Bacon and Ben and Jerry's and Take Care of Yourself

Maybe because this is a farming community, the local nursery is open when so many of the other stores are closed. I went there to get dirt the other day. I had gone the day before, but the parking lot was full, and I didn’t feel like walking into a petri dish, and so I went the next day just as they were opening the doors.

I am fairly clueless about what is going on in the world. I don’t watch TV, get a newspaper, or go online to read the news. I’m on Facebook, and I talk to my friends and family, but really I’m in this green bubble full of apple blossoms and weeds. I’m a little afraid of getting sick because I live alone, and so partly I don’t want my brain to see what’s going on and get ideas.

You can think you’re fine and that you’re not affected by things, and then, as you leave the nursery, you say “Take care of yourself” to an employee who is walking in the door as you are walking out, and you burst into tears.

She was going to work. She was walking into the petri dish so people’s farms and gardens could grow. I’m crying all over again. I meant it when I told her to take care of herself. I want her to be okay.

People are so good.

And we are so vulnerable.

We have been brutal to this planet, and the sickness we are experiencing is something the planet is probably rolling its eyes at, like, Duh, this is what has been happening, Goofball. I was listening to Michael Pollan talk to Terry Gross about how global warming is affecting the growth of coffee beans and how, in a few decades, the specialty coffee we find at places such as Peet’s and now take for granted may be gone.

One way I am managing my feelings I don’t even fully know I have is by eating ice cream by the pint (tonight it was Chunky Monkey—thank you, Carolyn, for dropping it at my door). Last night it was The Tonight Dough.

For dinner, I played “What Would David Chang Do?” as I looked in my refrigerator. I chopped up some brussel sprouts and browned them in olive oil and some chicken stock I had made the night before. I was just going to add some bacon, but I decided to go crazy. I threw in some little tomatoes ( I should tell you now that I normally go to the store every day and get one day’s worth of food, but two days ago I went and spent $150 on what should be many days’ worth of food, but because I’m not used to having food in the frig, I may eat it all just to feel normal). (Last night I cooked three dinners. I had one—squash—for breakfast.) (When you are single, you can eat strange meals and no one says anything.) (I don’t know if I’ve ever bought cherry tomatoes before. They gross me out, the squirt of them, but they looked pretty and I thought if I was going to get taken out by a virus, I should buy some cherry tomatoes before the curtains close because it seems like an adult thing to do. It seemed like a smart purchase since they were organic and less than $3 for an overflowing basket.)

Back to David Chang and my dinner. I remembered I had a husk of gouda cheese in the frig, so I scraped at that and threw the shavings in. (Cheese is also something I almost never buy since I am lactose-intolerant, but I spent $22 on lactaid pills for the ice cream free-for-all so fuck all that. It’s a pandemic and I am going to buy cheese if I feel like it.) I added salt and pepper because it seems like David Chang would use spices, and since I don’t know how to use those things, I figured salt and pepper had to count for something.

I remembered I had forgotten to add the bacon, so I chopped up some Neiman Ranch slices of what looked like fat with specks of not-fat and threw them into the pan, and then things started to smell really, really good.

Bacon. Ice cream. Netflix. Cold water morning swim. Blue sky. Weeds. Worms.

This afternoon as I weeded I listened to an iTunes mix from 1975. Born to Run, Kashmir, Walk This Way, Slow Ride, Rock and Roll All Nite, Feel Like Makin’ Love, Tangled Up in Blue. I have this weird sense that I’m back in the 1970s, that life has slowed down: parents are out riding bikes with their kids, people say hi when I see them out walking. The back has been broken on the crazy 2000s and now we have something else.

I like the slow.

I know there is a roar of suffering I do not hear.

I miss people.

The next time I get to hug someone, I might not let go.