On the night of October 28 around 9:30pm I awoke disoriented to a man shaking me by the shoulders. I was still in my work clothes, sound asleep beside my son in his twin size bunk bed. A couple feet away my daughter slept in her crib. The man demanded my name and pulled me out of Francis’s bed. Two more cops stood behind him. The one holding my arms and leading me out of the bedroom was not in uniform. There were more cops in the hallway, more in my bedroom, more in the office, more on the stairs. I heard more downstairs. Mary began to cry. To me in that moment that was the most important thing happening. Everything else was background noise somehow, like I was watching it happen to someone else. “Hands in the air!” Said one voice. “Hands on the wall!” said another. “Hands on your head!” said the one closest to me. What did I say? I said, “It’s all right, baby, Daddy’s right here. Ssshhh. Go night night Mary.” I felt the cuffs dig into my wrists as they wrested my hands from the top of my head to the small of my back. She buried her head and quieted down momentarily. I felt hands digging in my pockets.
Francis always insists I lay down with him at bedtime. It used to feel like a burden. Sometimes it does. But it’s also a treat. He loves pillow talk time. He’ll ask me questions like how big are tornadoes or why isn’t he allowed to marry his sister when he grows up and are Blue Whales really bigger than all the dinosaurs and are there tornadoes in Philadelphia and did you know there was a pumpkin as big as a car you have to believe me Ms Miller told me so. I also love pillow talk. He usually demands two more minutes when I get up to leave. I often fall asleep next to him. I fell asleep next to him on Wednesday October 28. There were dishes in the sink. There was food on the floor. There were toys all over the place. Two hampers of clean laundry, not yet folded, overflowing on my unmade bed. A bike was in the stand on the back porch, shifter cables dangling loose. I fully intended to attend to all those things after putting Francis to bed but I was tired, the room was dark, and the comforter comfy.
They led me cuffed down the stairs. “Who else is here?” “Are you a mailman?” “Where is your wife? Get her on the phone now!” I saw no pattern to the questions. I heard Mary crying again. I knew it wasn’t a dream. I couldn’t believe how many police officers were in my home.
“Daddy’s right here,” I said to my crying daughter, projecting loudly and calmly, craning my neck up the stairs as I hear her whimpering. I answered all the cops’ questions which is unlike me. You see, I was half asleep. They berated me for not answering the door. I was cuffed and now somehow on a FaceTime call with Naomi, one officer holding my phone, another holding my cuffed wrists, others tearing through the house doing god-knows-what. “I’m babysitting for our friends,” I hear her say. “I can’t tell you how in love I am with my husband. I am soooo safe with him.” I have no idea what the question was but that’s nice to hear I guess. There are at least three white-shirted assholes.
The plainclothes guy instructs some other cop to uncuff me. They say something about how they needed to be sure. Sure of what? I don’t fucking know. He’s trying to ask me about someone named Joseph Smith, asking if I know anyone who would SWAT me. I ask if my daughter is back asleep. The redheaded lady cop says yes. The cops begin to filter out. One coming down the stairs says to another cop, not to me, “That boy is zonked out. We couldn’t wake him up.” I realize I’d seen one trying to shake him awake when I was being pushed down the stairs. One of them tells me I should lock my back door. I don’t respond. I run up the stairs past more cops. It’s an 1100 square foot row home and there were 20 police in there. I ran to Mary’s crib and scooped her up and snuggled her for an hour. I heard the door shut. Fuck em.
I hold her and I listen to our breathing. She’s my medicine. I love her so much and— and I know I say this a lot, but I’ll say it again— she loves me so much. To be loved by a child so purely and passionately is a joy I could have never known. It opens a world of knowing how lovable I am.
When our friends get back from their concert, Naomi tells them the story. They insist she should have had them rush home. “To what end?” I ask around midnight when she’s home with me and we’re debriefing. She says I seem weirdly calm for having just been SWATed and I said one of the coolest and wisest things I’ve ever said:
“Cops are like mosquitoes. I hate them, but I’m not going to let them ruin my evening.”
I got up off the couch and wrote it down.
===
One of those little Scripture mantras that kick around in my head is “Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.” Hating cops is integral to my love of my children and my love of my neighborhood. We must despise that twenty armed agents of the murderous state can storm into my home, scare my children, bind my hands, rifle through my belongings, and leave without an apology or a paper trail. And I do. I was, as near as I can tell, born full of rage and dread. But also I have to wake up in the morning and do the school and daycare dropoffs and go to work and fight the fights there. You can’t do that without taking a deep breath and remembering you love your fellow workers, your neighbors, your place on this world that’s worth fighting for.
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I have a transphobic boss. The grievance process is a pain in the ass and slooooow. Today I got a letter saying the step of the grievance process just before arbitration has decided a grievance I filed against her is sustained. She violated multiple policies by persistently belittling someone for their gender identity. I did the paperwork right. I documented her pettiness. She'll get in trouble now. I'm a union boy. Transphobes get wrecked.
===
What is love? I recently heard someone say if you can explain why you love someone then it probably isn’t love. That made me think of the Nietzsche line “What is done out of love is beyond good and evil.” Yes, I’ve read a lot of Nietzsche. No, I don’t know what he’s on about. But that’s a good sentence so it stuck in my head. I think to be in love is to act inexplicably. It’s not irrational but it’s not rational. To love the Lord your God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself is in a way a single anti-commandment. It’s a declaration of freedom, not a rule. Loving comes from being loved and to receive love is an act of love.
To be a good lover is to be attentive. What did you pay attention to today? Who paid attention to you?
As you probably know, I have a happy monogamous lifelong romantic commitment. I’m not always happy, but I have a happy marriage. Naomi knows me better than anybody on earth and she still likes getting to know me. To rest in the knowledge that you are known and loved because of it not in spite of it makes you yourself more capable of love.
I was nineteen years old when she saw something lovable in me I didn’t see in myself and I’ve become more lovely from the power of her love.
The thing about love is it works.
•••
Nina Simone on love and freedom:
When have you been free lately?
They say direct action is acting free before you're free. I think it's important to remember that, as Nina Simone says here, you can do that by singing. To live unafraid is a place you can go without the oppressors' permission. We can't wait for permission to be free.
I know this blog is 50% me saying I like to ride my bicycle. But I really do feel free riding through empty streets on a cool crisp autumn night.
•••
There are countless ways to be free in this world. Maybe freedom is permission to be useless.
•••
“It is for freedom we are set free,” says the author of Galatians. That can sound like a trite tautology but it’s not. The point of freedom is just freedom and freedom is good in itself.
•••
The screen on my Casio digital watch started glitching out and has a big scratch on it. The pigs busted my watch when they cuffed me. It still has the right time when the screen goes back on. I tap at the screen like it's an old tv set. The screen fades back on. Great watch. It’s the A178W. Peak Casio. Day and Date big and readable right there on the main screen. It’s got a stopwatch and an alarm. Better than a Rolex or an Apple Watch. I might have to go spend $30 replacing it now. FTP.
•••
“People who think they’re free in this world just haven’t come to the end of their leash yet.” Michael Parenti
•••
I’m for bodily autonomy not for some froo froo feel-good reason. There are presumably millions of transgender people who feel more whole, more themselves, more authentic, etc. after transitioning. Good. I don't mean to downplay that. I just don’t think it matters to my line of reasoning if someone transitions and detransitions over and over like Dr Suess’s star-bellied sneetches. You don't have to have a narrative of your life to appease people who would stop you from living your life.
Why would we grant the authority to any entity to enforce laws about who is a man and who is a woman? That is the behavior of perverts with violent fantasies.
Life is a gift, not an assignment.
Living is a free gift and every time someone utters the phrase “earn a living” they desecrate the whole gift of being alive. It is not a thing to be earned. It’s your life. Be free.
•••
A word in praise of thriftiness:
The idea of “fuck you money” is appealing, but we should not forget that a “Fuck you I don’t need money” can be even more powerful.
I think conservatives get too much credit as the “fiscally responsible” side considering that in fact they rob the poor to make machines for murder.
It’s good to have a budget, know how much you spend on what, not be surprised by routine expenses. I have a many-years-long morbid fascination with the Evangelical personal-finance guru Dave Ramsey. Like me, he uses little passages of Scripture as mantras. Like me, he values the freedom of not being financially dependent on others. He’s a little bit mean sometimes. He’s so right and so wrong all at once. Sometimes I think he’s just a classic seminar grifter, the most common kind of grifter. How to be a seminar grifter: You pretend to be wealthy and good at X then you lead seminars on being good at X, using your wealth as evidence that your method of X is better than everybody else’s. Do it successfully and you get rich for real lending even more credence to your claim that your method of achieving X is the best but actually you're just the best at charging for seminars. Half the books for sale at airport bookstores are by seminar grifters. Instagram influencers telling you about the joys of tradwifery, vanlifery, or supermasculinity are also seminar grifters. But there’s more to Dave Ramsey than seminar grifter.
His program goes like this: It’s your fault you’re poor. You can become rich. Begin by budgeting and accounting for every single penny that passes through your hands. Set aside a small untouchable emergency fund. Pay off all debt aggressively. Give up all frivolous spending until you are in the black. Once you’re debt-free save aggressively until you have 3-6 months of expenses (That’s a lot of money!) Don’t finance anything ever, cut up your credit cards, put at least 20% down if you buy a house, and pay the mortgage off early.
This is all cool aspirational advice and many people have followed his steps and are rich. Good for them I guess. The thing that gets me about him is he quotes Proverbs all the time. One of his favorite quotations is “The borrower is slave to the lender,” which I actually think is a profound sentence. The thesis of David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 years is that debt came before currency, that currency is just tokens of debt. Debt is a promise backed by violence and made impersonal. Promise to pay me back or I can extract this much value from your life. Back to bad Dave: He has no problem with slavery as such. He just wants everyone taking his seminars or watching his YouTube channel or paying for his budgeting app to be the lenders, not the slaves. He has no imagination. We need to abolish debt because ol’ King Solomon is right. The structure of debt is the structure of slavery. It’s bad to wield power like that over others. Jesus taught us to pray "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" because the abolition of debt is necessary to become fully human. To be a lender or a borrower is to deny the freedom that is the gift of life.
We should aspire to financial simplicity because it’s not good to be a lender or a borrower. It’s not good to be enslaved or slaver.
Dave Ramsey thinks wealth is a sign of moral uprightness. I think wealth is a sign of moral decay. Nobody needs a mansion. Nobody needs more cars than people in their household. Don’t waste your life getting rich.
I think he’s right we should avoid debt and work hard to be free of debt. I think he’s right we should live within our means.
Don’t let the conservatives claim thrift. It’s a progressive value to live within the limits of our fragile planet and it’s good praxis to live within the limits of your own wages. Demand the world for workers and respect that there are limits to what we can have in this world. We are meant to be neighbors, not gods.
Elon Musk’s Fuck You Money doesn’t even buy elections anymore. All he’s got is twitter turned into a child-porn generator and his own empty existence. Woe to you who are rich.
•••
Alcohol. It’s no good for you. Carcinogenic. Might rot your stomach or make you stupid, mean, inattentive, sluggish.
I treasure beer. Do you come home every day and feel you’ve felt too much? Alcohol fixes that. Not only does it relieve the built-up tension, it dulls the oncoming stimuli. A true miracle drug. But wait, there’s more. There’s a bonus sensation of euphoria.
Side effects may include accidentally killing someone, destroying a relationship, financial ruin, nausea, bloating, vomiting, weight gain, bad judgment.
I bought a bottle of Chimay Blue last week. Naomi and I drank it together, and the first sip took me back to the back patio of the community house she lived in in 2008. It was a cool summer night. Rob had bought a bottle to share. Beer is ritual; beer is the medium to activate sensory memories; it’s the On switch for Me Time; it’s what’s for dinner.
I have a romantic relationship with alcohol. Sometimes I take a big swig of a beer and I feel grateful to be alive and happy where I am and who I’m there with. The thing about alcohol is it works.
It’s normal to fear having to give it up and I know plenty of people for whom giving it up has saved their lives. Its an anomalous lethal addictive drug in that it's available at gas stations and foisted upon you at weddings and funerals.
Abstinence, reverence, embrace, something else? Is alcohol a part of the joyful life I demand? I’m not sure of the answer to that question.
•••
A delicious cocktail:
One of those tiny bottles of Underburg.
A glug glug glug of whiskey.
Little squeeze of lemon
Ice
Seltzer water
It’s good. I want to see which whiskey works best but I never have more than one bottle of whiskey around. I used Johnnie Walker. Something else might be the move though.
•••
Exactly two of my semi-faithful blog readers have requested more tofu/vegetarian recipes. That is twice as many people as have requested any other content, so here we are. You bet your ass it’s gonna be a tofu recipe. Here’s a recipe for all soy boys and moms of all genders. We’re gonna start with some basics.
We’re doing Teriyaki Tofu today. This is one of those barely-a-recipe because one of the steps is just, “Now dump in all that sweet syrupy teriyaki sauce you bought such as Soy Vay Teriyaki or Trader Joe’s Veri Teriyaki or whatever it’s called.”
Start by buying a reasonable quantity of tofu.
Squeeze a good bit of that moisture out. I did my typical method of wrapping all 24 blocks in a dish towel then sandwiching them between a cutting board and sheet pan with two cast iron dutch ovens as weights and a little towel rolled up under the cutting board so the drips go into the sink. I'm sure your method is fine. Get a lot of moisture out.
Success.
Slice it hamburger style. Like so you've got two slabs maintaining the original width and depth but halving the height. I don't know how to say this any better and I made Naomi take a picture of me cutting a piece of it like that for some other blog post and it feels weird to recycle the picture.
Freeze flat in freezer bags. You can get nine in there. It's nice this way because they don't all stick together and they're easy to thaw in meal-size amounts.
OK, stop here. You have a million possibilities now. This is a great way to store tofu. It changes its texture. That’s not good or bad, it’s just different. It’s way better for some dishes, inferior for others. It's fine frozen until the heat death of the universe. You're not racing the clock anymore. BUY TOFU IN BULK. Put that on my tombstone.
When you're ready to make a meal with the frozen tofu, thaw for a day or two in the fridge or zap it in the microwave. Then squeeze out the remaining moisture. You can do this right in the bag. Just open the ziplock a bit and give it some aggressive squeezes.
Once you’ve gotten all that water out, open that freezer bag and pour a whole glug glug glug glug of the veggie oil of your choice in there.
Zip it back up and massage that oil into the tofu. Give it some squishes and scrunches and wiggles and whatnot. If it sops up all that oil add some more. We want it saturated. Fat is good. This is a pro-fat pro-seed-oil pro-soy blog. Now pull that oily tofu out of that oily bag and rip into bite size chunks and fill up the air fryer.
If I don't wash my ziploc bags right away I end up leaving them in the dish pile of shame and then just throw them away when I'm doing dishes two whole days later.
Meaningless symbolic gesture? Thrift? Good old fashioned misplaced liberal eco-guilt? Whatever. You can use these a dozen times. Here I am squeezing some dish soap out of a single use plastic squirt bottle.
Turn the air fryer to “Air fry” or “390F” or something thereabouts. Also drizzle a little bit of the sweet syrupy Asian-dish-themed sauce of your choice on now. I like some of the sugar to soak in and help create the caramelized crispy outer part. Shake the basket occasionally.
Once it’s pretty crisp dump it all in a mixing bowl. Brownish gold like this I think is perfect. Dump a whole lot more of that sauce on. Give it a toss, let it marinade in the syrupy gloop for a few minutes. Serve over rice with steamed broccoli.
While Naomi was patiently taking orders about photographing my kitchen escapades Mary for some reason stripped completely naked and was running back and forth saying "Dragon! Fast!" while Francis had secured a steel mixing bowl to his stomach with packing tape and declared he was pregnant with the various toys and knick knacks contained in that bowl (one of which was "tiny Jesus") but was also walking like a robot and banging his helmet (another steel mixing bowl) with a magnatile like his head was a gong. Also he was wearing coozies as mittens and slippers.
Nobody is in control of anything.
I enjoyed making this meal and the people who were there with me for it. All hail Trader Joe San's Veriyaki for a quick and delicious meal.
I steamed the frozen broccoli in the microwave in the single use plastic bag it came in which I promptly threw away in the single use garbage bag hung in my trash can.
Naomi made Mary get dressed for dinner. She said that's a rule in our house that you have to have clothes on to eat dinner. News to me!
She liked it.
I like her.
•••
I have recently rediscovered Pink Floyd. I think part of me dismisses classic rock bands with t-shirts so ubiquitous you have to wonder if they’re dispensed from vending machines somewhere.
Pink Floyd made good songs. Trippy, inventive, surreal but human. You could do worse things with your day than go lay down in the dark and listen to a Pink Floyd album. Try it!
•••
New Republic article about wacky End Times Christianity and politics.
That policy-focused Democrats struggle to imagine a movement more concerned with the Second Coming than with improving material conditions is not surprising. But as beliefs about spiritual warfare and God’s covenant with America worm their way deeper into both our government and our culture, as the Trump administration begins enacting Christian supremacist policy and the Department of Justice gears up to prosecute left-wing groups for “domestic terrorism,” that ignorance becomes downright dangerous.
I would also add that it doesn’t work as well. Eschatological hope is what drives Marxism as well as Christian dominionism. Building a brighter future is a better appeal than making groceries cheaper. Tell people they can be a part of making the world the kind of place you can call God’s dream come true. Because we can! Just not through this religio-quackery.
The author is not as religiously literate as he seems. Claiming John of Patmos prophesied the Second Coming would not have made it past fact-checking at a news outlet that takes peoples’ faith seriously. John wrote wild fever dreams about the end of the world. Revelation is a text that means a lot of things to a lot of people. I do not think it predicts anything.
The “panmillenial” thing is also not unique to NAR. As a child of devout believers in these apocalyptic conspiracy theories who took me multiple times per week to institutions preaching various and conflicting versions of these roadmaps of the end of the world and as someone who read the entire adult version (there was a kids’ version too, designed specifically to scare CHILDREN) of the Left Behind series before the onset of puberty and who has watched every single known rapture film and who also after leaving all that behind developed a fascination with the book of Revelation I’m a pretty reliable fact-checker on this topic. Lots of end times right wing fanatics who want to bomb Muslims in countries they could never locate on a map unsurprisingly also don’t care about the actual order of events for the end of the world— they just want it ASAP.
Christian dispensationalism is at its core a suicidal ideology, specifically a suicide-by-cop ideology, God being the cop. Drop enough bombs near the landmarks named in John’s cryptic hallucinatory nightmare of God and eventually this will lead to the righteous getting teleported off this planet of suffering to go to the big white gated community in the sky or maybe God nukes all the Jews and Muslims and sets up the gated community on the rubble. Either way, racist violence is the accelerant. Bleak vision.
The article isn’t clear that the Seven Mountain mandate is not an NAR invention. It’s common lingo among many flavors of Christofascists and worth knowing about.
“We recognize that you, Jesus, the final and eternal king of the Jewish people, are the hope of Israel,” IFA Montana leader Brian Friess intoned shortly after. “Come and destroy the deep darkness that has clouded the minds and hearts of the Jewish people.”
I heard many similar prayers as a kid.
•••
This woman wants you to ditch your smartphone. She’s probably right. (NYT article)
•••
Fuck it. Let's add another tofu recipe.
A good tofu scramble:
It’s easy to make a bad tofu scramble. Often there’s no acidic bite. In that case add a splash of vinegar or, as I prefer, some pickle juice or kimchi liquid. Most tofu scrambles are under-salted.
Fry up some veggies chopped small in a generous amount of oil. Grease is good. Fat is fantastic. Onions, peppers, the zucchini going soft in the back of your produce drawer, whatever.
Crumble in a few blocks of strained firm tofu. Just break it up with your hands.
There are lots of good spice combinations but here’s what I did today:
Whole cumin, chopped a little bit.
Turmeric
Black pepper
Soy sauce
Splash of pickle juice
Salt
Paprika
You could also add some veggie broth, chili crisp, hot sauce, chopped chilies, ground cumin, spicy ground red pepper, fresh parsley, almost anything. I didn't today but maybe I will tomorrow.
Let it simmer.
Add more oil if it’s all been soaked up.
Keep tasting it and adding things until you like it. When you like it it’s done. A long simmer is good. Let it soak up all those yummy herbaceous juices.
Don’t be one of those freaks who doesn’t use all five senses when you cook. Don’t trust a recipe. Trust your tongue finding pleasure, the soft crumble oozing between thumb and forefinger, the sizzle quieting to a soft simmering gurgle.
Eating gets to be pleasurable. Don’t miss out on the foreplay.
We're not SUVs and our stomachs aren't gas tanks. Drink some wine or seltzer water while you cook. Take a deep inhale before you eat that spoonful off the pan. Let the steam fog up your glasses. Cooking isn't a means to an end; it's an end in itself. A story that's just a climax is no story at all. It's hard to remember these lessons when cooking for children who call your food yucky. I get it.
A scramble like this is nice wrapped up in a warm flour tortilla. Or you can eat it by the forkful or beside some home fries. It can be breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack. There are no rules. Practice freedom in the kitchen.
•••
My children demand to be loved. I admire this about them daily.
•••
Bob Smietana (former editor of Christianity Today) wrote this little piece about racist theobrogians. If the landscape of modern evangelicalism and its intersection/overlap/interdependence with “manosphere” is not of interest to you then you will not find this article worthwhile probably.
The aesthetics of these neo-confederate pseudo-intellectual “theologians” fascinates me. They have elaborate sets for their podcasts in which they pretend to be guys who wear old-timey blazers and sit in their plush leather chairs reading the yellowed pages of ancient religious texts as they smoke their pipes and sip their whiskey. Frankly that sounds awesome to me. Too bad that’s a racist-coded aesthetic sensibility now. Guys with beards and tweed coats are telling lonely and angry young men that the real problem with society is women and Jews.
I do want to sit in an Eames lounger reading leather-bound dogeared copies of Aquinas though. Just not racistly.
•••
Good article in Vulture about Zohran Mamdani's momma. (archive link here in case a paywall gives you trouble)
•••
I filed a complaint against the police for their invading my home and shaking me awake and handcuffing me etc. They said they investigated themselves and found something like "while the encounter may be upsetting to you, it does not appear any of our officers violated any departmental policy." Frankly I believe that sentence. Like, was it an unreasonable search and a warrantless entry? Obviously. Do the police have any policy forbidding that? They don't think so. The thing about police brutality is that it's routine. They believe that if you have your door kicked in or your home sneaked into and act any way but grateful it's within their rights to end your life. What if I'd been someone who sleeps with a gun? We could all be dead.
We must defund, disarm, and disband the Philadelphia Police Department. It's been a long time since I've believed there could be a good cop. You should stop believing that fantasy too. The difference between ICE and your local police department is a difference of degree, not type. ICE is just policing better-funded better-armed and more-legally-immune. So we see funding, arming, and giving legal immunity to people who sign up to be a terrorist organization like ICE are pieces of shit and it's a bad idea and we should stop doing it. They may be self-deluded pieces of shit who believe they're the good guys. Don't tell me your dad's a cop. I don't care. I don't care if they think they're good guys. They're still on Team Evil. Defund the police. Fund public goods. Hate what is evil. Cling to what is good.
•••
Yes, I have sought legal counsel. No, I don't want any more lawyer recommendations. Yes, I have also submitted a complaint with the Civilian Police Oversight Commission. Yes, I'm OK. Yes, Francis truly slept through it. Mary is herself, which is to say a goddamn delight.
•••
Peace.
I am so sorry yall went through this.
We love you, Ben.