Just Kids

When reading is a priority you find yourself reading many books. Especially in pandemic times escapism seems to be the most important goal when reading. Looking at my shelves I can see many genre books waiting to be read: Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter, Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson, Network Effect by Martha Wells… and the list goes on. We want space skyscrapers and long magical blades. Dragons, robots, nymphs. Anything but what is happening outside our front door where we dash around maskless neighbors like they are lumps of fiery hot magma.

There comes a time in all of this fantasy that one may tend to get burnt out. If you are a writer you will find yourself writing about things that could not exist on Earth’s terra firma, writing within a bubble on an astroid hellbent on crashing into a lunar ocean.

So we turn to a different TBR pile. Memoirs, biographies, science, nature. Instead of escapism one decides that they want reminders that the world, under all of this sickness and pain, is still a beautiful place. A place that has beauty in spades but we, if only for a moment, forgot. We’ve been sipping air through our masks and haven’t gotten the sharp scent of grass that had been our lifeblood. Learning tends to be its own kind of escapism. Especially when we can exit our own brains and follow the life of another.

This brings me to Patti Smith’s Just Kids.

I am not entirely sure why this book hit me at just the right time. I have always noticed that Smith had published books and it has always left me curious. Isn’t she a musician? When does she have time to write? This all through the lens of someone who didn’t know a thing about her. Now that I do, I understand.

Patti Smith was a poet before she was anything else. The fact that she came into music was merely a small twist of fate. Just Kids is not a book of poetry but it still reads like one just the same. The relationship between Smith and Robert Magglethorpe, the late renowned photographer, is unlike any I have heard or read before. Filled with love, frustration, friendship and, most importantly, trust. Just Kids is a look at two artists and how they bolster one another through each other’s creative endeavors. This fact alone is very inspiring to me. To me there is no greater love than helping another rise to their fullest potential, no matter what you fear about their art. It is selfless and beautiful.

Without giving anything away there is much heartache, as is in most of these kinds of relationships. But that doesn’t mean it ends on a negative note. Smith turns everything into poetry while at the same time never sounding pompous of over-elegant. Her prose, as I’ve found with nature writers like Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver, forces you to pay more attention to your world and your relationships. To love with reckless abandon when you have the chance. To make time for your art and to find the ones who see the spark in you and help keep it alive.

Best Case Scenario

May, 2020.

Like waking up in a brightly-lit apartment and seeing, feeling, nothing but darkness. You check each bulb to make sure they haven’t been replaced with something far more magical while you were “sleeping”. 60 watts have been transformed into an amount of lumens that makes everything feel topsy turvy enough that you hold back the want to choke on invisible fumes. The fact that everything, every single little thing, is just slightly off means that your new reality is through a set of goggles with a vertigo setting.

This morning I was not sure what was wrong. As most mornings go I watch as 6 a.m. becomes 7, 7 topples into 8, and only at half past 9 can I do something that resembles removing myself from my bed like a fly stuck to glue-lined tape. If I thought that I was alone in this waking dance then I would be sorely mistaken. I am living one life among many who reach out for the railing and find it missing. Stolen in the middle of the night, the object that tied us to our sanity has gone the way of the dodo.

Emotions are like a bouquet of multi-colored flowers. Each day we pick off a thorny singular rose and we don’t know which it will be today. A blue-dipped stem and we prick ourselves to the beat of anger, not knowing in which direction to aim it. Red the color of deep passion means something else entirely as we lie on our couch and even the way our cats sleep makes us want to cry. There is a bout of happiness as we brush our fingers on petals the color of a newborn chick, but it is short-lived. Every minute a reminder that the self-created smokescreen of our lives is still see-through and we can see the fabrication as well as the reality.

We creatives are in mourning. Days filled with minutes that feel stolen, hours that stretch on begging to be filled. With flung paint, pages of finely-crafted words, in front of a microphone with an emotionless weapon at hand. We told ourselves, “If I only had the time I could finally make my masterpiece.” But they never trained you how to paint in the middle of a war zone. How to write when you look at your hand around your pen and wonder if you need to wash your hands again. We go to sleep under heavy blankets of guilt, hoping we will feel better in the morning.

What does all of this even mean? Months and months of trekking through thick mud that tries to take us under instead of forward. Uncertainty like seeing a target but they’ve changed the ways to throw the darts without telling us. The only thing we can do, it seems, is to tell ourselves that getting out of bed, weighed down by our heavy thoughts, is a battle won. The war on the other hand isn’t something we can fight. We can only do our best to stay just outside the battle lines even when those lines are constantly in flux. A calmer mind once told me that we were now experiencing something that no one alive has experienced. Did this make me feel better? Worse? More unsure? I still don’t know. But I do know I have since put my fingers on this keyboard and put one word after the other. Reading this back I may even be able to comprehend it.

I wonder sometimes if it is true that they’ve given us a blessing in disguise. That fate has played its hand when it saw us overworking ourselves and losing sight on the things that matter. If that is true, then are these the side effects? The guilt that we carry in our pockets that jingle like rocks as we make our way from shallow to deeper water. 

Maybe we should make a list with two columns. We can write an effigy for the things that we miss in one column, ruminate on even the most petty things—though we know nothing now can be considered petty, not anymore. In the other we can think of the first things we will do once these restrictions are lifted. What are you most excited about? Running your hands down the bookstore shelves, sitting in tattered seats with the remnants of a prior patron’s popcorn pile. 

As lonely as we feel, we are oddly united by our longing and loss. We are holding on to things as if they have been doused in grease and are threatening to escape. It seems that all we have is an untapped amount of forgiveness we can use on ourselves daily. Hourly, if it necessitates it. There is no right way to spend your now open calendar, no matter what others try to tell you. Like a teacher who has been given a subject that has just been created a few weeks before. It’s a good time to hold on to those few things that don’t make their death dive out of our hands, grow legs, and crawl in between the cracks. Tell a friend you believe in them. Tell yourself that you believe in yourself. 

Read that book that has been burning a hole on your to-be-read shelf

Or don’t.

Begin writing the novel that has been haunting you for thirteen years.

Or don’t.

There is no right way, and maybe that is the best case scenario.

Produce Minotaur

I walk through a labyrinth of multicolored orbs in search for—what? Purpose, perhaps. I pick up one with the smoothest flesh, my own face reflected. Whose hands have plucked this reddened beauty from the earth? From it I look at others and think of -cides: pesticides, fungicides, herbicides… My heart is beating too fast for this chore. As I follow other walls of this maze I wonder. I wonder aloud under my breath. I speak to the boxes and cans and frozen bags that I have lived my life living in, actually living in? Maybe. Just maybe. What it takes to preserve you, I speak to the meats that I have recently shunned. What does it take to keep these foodstuffs alive, to keep myself alive?

Organic and free range and -cide free and free trade and we can get lost in an echo chamber of our own fears-turned-flesh. It isn’t exactly for this reason that I made the totally “crazy” decision to cook for myself in earnest, but control over the elements does have a say. Grocery stores have always been my minotaur in the maze. Why? When it comes to cooking, I don’t have the mental dexterity of others. The creativeness when it comes to vegetables and turning them into more than raw side items. I found myself filling a basket of cereal, bread, peanut butter, jelly, Progresso soup cans. After work it would be all I wanted, something quickly made or hastily microwaved. It isn’t out of laziness dear reader, even though I would be quick to call myself so. It’s pure lack of knowledge when it comes to the kitchen. 

I am in the labyrinth again when I see it. Snarling, a maw of rage and smelling of rotted meat. It is blocking an assorted section of fungi: button, shiitake, portobello. Doesn’t it know that I have never cared for them? A hoof as large as my head protects bell peppers like a goalie, a hairy knee hiding an eggplant. But it makes me want them all the more. To defeat this ugly beast I picture it as a tiny bobblehead on the dash of my hatchback. I can promise you, the minotaur doesn’t like that one bit as it begins to growl. As it bursts into blue-black smoke.

It may be that cooking has always seemed like a pastime meant for dinner parties, not for a solitary man bent on getting sustenance quickly and efficiently. Even though I am not opposed to leftovers in the slightest, I think of how long it takes to make certain dishes and I cringe. If there is only an hour until bedtime, why would I go through the trouble? But once again—that lack of dexterity, of creativity. So, I throw out the meat. I throw bell peppers, eggplant, garlic, and shiitake mushrooms into a pan and stir fry them. I throw these simply over rice steamed in vegetable stock. Shrimp with butter and cajun spices. This is not rocket science, I tell the recent victor over the produce-guarding minotaur. And I kick myself for ever thinking otherwise.

What I also get now is a new high, like a runner at full tilt. And to my science-loving mind, there is something about measuring, even if you let instinct control your heavy hand when it comes to the salt. What also helps is finding someone you love who also loves the kitchen, who you can dance with when granules of sugar and salt and baking soda and spindles of zucchini litter the floor. You think to clean it up before the cats get to it but the smell is intoxicating and maybe there was something in those shiitake mushrooms… You’ll keep dancing. Because you’ve been stealing bits of eggplant while they have been sizzling and you are feeling something special.