Race against the rot

My cooking to-do list is piling up, and life keeps pulling at my attention.

Shelves in a refrigerator, with leafy green produce and a block of tofu.

I'm in a race against my groceries again.

I bought ingredients to try making tofu musubi (I love spam, but my latest blood labs say I need to cut cholesterol, tofu is a real hail mary attempt), plus salad dressing, and a new-to-me pesto beans recipe. Dear god, there is an avocado involved! Herbs! Ticking time bombs!

But half the weekend was lost to the shingles vaccine (worth it), then Monday I had some major-ish dental work, and my body is... it's not in revolt or anything, but it would very much like a break, please. And it's not getting one. Wanda's social calendar is hopping, and in just a few years I'll wish she would let me be a part of it, so I'm enjoying still being in her orbit while I can.

Plus, in the past couple months she has grown out of most of her clothes (she's taller than me, now). Just over the weekend, three pairs of flip-flops broke on her, and she has grown out of all other shoes. So today and tomorrow are being spent completely restocking her wardrobe.

And last week—ah, what a simple time it was then—I told her I would make her cucumber sushi. I've been on the hook for that, and it kept getting pushed out and pushed out. I finally did it tonight, my ass was dragging the whole time, but I did it.

Our neighborhood sit-down restaurant, Gentilly, is closing on Friday, after five years serving our community. We've loved having them here, we pick up to-go orders from them all the time, and it sucks that they're closing. (They saved my bacon just tonight, when I used up my last ounce of energy making Wanda's cucumber sushi, they made my dinner, bless them.)

There's a special bond made with people who make food for you, and over the years I've felt compelled to return in kind by sharing my baked treats with Gentilly's kitchen crew. Christmas cookies, macarons, biscotti, bread, and I even made a special custard tart for them using the flavors of their Second Line Daiquiri. I really, REALLY want to bake one final special treat for them, something they can take with them into their weird new normal and reflect on a job well done. So, throw that on top of the cucumber sushi/tofu musubi/pesto beans to-do pile.

And I'm way overdue to catch up with dear friends. Fuck.

Hold on to your butts, here comes a ham-fisted metaphor!!!

I've got vegetables in my fridge that need my care and attention, but more than that, I feel the looming dread of a society that needs my care and attention. It's front and center in my mind. I truly love our country, I love our people, I love what we can be when we come together and care for one another. And that's why it hurts so damned bad, this heel turn, this collapse. But I know, I know, that we can build something better, something more true, something more real, something more functional. Something that serves us all. I see the hope of it over and over again in the stories of resistance in our shared history.

And I know the place to start is with me, right here in my neighborhood, and with everyone else, in their own neighborhoods across the country. We need to start like spores, and grow into colonies, and grow and grow. We need to fight against the forces that want us to give up and turn against our neighbors and collapse into fear and hate, and retreat from caring about how things are run around here.

This country is us. It is my neighbors who all speak different languages from one another but live together and care about each other. Why the hell would I care about who has what paperwork? They are here, they're my neighbors, they count every bit as much as I do, and damn straight they should get a say in things here. This silliness over paperwork is a delusion, and it has bald roots in racism. A neighbor from Guatemala is the same as a neighbor from Oregon. GTFOH with your bs about all that, we've got bigger fish to fry.

Which is exactly the point, we do have bigger fish to fry, and building a better world takes earnest work. Frying those fish is hard and inconvenient, and it means shifting our values away from bottom lines. So, we get cheap leaders feeding us inane bullshit about immigrants, and transgender folks who are committing the crime of existing? (Sweet jeebus, my kid could understand this stuff when she was five, grow up already, drop your creepy, warped gender obsessions, you're just hurting everybody for awful, awful reasons.)

So yes, fascism, fascism probably deserves some attention on my overfull plate. The rot in our society is uncomfortably like that rot in my refrigerator: the clock is ticking. But the stakes are so much higher than having to repurchase an avocado. We cannot easily repurchase the things they are destroying. DEI was making the world noticeably better! I have loved it! Call a spade a spade: removing DEI is resegregation, it's going back to Jim Crow. And good god, the damage being made to medical science alone....

So I have to figure out how I can carve out time for all of this. For fighting fascism, and also making pesto beans? And caring for family. And staying connected with friends.

Can I fight fascism with the pesto beans? I probably shouldn't try to put so much on the shoulders of a recipe I haven't even tried yet.

But can I bake for my whole neighborhood? Can I set up a card table and build unity with my neighbors, and fight the gloom, and connect folks with resources, and draw them in with baked goods? Antifa cookies?

Probably ones that don't call for eggs, I'm thinking?