#176 - Spice Boxes and the Pink Snake sneak into your inbox with: The Twelve Days of Smokemas Day 6 | Dive Bars on a Rainy Night

Well hey hi hello I've had a wonderful night in which I ate a meal so good it reawakened some deep part of me that's felt slightly dim and dormant form months at a time and it was spicy and it came with curry and there was dry rub on these really great chicken tenders and the drink special I ordered (mezcal, aperol, triple sec, and soda) was on draft which felt like a surprise I haven't had since Portland.

(And, if you're ever in PDX, I do recommend stopping by Santaria where all of the margaritas are on draft and the bathroom is shared with the famous strip club next door!)

The first time I had a spice box was this summer in a tiny pan-asian restaurant in the middle of Castle Connell, Ireland. It was solid, I definitely should have taken more on the first round of passing (eating with my dads family is funny because there's just so many of them at any given time like we were at a table with 9 people and another brother popped by in the middle of it), and it wasn't that spicy.

But I've thought of them fondly ever since, mostly spurred by seeing the random "this is what I get from chinese takeout" videos that go viral every once in a while from Irish influencers.

It never fails to crack me up to see Americans clutch their pearls at the idea of adding fries and gravy to what is otherwise very standard in terms of chinese takeout meals like why are we acting like we've never seen sweet and sour sauce before???

But it turns out there's a dive bar in my neighborhood with a permanent food truck out back that makes them, so, we simply had to go.

They also have a massive menu with tons of vegan options (including wings!) and that just makes everything so much more fun I love being able to make sure that everyone gets to be excited by how big the menu is!!

Anyway, it was delicious, the drinks were great, we timed the cigs perfectly, and managed to avoid the heavy rain! And still went out despite the weather which doesn't always happen because I'll take almost any excuse to stay in even though I almost always enjoy myself when I do go out I'm just suuuuch a homebody and I've made my home maybe too comfortable–

Onto the other part of this whole discussion: politics.

Groan, grumble, I hate it all right now and everything feels terrible but I still need to just write some stuff down because I think that's important even if I don't have solutions to all the problems.

Right after the election, there was a dearth of leaders that I wanted to look to or hear from. And that's a problem.

Even the podcast bros over at Crooked used to manage to get me to tune in just to hear what the moderates had to say about certain situations. But I've detested the Jons for years, Pfeiffer is wishywashy and like annoying because I acutally think he really does believe the shit he's saying unlike the Jons who sold out their company for VC money and slap their names on books with AI made from spec artwork they never paid for, and Tommy gets a pass because Pod Save The World is actually good and things are bad bad bad when Ben Rhodes is the guy that I think has the most moral clarity at that company.

There's also an inability to take anything seriously.

And I get that humor is a coping mechanism (the best and cheapest and seemingly least destructive one, to boot!) but it feels like the gravity of situations can't land and therefore we're all living in various states of denial about the future and what our actions actually have the ability to influence.

But denial leads to numbing. Blocking out and head in the sand behavior.

There's always the need for rests, for breaks, for focusing on your survival.

The continuous weardown and indignity of capitalism is that our survival isn't guaranteed by anything but ourselves. The social safety nets are gone. FEMA gives out loans, not grants.

And the Democrats are frankly, embarrassing.

What are we doing here??? Why is AOC not getting committee seats because Nancy fell down and broke her hip in Luxembourg (apparently she was there for an anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge but I can't take that tiny tax haven country seriously it's so small that it's covered by the dot that denotes its location on a map) but still managed to thwart the only democrat in the house who regularly features in news cycles.

Like, don't get me wrong, I think she's a hack and a sellout, but AOC communicates her points well.

I think the points she makes are often weirdly compromised and she seems to have been sold a shit deal from leadership but the thing is: no one likes people who are bad at their jobs.

So she's lost a lot of her progressive supporters who really were excited for a young person with decent values to upset the status quo and run against an incumbent and win the seat so hard she's one of the major stars of the party.

So why'd she get usurped by a 74 year old I've never heard of for the biggest seat on the most important committee when it comes to any hope of checking republicans???

The representative who beat her, Gerry Connolly, has esophageal cancer. I am in no way trying to be glib about his diagnosis but also WHY ISN'T HE RETIRED???

He is 74! And has cancer! Go home, Gerry! It's okay! You've given your best it's time to REST AND RECOVER.

Dying Congressman to Lead Watchdog Committee

The gerontocracy wins again

Ken KlippensteinKen Klippenstein

Don't worry though, his 73 year old colleague said he's a "young 74, cancer notwishstanding". Phew!

It does make me feel better to talk about even when there are no obvious solutions. Having my friends confirm that they too are infuriated by the current state of affairs at least allows me to feel like if my head does in fact explode because Eric Adams receives a pardon from Trump for all his crimes (he complained that legal defense is expensive recently and like not only are taxpayers footing a huge amount of his legal bill – boo fucking hoo Eric sorry you have to literally pay for your crimes! it's cheaper when you don't commit them!!!) I won't be unique in that experience.

Getting involved in local politics is good and does matter, but also disgraced sex pest former governor who lied about nursing home deaths Andrew Cuomo is running for mayor so my local politics makes me feel like the Kill Bill soundtrack is blaring around me at all times!!!!

Things are bad. We are being held hostage by people in their 70s and 80s who not only refuse to retire, they refuse to pass the baton to literally anyone else so they can...protect corporate interests???

Like omg who CARES?! It's a company! If they'll fail, we'll make new ones don't worry!

The market is broken because we don't allow things to collapse that are collapsing because the market no longer wants or needs them!

I know I know I know, they're addicted to the power and the money and they have ego's the size of the states they come from but like this is how they want to spend their one precious life? Protecting "assets" of companies that don't create anything of meaning?

I've been thinking a lot about life and how I feel like I kind of...got away with this year. I didn't do anything wrong or wildly destructive, but I was rarely constructive.

A lot of time was spent scrolling and I wish I had spent more of that time reading. I don't want to feel like time slipped by or that I was just angry all the time about politics but never realized that anger into effective action.

I did hope the actions I took would be more effective, but I also know that there is far more I can do just by helping people directly in my neighborhood. If the government won't take care of us, we have to get really good at taking care of each other. And that instinct is there! It's community! It's everything!

It's present in the dive bar when people scooch over or offer a table because you've ordered a ton of food and the tables are just soooo tiny and the guy at the door says he'll watch your coat when you slip outside for a cig and the lady who takes your order is really nice and gives you straws without having to ask for them.

Food! Fun! Reminders of the experiences that connect us on a global scale because borders are dumber than ever in a post-internet age! And that's true even if I also think the internet promotes tribalism to an alarming degree and the right has manage to co-opt a lot of youth via long-term strategies involving the soft launch of eugenics and vaccine trepidation so it's equal and opposite in it's existence in terms of being the greatest and worst invention for humankind!

I got to eat a spice box in my neighborhood in new york city, a neighborhood filled with brick houses built by Irish immigrants who came over and lived in this exact building I'm now in but where I fit just one me into this apartment, the families who occupied it first might have had seven to just one of the rooms. So while it seems new to me that Irish cuisine has made it to a divebar in Ridgewood, it's really just part of a long tradition of cultural exchange.

The world has gone dark before. Conservatives rarely win for long stretches of time. People like socialism when we don't call it that!

And honestly, even when things are bad, friends and food are good.