Waning Gibbous
“But the world don't stop / Even when you're living in colour / No, the world don't stop / Time is only gonna pass you by / Now you're in real life” -Caroline Rose, “Jeanie Becomes a Mother”
What my Aunt rightfully renamed a “Screaming Pig Summer” is now well past its end, and as Estelle the fox from themalie show on Instagram would say, the air is now getting “crispay,” and the recent full moon is now on the wane.
My friend C, when we bartended together, often used to point out to me when people were “doing the most,” and if the truth be told, I have pretty much always been a “do the most”type of person. And while this can be a good impulse, generative of focused work or leaps of imagination, it can also be an an impulse generative of unmanageable anxiety that pushes me to over do it on any possible level.
Coming out of quarantine, the sheer excitement of being able to imagine life outside an enclosure led me to create some great new cocktails and make some great new friends (reclusive as S. and I can be, human contact suddenly had far more urgency to it) but my excitement at having survived another plague also unleashed a “gimme, gimme, gimme” impulse, and an attrition of impulse control born out of months of sheer frustration.
I wanted a new striped t-shirt (the four dollar one from the long defunct Brown Elephant on Milwaukee had disintegrated), I wanted a caramel brown leather messenger bag, and I wanted more vintage Brooks Brothers plaid non-iron dress shirts.
About a year out of captivity, my Father almost died multiple times for about six months. And this period of anxiety predictably reignited my barely dormant magpie impulse. And then another parental figure of great import received a frightening diagnosis. I craved easy dopamine.
And while at this point I did rather need a therapist, and we certainly did on a practical level need a new vacuum cleaner and an AC that didn’t double as a water element in our apartment, I did not need a salmon cable knit cashmere sweater (second hand cashmere isn’t that huge a bargain), four cans of the wrong kind of fava beans, or two jars of Urfa Biber peppers. My justification for the peppers was that Aleppo pepper was becoming scarce, which in hindsight, remains well beyond my remedy.
My obsessive tendencies can make me very focused when thinking, writing or creating art, but left unchecked in the realm of day to day life, they led me into a scenario where I was stashing unnecessary internet purchases at work to avoid their discovery, and concealing the sweater I bought in Spring behind the screen in our bedroom, so I could “give” it to myself for Christmas.
And yes, things could have been markedly better during the period in question. I suddenly found my walking severely impeded, I started to have to take two different medications to control my histamine surge rashes, one of which literally *thinned the skin,*and death felt awfully close in general. So, while buying overpriced cookies at the airport when overwhelmed made a certain sense given the circumstances, my hoarding of vintage preppy clothing and winter beanies wasn’t really in dialogue with the realm of the *necessary.* Most of those clothes are too big now, except for a cashmere beanie I bought on sale. It is still too small.
As I’ve noted before, one advantage of this recent Summer of losses is that my grief and consternation could not be bought off. We simply didn’t have the money.
Sitting or wrestling with difficult circumstances requires a commitment to the actual *doing* of the thing, and given more time than money to play with, I wasn’t left with much of a choice: I had to sit and reckon with the sorrow. Loving people unabashedly is a gift, but it somehow makes the loss of someone you loved, or the loss of someone incredibly close to someone you love, all the more intolerable.
So now I am at least attempting to do less. Not *the least,* but not *the most* anymore.
A decade ago, I lost my Mother, and then my rather prestigious job, which I had worked very hard at, in short order. Two of my biggest fears became realized in succession.
Out of deference to my Mother, I had never gotten a tattoo while she was alive, but I got one after she passed. It reads “fearless” across my chest. And at the time, I think it was a dare to the universe, and a positive step, but also very much doing “the most.”
Plenty of things I mercifully didn’t have the foresight to fear have happened since, and so while I still enjoy shocking people who would never expect me to be inked, “fearless”has proven to be a rather hubristic construction. Fear doesn’t drive the bus for me, but there has proven to be a great deal to legitimately fear over the course of my adult life than I would have ever had the paranoia to imagine, and I’m well aware I’ve had it rather easy in relative terms.
When I moved into my first apartment after Wesleyan, my bedroom contained only a futon, a folding screen, my laptop and a postcard of the Virgin of Guadeloupe on the wall left by the previous occupant. I was craning towards simplicity.
I would sit on my futon and listen to Mary J. Blige’s “No More Drama” on repeat, and promise myself that after a socially awkward College experience, and finally moving out of my parent’s house, a new life was about to begin, and things would definitely be simpler going forward. Ha!
I am still figuring out what doing less looks in practice.
A friend recently mentioned having seen a coffee cake in the grocery store and wanting to buy it, even though she knew it wouldn’t be particularly good.
But she wanted it. That impulsiveness or obsessiveness is useful to both of us in our artwork, and of course, Susan Sontag herself wrote: “Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.”
But she didn’t end up buying the coffee cake, and sometimes that’s enough to remind folks like us that our brain’s impulses are suggestions, not orders, and while letting anything becoming an object of obsession can have an artistic dimension, sometimes we just need to eat something,(anything), drink some water, take a walk or just sit quietly, and not let our gimlet eye consume ourselves in its hunger for the world.
Our old furnace finally gave out this week, and what might have been a low key Sunday of relaxing and cooking this past weekend turned into something else altogether, as its replacement took about two days to be installed.
I had a pistachio dukka recipe I had planned to attempt that day with the two bags of broccoli that needed to be cooked in our fridge, but when I got home after my shift on Monday, I decided to ditch the pretense, pre-set the oven to 450, and just threw the broccoli in a baking pan to roast with some garlic and olive oil. Just as nourishing as the more elaborate broccoli recipe, but with less fuss attached. I did not even take a picture of it. We are still enjoying it. I think I will attempt to make a simple pasta with the leftovers tomorrow (famous last words), though I still will probably find some way to make it more complicated than necessary. I definitely still have not reached the hump of my learning curve where useful restraint is concerned, but, Yoda be damned, I can still say I’m trying.
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