down and up

nothing lasts forever

(early June)

You get far enough into winter and you no longer believe it was ever warm or ever will be again.

This was upstate New York, where the snow layered upon itself, rising like one of those out-of-control lemon meringue pies in the glass case at the Underhill Diner.

Whiteness is the distinction many of us cling to when we have nothing else.

“I think you should define the word ‘gentrification,’ ” my husband tells me now. I ask him what he would say it means, and he pauses for a long moment. “It means that an area is generally improved,” he says finally, “but in such a way that everything worthwhile about it is destroyed.”

Our world inspires a certain level of paranoia. Perhaps it is a measure of intelligence—after all, everyone is being watched and controlled within borders they didn’t determine, exchanging paper someone else told us is valuable for things of actual value, living under a dangerous government since forever.

inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for—a violence.

caring for ourselves is “not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

When the baby cries, she could be hungry or thirsty or angry or cranky or sick or sleepy or paranoid or jealous or she had planned something but it went horribly awry. So you'll need to take care of that when it happens.

particular neighborhoods are not as dangerous as the conditions within those neighborhoods. It’s a fine line but an important one, because if you don’t live in those conditions, you aren’t very likely to get killed. Not driving through, not walking through, not even renting an apartment.

Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves.