i was on an unintended hiatus, writing two different pieces that keep spiraling into more and more words. until Tuesday afternoon, when i self medicated with delicious udon and an assortment of tempura. the meal reminded me of another time i binged on hamachi, to save my soul. so this piece was born.
before you read, consider these three actions:
one: a paid subscription, because it costs money to feed my inspiration :)
two: shop my fermented locust beans, which is vegan umami magic in anything sweet or savory, meat or plant.
three: buy some of my booze to soothe your spirit.
oh: i’m doing something different today, adding pictures from my last delicious meal.
oh, oh: if there are any typos, it’s because you’re not a paid subscriber, enjoy. 😎
Food chokes, at least the way I choose to eat on those days when the cupcake, flap meat on my sides tremble from loneliness.
The extra adipose is a blessing, it protects against the feels. When you are lonely you feel it all, you can't turn your feelings off: every solitary breeze stings and each hot icicle felled from the fixed sun's beams pierces. Everything is heightened, experienced one drop at a time. Pain is sharper, joy more acute but sorrow is the baseline. If a rainbow should crest, believe you can only enjoy it wistfully. Misty eyes are the lens of lonely souls.
There are many of us lonely souls looking for something to do. The more mature of us cook. The rest find something good to eat; a cigarette, dick, or tail. A book or the bed, because loneliness is the ghetto.
The state of loneliness is Ghetto, freedom is slivered like almonds. But its capital is Pleasure, where we can find it. And what soothes after Sergeant Pepperoni’s Lonely Heart Club Band has played its hermit ghetto blues in the rotunda? Food.
Food is the only antidote to loneliness.
It's why we snacked after the sack on the capitol, eating chips and salsa watching the Vikings cruise to a temporary victory over the Commanders of this empire. It's why francophone Africa is preoccupied with coups-- life is loneliness, politics is navigating the loneliness, and the ultimate politics is of the belly!
It's why liberals love coops, particularly the bulk food section. Why Black lives keep marching and pussy hats meowed with purpose. We are lonely, pretending otherwise. It's why we eat and the food chokes right at the collar bone.
There was a special grilled hamachi collar I communed with in the bottom apartment of a Presidio duplex. In the fancy part of San Francisco. In the neck of le poisson morte, I coped with the dull, dreadful night time blues.
Every night, when God is done for the day, when the gays come out, and just before the proletariat snores peacefully in preparation for the next day’s work, the night time blues play. Every night without fail. Night is the illuminating moment of modern life, when the trinity are too busy to distract us. When God is too busy remaining quiet; queer folks are raging against violence and everyone who spent the daytime pretending there is no other choice but to punch a clock, pauses. In the silence and violence and absence of punching and nose growling, is loneliness. It is the night that brings us this gift of loneliness but in the morning we are back to blaming the system.
We blame it on the liquor, on extinguished romance, on Capitalism et al, on the Goose, on the Henny. Shit, I once blamed my loneliness on bell hooks and her uncompromising theory of love. At night our noisy fingers are pointing to the blood red moon, which is the Truth. But all we see are our noisy fingers tracing the romantic rising and waning zodiacs. So we blame it on Trump and his pussy grabbing promises. It's not loneliness, it's the retrograde of Venus’ anus that's the blame!
I'm not lonely, just hungry. It's why that night in Presidio I used Pacific Yellowtail to soak all the bittersweet stories up. Piped those lonely feelings down. I prefer my Yellowtail delivered by app. Where's the value in walking or driving from a lonely cube, in this expensive ass city, to a nearby eatery, just to pick up a meal that will soon disappear with the instant-noodle-cooking-time quickness?
Who wants to pass those hot reminders of failure, cold markers of fabricated poverty: the expensive, homogenous, commercial and residential buildings one can't afford? Who wants to walk by the cracked out, the unhoused, and troubled? The tricks, techies and fitness freaks? See, in this capitalist city we are not of here, we are mere habitués, living for money, congregating around the economics of it all. Performing Tawaf against love and family, we circumambulate in the direction of a dime. Our supplication is a lie: God, I am Here for Money.
A truer prayer might go: God, We Are Hungry Not To Be Lonely.
So money, convenience and dissociation are what we have chosen, hence food apps are the proper way to procure beautifully glazed and grilled hamachi collar. When it eventually came, almost an hour after I placed the Uber Eats order, in that mediatory time my loneliness had expanded swelling like tapioca in the sea. I was glad I ordered sashimi and other comestibles because I needed more to do after the fish was finished. I wasn't hungry for food but I needed to eat to keep loneliness down. I shaved the split chopsticks against each other to save me from splinters and then I went to work, binging.
Tapioca is hungry for the aqueous, humans for money and our egos don't want to be lonely. We swell our heads with credentials, swell our bank accounts with lonely notes. Swell our bellies with Bangus or Hamachi.
Food doesn't buy happiness but Hamachi is my happy place. Thin my shoyu with tears, that's what crying is for. Feed me the best meats from swelled endangered seas because by the time I finish roaming through the fish’s fried flesh-- with the sweetest meat always stuck in hidden bone compartments. By the time, I have cleaned the collar to its chalky white bone, transferred the oils from the Yellowtail to my chewable glistening lips. I would have forgotten all about my loneliness. And that's all that matters, to forget that we are lonely.
On the other side will be new and more manageable problems, like my heart burn. There will also be the overwhelming urge to vomit because arranged in a pyramid from the pit of my belly to my throat, is all the food I didn't need to eat.
When I belched, I smelled the smoke that made my delicious collar. It was very late into the lonely night when I was done with the hamachi and its friends. The corner of my bed was a pyre of disposal plastic containers, inside were withered bones and untouched folds of ginger stuck in dabs of wasabi. Little pools of soy sauce spilled from the heads of different ripped packets, traced the corners of the containers. I pressed my back against the wall and crossed my legs on the bed. My tight hips stretched to the limit to accommodate my modest lotus pose. It was my distended belly that pushed my hips apart. I was so tired from the day of loneliness, but that was another life. My concern now was how to keep my upper body upright even as my spirit kept slumping to sleep. To be anything but upright would be a disaster, the gastric juices might run out of me. Burn me. Choke me.
I stayed upright for half the night, belching, sending smoke out my nose rather than fire up my throat.
I wish this was a metaphor for the soul-immolating workday. I wish.
This is just a story about hamachi.
Choke on it.
This cut right to my bones, beyond resonant. Thank you for sharing this experience of alienation that is in fact collective, connective in the act of speaking it.
Scalding. Hurts in a feels so right kinda way. Your quote, "God, We Are Hungry Not To Be Lonely" I am choking on.