The frailties of old age creep in like cold air from an open window. At first it’s barely perceptible, then you feel it around your exposed ankles until it flushes through your lower arms and into your chest with alarming suddenness. Before you know it, you’re left shivering, only in the case of the window you can close it, with age, there is only one direction this can go.
This is all to say that I’ve been feeling particularly fragile these days. I got sick—like for real, have-to-sleep-all-day-for-three-days-fever-chills-and-eventually-a-bacterial-lung-infection sick. I had to cancel work, I had to cancel mine and Youngmi’s trivia night (NEW DATE! September 22nd). It was the first time I’d been really sick in years, maybe even a decade. (Ok last year I had covid and monkeypox in fairly quick succession but the Covid I barely experienced symptoms (thanks Paxlovid!) and with the Monkeypox I could still go about my life, it’s just that it felt like someone was trying to shove a morning star up my ass 24/7, a sensation that was only made bearable by a few dozen Percocet.)
I know it’s trite to be like, “I’m 40 and now my life is over and my body is a desiccated husk of what it once was,” but here we are, at least for now. This feeling is dovetailing with something I’ve been thinking a lot about since I read adrienne marie brown’s excellent Pleasure Activism: the ways in which I engage with healing in my life.
I had originally purchased a copy of Emergent Strategy, an earlier work of hers, but it languished on my nightstand next to the biography of the Stolichnaya family that I 100% swear to god will definitely read eventually. I’m not sure exactly what moved me to request Pleasure Activism from the NYPL, but when I picked it up, I could not put it down until I was finished—I actually stopped to re-read huge portions of it, which is not something I regularly do.
The book is a series of essays, mostly written by brown, along with a few transcripts of conversations that feature the performative exuberance of a great podcast. The general thrust of the work is—and I am simplifying greatly here—that our bodies are hardwired to experience pleasure,and that the experience and promotion of pleasure should be a central motivating goal in social justice movements.
Throughout the book, brown connects pleasure to healing in a very natural and obvious way. Healing enables our ability to experience pleasure and pleasure can be deeply healing. Pleasure Activism urges the reader to think about how they can find, support, create and participate in communities of care, which I think is neat!
The book affected me in a lot of ways, and I urge anyone reading this to pick up a copy. (It’s one of those rare books like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun or The Collected Novels of Charles Wright, that made me want to buy 20 copies just to have and give out.) First, it made me totally rethink the novel that I have been threatening to write for years now that I’ve written about 10,000 words of worldbuilding but no actual narrative (LOL).
Second, and more relevantly to this newsletter, it made me think about what ways the activities in my life intersect with healing. (I cringe to think how much not-healing I was responsible for during my time as a very effective bartender…) My grandfather, who was for the most part very grumpy and disinterested in my presence always made a toast every holiday to “people in need of healing” which I always thought was nice and I’m now thinking about how the work I do promotes healing in others especially since most of the work I do these days is helping people find more delicious ways to ingest a harmful substance. (Drinking alcohol, like every activity in life, involves some risk, and for the most part, people are able to engage with it safely. And that’s that on that.)
All this is to say that my acute feelings of physical frailty (age) are combining with a bit of an existential crisis in terms of what I “do.” Am I just going to be over here writing my silly little articles about drinks and occasionally trolling the trolls on social media for the rest of my life? By the age of 40 most people who’ve “done it” have done what they’ve done, and I’m over here feeling like I’m just getting started, but also that it’s already over?
I do wholeheartedly believe that experiencing joy in the form of deliciousness IS healing, so the work I do creating recipes and teaching people how to better enjoy things does fit into this desire, but it’s not enough. What’s bigger and more impactful on people’s lives? (Am I even talented enough to do anything bigger?) Is it creating art? teaching yoga? running for office? becoming a therapist? These are all actual things I’ve considered doing at various points and to various degrees of seriousness lol.
TL; DR: I feel death creeping in, and what am I supposed to do with my time to make the world a better place, and am I even capable of doing it?
Ok if you’ve made it through whatever that was, thank you. Now onto some updates:
September 22nd: Y2K Trivia Night with Youngmi Mayer at Parkside Lounge. Doors at 6:30, show at 7. Reply to this to RSVP!
October 11th: I’m putting on a 90s-themed DRAG SHOW with Switch N Play that’s basically just an excuse to have another book party and serve people Chambord cocktails
November 6th: Save the date for RWCF’s first fundraiser in NYC in over two years. More details to come!
Aside from an article I did for Full Pour that’s not out online yet don’t really have a lot of writing in the pipeline, but the Watermelon episode of Recipe Club was perhaps one of my favorite episodes of the show and easily my favorite recipe I’ve ever had to make for the show—it dethroned Lomo Saltado…
What else? Been reading a fair amount these days and really enjoyed Children of Time/Children of Ruin/Children of Memory, which is kind of a fusion of Three Body Problem and Semiosis and is probably one of the coolest explorations of what non-human consciousness and the societies built upon them would be like if any existed. Also loved Babel, which is a vaguely steampunk alternative-history 1830s Oxford England with a little bit of magic and a very hit-you-over-the-head allegory for colonialism and imperialism. Currently reading the Matthew Perry memoir because it’s always nice to hear about people who are bigger hot messes than I am.
Until next time!