Hello everyone!
This week won’t be as heady or heavy as my previous posts have been. “It can’t rain all the time,” after all. Besides that, some version of whatever had Emily laid up for the last week or so has moved on to me. I don’t want to skip another week though, so instead I’m gonna pump myself full of DayQuil, chug broth, step back from the shitshow the world is being, and tell you about a project I’ve been working on and how you can get involved!
We all want to belong. To something greater than ourselves, to have a community, a tribe, even just to have a family, biological or chosen.
The last few weeks have been a serious trial of my personal sense of belonging. Getting (mostly) off of social media has helped stem the tide of belabored bullshit. “You are either with us or against us,” whatever the “us” is, is a big red flag for whether you actually belong to a certain group or whether your belonging is conditional on saying and doing the “right” things.
Work in the kitchen has provided a sense of place and community. Kitchens ave historically been my “safe spaces” and sanctuaries. Everything has a place, a purpose, and my belonging in them is undeniable and absolute- by my experience and skills if not myself.
“Matt the Baker” is only part of me though, and leaning into that solely for my sense of belonging is dangerous. I am also an American, a Jewish man, more a leftist than anything else politically, and fundamentally a human being.
“Belonging” to any of those things has been intensely difficult lately, but I still feel the need to have a tribe and not be a “man without a country” when things get tough.
We have to learn to belong, first and foremost, to ourselves.
The world feels like it’s exploding.
If you are like me, you are constantly fighting with yourself between staying informed even at the risk of marinating your brain in Sensationalist Hate Broth of social media, and burying yourself in tiny comforts and ignorance until it goes away.
I have my own opinions of Israel vs. Hamas, and since October 10th I have felt the need to share them as loud as possible. Maybe, just maybe, at the cost of my peace of mind and sanity I could get people to stop being pissy and angry and screaming past each other so that maybe- MAYBE- we could all make sure the violence, madness, and death stops.
Wasn’t gonna happen. There’s room for every voice and opinion on the internet, but social media in particular isn’t built for connection or communication. It’s built for engagement- for keeping us doomscrolling and “interacting” and staring at ads and being on the platform for as long as possible.
Things that make sense don’t help that. Patience, compassion, complexity, and nuance don’t jive with that goal. Anger, rage, hate, pain, and self-righteousness do. After marinating in that hellbroth for way too long on a false hope, I made the call to back off for my own sake. I post for this blog, I answer messages, and (every now and then) I watch funny videos. That’s it.
There’s ways to bring happiness and reason to the world, but screaming on social media sure as shit isn’t one of them. By backing off, you get the brainspace and emotional bandwidth to find them on your own.
Emily is about to go back to work as schools reopen for the fall semester. Yesterday we hit our favorite food pod for what Emily realized would be the last time she could meet me for a post-shift beer for the semester, and today we hit up a street fair.
Sitting in Belmont Station afterward for beer and writing, flush with the book, pins, stickers, and such we bought from local artists and businesses, I can’t help but think of some of the conversations we’ve had with and about the business owners we know.
One woman is at a farmers market and she makes Haitian marinades and sauces we love. The other day, Emily went by herself and Elsy handed her a new product. “Your husband is going to love this one.”
The owner of one of my favorite taprooms, when I asked for take-home recommendations, would look at the menu and go “I know you go for darker and sour beers, but your wife is gonna love this amber…”
Corporations are not people. Small Businesses are. Small business who have regulars, who know your name and who you build relationships with.
When they vanish, it’s not enough to just write a pseudo-political screed on social media or go “Awww but they’ve been there for so long and they were so good!”
If they were so good… why didn’t you buy from them?
He’s the admiral of the ocean
– Jimmy Buffett, “Beach House on the Moon”
the lone eagle in the sky.
He gave me my first sextant
and he taught me how to fly
I saw him through my telescope
on a cloudless night in June
as he rested between voyages
at his Beach House on the Moon
There is no internship for becoming a writer. All we have is the writers and creators we love, their body of work, the will to dive into it voraciously and- ideally- add our own selves to the mix. Back in high school, one of my teachers encouraged all of us to find our literary “genealogies.” We should pick our favorite writers, find their favorite writers and read all their work, then find their favorite writers, and so dive deep into the sources of our own styles.
At the time Mr. Murphy charged us with this task, the majority of my literary heroes were long dead and their heroes were Early Modern or even antiquity. The only remotely contemporary writers I enjoyed at the time were Kerouac and Langston Hughes.
As I sit in a thankfully unfamiliar dive bar patio sipping a memorial margarita, I know that one of my influences has passed on and, in a strange way, I’m glad I never got to meet him.
Fins Up, Parrotheads.
The Black Hat Baker 