The Cake Axiom
"I don't think I want to celebrate my birthday this year," she said.
This week in The Experiment, Robin Whetstone takes us inside a hospital in her Moscow memoir, Red Ticket. Also, Omar Gallaga translates letters to the editor in a Hallmark to a dying art form. This week we’re also premiering “You’re on mute,” an interview series in which I call my interesting friends while I’m out walking. In the debut, we hear crime reporter Tony Plohetski talk about his latest huge story. And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and recommend things to do, read, watch, and listen to. And for real, if you haven’t listened to Run The Jewels’ latest, you owe that album your attention.
But first, did I ever tell you about the time I yelled at my wife because she didn’t want a birthday cake?
Run The Jewels dropped RTJ4 last week, and it landed hard. Killer Mike’s verse in “walking in the snow” hooked me with his nerdy disquisition of the fraud of standardized testing and then leveled me with lyrics he wrote about Eric Garner that sound horrifyingly current.
The way I see it, you're probably freest from the ages one to four
Around the age of five you're shipped away for your body to be stored
They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores
And they predictin' prison population by who scoring the lowest
And usually the lowest scores the poorest and they look like me
And every day on evening news they feed you fear for free
And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me
And 'til my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, "I can't breathe"
And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV
The most you give's a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy
Everything seems too much, and I am not enough. Is there really a police-free zone in Seattle? Is Trump really holding a campaign rally, like, with people, on Juneteenth, in Tulsa? Did some sheriff’s deputies in Texas really kill a black man for not dimming his lights while a reality TV crew filmed his last words which were, of course, “I can’t breathe”? Are the COVID numbers rising in Texas as we insistently continue to open back up? Is a quarter of the American workforce really unemployed? Are police really responding to protests of police brutality with police brutality? Is my choice really to risk getting beaten by a peace officer or infected by a peaceful protestor? The horror is beyond my capacity to accept but not to understand. It is too much, and I cannot do anything that seems enough.
When my wife turned thirty she was not yet my wife. Our relationship was new, and I ordered a layered chocolate cake with Chaucer quoted in green frosting. The friends who had traveled to celebrate on the rooftop overlooking Fifth Street made certain to introduce themselves. Her friends were not my friends, yet, and I looked out of place at my girlfriend’s party. When we picked her sister up at the airport, she told her, “Want to meet the man I’m going to marry?” I didn’t hear that until later. It was early in our relationship, but not so early that I wasn’t done for.
I drove her, her sister, and the woman who would later be a bridesmaid home. We stopped at Taco Bell first. In the drive through the woman who would become my wife tried to tell everyone in the backseat what to order.
“Okay, Bourbonface,” answered her sister, which is how my wife got her nickname.
All of which is to say that we began celebrating and have not stopped. Her birthday is my national holiday, as is the day we met, the anniversary of when I proposed, and, of course, the day we got married. We don’t celebrate these private holidays as much as we observe them.
“What do you want to do for your birthday this year?” I asked her. We were observing socially distancing and had a few friends who had as well. In what passes for quarantine in Texas, we remained the relatively faithful, scorning the unmasked, washing our hands, avoiding people. We kept ourselves to what passes for pure and could count on a few of her closest friends to have done so as well, but a birthday requires a little more planning in a pandemic.
“I don’t think I want to celebrate my birthday this year,” she said.
I do not relate my answer here in full, not because I don’t remember but because I fear my enthusiasm (see also: ardor) for my opinion, though correct, would reflect badly upon me. In sum, my position articulated a Cake Axiom that holds that the degree to which the world is running down is inversely proportional to the imperative to making the best of what is still around. You don’t just fiddle when Rome burns; you hold a concert because there will be nothing left but ashes when it’s over. The pain and suffering do not negate or invalidate your joy but necessitate its expression.
I refer you now to the gospels, the Book of Mountain Goats:
There will be feasting and dancing
in Jerusalem next year.
I am going to make it through this year
if it kills me.
We do not suffer for the sake of suffering but to create the space for something better and not necessarily later but now if now is a rebellion against a hailstorm of suck. The protestors had to work through successive hailstorms after George Floyd’s murder, first dealing with the white boy anarchists, then the barrages of bean-bag rounds, rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and tear gas when cops decided to cowboy up against peaceful protestors, and finally claiming the streets. My friend M.B. visited Black Lives Matter Plaza last weekend and discovered a joyful place.
I hadn't gone down to the protests because I was afraid of catching COVID, but I went down to the new "BLM Plaza" Saturday night and it was a PARTY! Music, dancing, food trucks, ice cream. It felt like a release. There was fear and anger there, but also connection and resilience. People were flirting. So many young people. And yet, snipers on top of the tall buildings and big war tanks with soldiers at every intersection for blocks and blocks, up to Dupont.
Her account reminds me of the winter of 1862-63 at Moss Neck Manor in Northern Virginia. In Rebel Yell, my friend S.G. broke my heart. After hundreds of pages of senseless and unimaginable violence, he brings Stonewall Jackson and his Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia to rest on an estate where they build a theater and stage original plays every night, take time to read books for pleasure, even staging what might have been the world’s greatest snowball fight between two regimented armies of 2,500 men each, “complete with authentic generals, colors, signal corps, fifers and drummers beating the long roll, couriers, and cavalry. They conducted head-on assaults and flank attacks. There were formal demands under flags of truce, and fortifications everywhere.”
But the greatest snowball fight in the history of the world was not the what broke my heart. It was the concert.
The sweetest and saddest moment of this dreamy season come one evening when several Union bands appeared on the northern bank f the Rappahannock to play some favorites, song such as “When This Cruel War is Over” (by far the most popular, “Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground,” “John Brown’s Body,” and “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” Thousands of soldiers in groups on the hillside sang along while the rebels listened. Finally the Confederates called out across the river, “Now play one of ours!” Without missing a beat the Yankee bands pitched into “Dixie,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” and “Maryland, My Maryland.” They ended the concert by playing “Home Sweet Home,” with 150,000 men on both sides choking up as they sang it.
We got a fucking cake. It was Black Forest. I rode it home from the bakery in the basket attached to the handlebars of my bicycle. By the time I reached home a mile and change later, the cake looked like a dad’s chocolate beard gone to seed on the weekend. She didn’t mind. The boys and I — my sons she’s grown over the years to calling her sons, too — lit one candle and sang a muted Happy Birthday. The cherry was sweet, the cream happy fluff, and the chocolate was so light it nearly floated. It might have been the quietest celebration of any of her birthdays, but it was still happy, a wish promised, a moment marked, time stolen from this malevolent era. “Where there is cake, there is hope. And there is always cake.”
Red Ticket: In the Hospital
by Robin Whetstone
This week in Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s, she goes to the hospital before hitting the grocery store.
“The pain!” I said, “What about the pain?”
“Yes,” said Lyosha. “There will be pain.”
An Ode to Letters to the Editor
by Omar Gallaga
As a longstanding newsletter publisher for more than a year now, I am saddened to offer the following bootless bruit of one Omar Gallaga, who in betimes wrote for the local broadsheet but now freelances words in trade. Today, he offers up this ode to the letters to the editor.
If you dig into the letters themselves, you will also find that the same phrases come up again and again, as if everyone is using the same Microsoft Word Letter to the Editor template. That codified language often obscures what the letter writer is feeling or actually trying to say.
“You’re on mute” with Tony Plohetski
This week on “You’re on mute,” an interview series in which I call interesting people while walking, I called Statesman journalist Tony Plohetski to ask him about his latest scoop about the death of Javier Ambler. It’s a quintessentially Texas story, both absurd and cruel.
RIP
the ‘Shakespeare Lady’ of New Haven
How we’re getting through this
Preparing for a road trip
Braising pork all’arrabbiata
Building these eight healthy habits
Making one-bowl chocolate chip peanut butter cookies (win)
Buying Andrew 3000’s T-shirts so all proceeds fund the BLM movement
What I’m reading
Bloomberg: “Music Industry Rethinks ‘Urban’ as a Genre for Black Artists”
CNBC: “A housing ‘apocalypse’ is coming as coronavirus protections across the country expire”
Allysa Goard: “Austin police to update neck restraints policy amid pressure for use-of-force reforms”
Healthline: “Nearly 20% of People Have Used Bleach on Food Due to COVID-19”
Ryan Holiday: “It’s Always the Time to Act Bravely”
INSEAD: “You May Be More Original Than You Think”
Lilly Kofler: “One Positive Side Effect of the Coronavirus”
Mark McKinnon: “Democrats Blue-Texas Fever Dream May Finally Become a Reality”
Morning Consult: “Taking Down Confederate Statues Is Still Relatively Unpopular, but Opinion Is Shifting”
NPR: “Tracking The Pandemic: How Quickly Is The Coronavirus Spreading State By State?”
Tony Plohetski: “Austin area police chase ends in death as ‘Live PD’ cameras roll”
WaPo: “Big majorities support protests over Floyd killing and say police need to change, poll finds”
Yahoo News/YouGov: “Majority of Americans now support NFL players' right to protest”
What I’m watching
I bailed on Homecoming Season 1 because I got bored and creeped out. Enter Janelle Monáe to carry the second season, and I gave it another chance and ended up richly rewarded with a tale of techlash. You do not need to have seen the first season to enjoy this. The first episode is preceded by a recap which will will posit existence of creepy company doing things to veterans. Enter Janelle Monáe in a boat. Action.
What I’m listening to
The video for “Ooh LA LA” is a party anthem for the end of the world.
People, we the pirates, the pride of this great republic
No matter what you order, muhf***a, we're what you're stuck wit
I used to love Bruce, but livin' my vida loca
Help me understand, I'm probably more of a Joker
When we usher in chaos, just know that we did it smilin'
Hannibal's on this island, inmates run the asylum
People, Run The Jewels accidentally put out the perfect album at the worst time.
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