A Taste for the Present Time.

The desire for a good meal resides in a place within my conscience which is not easily summed into a single concept. I do not like to cook but I want to eat things that are well prepared. I don't like to cook because I just do not have the skill sets that make it easy. I cannot finely chop anything. My diced onions are always large chunky affairs. I lack patience. I seem to lack patience in every area of my life these days, though maybe that isn't the right way to frame it. I am easily bored now and cooking isn't very engaging. So, what I must do, when I am cooking, washing dishes, cleaning, putting my laundry away, and even when driving, is to keep a constant stream of YouTube videos playing on my phone so I can listen to lectures on philosophy. I have this self awareness of what I long to get out of the pleasure of a meal. I do not like the fact that I have this experience, this sense I have of a thing which I am seeing in myself, this inchoate concept, for which I have no conceptual frame or term to sum. I long to understand my own being and to have the terminology needed in order to name and connect my experience with the great patrimony of thought. A grilled cheese sandwich by any other name.

What do I want to get out of a meal? I am 59 years old, and objectively speaking my life is kind of a total failure. I am alone. My best friend died many years ago now. I am estranged from most of the other people I knew in the past. I am not totally friendless, but it is such a different reality from how it had been. The plain fact is that my life is hard and I experience a lot of pain and suffering. I want a meal, which is a pleasure that life still affords me, to somehow console this tortured present moment. A tall order. I am older, and I suffer from ongoing sinus issues, and I guess as we age our senses dull, I don't know, but I can say for sure that my experience of flavor feels mitigated, as though the sensual world was behind a plastic veil now. I want my meal to recreate the sensations and memories of my life gone by. To re-embody my youth.

What do you call it when someone has rhinoplasty but then decides they miss the way they looked before? ….............Nose-stalgia.

I am convinced that nostalgia is a disease of the soul which does not know how to properly be grateful to God for the present moment in time. To live through memory alone is the worst form of mannerism of the style of the self. To be a parody only of what once we were, instead of living in the source of life as who we are. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be a young person now. The world has moved online, and that mediated existence is frictionless, fluid, and purely mental, like we are all just brains in a jar. We are training for the Matrix world, where we live in a constructed fantasy. And nostalgia is part of the stock and trade of that online world for young and old. It shouts this message about the past and how great it was, and the irony is that this very online medium is the bars of the prison cell which prevents people from going back into the world where that kind of greatness can happen. For people to make great art, they need to live real lives and have real experiences. Art must feed on life more than it feeds on old art. When art only feeds on art, we get a kind of mad cow disease of culture, if you follow the analogy. Reality is more than the sum of our tropes and rhetorical devices.

What do I want from a good meal? What makes it a good meal? Of course, I am very conscious of the connection between food and health, not to mention between food and the satisfaction of physical desires, self mastery, fasting, and moral virtue. Try, as I might, I cannot fully embrace the discipline of being a vegan, or a carnivore, or of eating completely clean all the time. I like meat. I like veggies. I like bread and cheese. I like ice cream and cookies and pie. I am not very good at fasting. I don't eat meat on Fridays, but actually going for long stretches without eating at all; I do not seem to have the will for that now. I did it when I was younger. I did some juice cleanses, kind of things, and I do remember that somehow I felt amazing doing that. But again, back in my 20s, I could go all day on nothing but coffee and cigarettes. I do not smoke anymore, and I cannot drink more than a couple of cups of coffee in the morning, unless I want to have insomnia later that night. I tend to cook what I know how to make, and what is relatively easy, and, of course, what I can afford.

Hamburger meat is what I tend to buy. Frying a hamburger is easy. I toast some bread, and lather that with ketchup, mustard and mayo, slice some onion, slice up a tomato. I have some tiny cucumbers and pre-made potato salad in the fridge, which I put on the plate. I look at this, and I think for a moment, “I eat like a king.” I am poor. I work a relatively low skilled job for relatively low pay. I have no savings to speak of. I am, I suppose, the working poor that people hear about. This is largely my own fault. I spent most of my life with the dream of being an artist, and sure, I worked on my art, while working various jobs, but my head was in a cloud or marijuana smoke, and I had no conception for how to actually achieve any real goals, or how to even set them. I was a high IQ, under educated, idiot. What do I want from my good meal? I want to quell the hunger in my belly, and the fatigue in my body, so that I might devote some time to working on things that will improve my life. There are all kinds of things I should be doing, like working on making art again, stretching and exercising, looking for a better job, and straightening up my apartment, but in the end the fatigue in my body wins, and I spend my time just sitting and thinking a lot. I am also trapped in the disembodied world of being mental without actually touching grass. Dreaming is easy. Doing things is hard.

I dream of good things too. This strange and maligned present moment of culture where we have lost the metaphysical grounding of truth, beauty, and goodness in favor of these half baked notions of the self, of identity, of the malleability of being, as though there was no fixed reality, and we could all just wish ourselves into whatever thing we wanted because we think it will please us or satisfy our cravings. Such notions are as misguided as thinking we can eat only ice cream and be lean Greek gods. We have degraded the very word and concept of beauty into being only that which give sensuous delight, and so forgotten that beauty is actually the perception and experience of the radiance of being itself. This is why beauty exists across so many domains of human experience. It is not merely the prettiness of something, though those qualities of sensuous delight cohere with beauty at times, but they do not contain beauty as a boundary. Scientific truths and theorems and mathematical proofs are beautiful. Meaning packed moments of narrative events, like two long-married elderly people still together, are beautiful. We perceive and think and function in a world of stories, because we are stories. We are process with desires and goals and relationships and moral duties. Beauty is the perception of the world and our place in it. It is the intelligibility of reality. The crucifixion has beauty, even while being grotesque. Even the ugliness of the world and of suffering touches upon beauty because sensuous provocation and disorder speak to our perception of meaning. They situate us in a drama. This meal is an act in the play of my life. I eat like a king. I see and feel the blessings in my life, and it makes me feel the lament for those in need which are all around me.

I live in the city. Crime is high, and the deprivation is everywhere. Trash in the streets, potholes, gun shots in the distance, beggars at the intersections, human heaps of tragic wreckage sleeping on piles of detritus on the side of the road. Even the people who are not as bad off as all that have that look in their eyes of being lost. I look at the food on my plate, and I feel an enormous pressure to be generous with what little I have toward this army of need which surrounds me. It is overwhelming and I am not up to the task. On the one hand, I wish that we could provide services to help all these people, and on the other hand, I feel as though true compassion would not allow these lunatics to wander freely about. Compassion for the down-trodden must not come at the expense of the well-being of everyone else. How do we balance these things? I don't know.

I sit in front of my computer and eat my dinner and watch free streaming programs, like old Doctor Who on Tubi, or random videos on YouTube, and after I eat, I become numb and my exhaustion catches up with me. I brush my teeth, take my pills, and go to bed. Every ambition sidelined to the need for sleep. The meal did not satisfy my longing. It was good, but I am asking more from it than it can give. It is not bread alone, but bread shared with others, that I truly need. But, I know where to find food. Finding love is not so simple. And what do I want from love? I wish I could be so saintly as to say that I want self giving sacrifice. That is what love truly is. But, what I want is sensuous delight. I want to satisfy my appetites. I want to satisfy my ego. I want to be desired and to desire. I want affection and pleasure. I don't want friction. There too, I want to satisfy desires which may be beyond what is reasonable to ask. It is the human heart which is hungry. It is the human soul which needs. What can satiate us? I cannot solve any of these dilemmas, but to say that faith in God is the answer. But even that does not end the drama of our lives or our very human needs. I don't know how to find love, but I can ask again what's for dinner tonight, and there, I have some control.