Rampant Bicycle

One of the really nifty bits about living in a bigger city is that it is so full of things.

Not, of course, that the wilderness is not also full of things; everywhere except perhaps the bleakest Arctic landscape or the deepest ocean depths is full of something. Tangles of roots; fungi; bacteria; all the things that creep or swim or walk or fly. Those are all things. Wonderful and amazing things (even if they are also sometimes horrifying.)

But, specifically, I am thinking here of the things that happen when you get enough people together into a place, for a long enough time, that they begin to make things. Row houses and graffiti and artisanal doughnut shops. Parks and museums and inexplicable corporate art. Guitar lessons and omakase sushi houses and afternoon teas and those little shops that sell stationery too glorious to really write on.

And, in the basement of a Ukrainian church somewhere in the middle of town, marked only some of the time by a quiet sign, a mostly-hidden restaurant, specializing in (of course) Ukrainian food, particularly pierogies. We were in the mood for some, over the weekend, and so we went looking for it; we’d heard that in addition to dining in and takeaway there were frozen pierogies to take home and prepare.

You slip in through the side door, down a flight of stairs and then another, into a surprisingly large hall that, at this hour of the day, was dark and empty except for us and an array of those giant round tables one sees in hotel ballrooms for conferences and the like, decked out in simple white tablecloths, each circled by an eager little huddle of the chairs that usually go along with those hotel tables, the sort that will be stacked up and pushed aside to the walls when this room is next used for…whatever other purposes the room might serve.

Tucked into the wall, a single lighted serving window, a menu and a bell the only sign that there might be anyone back there in the kitchen at all. A little eerie, in a sort of cozy way.

Still, ringing the bell brought a brisk young woman to the counter, and it was a matter of moments from there before we had in hand a little bag containing three different kinds of frozen pierogies, ready to take home and warm up and eat with sour cream, half now and half some other evening when cooking just isn’t something we feel like doing. Perhaps when the weather has cooled off, a little.

And so we do. And they are delicious, which probably means they are terrible for me, but to hell with it, one cannot be virtuous all of the time.

Perhaps next time I’ll add bacon. And a fistful of green onions.

And perhaps another time I’ll go back to the little restaurant in the basement, later in the day, when it might be expected to be more bustling, more lively.

I wonder who I might meet there.

Delightful Things for today:

• One of my favorite games is getting a remake, and the story trailer landed today, and I am simultaneously hopeful it might be amazing and full of dread that they might fuck it up.
• In a completely different vein, another trailer came to my attention recently – equally delightful, though for different reasons.
• This is weird, right? It is? No?
• A longer read, about what it means to read – and to be a critic reading – Sylvia Plath.

There are those things one has to do every week.

Laundry. Meal planning. Lately, reviewing what’s been going on in my area to see if any of it might be interesting to go and explore.

And buying groceries, of course.

Every single week. Working out the weights of meat we’ll need. Checking to see if we need more mustard or if I really need to get more red pepper flakes (spoiler: I almost certainly do not, as the last time I bought these I came home to discover I had an entire, untouched jar that I had somehow completely failed to notice.) How is the remaining supply of sugar? Flour? Paper goods?

Every single week, I plan out meals and make a list and double-check: do I have something in mind for every single meal? Are there too many instances of the same protein? Too many dinners in a row where we’d be eating rice?

Every single week, I take a cart and work my way up and down the aisles, checking off items from the list as I go. I pass the deli and collect a little shaved ham, not too much, just a couple of hundred grams. I fish a bundle of cilantro or parsley from a densely-packed lawn of the stuff, each little bunch sitting upright in water that spatters icily onto my arm as I flick it dry. I heft a lemon, feeling for weight; pick out a handful of crisp-looking brown mushrooms, checking each for tight, creamy gills. 

Occasionally, there will be the Schrodinger’s-cat of produce hurdles to clear: picking out an avocado that stands the best chance of being ripe at just the right time. (Spoiler, again: It will almost certainly not be, but we will make do as always.)

Eventually, all of this will come with me to the register, where I will exchange money for it, attempt to load it all into various reusable shopping bags, return the cart to a proper spot for collection (because I am not a monster), and then it comes home with me, and next week we will do it all again.

You see, last time I went looking for reusable bags I decided I wanted something a bit more…fun. Livelier. I am, after all, being a responsible adult by going to the store every week – so why not have a little fun with it? And somewhere amid the sea of sensible black and navy-blue and classic stripes and polka dots and the occasional floral-block print I found a three-pack of bags that were Hello Kitty themed.

Bright. Colorful. Rather cute. Perfect! I bought them and have been taking them to collect groceries every week ever since.

I don’t know what it says about the world that I get such a volume of comments on these, but they are real conversation-starters with cashiers. Admittedly it’s usually the same conversation – “Oh, these are cute!” “Thanks! I figure I might as well have some fun with them, you know?” – but it’s still easily more positive commentary than I think I have ever received on a thing I carry about with me.

A couple of weeks ago, as I unpacked these for a cashier at a grocery, I instead got a version of this conversation where I got to hear all about a Hello Kitty fan in that person’s life – a funny, simple little moment of random connection with someone that I like to think improved the day a little for both of us.

It’s the little things, I suppose.

Back in the days when “Harvest Gold” and avocado green were the It Colors, a thing called the “Economic Discomfort Index” was created – a kind of summation of inflation + unemployment and their effects on the populace.

It would later be re-named “The Misery Index,” because that is what it was meant to be in practice.

I heard the term for the first time this morning, an offhand mention in the New York Times, and thought: Well, it’s pithy, even if it doesn’t really fully express all of it.

I mean…

The prices of food are skyrocketing (I learned this week of the existence of r/dumpsterdiving, and of course that is a thing, but…)

Insane people appear to be uncomfortably present in (if not dominating) most spheres of public life, if not all of them. They are in the media telling us we should be freaking out even when it is completely ridiculous to do so, they are in politics repeatedly failing to perform the most basic functions of governance, they are even now lining up to make everyone’s life markedly worse by privatizing public health care, etc.

They are in faraway lands, invading their peaceful neighbors and killing thousands on thousands for no good reason.

My phone is constantly receiving spam texts and calls, and the only thing corporations seem really passionate about is “monetizing” every little corner of everything I enjoy. Video games are crammed with microtransactions. Tabletop RPGs face the incursion of a new “open” gaming license with absolutely bonkers conditions that are, justifiably, raising objections.

I am not suffering from any of this to the degree that many are, true. So far, at least, I can eat and I am housed, and I am relatively healthy (as far as I know.)

But even I feel…a pressure. It’s not the Big Bad Wolf at the door out there; the Wolf would be here because he was hungry. In a weird, very bad-for-me way, he would care. This, though…this is a greed without hunger, a want without need: give us more. Not just your money. Your data. Your loyalty. Give us the workings of your mind, the boundaries of your creativity. Give us everything that you are. Not because we want you – there is nothing about you that matters. You will become numbers, and we will offer them to our gods.

Our gods do not need the numbers that you will become. But they want them. And their want comes above all things.

…It’s a mood, I guess, is what I am saying. And every time I feel it out there, lurking at the edges of the places where I get by, I feel a strange urge to go and smash a window (if I am otherwise feeling sturdy) or to fortify the last little inch of myself even more, to place it beyond their grasp (if I am not).

There is something almost insulting about this kind of devouring, I suppose. To be sure, you’d end up dead either way; but the Big Bad Wolf would, at least, presumably relish the meal.

The Misery Index should really encompass all of those things, I think. I imagine one of those forest-fire boards one sees in national parks. Misery Index today: Moderate.

Though I do not really know how one goes about taking a daily measurement of existential despair.

It’s not all bad, of course. I have a plan to make a birthday treat coming up, which I will not link here just in case. And someone out there is making this Delightful Thing: Lego mukbangs. (Even if one cannot get onside with the whole mukbang idea, the Lego artistry on display is charming.)

And I think I want to try and cultivate an art habit, however small, for the new year. That’s a good resolution, right? I feel rather disconnected from my creative self of late, and reconnecting with it would, I feel, do me some good.

Let’s see how I do.

So today I read a piece about how browsing isn’t so much a thing any longer.

This strikes me as both true and – as someone who has quite enjoyed long afternoons wandering over to the local bookshop and just…seeing what there was to see – rather depressing. I like puttering around; I like exploring. I have missed it tremendously during this long time of Not Very Much.

At least there are things beginning to happen, I suppose; today was my first day back in the office in a very great while. This meant quite some time today went toward moving all my things from one desk to another to support social distancing, for example – and wiping dust off things, organizing papers, making sure everything’s in order with my dishes and such…

And then there was a group meeting tonight for classwork – and, oh yeah, also all the everything what with us maybe being on the brink of another world war or similar, and…

Yeah. I think I’m tired.