Calling a Fork a Fork

Despite/because of everything, I was up at 5:30 AM the other day, thinking about forks. To be clear, I wasn’t UP up. This was The Middle of the Night. I was just peeing, eating some red pepper walnut spread on health-brand Triscuits, and going back to bed.

Where I lay and thought about forks. Particularly, the plastic forks at the taco truck at the gas station on Rainier just north of Othello Street. Particularly, the taco truck at the gas station on Rainier just north of Othello Street that I used to eat at when I lived nearby. There were two gas stations on Rainier just north of Othello Street, and they both had taco trucks, but this one, when I lived nearby, also had a yellow bikini espresso stand. That bright yellow stand used to be my landmark: turn there to get home.

I thought, for a little while, maybe 5:35-5:43, about how much I dislike bikini espresso stands, and more, about why. For one, it’s nice to drive across gas station parking lots without having to explain pasties to carloads of children. (Bikini apparently is a broad, broad term.) And I do have hesitations about commercialized nudity in general, and judged hard all the men leaning out of their idling trucks who seemed, in my casual but frequent observation, to be the main customers. They seemed to ooze both entitlement and loneliness.

I’ve never been a bikini barista, and when I was a shirt barista in a bookstore, there were still plenty of weird men doing weird man things. Answering the question “What [coffee] would you like today?” with things like “Tickets for two to Maui.” Writing poems about my chest moles. Or the time someone left both an architecture photo book and a photo book titled Happy Naked Girls in the private bathroom. (I’ve always secretly believed Happy Naked Girls was a cover for those sexy sexy skyscraper photos.) I imagine the bikini baristas’ tips are better, and that it’s a job with some interesting conversations, and it’s not the baristas I dislike.

The thing that makes me the most ruffled somehow is that the business model excludes everybody else. Anyone who wants to get coffee without learning how their barista styles her pubic hair is kinda out of luck. It makes me feel insignificant and sidelined. Like really, how many leering truck dudes are there, as a percentage? You’d think catering to just a slice of the coffee-drinking masses would be bad business, and it unnerves me that they don’t need my business, even though I actually almost never go to drive-through coffee stands of any kind.

But back to the forks. The forks from the taco truck were thin white plastic forks, so cheaply made that they broke if you tried to use them¹. They were like twigs before the delicious heft of the food they came beside.

These forks have become the symbol of late capitalism to me. They don’t have to work like forks, they only have to look like forks and be called forks, and there they will be, called upon to be forks. Just as it is for mealy January tomatoes, language is doing the bulk of the work: reality does not prove out that these things are what we consider them to be.

At 5:45, a great and profound truth arose within my mind: at this moment, politics too is full of taco truck forks. Language bending the real until we see it as something it is not — until we let it serve as what it is named, regardless of whether it fulfills its function. And perhaps I am angry at weird hours about espresso stands because the halls of power feel crowded with leering truck dudes in suits.

There’s such a deep cynicism to a fork that does not work as a fork. It’s a cynicism I feel corroding so many things. But there is also a solution: real forks.

Demand real forks, people. Don’t glorify puny spined plastic with a generous name.

But seriously: there’s a lot of spell casting going on. By which I mean, a lot of saying things to make them be. But we all have the power to speak things into being. We all have the choice where we lend our vision. To bring in another metaphor, the emperor needs us to lie for him if he’s going to get away with wearing his new clothes.

There may be only puny spined plastic at the taco truck, but we don’t have to call them forks. We can complain at the window, waving the broken plastic. We can ask for real forks and if they can’t deliver we can drive home, past whatever idling trucks, to the vast reserves of our silverware drawers.

We can eat with our fucking hands.

Google maps says there’s a new coffee stand in the gas station parking lot. It showed a woman in a sweatshirt in the window, so I think there are more clothes at the new one. Things come and things go. It’s useful I think, to be bigger than each flare.

Other useful things

I’m reading Valarie Kaur’s See No Stranger right now (go book club). I knew Valarie slightly at Stanford, where I picture her as the one with the bullhorn. Her grown-up words are just as empassioned, and have deepened into something experienced and wise, and so relevant to the times.

Speaking of spells, I think we all need some charms against despair right now. I’d love to know yours.

Two of mine:

I have this plan when I feel outraged or overwhelmed to do one concrete thing towards the world I want (call a rep, donate $, do something to support someone doing something), then go hang out with a tree or someone I love. (Remembering this when I need it is a work in progress.)

A friend was talking about his mental and physical stress today, and how healthcare doesn’t really support us, and I wanted to give him a grandmother. The kind of grandmother who gives really great bosomy hugs and always has some strange and comforting remedy, maybe with honey and/or garlic in it. Kind of like the grandmother my daughter has. (Hi mom!) And then I’ve been thinking about how much of being held and healed is a kitchen thing. So I hope you all have this kind of grandmother, genetic or not, female or not, old or young. I think an imaginary one would still be helpful. My imaginary grandmother just made me cinnamon tea in a blue ceramic mug whose handle was glued back on long ago, and told me to get my beauty rest. So goodnight.

1. I’m not trying to throw the taco stand people under the bus here. We end up with forks to cheap to function through a system of broken trust and cynicism much bigger than their one possibly accidental purchase.