'm thankful for the small percents, perseverance, chaos, chance and determination.

As a mother, I was not a good cook until the beginning of the Food Network. 

I became an excellent home cook and began writing food and dining critiques for a decently known news group (corp.) until gallstones rolled in, but really the problems started not long before that when my appendix exploded. A couple years and multiple hospital visits later it was no longer "safe" for me to eat out anywhere. I stopped writing the column. I still eat my words every day. 

Nowadays it's not just empty calories, following recipes and painting by the numbers.

I changed my diet, I thought I was always hungry, I was just not understanding what I was hungry for. A craving always finds its fulfillment.

Eating out is a luxuriant cultural tradition. Eating more than you need is a luxury every American takes when they eat out or eat any one of our three prescribed dietary recommended daily meals. 

Most American's no longer speak the same language as their own bodies, a communicable barrier, a language gap, the thigh gap? That's still a thing, the thigh trap for teenage girls. My daughter told me no young attractive females like the fitted t-shirt, mid-drifts and booty shorts and they were all designed by pedophilic men, she may be right. Aside from the washing label stating 'wash delicately', it should also say made with less than 1% of self-esteem. Why don't women get pockets that actually hold anything? Women are expected to hold everything because we are used to carrying weight, not just ours, or our children(s). 

Women have a stronger sense of smell and a higher pain threshold than men. If only I could smell fear like bees and dogs.

American's enjoy denying the joy of eating. Morality is the condiment of the 'new world'.  It's an acquired taste. Many countries I have learned spend hours eating a meal, and I admit I don't love food that much anymore to spend that much time 'eating' and mincing words about alphabet soups and umami. American's eat wrong, weigh the evidence. I'm not one to write about it however.

When I was little and my grandmother shared with me memories about the spread of 'consumption', I thought she meant over-eating, eating everything from paper to plastic, from primer to paint.

She meant the TB kind, which was first thought to be a disease confirming vampires prior to the Industrial Revolution, but really humans have been getting this disease since the beginning maybe we were born with it even latently. This is not just an old affliction or a thread of my grandma's yarn, in 2012 alone 8.6 million cases of consumption were confirmed around the globe. Consumption can also mean ingestion or to utilize economic goods and bads for the satisfaction, wants, desires, whims in the process of 'production' with the likely result of destruction, deterioration, and/or total transformation. An appetite for destruction. Some people allow television to consume their time. I let books consume me.

Feasting your eyes on art is a guilty pleasure that will add positively to your total weight, but don't worry, you can never over eat creativity. Like water, it goes right through you. 

America chose corn over art. Sugar over poetry. Fast food over brain food. Controlled manipulation. Famished Nation. Inherited ignorance in a state of bliss. 

Meanwhile, my stomach growls, I understand what it's telling me, I am sated with food for thought. 

Image By Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.