Food for the Thoughtless

When my father tired of a place, he would occasionally dust off his seldom-used South Philly accent, lean over to me, and quietly say, “Let’s throw this place a fish”.

It’s a combination of words I’ve heard only one other human being place in that particular order– a woman named Catherine who grew bored of hanging around a bowling alley simply to humor her co-workers. She looked surprised that I knew what she meant without her having to explain. She told me I didn’t sound like I was from her part of Philadelphia. I said “No, but my father is” and she seemed pleased that we understood each other.

It’s a phrase so arcane that even Google doesn’t seem to have heard of it and no one in my family could be absolutely certain of its origin or accurate meaning. Dad and I settled on the idea that it came from tossing fish to performing seals when they’d finished a trick onstage, but neither of us were ever completely convinced it was the best explanation. Whatever it’s origin, “Let’s throw this place a fish” means “Let’s get the hell out of here”, plain and simple.

Late last May, my father threw this world a fish, you might say. He’d had roughly 89 years of decent health. His 90th, however, was a doozy. My stepmother, who was 12 years younger than Dad, died 19 days after him– something no one quite saw coming–at least not with such mind-numbing swiftness. My sister and I always assumed she would be around to help take care of her husband in his declining years. But they did everything together, so it should have come as no surprise at all that they began their respective declines in tandem.

I won’t bore you with the details. But I learned that being a full-time care taker for a dying parent is heartbreaking and grim, to put it mildly. Doing it for two parents at the same time is exponentially harder. There’s no such thing as a happy ending with these things.

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Mourning is so odd– one never knows what form it might take. In the case of my father and stepmother, my brain simply decided to close up shop and shut out the world. I’ve seen very few people, gone very few places, and gotten very little accomplished.

And it’s been eye-wateringly dull.

It’s been more than two years since I’ve written anything more complicated than a grocery list and I’ve come to discover that I’ve missed it terribly. I miss the art of it, the discipline it requires, and the mental clarity it affords.

And I miss connecting with my readers, if you’re still out there.

The last several years have been rather rough. The loss of my mother (also to dementia), a heart attack, 4 years of Trump, and the isolation of COVID took a heavy toll on the old mental health over here, which isn’t terribly surprising. Life has felt relentlessly bleak and deadly serious for what feels like eons. As a result, Food for The Thoughtless gradually became a “Let’s read along as Michael’s emotional state degrades in real time!” sort of thing and I felt as though I had no right to be arch and (hopefully) amusing what with the world going to hell.

Turns out I was terribly, terribly wrong. We could all use a good laugh, myself very much included. And my time away has caused me to miss out on the human connections I have made here over the years. I miss writing. A lot. I miss my readers. Also a lot.

But I do not miss this blog.

I think Food for The Thoughtless has had a long, eventful life, but all things must come to an end, good or otherwise.

In other words, I’m throwing this place a fish.

It’s time to turn the page (or click, since this is web-based reading material) and start afresh. It’s time to allow myself to enjoy writing again.

You may be asking yourself, “Does this mean what I think it means?”

And the answer is “Yes, Dear Reader, I have started freaking Substack.”

Simply follow this link to my new home: SPATCHCOCK

And please be sure to subscribe.

It’s about [insert expletive here] time I had something fun to look forward to.

Cheers,

Michael Procopio

The house next door, once vacant and more or less abandoned for years, is alive again with the sound of workmen’s saws, jackhammers, and polka music from 8 to 4. The overgrown jacaranda in their yard that used to shielded my living room from the afternoon sun and give me the half-illusion of living in a Southern California arboretum if I squinted hard enough has been cut down and hauled away to make room for piles of rotten wood and old concrete, which are then cleared away at regular intervals to make room for new piles of ejecta. It’s good that the owners are sprucing up their neglected property, but the noise from all this improvement is excruciating.

My across-the-hall neighbor Rachel moved out two months ago to co-habitate with her boyfriend. I wish her all the luck in the world, but resent the different sort of banging that could be heard from the other side of our shared bedroom wall as the handymen refinished the floors and did whatever else they typically do when freshening up a place in order to entice new tenants into paying $3,500 a month for a small one-bedroom apartment.

Last month the noises started coming from an entirely new direction when the low, constant-yet-oddly-soothing Satchmo-like growl of my downstairs neighbor, Stephen, was replaced with the sound of power tools and yelling to be heard over power tools. I found his kitchen door wide open as I climbed down the back stairs to the laundry room. The place was gutted. Any trace of the man who had lived there for the last forty-four years had been eradicated, which caused me to worry. Did he move out by choice? Was he ill? We weren’t friends, but we were neighborly. The owners are now installing new kitchen cabinets, which have been boxed up and cluttering the building’s foyer for a week. I saw another tenant moving out the other day. One I’d never even met. They’ll be starting on his apartment next and the noise will continue. The only quiet hours of daylight occur on Sundays. If I’m lucky. At night, there is an eery silence with my part of the building now half-empty.

My neighbors are vanishing one by one. News from the outside has been relentlessly awful. It is either too noisy or too silent to write much, even when I am able to concentrate. And so, dear reader, I feel as though I am slowly going mad.

Most means of escape that I once took for granted like hopping on a train to stay with friends or an airplane to visit my family are currently not an option. I get clammy just thinking about getting on a bus to go take a peek at the ocean, mask or no mask. My world has become remarkably small over the past few months and there are precious few places to which I can safely flee to find a bit of peace and quiet.

Fortunately, there is one tiny corner of the world where I feel I can take refuge– my local park. It’s a very short walk to a place designated to honor a man with an extremely long name– Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, the French hero of The American Revolution. It’s a small park, but it is surrounded on all sides by points of personal interest. To its west lies the hospital where I had my appendectomy. To the east is the home of Julie Newmar’s somewhat creepy younger brother. To the south is a building which offers up the dubious claim to have been the temporary residence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And what, you may well ask, is so special about the northern edge of the park? It is dominated by a Beaux-Arts confection called The Spreckels Mansion, built by syphilitic sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels and his artists’ model wife, Alma. It also happens to be the San Francisco residence of the 4th best-selling author of all-time, Danielle Steel.

In the park there is a long bench, high up and shaded by trees, which overlooks Washington Street and the mansions that line it. For example, Mrs. Merrill’s house, where I was once invited by my friend Justin (her live-in personal chef) to hang out as he prepared her dinner. After her meal was finished, Mrs. Merrill asked to meet me and suggested that Justin give me a tour of the house. From the top floor, he pointed to an enormous place across the little stretch of Octavia Street where Alma Spreckels convinced the city to place barriers in the road to slow down traffic enough to help with her husband’s sexually-transmitted headaches. He indicated that it was Ms. Steel’s house and that was my first glimpse of the woman, wearing a nightgown and pacing her bedroom carpet. Feeling a bit Peeping Tom-ish, I averted my eyes by lifting them to her rooftop, where I saw a play set– one of the cheap sorts in primary colored plastic. From my perspective, it looked as though the yellow slide would shoot any child brave or stupid enough to use it straight over the side and down three stories into her privacy hedges. That could not have been the case as I realized such placement would be architecturally unlikely, but it was my first impression of the woman and I cannot say it was entirely wrong.

And twenty years later, I find myself sitting on a park bench across the street from from her house in Portuguese fisherman sandals and a surgical mask wondering where all the time and most of my sanity and even that ugly play set have gone.

I always bring a good book with me when I visit the bench. There is perverse satisfaction to be had in reading good literature in front of the house of a pulp romance writer, though I can only get through ten or fifteen pages at a sitting because my attention span is shot to hell. But I tell myself it’s what I should be doing. I’m currently reading Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which was given to me for my birthday. I had the book tucked under my arm when I left the park the other day and ran into a friend at the grocery store who mentioned she knew the author. I told her I thought I had another friend who might know him and it turns out she’s friends with my other friend and all I could think was “San Francisco is the smallest world in the world.” Everything seems connected. Every book and every person and every park bench and every mansion, if you’ve lived here long enough and that, in its small way, is grounding.

When I arrive most mornings, when I find I can get out of bed at all, it’s foggy and cold, which is how I like my San Francisco summers. Yesterday, I shared the long bench with a bottle of water belonging to a woman doing Tai Chi. I looked up from my book at one point to find her hands open and held away from her body like a department store mannequin, rotating her torso slowly towards the mansion. Her hands then gently clenched into fists and I read far more into that gesture than was likely intended. Had she, like I, overheard Ms. Steel’s out-of-touch complaint regarding the quality of diamonds in San Francisco? Had she, too, been left with an unwanted party favor pack of cards labeled “Fifty Fabulous Farts”? I may never know for certain. The bottle was eventually replaced by a woman who took off her mask to smoke a cigarette, thereby breaking at least two park policies. She looked as though she was having a rough morning, so I said nothing. I read maybe five pages before my brain stopped working and returned home to the noise.

And that, dear readers, is another glimpse into my day-to-day, COVID-inspired life. I know I’ve been away too long, but it feels like the wrong time to tell my stories and the idea of ironic or clever recipe writing makes me feel a bit… “whoopsie”? Is that the current polite term for being sick to one’s stomach? I may have recently heard that come out of the mouth of Brett Sommers on a Match Game ’74 YouTube clip and I hate that I’m not certain.

I feel like there are more important things to be doing right now, although I feel a bit helpless to do anything at the moment except check in on friends from time to time, send condolence cards when needed, call my family once a week, iron absolutely everything that can be ironed in my apartment, and try to believe that there is any sort of future ahead that isn’t totally bleak.

But it’s also good to reach out and tell people you’re doing okay. Or that you’re doing not-okay. Some days I’m one, some days– most days, really– I’m the other. But I’m alive and that, I suppose, is a good thing. I need to give myself permission to write as a diversion and that’s a challenge right now. But I’ll get there, I promise.

Just as soon as all this god damned* hammering stops.

*I was going to say “Just as soon as all this fucking hammering stops”, but my father hates it when I use profanity on my blog.

A pair of mourning doves were fucking outside my kitchen window the other day. At the very least, they were giving it the old college try. The male fluttered his well-groomed wings from time to time to maintain an awkward balance on top of the female. She locked her small black eyes on mine for a moment, but they were so expressionless, her attitude regarding the experience seemed very much open to interpretation. I broke away from her gaze. It was awkward and anyway I was cleaning a chef’s knife which required my full attention— a trip to the emergency room is a horrifying thought at the best of times. During a pandemic, it’s unthinkable.

Resignation. That was the look. Not ecstasy, not annoyance, just an avian impression of stoic practicality.  

“Lucky bitch,” I thought as I carefully placed the knife on the rack to dry.

This morning on my way home from the market, an Irish Setter placed its cold, wet nose on my forearm as I knelt down to tie my shoes. Its owner apologized and I said “No problem” as clearly as possible through the hot mask that was pulling at my ears. What I really wanted to say was “Thank you. That’s the first time I’ve been touched by another living thing in nearly two months.” I sighed into my face covering, picked up my bags of groceries that now felt 30 pounds heavier, made it back home, stripped down, and took a hot soapy shower where I sat in the tub with the water spraying over me and sudsed and scrubbed until I felt immaculate enough to safely hold my head in clean hands.

Sheltering in place alone isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but I don’t expect it’s meant to be. I often think it would be lovely to share the burden of waiting out the plague with another human. Someone I could cook for and while away the days curled up in bed with to watch British Whodunits. Someone who would tell me to stop touching my face and cajole me into putting on pants. Or to take them off, depending on my mood. Someone I could then shut away in a cupboard until I felt lonely again. I have the feeling my therapist would tell me that’s not how healthy relationships work and I would tell him I agreed, but really I’d think it would be marvelous.

How lovely, I often wonder, would it be to have a cat? It might be nice to have a sweet, furry creature purring in my ear or kneading my chest in the morning with its paws in order to get me out of bed and give it food. I could almost forgive a clawed up couch and the ammonia whiffiness of the cat box if it meant having a warm-blooded animal respond to my touch.

But at the moment all I’ve got are two houseplants and if there’s one thing I’ve learned during this whole nightmare is that a Pepperomia Frost doesn’t hug you back. I do the best I can with my adopted flora. I’ve even named them. The problem is that I can barely remember what I’ve called them from one week to the next. Currently, they are called “Hannah” and “Her Sister”. I think they’re good names. Hannah is the Pepperomia. She’s dependable and gives me very little trouble. Her Sister is probably Holly, the Dianne Wiest character, because she’s kind of a mess and is all over the place. I have no idea what species she is– she’s just viney and prone to drama, as much as vegetation can be. She’s currently got one of her tendrils on my Joan Didion. My therapist says it’s fine that I can’t remember their names for very long and suggests that a non-strong attachment to one’s houseplants is probably a good thing and that gives me comfort.

Cooking in isolation does pass the time, but I find little joy in it. Over the weeks, I’ve made runny lemon curd, indifferent buttermilk fried chicken, and so many meatballs that I quickly tire of them and attack them as they simmer away in the pot until I have a lumpy, beefy sauce. But I do cook every day. I find it helps. I very much doubt I’ll jump on the sourdough yeast starter bandwagon. I’ve never been much of a bandwagon jumper on-er. The only bandwagon I’ve ever enjoyed is a film starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Or, as I prefer calling people by their real names, Frederick Austerlitz and Tula Ellice Finklea, which reminds me of two things I have discovered about my self during this social exile:

1. I fall into Wikipedia rabbit holes a lot
2. Isolation exacerbates my tendency to ramble and take off on tangents.

Reading is a challenge. As is watching full length movies. I set out to tackle François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine last week because I was filled with self-horror for never having seen it. After twenty minutes, my eyes glazed over and nobody was home, so to speak. My friend Shannon gave me a book she thought I’d love, which I do. But I read maybe ten pages at a time. I’ll pick it up again today and go for twenty. The shortening of my attention span is aggravating. I find it difficult to hold a sustained thought for very long, which is one of the reasons I haven’t posted on this here blog earlier this month.

Music is a mixed blessing. I naturally lean towards sad songs in the best of times, so I thought I’d try to counter that by only playing happy songs and then I realized I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head and wondered what my therapist would have to say about that. I pulled up Nina Simone on Spotify last week and let her rip as I was doing housework because her voice always has a positive effect on me no matter what particular mood she happens to be in. I was scrubbing my kitchen floor to her version of Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny” and noted how satisfying it was to be performing the same domestic drudgery as the heroine of the song. Other tunes followed as I tidied my way through until she started in with Duke Ellington’s “In My Solitude”, which stopped me dead in my tracks:

“I sit in my chair
I’m filled with despair
There’s no one could be so sad
With gloom everywhere
I sit and I stare
I know that I’ll soon go mad”

It was an unfortunate choice of music and I found myself marooned in the middle of my kitchen floor still wet with watered-down bleach, wondering how soon until I, like Miss Simone herself, went mad. My feet were damp and if I ran into the living room to turn off the music, I’d ruin the rug. I just stood there until the song was over, motionless and feeling like an idiot. “Well, if I’m going to go off the deep end,” I thought, “I’m going to do it in a spotless kitchen.”

I somehow doubt I will go mad. I’m quite used to my solitude because I’ve had years and years of practice being alone. I enjoy my own company and, as a third child who grew up with much older siblings, I know very well how to entertain myself.

I generally like being alone. But when the choice to go out into the world and press the flesh, so to speak, is no longer a viable, responsible possibility, that aloneness can feel grim.

But I know I’m not alone. Physically alone, yes, but not socially. I know I’m lucky to have family to call every week who are healthy, and friends to Zoom and FaceTime with to shoot the breeze and share a cocktail or two.

I’m also lucky to have a roof over my head, food on my table, and enough resources to get through this year that seems to stretch on forever. Next year is another story entirely, but I’ve decided to cherry-pick from my mother’s trusty 12 Step Program and take this thing one day at a time.

And though I probably don’t say it enough, I count myself very luck to have you, too, dear readers.

Thank you for letting me wander all over the place with this post. I hope it finds you healthy and as well as can be under the circumstances. I wish I could give a sustained, uncomfortable-because-it-lasts-for-more-than-three-seconds hug to each and every one of you. And if I happen to see you in person after this nightmare is over, I want to apologize in advance for being uncharacteristically touchy-feely, but like I mentioned earlier, if you’ve ever resorted to hugging your houseplants, you’ll understand. And forgive.