Welcome to The Most Golden House
I’m baaack.
I’m baaack.
It’s been over a year since Ida’s and my gustatorial navel-gazing writing exercise, Hot Blog Dogs, which came a year after our seminal hit, Sonic Shot Club. We’ve had a few partially-developed ideas in the time since, including an ill-fated attempt at watching every film with Kathy Bates in it that only lasted two entries. And one of those entries was Cherie.
I still stand by that piece. Cherie really *clenches fist* is a little lad who loves berries and cream.
A lot has changed in the past year and two months. I came out as nonbinary to my partner and then everybody in my real-world life, after literal years of using they/them pronouns and writing about gender shit half-surreptitiously online including on a fucking milkshake blog. My eating disordered behavior has gotten a lot better on the whole, thought it will probably never go away. I wrote an essay about Trigger Warnings and did tons of media interviews about it. Trump was elected. I went to therapy for the first time. I fired my therapist like a month later. I started a Slime-centric Instagram.
And now I’m looking back at old writing from the past year, trying to figure out who I am. What’s consistent and enduring about me, what’s not. I’m always looking back on my old writing, trying to discern a unified sense of self from the mess. The problem is, there’s too much data. I’ve written a lot, and a lot of it is way too wordy.
I tried to keep my Sonic Shot Club and Hot Blog Dog entries relatively brief, which for me means hastily typing a review of a vegetarian hot dog that quickly veers into a 1000-word diatribe about hating having breasts for…some reason. I try to order a Strawberry Milkshake and I end up writing about how everybody in my family dies at age 50. Also I don’t even get the correct milkshake.
I’m not gonna call any of that my #brand, because I’m sick of people saying that. Being neurotic and wordy is just who I am. Somebody on Tumblr called me the most hand-wringing milquetoast person alive. That’s true, but it doesn’t acknowledge the equal extent to which I am fueled by rage. I’m very Type A and aggressive, but only about boring shit, like getting enough sleep and having a quiet place to film slime videos.
I was Type A about graduate school and getting a PhD, once, but now I am a ghostly lich of my past self who eats snacks and works from home and doesn’t give a shit about life achievements. Or maybe I’m just an actually vulnerable emotionally self-aware human, now. Maybe trauma caught up with me. Maybe I learned the folly of hanging my self-worth on my productivity only to find that all the people I want to connect with are still out there, working hard, hanging their worth on productivity. I don’t know. Having consciousness is difficult man.
Clearly, it’s time for some more food-writing-as-therapy. Come on in, get comfortable. I’m already splayed out on the Freudian couch with my intestines pouring out my belly button. All you have to do is look down at me and nod.
This time, I will be visiting The Golden House restaurant on Lawrence and Broadway in Chicago. I love this place. I’ve been like, three times. But I love it. I knew right away that it and I would love one another. It’s like when my ex-boyfriend saw my current partner of six years, Nick, for the first time. My ex told me that he knew he was screwed. Nick was too cute. Of course I was gonna leave him for someone who looked like that. My ex was a real abusive shithead and this anecdote paints me as a really vain person, but like, whatever, I’m just glad he was unhappy and insecure for a moment.
Golden House is the perfect place for me, because it is a traditional diner with old-as-fuck décor, it has a voluminous breakfast menu with lots of unique options, and it is cheap as shit. Just look at this menu!
Pineapple pancakes! Pigs in blankies! Every time I go here, I am waylaid by the options; I want to eat all of them. I forgot for a while that I could just eat all of them. And call that a writing project.
I love diners because I spent a lot of time in them as an adolescent, shooting the shit with close friends and being openly depressed, eating disordered, lost, and self-important. High school sucked, of course, but I had a few really good friends, and wasn’t lonely at all. I was a lot happier before my frontal lobes fully developed, or at least I was less sad. My sadness had bounds back then. There was a basement to it. Once I hit that basement, I went back to playing Soul Caliber and ranting about George Bush. It was easy.
Back then, with my half-formed brain, I was capable of being a thoughtless asshole. I could go about my day certain that prepping for my debate tournament and swearing at my dad were the correct and most important things to do. I was sure I was brilliant and important and other people, not me, were in the way of that brilliance finding purchase.
I miss that feeling. I don’t miss being an asshole. But these days I feel guilt for just about everything, and I worry about turning into my dad and isolating myself from everyone and dying alone through self-abuse. My brain is a place I can’t escape by driving around smoking in Katie’s Honda Civic and eating half a pancake late at night.
I’m gonna pump the breaks on the depressing shit, but suffice to say: adolescence was a more ignorant time, and I associate a lot of positive, connected, fuck-the-world-I’m-amazing feelings with bumming around in diners. Since high school, I have always been drawn back to them. In diners, time doesn’t pass very quickly, and you’re perpetually too young and too old to really live. Conversations are supposed to be languid. The coffee can keep flowing as long as you want it, and the sweet carbs can fill your belly without denting your wallet. And there’s always someone there who is more of a set-in-their-ways grump than you.
I am forever chasing the feeling of powerful, jaded-without-reason self-satisfaction and connectedness I experienced in diners as a teen. I am forever a teen, really, selfish and too big for my britches and not yet cashing in on potential I was always told I possessed. Plus I’m a cheapskate and I love breakfast and drinking so much coffee my stomach erupts in a stream of bile. If there’s a place where I’m destined to Figure My Shit out via food writing, it’s a diner, and I’m overdue for such a project.
A couple of months ago, Ida told me that one of her students had mentioned, on the last day of a Neo-Futurist class she was teaching, that they’d read and adored every entry in both Sonic Shot Club and Hot Blog Dog. I really thought the only people who read that shit was our friends and a few of my tumblr-follower-buddy people.
It’s amazing how you can never feel your own impact on the world. I’ve had several pieces of “work” make a big internet splash at this point, from the Trigger Warnings essay to a poorly-made Cereal Meme. Those things, and a couple others, have reached tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people. And it was always cool, but it never was something I could really feel.
Individual comments and messages are nice, and they’re meaningful, and they keep writers going, but they can never make a person feel like their existence is worthwhile if they’re not already convinced of that fact. There is no inverse of the feeling of adoring somebody’s work. A writer’s work can be enjoyed, but the writer can never, actually, feel that enjoyment. It’s not a hug you can receive. And I just think that’s fucked up.
Other people’s writing has kept me alive at times. Other people’s writing has changed and saved me. Octavia Butler convinced me that adulthood is defined by grimly choosing to do sad, hard, responsible things. Jonathan Franzen kept me company in a particularly dreary and desperate spring; later, his shiftiness taught me that you can’t admire anybody without caveats. Casey Plett helped me realize I wasn’t making the whole trans thing up, that being some variety of trans explained decades of body- and relationship-issues. Carey Callahan challenged me and angered me; like a whetstone, she made me sharper. Jenny Offill pulled me out of a long writing funk and convinced me I would never be a selfish art monster, after all, and that that was okay. Mary Karr taught me that smoking was a way to hurt myself by play-acting at one of the ways in which my dad killed himself. Alison Bechdel helped me process that he probably did kill himself.
There are so many writers who have saved me or broken my brain open. My heart strains with gratitude when I think about them. They cannot feel my love, on the other end. And when my writing does connect with or help somebody else, I can’t really feel and internalize their gratitude or love, either. A lot of times, I have no idea how many people my stuff actually reaches, how many folks are happy to have read it.
That doesn’t mean the enterprise isn’t worth it, though. Sometimes you just have to grimly sit down with your delicious pancakes and let yourself be messy, and vulnerable, and meandering, and milquetoast, and trust that there’s somebody out there who might want to join you across the booth.