This being rural New England in September, I fetched all the produce for this soup from farm stands within miles of where I’m perched. Now it’s simmering on the stove, hopefully to take the edge off this cold, foggy Sunday as I write through feeding the birds with my Daddy in 1978. As of today I’ve written about a quarter of this book, which feels both daunting and impressive. I’ve never run a marathon but I imagine it’s as exhilarating and impossible as this. Thanks goodness everything I’ve foraged, stewed, baked, broiled and simmered here has produced such immediate pleasures. Cooking and writing are such happily codependent activities.
Archive | Church Matters
The Church of Act Up
I’ve been thinking a lot about the AIDS crisis in terms of the Trump/GOP coup. We are in a moment in which our ostensibly elected leaders are hanging women and queers and people of color and Muslims and Jews and immigrants out to dry. Actually, that’s the best way to phrase it. The worst is that they are hanging us out to die.
I was in elementary school when AIDS first became nationally recognized, and a teenager when ACT UP first came on the scene; I remember joining the Philadelphia chapter and waking the fuck up because you couldn’t not the minute you entered those meetings. I graduated from college and moved to New York City, where so many beautiful young gay men wore stocking caps and four coats in the middle of summer, were covered in black sores, were walking skeleteons held together by scotch tape and four kinds of antibiotics and a strong community of love. Continue Reading →
The Church of American Ashes
We’re at the point where the American dystopia is so real and so raw that it’s as if this country’s core uglinesss is erupting inside my guts–which of course it is, me being the literal Crapicorn that I am.
Really, it is living inside all of us.
White supremacy is and always has been terrorism. Not recognizing this means you have blinded yourself because it suits you. Because you think your part is greater than the whole. And because—g-d help us—it is the American way. Continue Reading →