The Weekend in Foolish Attention
Bit and bytes of the week
THE LOVE OF CHEESE. Were a vampire to appear on one of the winding streets of Chicago and seduce me into a fatal hickey, said bloodsucker of the unholy would walk away with the eerie flavor combination of blood, cigarettes, and cheese.
As far as I am concerned, cheese is perhaps God’s greatest creation with respect to water and fermentation. I, frankly, love cheese. If stranded on a desert island, I’d choose an endless supply of Brie over the tools to make fire or access to pornography. It is both my joy and debilitating weakness.
I’ve long held that the stinkier the cheese, the more complex and satisfying the bite holds. A slab of mild Cheddar or a Colby Jack is suitable to eat naked but a morsel of Epoisses de Bourgogne, sprinkled with cumin seed on a sesame cracker, washed down with a sip of a dark beer is something that is like a kiss from a sexy French actress covered in tattoos and wearing an off-the-shoulder ball gown. Velveeta, while not strictly cheese, on pasta, vegetables, or a Triscuit, is a handjob from the same woman should she be from Texas and wearing a sequined tube top.
To crown cheese as the perfect food is not hyperbole but an acknowledgment of its multifaceted excellence. It is a product of history, biology, and culture, a sensory delight, a social binder, and a versatile culinary companion. Cheese is a testament to human creativity and nature’s bounty, a sublime intersection of science and art. It is, in the truest sense, a marvel, a wonder, a gastronomic gift that continues to enrich our lives with every glorious bite.
If I could find a spouse who I crave and love as much as I do cheese, I might be able to stay married for my relationship with cheese is absolutely til death do us part.
FIVE MONTHS. I’ve been back in Chicago for just shy of half a year. The work in the park has been (and certainly continues to be) a perfect combination of fun, exhausting, invigorating, and educational but it was never a lock as a long term solution to feeding and housing myself. Thus, the search for employment and the doubling down on the fall.
Likewise, the beginnings of pursuing both the art I crave to participate in and the culinary journey I’m excited about are in those primordial stages when the planning begins and the anticipation takes over. The plates are spinning, gang. It seems in the past few years, I’ve been living with one foot in one place and the other in the next place, leap-frogging from Vegas and married to Kansas and divorced, from healing up in Wichita to casting off for the voyage in Chicago as a reboot. That never know what’s coming way of life is my go-to but I’m focusing on a bit of solidity (which is not the same thing as security) in the path.
This weekend I get to spend time with my family. A resting stop, time with my favorite people on the planet, cooking, laughing at wildly exaggerated stories we tell about each other, long drives across the MidWest, and a sort of benchmark before getting all Spartan and Balboa about the coming autumnal activity.
Take a break before the decathlon.
THE CRACK AIN’T THE MIRROR. Focusing on the smallest of exceptions as endemic of the whole is a broken mirror. Back away from the mirror and the cracks seem less daunting. The closer you get, the more horrifying you look and the more the cracks supersede the purpose of the mirror itself. Do the cracks require repair? Of course. Does that repair require a wholesale destruction of the mirror? Gimme a break, wilya?
THE PERFECT FIRST DATE. I’ve been thinking about dating and how that specific sort of theater sets up unrealistic expectations. The entire point of a first date is to get to know a brief bit of a person to see if there is potential in the dance. Assessing the possible partner and being assessed. An interview of sorts. The tendency is to pad the resume, in behavior make unsustainable promises (dressing in a way that you almost never do, going to restaurant you mostly could never afford, carefully curating your questions and answers to place yourself above and in contrast with other suitors).
I’m coming to believe that the perfect first date is to take someone to a free concert with a tasty but easily eaten picnic dinner, sitting on the grass, and simply talking and responding to the music. No artifice, no transaction, just wading in the kiddie pool of personality, ideology, and chemistry.
I’m not in the headspace yet—where when considering someone I see almost anything but reasons to distrust, signs that declare Beware Falling Rocks and a danger symbol with a skull and crossbones—yet it’s a solid step in the right direction to at least consider that first date.
“You meant you won’t have to vote for you because you’ll have four years in office,” Ingraham pressed.
“I’m saying go out, you must vote,” Trump replied. “I said to the Christians in the room … you have to vote on Nov. 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore — I don’t care — because we’re going to fix up, the country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore because frankly we will have such love.”
HOPE FOR THE MCU? Last weekend, Bob, Ray, and I caught an afternoon showing of Deadpool & Wolverine. No spoilers because the surprises are just too damn fun. It feels like Kevin Feige, the mastermind behind the twenty-four movie saga culminating in the death of Iron Man in an epic and tragic manner, decided to take a break. He handed the reins to younger writers and directors who had long felt left out of the MCU storylines. Instead of building on the existing stories, these writers and showrunners decided to replace that which had worked so well it established an unprecedented dominance on popular culture with something completely different. Like if someone decided that Taylor Swift was just too much Taylor Swift so they replaced her with a short dude with a fetish for Coors and beef jerky singing the same songs. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t really work.
Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and Fiege decided to blow this all up in hopes that the industry juggernaut could course correct and I’m happy to say it worked. Effectively mocking the weird excesses of the multiverse and the machinations behind the Fox and Disney corporate IP deals, Deadpool & Wolverine is so full of gleeful disdain of so much of the MCU and still isn’t the fuck you that Thor: Love and Thunder turned out to be, I have hope.
LOLLAPA-LOSING ME. I consulted on the titular music festival on their front of house presence but, given the fact that next week is my sister’s birthday and, after most of my summer being encased in huge crowds of people, I’m less inclined to want to be careened from sweaty teen to sweaty soccer mom dressed as a teen to hippie guy with a faded Find Joy t-shirt. On the road Friday for the DH patented twelve-hour Prius drive through the MidWest, I’m currently wrapped in the bosom of Wichita.
I’ll leave it up to others to navigate the crowds this weekend.
SO MUCH FOR IDENTITY POLITICKING. “Democratic Party elites and billionaire donors are attempting to manipulate Black voters by anointing Kamala Harris and an unknown vice president as the new Democratic ticket without a primary vote by the public. While the potential outcome of a Harris presidency may be historic, the process to achieve it must align with true democratic values. We have no idea where Kamala Harris stands on the issues.”—official statement by #BLM
Looks like the standard unity behind anyone of a certain racial makeup or identifier has gone by the wayside along with popular support for the #BLM organizing principles.
I IDENTIFY AS AMUSED. For a while, I dated (and lived with) a Korean woman from a wealthy background who insisted (in the way that gave her a sense of moral authority) that she was "a woman of color." And she was correct—not being the shade of pinkish beige that I sported, she was definitely a woman of color. But the label, Woman of Color denotes something far more tread upon, marginalized and oppressed than anything her rich Asian girl from Buffalo Grove could claim. The distinction was a confusing one for me.
Actually, that's not entirely true. It wasn't confusing. It was ridiculous. The idea that because of her skin color, she could readily identify with women who grew up in group homes or on the street or without the financial stability of having doctors as parents, seemed kind of outrageous. It was my introduction to the idea of identity politics.
Identity politics or "...political attitudes or positions that focus on the concerns of social groups identified mainly on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation..." is a troubling phenomenon. The history of liberalism is one of expanding inclusiveness; the idea of identity politics is about trumpeting esoteric groups based on an increasingly narrow set of criteria. It has also spawned an entire generation or two of victims: victims of racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, those who are discriminated against for their weight, for the manner in which they choose to dress and on and on, further and further adding criteria for political inclusion to the point of lunacy.
The natural conclusion of the identity politic trend is to have each and every individual representing him and herself as a fully independent political organization. After all, I am of the Angry White College-educated, Middle-aged, Heterosexual Males with Mothers less than Twenty Years Older than He named Don Hall political demographic, right?
The problem with almost any form of this is that groups of people based gender, race or sexual orientation are not monolithic nor homogenous. A 22-year-old woman of color can be middle class or not, have a history of racial strife or not, have a successful educational background or not. The fact that two 22-year-old women of color are exactly that means almost fuckall when it comes to the two women and their various perspectives on the planet and what they both may maintain as solutions to the problems they face. The more you narrow it down, the less effective it becomes and the more absurd it is.
HYSTERICALLY FATIGUED.
TINY MOB: "There's a wolf!"
THE REST OF US: "That is a wolf. Let's get rid of it."
TINY MOB: "There's another wolf!"
THE REST OF US: "Um...that's a dog, I think."
TINY MOB: "WOLF! Over there!"
THE REST OF US: "Hey. Wait a sec. Looks like a squirrel to us."
TINY MOB: "FUCKING WOLF!"
THE REST OF US: "No. No. That's just Matt Damon."
That’s the week, my friends! Enjoy the dog days of August as they unfold like a sauna in a convenience store.
Try making your own park chips...easy and delish...i add garlic and onion powder...yummy! Bud, enjoy the fam! & remember, everybody's a person of color unless they're invisible...