A cyclothymic approach to hosting: absolute maxima, local minima, inflection points, slopes corresponding to varying tangents. Sometimes it feels like I could make a grocery list for all the different joys I could behold, all of the jarred ones, artisanal ones, plain ones beneath recyclable glass and shelved at the supermarket. Shopping around in endless bliss. Embarking on a trip to see the butcher, the baker, and you know what? The fucking candle stick maker. Tote bags sliding off my shoulders but total euphoria propping upright my busy body. Hours writing over dashed lines in the kitchen, marking my trail between sink/stove/surface. Things to be prepped early and refrigerated. Things to be minced so as to be added to things diced. Things to be assembled only at the very first knock at the door, the whining of the old hinges availing historic friends that enter before the hostess’s voice can pierce the foyer, beckoning come, pour yourself a drink, I have all the world’s love to offer you.
And at other times, it is inability. A human-sized vat of inadequacy trying to articulate a chef’s knife. Don’t arrive. Don’t you dare, I don’t have it in me. There is so little left of me that hasn’t been appropriated by sour self-hatred. Your venue will be marred by social obligation and despair; the food will be salted with tears. Please not today, not this week nor this month, when the reality setting its own place at the table has already vocalized its authoritarian needs. It has dictated the courses and the beverages to be served, exploited the help in white gloves standing anxiously before the rapidly cooling entrees. I cannot contribute, even as a pseudonym, in this circumstance. My approximations to love – food, drink, service – have been muddled by a brash bat with heedless aim.
But still there is so much virtue in the washwater, scalding and cleansing and real. Unless I really did fuck it all up with poor taste, with bland despondency, there will linger in my brain some mathematical formula that renders every night a success, however protracted, however tiny. This home is at worst a place to be fed; it can be wonderful when the galaxies graph themselves just so. Perhaps it’s not solely my work to extrapolate what seems good and to turn every pressure point into pre-nostalgic glory, as in maybe that’s a form of aggrandizement that cannot be deliverable without effect. There’s bread in the oven but you’ll have to wait. Let us all sit and imbibe and nurture the elements of humanity that have nothing to do with hosting and appreciate the lineage that led us here. Talk about our trajectories. Talk about our fears. Neglect the origin of the offerings and put forth, as a collective, the scraps and sustenances that proliferate friendship. Fuck the pageantry. Embrace the voices carried rainward inside to be lit over indigo stovetop flame.