God's blood is sour two buck chuck and his body is an almond
"It's all going to be okay," and other hot takes
👆 Introduction audio and “thank yous” and a bit about the piece below.
👇 The piece below.
Sacralize Everything
I spent $300 on an Urgent Care for 600mg of children’s aspirin. What can you do? I mean, I’m proud of myself for taking care of me.
Years ago, I cut my hand on the metal gate between Indian School and my backyard, and black spiderwebs started to make their way up my arm, and Brandi forced me drop in to a clinic down the road, and I almost didn’t let them treat me because who wants to spend three hundred bucks on a silly little thing like blood poisoning?
In a cab last Sunday, in the pouring rain, Jayne tells me that I don’t have a particularly high self-preservation quotient, which is weird because I’m terrified all of the time, but mostly about things no one else cares about.
“Imaginary nonsense,” says Mark. It’s all the stuff I should be scared of that doesn’t scare me. Like tree wells, or getting mugged in London, or when my dog got out of my uncle’s gate and I figured he’d show back up, somehow.
👆 I saw this on IG the other day and [purses lips, gets serious, blinks puppy dog eyes]: “It just really spoke to me, you know?”
Who knows.
I really just think it’s all gonna be okay. Alex told me that’s what I should write about.
Maybe it’s faith or maybe it’s the briefest moments spent with a calm nervous system that I remember or maybe it’s all the same, same, same.
On Saturday night we were drinking dirty martinis and eating shrimp at The Black Crescent and he asked what my hot take is and that’s what I told him: “I think everything’s going to be okay.”
Don’t ask me how I can hold that at the same as I reinforce my Jericho walls while God goes stomping around inside my — my… God, this is MY — cave. It’s hardly a belief that feels welcome at my table, but then I sometimes realize that’s because the “belief” is not a belief.
It is the table. 🤷♀️
Last year, I told my therapist about this table underneath all the clutter she was helping me clean off of it. All the dirty dishes and dessert that had gone moldy and utensils with blood on them and napkins with little secret notes and resentments covered up on silver serving trays.
“That’s the gift that Nines have to offer the world,” she said.
And I don’t need this to be another paradigm conversation but the Glimpses of “gonna be okay” are the reasons I decided to try to like myself more than continuing to think I need to become you.
Across the Williamsburg bridge, at Devoción (my favorite), the sun hits for the first time in days. This city is beautiful. I love it here. I was looking at apartments even though I just got back to Albuquerque. I always wanted to move to NYC. I know people don’t always get what they want, but hey. When I graduated high school, before I met the woman I thought would be the love of my life (and really: love never goes away, it just expands), Pratt was at the top of my list for colleges I hoped to attend.
Seventeen years later, I’d fall in love again, and with a different woman who — way back when — I’d have likely attended with. She knows, too, that all that’s empty is full. She sits at / on the same table. She gives it her full weight.
Maybe life just does that to you. If you let it. After you don’t let it. However you think about whatever you think about. Whatever you’ve done or left undone.
“Maybe it’ll be okay.”
Maybe someday I’ll test my full weight on the corner of this table — near a leg — and maybe someday (after I’ve hopped off enough times for failure and grace to wear my psychology down) I’ll lay naked and prostrate across the top, thankful for whatever of the spoilt leftovers are gone and just embracing whatever stained cutlery and mess is left next to my elbow or uncomfortable beneath the top of my foot or slightly off beside my left hip.
It was Cinco De Mayo. My cousin bought a place in SoHo and we celebrated with Dirty Lads at Mother’s Ruin. Tacos and Mezcal.
At the beginning of the week, it was bread and wine.
One time I took communion by myself on the only couch left in my otherwise empty house and all I had for blood was sour Two Buck Chuck and all I had for flesh was an almond.
“Fuck it,” I said — out loud to God in a way that echoed through all of the gutted rooms I was getting ready to say goodbye to — “Today, You are a turnt almond.”
Last fall, I remember telling Jen about how I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to participate in the body and blood anymore. She shook her head and her eyes were opened not in a way that read, “You’re insane,” but in a way that wept, “Compassion.”
My God, the thing we’ve made all of this, and the pain I’ve paid forward. Forgive me.
Tacos.
Bread.
Almonds.
Mezcal.
Grapes.
Sour Wine.
Same.
Same.
Same.
Sacralize everything.
Lay down on the table and weep for loss and gain and how you’ve found and lost and found your faith and woken up to the self-inflicted breaking of your own heart along the way.
“It’s all going to be okay.”
Most of my interest, writing and creative expression exists as an attempt to discover “language in service of the unsayable.”
In other words: giving bodies to ghosts.
I’ve been finding sheets to throw over them for almost fifteen years now, and none of it would be possible without you.
Since folks often ask, below are five ways that you can help me continue to find language for a living.
Become a paid subscriber of A Becoming.
Buy my book, “It’s All Worth Living For.”
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Check out the rest of my work, here.
Let me help you with / coach you through yours, here.
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"the Glimpses of “gonna be okay” are the reasons I decided to try to like myself more than continuing to think I need to become you."
Yes. Also, loving the additional ramblings like I already said, def keep those coming.
Reminded me of a passage from Strahan Coleman’s book:
“To look at the world is to see Christ hidden amidst it, and though it may not always feel ecstatic or outer body, it's as valid as sharing a meal with Jesus in Cana, where before He transferred water into wine, He was just another ordinary guest. The Eucharist demands that we see the world enchanted.
The miracle of God filling ordinary stuff is that ordinary stuff suddenly becomes sacred and otherworldly again. The world becomes illuminated with God like it was in the Garden, a place for communing and meaning-making with Him. To say that God fills our mundane lives is the same as saying once we see the world Eucharistically, there is no such thing as the mundane. God is everywhere, and were invited to transform every ordinary thing into holy things by loving God with and through them.”