Befriending Hunger

On decorum, interruption, and taste.

A few weeks ago I was in the car with my parents and husband on our way to dinner. We stopped at a light at a busy intersection during rush hour, traffic buzzing, sun beating, pavement unforgiving, and we watched a man dig a hole in the median. His shovel was short, but he’d already removed a significant pile of dirt. His movements were feverish, starting the next downstroke before the soil had left his shovel blade, using his shoulders to plunge it deeper into the compacted earth. Sometimes you just need to dig a hole, I thought (said). Then we crept forward in traffic and saw the dead dog. A gray pit mix. It lay on its side very still, ribs identifiable, face pointing away from us. The man did not look at the dog; we did. Then we drove away.

Perhaps he only found the dog and felt compelled to bury it on a Tuesday afternoon rush hour. Where had he gotten the shovel? Was the dog hit by a car? How long had they been companions? Had they shared that scrap of earth together long? Why there? Why then, why now? How will I ever get the image out of my head? How did I think I knew anything about sadness, desperation, before it was in there. 

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Earlier this summer I attended a reading by Anne de Marcken, in which she was in conversation with the writer Colleen Burner. Afterwards, I approached her to sign my copy of It Lasts Forever and then It’s Over, and she flipped through my copy of the book to choose a line at random for her inscription. “Oh,” she said, furrowing her brow. “I don’t think I should write this one.” But I convinced her to write it anyway, and now my copy has the line “You can’t be a friend to your hunger.” inscribed on the title page. 

In an unconventional zombie novel like It Lasts Forever, this phrase serves as a self-chastisement for an undead woman trying to do the right thing. But in a strange twist, this sentence has become the refrain of my summer. Struggling to pay rent and afford food at the same time, I took a part-time job to make ends meet. You can’t be a friend to your hunger. After twelve years of testosterone injections, I’ve decided to stop for awhile, maybe forever, for my health and other reasons. You can’t be a friend to your hunger. You can’t ignore or fetishize your own suffering. You can’t be a friend to your hunger. Feeding myself, literally or metaphorically, puts hunger out of business. You can’t be a friend to your hunger. Sometimes what I want is less of what I desire. You can’t be a friend to your hunger.

I would argue that both ignoring and idealizing are different sorts of befriending when it comes to suffering. One hides away the pain, perhaps even from the sufferer herself, in an effort of self preservation. Or one magnifies the pain until it metastasizes into something else. The hurts of our parents and ancestors—they are not our hurts. There has been a spate of creative nonfictioning surrounding scientific evidence of the genetic transmission of trauma, but this has been misinterpreted in the popular consciousness. A cell does not know what happened to you or what happened in history. It knows only how you reacted. The difference is enormous. Trauma on its own does not indicate a political position.

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Decorum is often confused with what is correct, true, and good. But really, decorum is behavior considered polite and appropriate to the circumstance, and depending on who you ask, these two things might diverge quite a bit. Perhaps according to delicate middle class norms of hiding death away behind a calm demeanor and large green spaces, it is in poor taste to bury your dog in the median where anyone can bear witness to your suffering. Or perhaps you think death and genocide have no place interrupting a political campaign speech. What you really have a problem with, it would seem, is interruption as a means of claiming attention. What you desire is the uninterrupted expanse of your life. But depending on the circumstance, interruption is a vital means of continuing a conversation or of ending a conversation if that conversation has been circling the drain and going nowhere for awhile. And it would be considered cowardly and disingenuous not to listen to the interruption. It would, in this case, be in very poor taste to continue the supposed conversation and completely ignore the interruption.

I believe in not making metaphors of grief. I can see with my own eyes the end of liberalism and the convergence of our two dominant political parties in this country, and I can feel the hollowness of the visions on offer. I believe in the power of collective action to end empire, abolish borders and police. And I believe in the need for new movements, actions, and perspectives to make this a reality.

I had a strange dream the other night. I was leading a guerrilla army through enemy territory, but in lieu of weapons I’d given everyone a packet of five tarot cards (I know very little about tarot, in reality.) At one point, tensions were high and we were about to blow our cover, but at that moment everyone pulled out their cards and read them, and they were moved emotionally instead. Perhaps it was an interruption diverted, but the feeling was that we were able to continue on and carry out our plan.

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Recently / Upcoming

smoke and mold was proud to publish an interview with Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. Read “The Complex Simplicity of Translation” here. 

smoke and mold also announced our next call for submissions, which will open on September 1. Issue 11: Disability Justice, seeks “submissions both revolting and ‘revolting,’ documenting trans/disabled intimacies hitherto deemed unworthy of documentation.” We’re also taking pitches and suggestions for interviews on a rolling basis.

I’m excited to announce a new class for fall 2024, A Body Horror Class. Read more and register at the link. Starts October 22. And a reminder that the next chimeric writing workshop starts Thursday, September 5.