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Is having enough about getting more or needing less?
I was at a casual lunch meeting with six people and two eight-slice pizzas. I ate one slice of pepperoni and one slice of margherita. I was still hungry, and the pizza was really delicious, but you could not have force-fed me a third slice.
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It has been going on since the beginning of humanity. Why am I surprised?
I have been undergoing a psychological transformation for the past couple of weeks. I have always heard that the horrors of war are too much for the human brain to process, and that PTSD and the elevated addiction and suicide rates of veterans are the predictable results. The contents of the Epstein files released on January 30th are too horrific, too shocking, for my human brain. I am not an empath. I work in the field of emotional abuse. I have aced grad school classes in sexual assault that required a lot of case-study critical analysis.
And yet, I was not remotely prepared for this.
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I touched her shoulder and her back a lot. My connection to her, and our comfort with each other, was evident to anyone who cared to pay attention to us in the crowded bar. Her husband definitely noticed. We had recently traveled together, she and I, and her husband’s mind was swirling with anger, jealousy, and questions.
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My daughter’s hands get cold. Not like normal cold. Really cold. They turn a splotchy blue and white, which is visually concerning as a parent. It has to be some kind of circulatory thing.
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I turned off facebook notifications because every time I put my phone in my pocket, it would ding about ten seconds later. Without fail, the ding was a facebook notification. Like a dog who sticks his nose in your crotch when you stop petting him, facebook demands attention and isn’t interested in the other things you have going on. We all know that we see ads for things we converse about within our phone’s earshot. We know that the intricacy of the techno-web designed to paralyze us while their venom finds its way to our bloodstream is vast beyond our capacity for conceptualization. But this particular tactic is particularly despicable to me. It is evil incarnate. Are you engaging in direct, face-to-face human interaction? Fuck you! DING! Pet me with your eyeballs.
***
I drank vodka and watched television news like it was my job in the days that followed September 11, 2001. Airplanes crashed into buildings. Nothing resembling that fresh horror had ever happened. Not in my lifetime. Not ever. America was angry, America was shocked, and America mourned the loss of our fellow citizens.
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When the gifts are purchased and wrapped, the dinner is planned, the tree is trimmed, and the cookies are baked, I might grind the gears a little as I down shift out of my hussle-culture existence, but I can get slowed down into holiday mode. Now, in the week between, I’ve got to check my own pulse to make sure I’m alive.
As a drinker, and in early sobriety, I sought an elusive perfection in the holiday season, and always started the new year disappointed. Now I seek peace and contentment, friendship and family. I’ve surrounded myself with people I love this past week. I want to carry this warm feeling with me as I shift back up through the gears into business as usual. Business as usual, but with a lingering feeling of love, and a foundational knowledge that I’m blessed and everything will be OK.
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“I wish my partner would die.”
The gruesome, shameful desire uttered faintly through hopeless lips, the unexpected authenticity of an exhausted heart. She looked up slowly, terrified to see the reactions of the people to whom she had gifted her trust, afraid that her new admission had crossed the line of relatability to something unthinkable.
She saw nodding heads. Lots of nodding heads.
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The boathouse in Wash Park has a long and storied history. I mean, it must, right? I’ve never looked into it, but it looks old, and it’s definitely the anchor of the park, the neighborhood, maybe the whole southeast side of Denver. It is the hub of the Independence Day bicycle parade, couples get married there, and it is an easy meeting spot for people walking together in the park.
But it doesn’t house any boats. Maybe they store the floating plastic paddle swans under it in the winter, but for all of its iconic grandeur, they ought to have an old Mississippi riverboat cemented into the lakeshore next to it.
A riverboat would make a nice backdrop for homecoming dance pictures for the high school adjacent to the south side of the park. We are in the midst of a universally acknowledged, social-media-exacerbated, mental-health epidemic, so the homecoming dance sounds like a great way to encourage our young people to spend face-to-face time together. And it is. I am pro hoco. But as I leaned on the boathouse Saturday night, trying to stay out of the way and not brush against any of the girls who seemed to have shopped for dance gowns in the lingerie department, it occurred to me that the predance picture ritual might not be helping.
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Waymo cars driven by humans are techno-mapping the streets of Denver. Local TV ads are recruiting D.P.D. officers to fulfill their destinies and become ICE agents (read that sentence in your best James Earl Jones voice). There are over eight billion people on the planet, but a handful of lunatics possess nuclear codes that could wipe us all out. People get their news from platforms that also allow us to sell our old air fryer or garden hose to our neighbors. I miss plays at the high school football game because I get distracted by the drones filming the action. And I just want to go deep in the mountains and build a lean-to out of sticks and mud.
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I bought a rubber stamp from a door-to-door rubber stamp salesman once. It was early in our whole grain bread bakery career–maybe 2005. He was wearing a suit and tie long after Friday business casual had seeped into the other four days of the week. He carried a brief case that he opened on our bakery counter. It didn’t actually have briefs in it at all. He had dozens of rubber stamps in little molded foam compartments. He had big stamps that said, “PAST DUE,” in all caps, and small round stamps that said, “Have a nice Day!” in letters arched around a smiley face. He had stamps with rotating numbers so you could adjust the date, and stamps with custom corporate logos. Of course, he had bottles of various colors of ink, and ink pads with lids to keep the ink from drying out.