Heartache Gumbo

Gumbo is sacred. It is the stew-soup of the south. Outside of being a regional delicacy, southerners tend to guard the process as a ritual; something "foreigners" to the southern states shouldn't bother to try and reproduce. For a long time, I felt this way about gumbo, but couldn't explain why.

When I was young, gumbo day was something like a holiday. It usually happened in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, using the Thanksgiving fried turkey carcass as a base for the stock. If any of us kids had any plans that night, they were cancelled as soon as the news spread. On more than one occasion, my friends actually cancelled entire social events to come to my parents' house and eat gumbo.

Yes, it was delicious, but that's only half the reason it was so important. My friends loved gumbo day because so few of their families sat down to eat together. Of course, when you're a teenager, sitting down to dinner with your family is a bother, because you have so many other important things to do. So none of my friends minded not eating with their families, until they sat down at our dining table. It's something you don't realize you want until it's right there, and you've been without it for years.

When I finally (yes finally) moved out of my parents' house, I had a lot of trouble making my apartment feel like home. I know everyone has trouble with that, but my family was so... rich in informal tradition that I really noticed when it was gone. It was like an un-nameable void in my soul, and I unconsciously bought things for my kitchen when the void took over. I thought it was just a compulsion to take my mind off things, but what I was really doing was creating a home, in exactly the fashion my parents had instilled in me when I was a toddler. Stocking my kitchen was the only thing I knew how to do, to recreate the smells and warmth of my childhood.

I lived here for years before I got the nerve to make a gumbo of my own. My father fried three turkeys for Thanksgiving, specifically so we could bring them home and make our own gumbo day. I was nervous, especially about the roux part--they're so easy to mess up, and if it burns, you just have to throw it out and start over.

I always heard that gumbo takes an entire day, sometimes two, to make. And it can, but my first one didn't take all day-- but it came out all wrong. Not in flavor or texture, but in feeling. The reason gumbo takes a whole day to make is because everything in your living space has to be spotless before you begin to chop. Why? Because when you're done cooking, you try to sit down on your couch full of laundry and put your bowl on the cluttered coffee table, and you can't enjoy it. It's downright unpleasant. You sit there and wonder why the smell alone isn't enough to make this place feel like home, and it's because everything is a mess. You get angry, like I did. Add to that the amazing amount of dishes and large stock pots in the sink, and you've got an erupting volcano of rage.

So when you've got a gumbo itch, no matter how late in the day it is, throw your stock on the stove and clean the shit out of everything in your life that could use it. Think about things you regret, ball them up and throw them into the stock pot--sadness and heartache are the unnamed spices in a great gumbo. And when you start cooking, there's no time to think about the bad, messy, or regretted things in your life--the roux is like a baby, you cannot leave it alone, and you have to put every ounce of attention on it for it to happen right. If your base is not done correctly, you might as well throw out the entire pot.

There's no time to think about the reason you wanted to make a gumbo in the first place. It might be because your life needs a hard day's work. Or, like me, because you're homesick--not for the place, but for that feeling: a mixture of aromas, a few people you want to feed, and everything in its place, inside and out.

When it's done, your apartment is still spotless, and you can take a break to cry if you want to, because it's hard to build a gumbo or a life. If you do this enough, eventually you won't have to measure anything anymore; it'll be a feeling, not a tablespoon. You'll somehow have everything you need to make it right when you need to; no running to the store or running out of time.

And you'll never burn a roux again, because you'll know how to make it without knowing exactly how to make it. At some point, you realize that no one does.

Mama never told me there'd be days like this, but I guess I should have noticed. She lived them every day.

There will be days where you don't want to get out of bed. The sun will drive its nails into your dry eyelids and tell you to shut up and do it anyway. And you do--you do these soul-crushing tasks that try your patience, stamina and comfort zone. Get yelled at by strangers, dogged on by people you hope you'll never see again.

Then that last table comes in at ten til close, and says they're not in a hurry. While they're waiting on their meal, they strike up conversation, asking if you're in school and such, oh you have a degree, well what are you doing here?

What am I doing here?

I'd love to blame them, really. Anything is easier than standing in front of a mirror and taking stock of myself, realizing that I have no courage or belief in my abilities and ambitions, and knowing that I am here just as much for me as I am for them. It's not their fault, but I blame them in haste, convincing myself that they kept me here late, because I have such important things to do after 2pm.

When I got home, all I did was lay on the couch for an hour. Then I got up and went back for round two.

Why did I go back? Why will I go back tomorrow? Why do I bounce back and forth like this? They aren't mood swings. The student loans hover over my dreams and, while college was spectacularly fun, my education is keeping me from them. Money enslaves me. Trying to make my education worth the debt is enslaving me, when the truth is that it just wasn't worth it. It's impossible to put a price on a six-year life experience like that, but the ruling authorities took a guess, and I can't afford it.

I've often said I'm far too empathetic to be an empire-maker. Empathy is my gift. I hold it to my chest like a newborn, and use it to make peoples' lives better. If I don't use it, I shrivel like a corpse. In short, I wait tables, and when I don't like my job, I might as well be dead. I need to use this gift every day of my life, and I don't have those grandiose ideas about it anymore--I don't owe it to the world; I owe it to those people I help and I owe it to myself. The world isn't just people.

I feel the need to step lightly like a ghost, plant trees and make things grow, in more than just a horticultural sense. I can't be happy in a building, even if it's a newsroom or my "dream job". I've often wondered why I don't have a dream job, for years I thought something was wrong with me. I've tried to guess, I've been on interviews for things I should like to do. But I don't like them, and nothing is good enough to settle on.

I don't have a dream job. I have a dream life. And believe you me, my dream life looks like it's on another planet to this society. So much so, that I can't reconcile it with anything I know to be real. Almost like this dream was instilled in me before I was born, something innate, unmovable. It's no longer big and glorious as it was when I was young. No, I don't want to make an impact on the population--I've seen that it gets so generalized in history, like Che Guevara t-shirts. I want to make impacts on one person at a time. One on one.

Soul to soul.

On Junkies and the Abyss

Enter: That sinking feeling you get when you see a junkie at a gas station, comprised of the knowledge that a day in your life might come when you choose that path. Being a junkie doesn't just happen to people--they choose it, and you have those same choices to make in your own life. You might be making them right now. And you think about God. God, what soul would think of free will as a great gift to mankind? Perhaps, a soul who has never been among them, faced these choices every day, and instead sent his son to die at their hands.

God begins to make no sense to you. The junkie is said to have "turned away from God", and they'll tell you that's why he's a junkie. Why? You start to dissect the logic, and discover that there is none, especially if you, like me, and like most people, do not have a clear grip on what God is. They'll tell you that you aren't supposed to understand. God is a nebulous, celestial entity who created life, and gave the glorious burden of free will to humans alone. Perhaps God is a feeling that you get when a path is set in front of you, clear-cut, and you have no choice but to keep walking on it, and a large portion of the world accepts you and praises you for it. The pure kind of love that comes with security, stability, and peace of mind, often found in infants.

Perhaps "turning away from God" is a feeling you get when you realize you can jump over the shrubs, scale the fence, get as far away from that path as you want to. Perhaps those "without god" know free will is not a gift, but a burden, because we have so many options. You could be a cabbie, rob a bank, breathe air atop Mount Fuji, or fall to your death. You realize you can do anything, and that there is no path.

Perhaps there is no God/Satan dialectic. Maybe it is the God/Free Will dialectic. The Set Path/Erratic Tumult.

Tonight, the sinking feeling will churn your stomach into a restless, fruitless sleep, because tomorrow your choices might land you begging in front of a gas station in five years. Of course you won't make those choices, you're better than that, but there's no way to be sure. All of a sudden, your path has sprung up sinister pot-holes, as if you could just misstep and plunge into a bad choice. You want to go to your parents' house, your childhood home, your alma mater, with an urgency that you haven't felt since infancy. You want to be coddled, to be told that you are a good person, and that you don't have it in you to end up like that.

But that thing that came alive when you saw the junkie, it whispers differently. You do have it in you, and you know it. Then you try very hard to dream, because at least dreams are outside of your control. You know you might feel better tomorrow, but at any point, maybe sitting at a desk or in the middle of a phone call, that sinking shadow in your gut could crawl up into your stomach and start convulsing again. You do have it in you, and you always will. God gave it to you like a treasure chest, because he thought you'd like to have a choice. Images of infected track marks and meth caves double-expose with cathedral paintings and crucifixes. The safety net is gone, and you think you might be at the bottom. But you aren't sure of anything anymore, except that you are human, and that this might be what freedom feels like.

forget now!

lay in bed and close your eyes

play a song in your head and

remember:

the dilated pupils

the rush of heat

the concrete

damning everything else to indifference

and the unstoppable vigor of a 16-year old will return to you with such force that it could knock you back ten years and you will breathe again, with clear lungs, before the smog and the cigarettes and the pain of living so long without feeling anything so hard, harder than a diamond, faster than speed and as fragile as an ecosystem so

for the love of god,

go slow

and try to remember what it feels like to not know

you'll ever have to live without it