A few years ago I was in line at an ice cream parlor and there was a little girl in front of me, maybe six years old. Her mother had had to pop out of line for a minute and the little girl was left, looking wide-eyed in the freezer case at the many ice cream containers, anticipating her choice. I said something incredibly neutral to her, like, “I think I’m getting that one there. Which one will you get?” And she turned to me, not turning her neck, but her whole little body, and stared wide-eyed and frozen, not saying a word. And then, like a possum, frozen into it’s false death, she determined at some point it was safe to turn, and hastily turned her back to me. When her mom returned, I heard her stage whisper, Continue Reading
Half Baked in the Time of COVID, no. 2 — Strange Times
I think one of the things that feels really disconcerting about this time of COVID is how strange even the most mundane and routine of activities feel. Things we have done mindlessly over a lifetime feel off-center, unexpected, and peculiar.
In the first few weeks of the pandemic, the stores looked post-apocalyptic with their ravaged, barren shelves. Even weird items like spam or canned sauerkraut…gone. That’s when there were 200 people in a single checkout line, carts overflowing with a combination of items that would never combine to make a meal of any value to anyone. I mentioned that spam and canned sauerkraut were missing from the shelves, Continue Reading
Half Baked In the Time of COVID, no. 1
Half Baked is a phrase I use to describe an idea, or sometimes a constellation of ideas that may hang out together but don’t fully form a cohesive concept or, in this case, blog post. In light of the COVID pandemic, I am introducing “Half Baked in the Time of COVID” — my first foray back into blogging in over a year; an attempt to connect and share and engage. I hope you enjoy it.
I am not going to lie to you, I have had an incredibly, almost impossibly difficult last six months or so. It has been challenging in ways that I could not have anticipated or known, and I recognize that, as Charles Bukowski says, “what matters most is how you walk through the fire”. But I’ve been walking through fire for long enough that my feet are singed. My knees burn. I need a break.