Guerrilla Food Wars

I read in "Restaurants & Institutions," a culinary trade magazine, that 52% of US consumers, aged 25-34, would "prefer to use convenience foods instead of cooking from scratch," "even when time is not a problem."
This disturbed the hell out of me: over half of UStians my age would rather not cook for themselves or their loved ones if offered a plastic-wrapped alternative.
How fucked up is that?
Do people remember how to cook?
How to sustain themselves without the help of corporations who lean toward profit rather than nutrition?
Do their tongues even know the difference between real and mass-produced food anymore?
To the last question, I present this observation:

To combat the oppressive heat and emotional simmering of the kitchen where I am employed, I started making ginger syrup for homemade ginger ale. Fresh ginger + sugar + water, cooked down to a thick, strong syrup, then mixed with soda water and a squeeze of fresh lime; it's absolutely refreshing. On my favorite prep cook's suggestion, I mixed the syrup with Seagram's ginger ale (loaded with high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavor) instead of soda, and was told by most of my coworkers that these new drinks were even better than the original, unadulterated product. My tongue being what it is, I wholeheartedly disagree with them, but that's a little to the side of the point. The point is that most of the cooks in this fine-dining establishment, cooks whose palates are daily exposed to high-quality ingredients, to better quality methods of preparation (food mills vs. giant mixers, hand-chopped vs. food processor, etc.) still craved the chemically enhanced taste of factory-produced soft drinks. We're not talking people who don't know better. We're not talking about folks with no other frame of reference than fast food. We're talking about fucking professionals whose job it is to know true flavor when they find it.
And, y'know,
...they didn't.

Inga Muscio offers this illustrative example in "Autobiography of A Blue-Eyed Devil":

"An old woman in Mexico was given a tortilla-making machine. It was explained to her how it works, and how much easier her life would be if she used it, and how much more convenient it is than forming tortillas by hand. She wanted nothing to do with this machine, and the person who gave it to her tried to patiently explain that she was being ignorant.
"The old woman sighed deeply.
"She patiently explained that her life, love, thoughts and memories all go into each tortilla she makes. It is this that nourishes her family, and the tortilla is merely a vehicle through which this nourishment is absorbed into the bodies of those she loves and feeds. A tortilla machine made no sense to her because it would separate her from the act of making tortillas, which was the whole fucken point of making tortillas.
"So who, exactly, is the ignorant one in this story?
"...You are what you eat, and when our entire culture eats mass-produced, machine-made food that is rarely, if ever, touched by caring human hands, it is no wonder that there is little compassion and respect for our food, our world, and one another."

Yeah.
What she said.

Why is this trend as ubiquitous as it is?
Better yet, what the hell can we do to stand in the face of it?
To threaten it?
To turn it back?

This isn't just the US.
Not by any imaginative means.
Cradled within the NAFTA contracts is a (UStian) law that destroys and prohibits collective, indigenous farms (ejidos) in favor of US-style agribusiness. Whole communities are now unable, by law, to feed themselves, their families and communities, in the ways that best nourish them. Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista movement refers to this as "a death certificate for the Indian peoples of Mexico."

The new Iraqi constitution, also handed to them by the US, prohibits Iraqis from using seeds that they have saved from previous harvests, demanding instead that they purchase their seeds from companies like Monsanto, companies that have trademarked seeds bred by generations of Iraqi farmers. Stealing people's livelihood and selling it back to them for exorbitant profits, at the expense of entire, ancient, tried & true means of survival. This is not only colonization, 21st century style; it is part of the New Slavery.

Along with rape, I believe that fucking with people's foodways is about the most destructive, invasive, soul-killing method of imperialism practiced on this planet. It is absolute physical and psychic murder, drawn out over generations, that will result in wide-ranging cultural genocide. And the thing is, we UStians, the ones who are exporting this shit all over the world, were the real test subjects for this brand of indoctrination. We didn't always eat the crap we currently tell ourselves is food. We didn't always eat like this. At the ripe age of 32, I am one of the only people of my generation I have ever met who was raised on home-baked breads, home-grown vegetables and fruits, and self-slaughtered animals. I am one of the few people I know who has a pretty damned good idea where my food comes from. I know what real food tastes like, although my taste buds generally suffer in this regard, living as far from any real farms as I now do. Too damned many UStians have never had this culinary luxury.

Maybe we are no longer able to see how our food choices impact our lives and the lives of our progeny, the lives of the animals and plants with whom we share our great blue-green home. Perhaps we are unable to see how our dietary proclivities affect our minds and elusive spirits as well as our bodies. We don't receive proper nutrition from boxes, regardless what those boxes advertise on their exteriors (low fat! low cholesterol! high in nutrients and vitamins!). Our bodies do not absorb chemically manufactured vitamins as easily as when they are naturally occurring in our food. For example, we are obviously better able to use the Vitamin C found in fresh oranges than we are in orange-flavored chewable vitamin-pills; so why do we, as a nation, so often choose the latter over the former? Are we so goddamned lazy that peeling a fragrant, dribbling-down-our-elbows, pop-juicy orange is too much trouble for us to handle in the middle of our workday? Are we so hopelessly inured to our truly meaningless, wage-slavery jobs that we cannot take an extra couple of minutes to care for ourselves the way our employers never will?

Have we forgotten, collectively, how joyous eating can be?
Have we forgotten that joy is necessary to our evolution and survival?

This is an opportunity for guerrilla warfare on a domestic scale if ever I've seen one. With agribusiness not only flooding our grocery stores, but also whittling our food choices (both in product and production) down to a Lesser of Evils decision, growing our own food, or paying our neighbors for their willingness to grow real food for us, is tantamount to sedition. I believe it is a choice that will bring heavier penalties from the corporate-government as time goes on; a choice that may one day require us to pay with our lives and/or livelihoods, much as it now does in places like Mexico and Iraq. If we're not brave enough to stand up to our government and its corporate henchmen (or is it our corporations and their government henchmen?) over basic things like healthcare for all people, equal and adequate pay for equal work, or the ridiculous breach between monetarily rich and poor peoples, then maybe, maybe we can find it within ourselves to at least stand up for dinner. Quit making excuses, start scrubbing our brains and palates clean of the pap we've been fed by people who don't give a shit about us, and do a little something that
might
mean
everything.

Find the space. I've grown tomatoes and herbs in buckets in my bedroom when I didn't have gardening space. There are tiny strips of dirt in every urban area, just begging to be brought to life. Herbs and vegetables, especially all kinds of lettuces and greens, will grow in the tiniest of spaces, with the tiniest bit of care.

Make the time. How cool would it be to just push back a little dirt with your fingers and plant some seeds leftover and dried out from that awesome tomato you had on your sandwich last week? Or that cool-looking cucumber you saw in someone's trash? How hard is it to do this in a little weed-patch on your way to work or school, somewhere you pass every day? How good would it feel to actually care for something that will in turn care for you?

Find the space, find the time, find the heart still beating in your chest---
y'know, the one that still cares?
The one that isn't totally jaded and Over It?

It feels So.
Fucking.
GOOD!
to bring your own food to life!
It feels even better to be able to grow enough to share with a friend, whether that friend is human or animal. And fer chrissakes, preparing food for ourselves doesn't necessarily mean dragging out a bunch of pots and pans, dirtying plates and forks and counter tops; it can be as simple as plucking berries from a vine or fruit from a tree. I am faaar more satisfied with simple snacks of found-food than I am with anything taken out of ecocidal plastic and reheated in a cancer-causing microwave. Done and done. It is high time...hell, it's long past time that we extend an effective middle finger at the forces that try to stiflingly rule us. They're not gonna listen to us, no matter how loudly we shout or how pointed our protest-sign slogans. We've gotta do something meaningful. Take back what no one has ever had any right to take from us. We have got to relearn what food IS and how it is us, from seed to waste.

52% of a population is a scary statistic.
That's a lotta people done been brainwashed into thinkin they can't care for themselves,
or that caring for themselves is best left to someone else.
To this brainwashing, I say,
"Pffft!"
We're smarter than that, damn it!
Way smarter.
And we deserve better.
We all do.
The whole crazy mess of us.

Now, how best to disseminate that knowledge through a vast population of people too nervous to hear the truth of their own bodies....

The Bile Piles Higher

I either have time for the briefest of notes, or I have time to write a novella.

Welcome to my see-saw.

Yesterday the 'chef de cuisine,' someone who was once an ally (I thought), engaged in a completely unprovoked, very personal, verbal attack against me that very nearly turned physical.

Kudos to me for avoiding the assault train.

I was in the bakery, back to the room, beating egg whites with a frenzy, when I hear this chef say "Are you done fucking over my friends?!"

What?
Is she actually talking to me?
Jeezus, she is talking to me.
What the fuck is it this time?
I thought she was in a good mood today, and I could slip out largely unnoticed as soon as my work load was finished.

Wrong.

She has apparently set it in her mind that I am in league with the Devil and have been doing my all-fired best to screw over everyone she knows. Her initial question, followed by my repeated queries of "What are you talking about," followed by a string of accusations of a purely personal sort (I've gotta stress that through this whole confrontation, not a single word about my job performance was uttered), quickly escalated to her pointing at me and yelling, "Fuck you! Fuck you!"

At that point, I realized that this was never going to evolve past vituperation into an actual conversation, so I started packing up my things to go. For the record, I never leave my necessary jobs unfinished, so, y'know, I was pretty upset. I've worked straight through 14 hour days, with a vomiting migraine, without leaving my work undone. However. I had told the executive chef, last time this happened, that if it ever occurred again I was gonna walk. Fair's fair. So, I get almost all the way out to my bicycle before I realized I'd forgotten to clock out. I returned to the kitchen and clocked out, with her sending up high-school style taunts of "Oh yeah, that's a good idea, fuckin clock out, you stupid bitch."

Fed up, tired, and...well, just fed up and tired, I sighed, "man, fuck off" as I was walking out the door. I heard her behind me, heard her anger building in her voice, say, "What did you just say to me, you little bitch?" as she's stomping, trotting, running up the ramp behind me. As she exited the kitchen, 10 feet behind me, in full chef's whites, she yells in full view of incoming clientele, "Do you wanna fuckin GO?!"

"No, Martha. No, I don't (just keep walking, get on your bike and go, go find Niki or Otter or anyone who will let you be calm and help you think)."

"Fine, then! Get the hell outta here! And don't come back!"

sigh.

Now, the fucked up part was (yeah, more fucked up than all that), she waited until everyone had exited the kitchen to unleash her vitriol...everyone except the three illegal immigrants who work with me, the three people who could never in a million years stand up for me in any legal sense because to do so would be to endanger their families and their livelihoods. She did that the last time, too.

Diabolical.
Absolutely diabolical.

I talked to the head chef on the phone, after I had calmed down considerably, and briefly explained what had happened. He's such a sweetheart, and I truly love him as a fine and very funny, warmhearted human being; he is also even more averse to confrontation than I am. When he told me he'd "try to get to the bottom of this," I understood that she would likely run roughshod over him the same way she does over everyone else. It's a lose-lose situation.

So, now, right now, I'm looking at the clock, know she's done "working" and is outside drinking at the bar by now, and I am absolutely sick at the thought of having to return to that place. Absolutely sick.

I'm looking for alternate employment, but, let's face it folks, this is the off-season, the hurricane season, when most places are shuttering up for the first few weeks of September. Ain't nobody hiring right now. My weekly checks are a full $500 less than they were in the winter months, so it's not like I've got a big ol' pile of cash to support me. Otter has a lovely new job, but he, too, took a massive cut in pay when he went to a smaller, more "respectable" restaurant. I mean, we'll get through. It's not like we're in a war zone, not like we're in Mexico having to kowtow to NAFTA-endorsed slave labor. We can still feed ourselves and we still have a roof over our heads (and a rare-as-emeralds sweetheart of a landlord). We have a wide base of beautiful, wonderful, openhearted friends who have shown their willingness to help us in whatever ways they can.

...But, goddamn.

Goddamn.

I think I've shown myself to have some pretty good willpower, some no-small-power to put up with a lot of psychically damaging nonsense, but...

...but goddamn.

I'm holding monetary struggle in one hand and my sanity in the other. I know what's most important to me. But how many other people are gonna have to pay for my decision? Otter, of course. But also the executive chef, who will have to take on all my baking work until they can find another freakishly-rare baker/pastry chef (and why is that? why are bakers so goddamned rare when bread is, and has always been, the acknowledged Staff of Life?). How many people have to pay for my sanity?

I say, goddamn.

Whatchoo Eatin?

Proposed introduction to Otter's and my joint food history/education project:

This project is an endeavor to educate ourselves and each other about the stuff we all eat.
This isn't to suggest we all eat the same stuff.
Not by a long shot.
This is to suggest that, amidst the gamut of worldwide gustatory experience, we do crash into each other's mouths a lot more often than most of us think.
We are related by a whole string of culinary coincidences, a zillion different people peppered along a chain of sociopolitical, economic, religious, you-name-it events in which food has often been our only common bond.
What we aim to do is illustrate how we're formed and connected by a very basic, very necessary understanding:

We need to eat.

The Ways and Whys and Hows of our eating proclivities are the places where all the really interesting stuff comes in. Those are the places that teach us about each other and ourselves. There are old folks and young kids and everyone in between, scattered all over the globe, who are inventing new ways with food and/or sustaining ancient traditions, many of which are rapidly disappearing in our "free-traded" world. We love learning about, and challenging, sacrosanct truths concerning food and diet, and some of the best ways we've found to do that is by, flat-out, asking questions of absolutely everyone about absolutely everything food-related. We encourage you to do the same.

Hell, we demand it.

We love food. We absolutely, passionately adore flavor. We will eat damned near anything and are attracted by everything from home-grown vegetables and wild-gathered fungus, to alligator backstrap and duck-stuffed Javalina. When it comes right down to it...

We just love to eat,
We love to feed people,
And we love to learn about food:why we eat what we eat.
Salud.

Come on, Hurricane!

There's a hurricane headed our way.

At the moment, it's a tropical storm, goes by the name Dean. By the time it gets here Monday or Tuesday, though, it should be the real deal, a Category 3 or 4, if the meteorologists are to be believed. Of course, it may bypass the Keys completely and just head to the interior of the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah, 'cause New Orleans and the Yucatan totally need to get hit again.

The impending storm has finally managed to give us a break in the hordes of gawping tourists that plague Key West year-round. We island-dwellers are doing all the regular preparedness stuff: stocking 20 gallons of water per person (though that can hardly be enough the way Otter and I drink and cook), gathering candles, checking all the shutters for both windows and doors, dragging potential projectiles (lawn chairs and tables, and etc.) inside, making sure the genny's in good working order and has plenty of fuel and that we've got propane for the screen porch stove. Of course, we also have to make sure we have sufficient amounts of our chosen inebriants, good books we haven't read, games to play, and a 5-gallon bucket of lubricant.

Just in case.

Wait, wait, wait...the two of us, shut in for a few days with just enough power to keep food and cook it? Baby, that ain't nearly enough to keep us occupied. There's gonna be a lot of drinkin, smokin, and fuckin, and not too much ambient noise to shield my yelling from the neighbor kids.

Come onnnnn, hurricane!

Forgiveness.

See Alligator Death Roll for today's date.

चंगे Willful Evolution

Man, it's crazy how fragile human emotional webbing is.

Just finished reading "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison, and all my will to go out and see Otter at work, to see Niki rock her Hairstiks at Mallory Square, to do anything but mourn the cursed relevance of that book to my own experience, just kinda got swept out with the tides I won't be swimming in tonight. Lord almighty. I squirmed and fidgeted, put the book down and smoked a bowl to stop my nervous, ghost-encounter tremors. Yeah, the story mirrored enough of my own childhood that I was nearly derailed by the Flashback Memory Train...

...but it was more the idea of another living human being having to go through that bullshit, more the idea of another unfinished child being forced to mature like that, so lopsided and hardened, so broken by force and mended by will alone, that drove the meaty, bruising fist into my belly. Oh, what an aching thing.

I decided a long time ago that I could either be victimized by my experiences or I could learn from them and make myself grow strong enough to never let them hurt me again. Strong enough never to hurt another person out of some backhanded effort to get back at my own past. Sounds easy enough, but, y'know, it's a daily decision-making process. A willful reformation of one's own ethos. I am still, a thousand years and a million miles later, affected by the virulent rage that accompanied my maturation, still feel like fighting at the slightest provocation, still am afraid to get too drunk or too wound up because that fire is still in my belly. Though I have learned to control myself most of the time, though I have learned to soften my brow and loosen my muscles, though I have learned to express my rage through more effective means, to meet anger with love and find laughter in slaughter,

The fire in my belly still burns.

Goddamn it, it burns.

I do not desire children of my own, indeed I fear for any offspring of my body, but I am fiercely protective of other children. Protective of children, animals, any who are not able to defend themselves effectively against unsought pain. I vacillated from wanting to destroy absolutely everything to wanting to destroy the people who think like me. Like I used to think. Like, some days, I still do.

Mama taught me, forever ago, that the only thing I can change with any certainty is Me.

Both my parents were beaten, lacerated, bruised, and just outright abused when they were children. When I developed language skills, my erstwhile father naturally assumed his parental role as household tyrant, raining down the verbal, emotional, and daily physical abuse that he suffered in his youth. Mama, on the other hand, realized how fucked up it was to have the people you were s'posed to trust treating you worse than the dog got treated, beating and cursing you like the meat they wish they'd never met, and she decided never to do that shit to her own kids.

She didn't always succeed, from what she's told me.
More than once, she laid her hand across me and meant it.

But I don't ever remember her beating me.
Never.

I remember her getting mad sometimes.
After I turned 11, I remember her being really tired a lot.
Tired in some place in her head that I couldn't touch.
Somewhere I couldn't help fix.
Somewhere that was probably my fault.
Maybe...

I probably had that same look myself.

...

It's pretty astonishing to me to hear people excuse their aberrant behavior with the phrase "I can't help it." Like that just fixes it all up and makes it just another shitty hand we all gotta play as best we can. Like there's nothin for it.

Baby, back the fuck up and look at yourself:

The shitty hand you got dealt was your bigoted community.
Was your manipulative, vindictive mother.
Was your hard-drinkin, fist-swingin father.
Was your sexually abusive grandfather.
Was your lack of family.
Was your lack of history.
Was your abject poverty.
Was your minority status, by sex or pigmentation or economics or religion or whatever.

The Way You Play Your Hand is the way you choose to conduct yourself in spite of what you've been dealt. The way you play is by trying to find and create honor in dishonorable circumstances.

To create love where there is too little love to sustain you.
To obviate violence with compassionate action.
To find peace deep in the very eye of chaos, deep within the bones of your ribs.
To reinvent yourself as only
You
Have the Power
To Do.

It's maybe the hardest thing you'll ever do. It'll keep you busy all your long life. But, y'know...

You're it. You're the only one. You are the only person in the whole wide world who can teach you to be the most rock-solid, fun-lovin, life-grabbin, experience-swallowin person that only you can be. I've heard a thousand times that the Cycle Ends With Me, that the violence has gotta stop somewhere, and it's gonna stop with me.
And that's true.
But what's also true, is that you are, I am, We Are the crazed solo inventors of our own fuckin cycle. The Cycle Starts With Me, goddamn it. The Love's gotta get up in my life somewhere, and I'll be damned if it's gonna be in anybody's bed but mine.

I choose.
You choose.

You're it.

I love you.

Bitter Bakers

There's such a dark undercurrent that runs through every kitchen I've ever frequented (and is probably why I keep going back), but professional bakers...

Bakers are somethin' else.

If most kitchen denizens delight in being analogous representatives of bright, slickey slaughter, bakers stand in for the darker, stickier blood, the next-day's-leftover stuff that's still thick and viscous by the bed, even after buckets of hot water and heavy scrubbing, ever ever after.

I think it may have something to do with...aw, jeezus, with a buncha stuff.

Like working day after day with egregious, brashly joyous celebrants of carnage who obviously would never in a million years have the patience and meticulousness to gracefully, mercifully kill another living being.

Vitriolic Vituperation

This is a Crab-Like Spiny Orb Weaver. This spider lives in my backyard. The exquisite arachnid not only does not bite me, but also eat gobs of other bugs that do like to bite my flesh and suck my blood. Thus, CrabLikeSpinyOrbWeaver is not only totally hot, but also one of my favorite Key West carnivores...and don't its markings make it look happy? Of course, what looks happy could just as easily be Nature mocking me for my lack of superhero silk-production glands in my backside. Like she already mocks me for my marrow-rich bones, incapable of easy flight. Damn you, Nature! I'll mutate yet!

Just you wait.

I get kinda confused sometimes about, about...y'know about a lot of things. Anyone who can see several different perspectives at once is bound to get a little turned around now and again. Lately, though, like over the last several years, magnified over the last several months, I've been getting tied up in the Justice of Balance.

How much Beautiful can outweigh or balance how much Awful?
And how awful is it if you're learning stuff from it? How beautiful if it's hurting you?
And isn't there always, always, always a vast expanse of Grey Plains that stretches endless between the black and white extremes we hold so dear?

How much do you take before you fight back, and then how should you fight back?

Yeah, maybe that last question's the real one, the one that keeps me up most nights. I spent so many years not asking too many questions about whether or not my self-righteous anger was justified. Or, y'know, fuck that, whether or not my high-volume vituperation was always totally justified. ...And, y'know, actually...goddamn it, I am tied up so tightly in this web, I'm choking on my own desire for wisdom in the form of pat answers. I am so twisted over another person's drama I can hardly sleep some nights. I have been making every effort I can, lo these past 7 months (aw, jeezus, has it really been that long?), to act honorably, to refrain from returning this person's vile and prolific gossip, refrain from behaving as spitefully and as egotistically as she. And lord knows...

Lord knows I'm about at the end of my goddamned rope. Yesterday, she tried (tried) to diss Otter in front of a kitchen full of our professional peers, then pulled Otter aside, ostensibly to apologize for her behaviour, but really to tell my Otter how awfully I had burned her, how I habitually burn people, and that she loves Otter and hopes he's not just the next victim on my list.

...Grrr...

Now, first of all, Otter is smart, is canny, is wise in a lot of ways, and, fortunately, can see through bullshit like it was virgin kitten breath. Like it was Wonder Woman's airplane. So he didn't buy into the manipulation she was layin down. I don't have to worry that she's gonna worm under his fur any time soon: her skull is just another mussel to be bashed against the stone Otter carries on his belly. Otter can see my heart through the miasma of my reasoning and knows that my Love is true, just as I know Otter's love is true.

I'm not worried, I'm just...

I'm just...

I'm just incredibly pissed off! I mean, this woman---well, her diabolical girlfriend should really be included in this, too, as an instigator on a power trip---these women seemed so down-to-earth when I met them 11 months ago. They seemed bereft of the overweening egos I find running so thickly among rock stars of kitchens and bars; they seemed like they valued food and communion above status. They seemed honest.

...They seemed like they might Get It.

And, oh lordy, was I ever wrong. I was so Wrong, I was out of sight of Right. I have never seen such aberrantly malicious posturing, such a campaign of abuse and slander directed by people who apparently have absolutely nothing better to do with their energies than manufacture a pouting resentment and vengeful vitriol against someone who did not turn out to be the succulent angel they assumed her/me to be. I've tried to figure out where it all started, and the closest I can come is the night I turned away the girlfriend's lascivious advances. She was very drunk, trying very hard to make out with me, said that they (the girlfriends) "had an arrangement" and that it was okay for me to kiss her, and I, I didn't want to kiss her or touch her or anything her; I couldn't bear the thought of her bitter, petulant mouth against mine. And the next day, the next many days, her manipulative crying began and continued. The gross gossip I overheard in the middle of the night when they thought I was asleep. The physically abusive things she did to Frida, my now-disappeared feline familiar. There were long months of violently whispered insults, the most hurtful followed by some gift or another (chicory coffee for my Sua Da, antique fabric so beautiful it hurt to look at it, a nice word or two dropped on my behalf to someone sure to repeat it to me), followed in turn by even nastier gossip, even more strenuous efforts to get anyone who might know me to see how hollow and callous I could be...though I have no idea why they really think those things.

There's a long string of indecencies, including these two colluding to ruin the food I make for work (oh, and you wanna see me go all Mama Bear, just fuck with my loved ones or my food!)---taking desserts out of the freezer and leaving them on the counter, repeatedly turning off the heat beneath my cooking custards, etc. There were several weeks where I had near-strangers approach me and tell me how sorry they were about what these two women were doing to me, weeks where people would ask me what was going on between me and the awful couple, when I was forced to reply honestly, "I have absolutely no idea," and listen to third parties relate lie after lie they had been told about me. And then when Otter and I got together? And when we were both so good for each other? So happy? Oh, lordy. Those women were aaangryyy! They've vociferously accused me of trying to take all their friends away from them, but the only thing I've done is try not to put same friends in the middle of whatever imaginary battleground these women have created for themselves. By refusing to return the women's slander, I have refused to force our mutual friends to choose between us and, thus, they have chosen for themselves (though I think that having to choose one-or-the-other is a buncha bullshit). As I said, I've been working my emotional ass off trying to follow my Mama's admonition to always treat people with respect, to respect them as the tortured individuals they and we all are, and, naturally extended from that, to never, ever gossip about someone, to never talk outside my own experience. And, y'know, the moral high ground thing does feel right, does feel like the appropriate action to have taken these last several months, and...

...and I'm fucking sick of it. Like, I just want to grab both of those women by the hair and drive their faces into brick and mortar until they are totally unrecognizable. I have dreams about putting them in unimaginable pain, about looking them in the eye and seeing that they know they got what they deserved. Short of physical violence, I at least want to return their vitriolic naysaying, a game at which I have no doubt I could emerge an unquestioned champion. I know the short-lived satisfaction of choosing violence over more difficult communication; I know that violent outbursts are common and generally endorsed in this society, that there are a lot of people who'd back me up if I chose that route. I mean, jeezus, I at least want to quit my fucking job, just so I don't have to see these women all the time, don't have to depend on the monster to order basic ingredients I need to do my job. ...Oh, yeah, one of 'em is almost my boss, is the 'chef de cuisine,' just under (resentfully so) the executive chef. The EC and I get along well enough; I like him and love him like family; but then he's not on a massive power-hungry ego-trip like she is. He's not out to induce an entire island, including my beau, to loathe me like these women are trying to do.

Man, I'd love to know what I did to trip these women's Psycho switches. That's a kind of thing so powerful, you don't wanna do it by accident.

So, back to the Balance I wrote of at the beginning of all this bitter drivel: this is where I'm at, trying to figure out what to do. The Awful Twins are obviously trying to goad me into quitting my job, or making a grand mistake (oh, 'cause you know she'd love even more to get to fire me), or just breaking down and crying. Or returning fire. Of course, the last option is appealing far and beyond any of the others, at the moment. But, I dunno. If I can find other work, I am fucking out of that kitchen; I don't care about the kitchen or its so-called reputation; I just care about the food, yo (aren't we all supposed to feel like that there?) But, if not, do I really want to stay in this opressive environment until we move to New Orleans in six months or so? Are the lessons I'm learning worth the frustration? Worth the daily temptation to maul and physically maim another human being? Or two? Is it worth the lost sleep? The pitiful turns my food takes in the face of so much negative energy? Is the revenge taken by not crumpling beneath their pressure enough? Is it worth it? Will it balance?