the morning bite: let the times find us

just some thoughts regarding frodo, timelines, and internal resistance to resistance whilst consuming scrambled eggs.

Welcome back!

You are at my kitchen table. It’s an old wooden one that I obtained from Facebook Marketplace. There are some scratches and rings where I’ve accidentally left a hot mug of tea for too long. On the table, there’s a small Tiffany lamp that is adorned with abstract tulips. Next to it is a metal pitcher filled with multicolored baby’s breath that has long since expired. This is on purpose. Dead flowers are often safer in my house than live ones. Hence, the assortment of dried blooms hanging from just about everywhere.

I live in an old building with tall windows. The morning light streams through both them and my white curtains in a way that feels cinematic. The walls are a tea green. The floors are marred by paw prints from the creature who lives with me. Further evidence of this cryptid manifests in the crate and bed on the other side of the table.

There is a refrigerator that has become a hazardous territory of magnets holding on for dear life and dry erase notes that I’m sure have ingrained themselves into eternity at this point.

The butcher block counters only have two states of being. Clean or the Battle of Waterloo. There is most likely some manner of cookware on the stove that I’ve yet to get into the dishwasher. There are also at least a handful of fruit flies that taunt me regularly with their existence.

This is my space.

Have a seat.

“the morning bite” will be a series of short, unglamorous musings from yours truly while seated at the kitchen table for breakfast. Maybe sometimes from my porch, but who’s to know?

Menu:

Cheesy scrambled eggs with slices of lunch meat turkey that may or may not be nearing its expiration... (I know. Fancy.)

Poison of choice: Water from my tumbler. The only thing staying cool in my home these days.

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“I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

We all know the Frodo quote from Lord of the Rings that has been making its rounds on social media. The young hobbit bemoans the fact that he must live through the upheaval of Middle-earth via orcs and monster spiders and goblins and undead kings and the soul of a villain pressed into a corrupting ring that he has to wear around his neck for the next two books.

To which the wise wizard Gandalf essentially replies, though in far more profound terms, “You and literally everyone else.”

“So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

It’s a quote that I dearly love, but, in truth, I think I am a little too angry this morning to engage with it maturely.

You don’t understand, Gandalf the Grey. I really really really really really wish these things did not have to happen in my timeline.

We praise resistance literature and the protest music of old, but we don’t want to have to write it.

We cherish the indomitable spirits of the justice workers before us, but we don’t want to inherit their struggles. I do not care how pious of a person you claim to be.

This is not the kind of world that you ask for. So what is one to do? What is a good response to being force-fed a lifetime’s worth of horror in such a short span of time? Where do you unpack the boxes of anger, sorrow, and disbelief that just keep coming like unwanted Amazon packages ordered by a trigger-happy toddler?

I don’t know.

I can only tell you what I’m trying to do.

I am trying to think about all the good things that make this timeline what it is. The people in my life who choose to spend time with me without a gun to their head (wonder of wonders). My sun-soaked kitchen. My scruffy canine. The artists that I follow. The writers that I read. The roots of a faith tradition that has room for my doubts and my frustrations. My family. The dried flowers on my wall. The city I get to call home. I don’t hold to these in a sentimental way. I am pressed up against them like the ledge of a cliff. My bloody fingertips digging into crevices of the rock as if my life depends upon it. Perhaps because in a lot of ways it does.

I am trying to allow myself the freedom to cry out about the things that are not what they ought to be and may never be in my lifetime. I refuse to explain them away with platitudes. I will not infantilize them. They will have names. Ugly and terrible names that feel like poison on the tongue.

I am trying to refuse the anesthesia of despair. I will not be undone by the tidings of little men. I can be a sweet interruption to their schemes through big actions on some days and little actions on others. In the words of the inspirational 87-year-old veteran a couple of weeks ago who was arrested for protesting on the Capitol steps, “I'm gonna just get a little sleep, but then I'm starting again.”

I deeply resonate with Frodo’s lament. No. I don’t want these times. We don’t want these times. But if they must, let them find us all the same. Let the times find us resolved and with an insatiable desire to cause good trouble.

Let the times find us ordinary. Let the times find us human.

-JHM