this is a paean for ordinary moments of light

The loneliest time of my life was when I was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. I had gone abroad with the vague and romantic notions one has about living in a foreign country where anonymity is supposed to be met with serendipity. Feeling unsettled is as physical as it is metaphysical. It is much easier, of course, to believe that our discontent is caused by tangible problems we can solve—and so every next horizon you move towards is Arcadia until you get there. Every city in your future is one terrace higher until you realize you’re climbing the mount of purgatory. The abstraction of the people you’ll meet and the places you’ll be—the self-satisfying and perhaps desperate idealization of a better future—is dangerous. The ideal that is never realized, that is always out of reach, is a betrayal to self, a recurring, insoluble disappointment.

I lived in a dark, windowless room that had only a sliver of a pathway to move through. In the morning I smothered myself with a pillow to block out the fighting screams of Paola and Leo, which was frightening at first, but for the sake of self-preservation, I came to believe that’s what Italians did—express themselves with passion that could be mistaken for fury. Even as my Italian neared fluency, I existed as a stranger in their house. The Cappios would come home from work—Leo was a train conductor, Paola a kindergarten teacher—turn on the TV, and sit at the dining table for hours, with frozen pizza, canned tuna, hot dogs with mayonnaise, and cellophane-wrapped cornetti, among other drab and depressing fare.

I remember this time distinctly as a counterpoint—a time I never want to return to. My melancholy existence clarified the forms of nourishment my soul requires, as well as the things that were merely false idols—wayward romantic notions of fulfillment. As the latter category grew, so my notions of the ‘the good life’ dissolved. Growing up requires this dissolution. Maturity, it seems, is letting go your false ideals of what constitutes goodness, joy, and meaning; sometimes letting go is not enough; sometimes these ideals are erased by their impossibility; absence and negative space are epiphanies of their own. Living abroad, in the land of Italian men and good food (not in my household) and the most incredible art and olive oil, gave me little joy in the absence of community. Majestic churches and azure waters, smoked mozzarella and supple leather, were little consolation for an empty spiritual life. I was looking for all the wrong things.

I write about this time in my life to help myself understand why I am so in love with my community now. The contrast of darker times brings my current friendships and rhythms into relief. All of this is sentimental, I cannot help it. Sometimes sentimentality is a byproduct of gratitude, the overwhelm of abundance, a gift of grace, not of my own doing. I have little to boast about, for I know how fleeting and how fragile relationships can be. One day a solid communion—only joy and purity and the feeling of eternity—and the next, all gone, people leaving, people changing.

But if I were to tell you how joy has punctuated my life, I would tell you (head buried in the most saccharine nostalgia) of the fires that burned in the wake of communion with the people I love. There is nothing subtle, nuanced, or complex about any of this. These fires have blazed, not in embers but in the wild; not sparks over kindling but in revelatory floods. I cannot temper the simple and child-like joy of sitting around a table with people I love, celebrating our lives together, filling our bodies and our souls; indefensible against our excessive appetites and our over-sized hearts. I have put off writing about what gives me so much life and vigor for fear that I would trivialize joy; that this love letter I daily compose in my head would be so achingly cloying that you would think I have no grief in my life, no capacity for deep sorrows, no recognition of brokenness. My own soaring joy scares me even as it spills over. I swallow it back down lest my joy is robbed from me. See, I can only talk around it; I admit, I am swimming in sentimentality.

On Tuesday evening, there were peaches, honeycomb, truffled cheese, bread, homemade plum and peach jam; sweet harissa carrots on a bed of basil, mushroom risotto dotted with peas, golden cauliflower steaks lined up on a tray, piles of red and green vegetables shimmering in a wooden nest. The west-facing sun beamed its harsh light through the windows, casting our bodies and faces into chiaroscuro. We sat down to eat, knowing that in the hours to come, we would not be searching for anything beyond what we had here; that our desires were not stretched beyond this table, but that we had found meaning in existing together, caring for one another, knowing each other, being in the folds of each other’s lives. I should not speak for everyone, but the feelings that moved me that night were so large that they felt communal, and were so large because they seemed to be experienced by everyone, collectively.

When we gather like this, we forget the abstract desires that grow out of what we think we don’t have, and we meet as we are. Time stops. Candles are lit and blown out; fires glow and then pass into darkness. The peril of joy is its transience, but that is not a good reason for not cherishing it, for remembering it.

In my sleep I am humming paeans to sanctify these ordinary moments of light. Winged joy surprised by its own flight, barreling through inevitable darkness.

Thank you God for this family of mine.

this is my daily toast

I have two homes in San Francisco, one in which I sleep and maintain a monastic silence; the other, which I go to, to escape the noise in my head that results from too much silence.

Luckily for me, the latter is one right, one left, and one more right turn away, a two-minute walk, or a 30 second scamper. I arrive often with a sigh. Or an exclamation, which is sometimes the same thing.

Crystal is usually behind the white kitchen counter, which is always remarkably pristine when she is behind it. Its ultra-clean blankness is particularly notable in contrast to mine, which is currently littered with: three books, not neatly stacked; one magazine, flipped open to the middle of an article; two cookbooks; my electricity bill; a tea cup stuffed with a bunch of cilantro, half of it snipped off—I'm keeping it hydrated; and a plate with crusty peanut butter remains. Tidiness is not a factor of self-sufficiency, but messiness can certainly reflect a lack thereof.

Today she is in the kitchen with a three-page letter in hand, a notebook with a bumper sticker that says “NO RAMEN NO LIFE,” and an open Mason jar filled halfway with an amber-colored liquid. When Jacob walks in later, he refers to it as a “healing potion” and asks if I need any, to which my heart says yes and my mouth says no.

“Jacob was feeling a little under the weather today,” Crystal says. 

The “healing potion” is a mint tea tonic laced with peach-chili jam, which was made in this very kitchen yesterday, after twelve hours of chopping, stewing, and sugaring many pounds of peaches. They are sipping this tea tonic slowly, prolonging its life with more hot water.

Jacob is scanning papers, an adequately monotonous task for this grey day, and I am staring out the window, my legs pulled up into my chest, while balancing precariously on a wooden stool.

“Jacob, you are a consolation to me,” I tell him.

“A constellation?” he says.

“A consolation, which is something that makes you feel better when you’re feeling bad,” I explain.

“I thought a consolation prize is what the loser gets,” he says.

“So that they feel better,” I say.

“I like constellation better,” he says.

“Ok, then you’re my constellation,” I concede.

Jacob and Crystal, in this house, on this day, are the perfect confluence of people in a place at a time. I feel small today, trivial, and they let me talk, and they ask questions, and they are witty, funny, and nourishing. They make no caustic remarks.

Later Crystal and I walk to Local Mission Market to buy some bread for the jam. We are both condiment people. While Crystal is deciding between the boules and baguettes, I stand silently in front of the bowl of olive bread samples, eating one doughy cube at a time.

“Bread makes everything better,” I tell Crystal. “I feel better when I’m eating bread.”

Back at the house, Crystal slices the bread and lubricates it with a stick of butter. She looks like she’s giving the bread a belly rub, which is how Crystal interacts with food—elegantly, easily, gently. I like watching Crystal move around the kitchen—always deliberately, never haphazardly—a true meditator. Sometimes she whistles and softly sings—always in a barely audible, quivering tone—while washing the dishes, or wiping down the counters, and I listen intently. Her demeanor is delicate, her mien beautiful. She is one of the most thoughtful people I know. I watch Crystal pour boiling water on a fork to clean it, and then she begins reorganizing her jars, as she often does, checking on the ingredients of each jar as if they were plants to be tended to, which makes sense, because she is a gardener.

“Mama Crystal,” Jacob and I joke. Mama Crystal, who takes care of us, who prepares two plates of toast strips, two corresponding bowls of jewel-toned jam. We eat.

  

this is the ship that sails

Crystal is sitting on the floor cross-legged, plucking filmy green cilantro leaves from their skinny stems. She's wearing a yellow apron, which is abnormally bright and frilly, considering her (and my) typical funerary garb, so we've been told. There's a beer can by her legs, and Carlos stands behind her, over the sink, washing the dishes. All morning he has been starting fires (literally), shepherding the kitchen herds, handling the meat, which are large and unwieldy slabs of flesh, a slippery sheet of stomach, red and yellow spiced chicken parts, offal-stuffed stomach lining. There is a lot to do. 

Jonathan is thinly slicing radishes, while Crystal makes kale salad in the sink because we don't have a bowl big enough. We make do with what we have--people power, mainly; the implements are not important. Carlos is stacking leeks and onions between pork slabs and tying it up in a burlap sack, an old coffee bean bag that I haphazardly sliced with a scissor blade. The pork has been seared and cooked again in its own coffee-filtered drippings. Now it is packaged like a meat present, and set atop a grill to steam through.

We've been shucking corn, and now it's painted with a cotija cheese-lime marinade, sitting on a rack that we pulled out of the oven, because we have so much food and nowhere to put it, nowhere to mix it and marinade it and salt it. Initially we didn't even have any salt, but we ran next door to Ben's house, and he gave us some, which was crucial. We always find a way to make it work.

People are arriving. It's sunny in Oakland, with a bay breeze that we'll never escape, even on the hottest day. The meat is shuttled back and forth between the grill and a barren wooden table, where the food is laid out, unmediated by bowls and plates, just piled directly onto the table, arranged like a garden of earthly delights. Here is green foliage with shredded carrots and jicama and caramelized onions like a blooming bush, here are sliced radishes and cilantro and garnishes for your meat, a pot of beans cooked with pork neck, and spanish rice, simmered like risotto in red spices. Carlos is chopping the meat, and the knife thwacks the table rhythmically, like a metronome. Now everyone lines up, and Carlos is serving people their food, from table to plate, person to person.

It's JD's birthday, and we are all sitting around a long table, eating in the sun. I don't know how they do it--these people, my friends, I am so in awe of my friends, and I've never witnessed such community as this, who serve each other food and drink and music so gracefully, who fill each other's stomachs and carry each other with such love, dedication, humor. 

In the early morning, in a warehouse by 47th Avenue in Oakland, we are working with our hands, making food, but it is not a labor, it is camaraderie, the purest that I know. In the afternoon we are so full, and we are aching, sun-tired. We laugh as JD, who is tied up in a sweatshirt, attacks a football-shaped Raider pinata like a madman, and then we scramble to pick up horrible chicken-flavored lollipops that probably cost $1 at the Mexican grocery store.

these are things i like, march edition

These are the things I ate and liked: 

"sea butter" -- sliced raw scallops in fruity olive oil with dill, capers, raw onions

at Swan Oyster Depot 

buckwheat waffle with marscapone and honey

at Linea Caffe

hass avocado, pink grapefruit

at home

napoletana pizza with tomato, young kalamata, anchovy

at Piccino

These are the spaces I went to and liked: 

 deYoung museum

at Golden Gate Park

Ruth Asawa / Georgia O'Keefe

James' fishing boat

The Aesthetic Union

Heath Ceramics factory transformed

for Butcher, Baker, & Candlestick Maker dinner
18 Reasons

loom

at Voices of Industry studio

Small Trade Co. studio

Heath clay studio

Verbena

Omnivore Books

home sweet home

"The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him."

-Lydia Davis

Now that the sun has set and the rain has abated,

And every porch light 

                                 in the neighborhood is lit,

Maybe we can invent something; I’d like a new

Way of experiencing the world, a way of taking 

Into myself the single light shining at the center 

Of all things without losing the dense, eccentric 

Planets orbiting around it.

                                 What you’d like is a more 

Attentive lover, I suppose—. Too bad that slow,

Wet scorch of orange blossoms floating towards 

The storm drain is not a vein of stars...we could 

Make a wish on one of them; not that we would 

Wish for anything but the impossible.

-Jay Hopler

this is a casual vacancy

FEBRUARY 2014

table of contents

I. VACANCY

II.  VISITING

III. VICTUALS

IV. VISUAL

V. VIVANT

VI. VIVRE

VII. VIEW

---

I. VACANCY

February was a month of vacancies. Leaving old places behind. Emptying a place of its contents and transporting those things to someone else's vacancy. Inhabiting a vacancy. Dissolving the vacancy. 

 "it was a sentence from a previous existence."

night shadows

strange, ordinary

At the moment I am empty of words, an emptiness which feels like a sleepy leg, needly and numbed. Perhaps I am doing the living which will distill the words I need later. The living is the vacation. The writing is the work. 

II. VISITING

Now I'm living around the corner from my friend Risa's letterpress studio, which she shares with another letterpress printer named James. The studio is in the Heath Ceramics building, in an old laundromat. A storefront, gallery, studio, gathering space.
The Aesthetic Union + Papa Llama. 555 Alabama Street. 

III. VICTUALS

Always.

roasted vegetable lunch, old mixtapes

soup, confessions

bread, butter

sushi, stories

shea, reveille

IV. VISUAL

taxonomies, textures, patterns from this book.

inspiration for living. 

V. VIVANT

rooftops

bookshelves

"Everything that I dreamed of is gone. [...] The places I've loved no longer exist. [...] You have to understand: I didn't visit places; I lived places. It makes all the difference in the world."

-Jack Gilbert

(the greatest vivant of them all)

VI. VIVRE

Remember the ordinary. Meditate on sentience. 

"a sense of the possibilities"

"Carol is around still, but less reliably. For almost a year, I would wake up from another later afternoon mini-nap in the same living-room chair, and in the instants before clarity, would sense her sitting in her own chair, just opposite. Not a ghost but a presence, alive as before, and in the same instant gone again. This happened often, and I almost came to count on it, knowing that it wouldn't last. Then it stopped."
-Roger Angell, "This Old Man"

(if you need a good cry...)

VII. VIEW

Driving alone at night, the world's pitch, black velvet

stapled occasionally by red tail lights

on the opposite highway but otherwise mild

panic when the eyes habitual check

produces nothing at all in the rearview mirror

[...]

Trying not to let imagination win over reality

Hurtling through the night

passions so spent become facts one observes

Not tempered, just momentarily out of the view

by the body that perceives them

Turning that into my prayer to be deprived

-"The Whole World is Gone" by Jennifer Grotz

"Language is dying, the novel is dying, poetry is a corpse colder than the Ice Man; they've all been dying for thousands of year, yet people still write, people still read, and everyone knows that nothing is really real until it is written. Until it is written! Even those who cannot read know that."

-Thomas Lux

"For writers have only one duty, as I see it, the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. [...] once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogmas, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, [...] once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognize and do not believe in -- what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception..."

-Zadie Smith, "Fail Better"

mission sightglass / banana espresso chocolate chip bread / wildsam field guides