Hi. It’s been longer than usual since I have written and that is because I have been getting my ass kicked by kitchen work again. I went back to this brunch place where I used to work because the pay was pretty good and the hours were very reasonable, especially for the industry. It’s a family-owned neighborhood place that makes great food. I like working there, I love touching food all day, I respect the owners and I dig what they’re doing. So when I needed money, I asked in they’d take me back. I thought since I would be working early in the morning to late afternoon, I would be able to have a rich intellectual and social life from 4 pm til 9 pm everyday. When I made that calculus I seem to have dissociatively forgotten that kitchen labor is physical labor that makes you want to lie on the couch all the time. So the best intellectual life I have been able to do lately is read at the bar on weeknights and have long shooting-the-shit sessions with my co-conspirator on Sunday afternoons. I’ve been able to do some of the pre-writing work of writing by walking and thinking, but I haven’t been able to take a pen to paper or think seriously in many many months.
That’s not totally true—I also just finished teaching a semester-long class on hymns at the church I go to. That caused me to think somewhat seriously. It was nostalgic to dip my toe back into the subject matter that I used to think I was going to dedicate my life to, and it was a fun challenge to craft a course for room full of amateurs with vastly varying levels of familiarity with the subject matter. This was also my first real, sustained teaching experience, and I found I really like teaching, and based on reactions from attendees, I feel confident that I could become good at it. I believe it could be a part of my vocation. Unfortunately, I dropped out of college and don’t plan to go back, so finding a way to incorporate teaching into my life is going to be a real uphill battle, or at least it’s going to take some deliberate steps and flexible thinking.
Because I miss not being tired all the time, because I want to spend time with my loved ones, and because I am ready to begin formally drafting the next phase of my life, I quit my brunch place job after an 9 month stint. It was an amiable split, so if the whole itinerant-worker-artist-academic thing doesn’t pan out, I can always go back to brunch. Of course, that’s how They1 get you—you don’t have money, you need money to survive, you get a restaurant job because it’s easy to get, you are underpaid and overworked, you’re too depleted to think about or try getting out of the industry, so you stay and pray to God they’ll give you a raise. So I’m hoping I have the psychic strength and somehow the financial wherewithal to stay out of the industry for a while.
I’m hoping I can write more here going forward. I have an essay about pop music in the works. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been thinking about:
George Trow’s 1980 essay “In The Context of No Context” has a section about that World’s Fair that precisely maps on to my experience of social media. More broadly, our boy George and others from his lineage correctly identified the cultural trends that would eventually generate a social media landscape like the one we have today, but they were in no way prepared for the reality the TikTok Pavilion, so it’s a good thing they’re all dead. Now this.
I’ve been reading Emmet Rensin’s madness memoir “The Complications”. If you are curious about severe mental illness (the chronic, hospitalizable kind) and you want to read someone smart talk about his life with it, I highly recommend this book. It will probably be a tough read if you have a history of psychiatric incarceration and/or generally being a terror in the lives of others.
Half of the self-identified queer people I know would not have become queer if it hadn’t been for TikTok teaching them how to look and behave2. The memetics and aesthetics of gayness have always existed, but I think that the homogenizing and glamorizing influence of social media is ultimately bad for gay people. Happy June.
I’ve been on my Pure Michigan shit. I love this state and have developed a weird Michigan Nationalism. Close the Michigan borders! Just kidding. Kinda. More seriously, I have been thinking about how fortunate I am to have a profound and enduring sense of belonging to a geographic place. Many Americans don’t have this, and I think it’s an underdiscussed axis of alienation.
My love for food continues to deepen. I just made some chicken carcass soup with dill and homemade spätzle (Pure Michigan!) and can’t wait to nourish my loved ones with it. Watch out, this might become a recipe blog.
To be extra super clear, this is not a specific jab at my ex employers; I actually think that they do way more for their employees than any other employer I’ve ever had. The big They is capitalism. Not to be trite.
For new readers: I am literally a homosexual so I am allowed to say stuff like this.