Search Results for: health

The First Book

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | July 2019 | 38 minutes (10,294 words)

For me the low point came two months after publication, at a playground a few blocks from my house. I sobbed on the phone with my sister, eking out incomprehensible sentences about my career this, my life expectations that, writing this, the publishing industry that, until finally my sister said, “Maybe you should look for a different job?” and I realized the jig was up — I was doomed to keep doing this ridiculous and often seemingly pointless thing.

A few weeks before this, I’d received my first letters from readers telling me how much they’d loved and needed the book, and I’d had another sister-to-sister phone call — just as wrought with emotion — in which I raved about all the deeper meaning and purpose of this milestone and how it wasn’t about the sales and the metrics but about what mattered blah blah blah. I ping-ponged like this for awhile, alternately aglow and despondent, hopeful and wretched, until finally I just started writing again and got on with it.

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

John Greim / LightRocket / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lizzie Presser, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, S. Margot Finn, Darcy Frey, and Logan Hill.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Five: The Remnant

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 45 minutes (9,790 words)

Part 5 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPBCatch up on season one of Bundyville here.

I.

Stella Anne Bulla was born in November 1949 in Asheboro, North Carolina to Dorothy Ann Lemon and Brinford Bulla, a man who served in the Navy and worked for the federal government as a postal employee most of his life. Stella — who, at some point, preferred to be called by her middle name, Anne — was one of five children: brothers, Artis, John and Brad, and a sister, Cara. The children were raised devout Southern Baptists, attending church meetings once during the week, and twice on weekends. Anne wanted to grow up one day and live in a place where she could ride horses. 

By high school, Anne adhered to the “higher the hair, the closer to God” school of thought: Where other girls of Grimsley High School smiled with youthful innocence from photos, Anne grinned knowingly, hair teased high and wide into a flipped bouffant. 

Later, Anne met a man named Barry Byrd, and the two married, had a daughter, and moved to Stevens County, Washington in 1973, after Barry got out of the Air Force. He took a job in a Colville body shop — finally starting his own in the tiny town of Northport. The Byrds started a band called Legacy. Anne’s brother, Brad Bulla, joined them, playing mandolin, lead guitar, and banjo along with the Byrds’ vocals. The group released two records: Sons of the Republic and, in 1984, Judah’s Advance — which were sold via mail order by Christian Identity groups as far away as Australia. “Legacy is unique in that their music is designed with the Israel Identity image, and is an excellent way to introduce the subject to thousands of people,” the Australian group wrote in a newsletter. 

 

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

The Judah’s Advance cover features a drawing of a ship bearing down on a rocky coastline, where a stone tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments sat amongst a pile of rocks that had fallen from the sky. In the center, an American flag — bearing just 13 stars and the number 76 — whips in the wind.

On Judah’s Advance, Dan Henry, the pastor at The Ark — the Christian Identity church where Byrds worshipped, but that has also helped produce violent acolytes — read a line of scripture, and the band thanked him in the credits. The producer for the album, they said, was YAHWEH. 

The back of the album is even more Christian Identity than the front. Alongside a photograph of the grinning musicians, the band lays out its beliefs: “Our forefathers understood that the establishment of this country was the fulfillment of the prophecy concerning the re-gathering of the nation of Israel,” it explains. The savior, the band writes, was a descendant of the “Judahites”, while “the true children of Israel,” after being freed from captivity, migrated westward, settling in “Scotland, Ireland, Britain and every other Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation in the world today.”

It reads like the liner notes to a Christian Identity concept album, and it made Legacy a popular feature on the Christian Identity and white supremacist conference touring circuit. In 1986, the band played the Northwest Freedom Rally in Richland, Washington alongside a bill of racist speakers. And from 1987 to 1989, the group reportedly traveled yearly to Colorado to play Pete Peters’ Rocky Mountain Bible Camps. Peters had been a guest at The Ark and the Aryan Nations, lecturing on the end of the world, and his hatred for Jews and homosexuals.

But Legacy was more than a band providing musical accompaniment to racists: In 1988, Barry Byrd and his brother-in-law and Legacy bandmate, Brad, were two of just 15 men who deliberated for about a week about their beliefs, and authored a document entitled “Remnant Resolves.” 

The document elaborates that the men felt a “spiritual burden”: “This burden was the need and desire to see Biblical principles of government once again established in our nation,” it reads. The men agreed that if they could not come to a consensus on solving that burden, they would not proceed with writing the document.

What comes next are resolutions to fix society for “the remnant” — the way for the chosen people to live in the fullest realization of liberty. Biblical principles should be put into practice at every level of government. The band maintained that in the home, women should be submissive to their husbands. Locally, the civil government should punish evil and protect the good. And at the federal level, taxes need to stop, since you can’t tax what God created. 

“It is blasphemous to regard antichrists as ‘God’s chosen people’ and to allow them to rule over or hold public office in a Christian Nation,” it reads. “Aborticide is murder. Sodomy is a sin against God and Nature. Inter-racial marriage pollutes the integrity of the family. Pornography destroys the purity of the mind of the individual and defiles the conscience of the Nation.” 

At the end, when it was all down on paper, there they are smiling wide for a picture — as if someone had said “say cheese” when they took it — and all fifteen men signed their names. 

A year after the Remnant Resolves, Legacy (now named Watchman) was back on tour, scheduled to play a Santa Rosa, California church affiliated with Dennis Peacocke, a self-described political activist turned leader in the “shepherding movement” — a religious movement in the 1970s and ’80s that involved congregants turning over all personal decisions to a spiritual leader, and has been criticized as cult-like

The Byrds made more than one trip to Peacocke’s church for Fellowship of Christian Leaders (FCL) conferences. During one visit, they stayed with a church host family: the Johnsons. Rick Johnson would eventually move his family north to Marble in the mid-1990s, and still lives there today.

At the time, Johnson’s son Jesse was just a kid, but he still recalls meeting the Byrds. Something about Anne immediately stuck out to him. “She has these piercing blue eyes,” he recalls. “I remember kind of being off put by that and … just by her presence. Because she didn’t smile very much. She was really intense and when she talked to you it was about what you’re doing to have a better relationship with the Lord. And I was, like, 8.

Within a week of living at Marble, Jesse Johnson says he and one of his brothers “made a pact that we were leaving as soon as we were old enough.” 

But back in 1992, when the Byrds were still working on bringing their vision of a “Christian covenant community” to life, people in Stevens County were nervous, citing concern over the couple’s connection with Pete Peters. People called the group cultish; the Byrds made a brochure that said they weren’t “the least bit cultish or isolationist.” In that same brochure, the couple predicted “cataclysmic events.” At a city council meeting, they claimed to their neighbors that they weren’t racist, and didn’t “condone hatred”— in fact, Barry told the Spokesman-Review that they wanted to create a ministry and a working ranch to “take youngsters” of all races in. The couple claimed they’d severed ties with Peters and that their attendance at the Rocky Mountain Bible Camp was only to play music. They didn’t mention the “Remnant Resolves.” Debate about the Byrds and Peters raged for months in the pages of the Colville Statesman-Examiner. 

In May, a Colville man expressed concern in the paper: “We would love to have our fears allayed,” he wrote of the Byrds. “But the trail back to Pete Peters appears to be pretty warm.” 

The Byrds attempted to shoot down a list of rumors they were asked to address by Northport’s mayor at a May 1992 city council meeting. They said they had no relationship with Peters, never held white supremacist beliefs, and concluded that people with concerns should come to Marble. Barry Byrd “advised that reading newspapers was not a worthwhile way of attaining accurate information,” according to a report on the meeting. 

Meanwhile, in nearby North Idaho, Bo Gritz — a former Green Beret who once ran for President, and who famously served as a liaison between federal agents and Randy Weaver at the end of the Ruby Ridge standoff — attempted to create his own Christian covenant community, called “Almost Heaven.” Some said he modeled it after what the Byrds created at Marble.

Paul Glanville, a doctor, liked the idea, too, when he heard it. He brought his family north to Marble in 1992, several years after meeting the Byrds. He was delivering a presentation on low-cost or free medical care at a Christian seminar when he encountered the couple, who were  giving a talk on establishing covenant communities. “They are very charismatic,” Glanville recalls. “I really was interested in this idea of a Christian community where I could practice medicine in what I considered a very Biblical way.”

Once at Marble, he says he enjoyed the close community, the focus on church and family. It felt like his family had moved to the promised land. People would get to church early, chattering with the company of the other people who lived there, hurrying downstairs to stake a claim for the casserole dishes they’d bring each Sunday for a potluck, before rushing up again for church. 

But over time, cracks emerged in the smooth veneer of the Marble promise. Nothing drastic, just small fissures that, over time, built up. In the spring of 1997 Glanville noticed a strangely competitive drive behind — of all things — Marble’s softball teams. He says he felt there was a need to win, to conquer all of the other church teams from the area, as if to prove Marble’s superiority. Glanville sometimes skipped the adult games to watch his kids play softball. Soon after, the leaders called an emergency meeting to chastise anyone who skipped the adult games. Glanville found the suggestion that he watch the Byrds’ team over his own child’s bizarre. 

After a few years, Glanville started to feel that he hadn’t made a covenant with God so much as with the Byrds. “What they mean by ‘covenant’ is total, absolute obedience to the leadership without questioning, and that the leadership eventually has your permission to question you and scrutinize your life in the most invasive ways that you can possibly imagine,” he says. “They might not start that out from the beginning like that, but they will end up that way.”  

From the pulpit, the couple preached about “slander,” about never questioning their leadership, and turning in anyone who did. The Byrds gave sermons about submission, obedience. The word “individual” was sinful — individuality being a sin of pride. 

The church leaders would encourage the families there to turn against their own blood — parents reporting on children, children reporting parents, neighbors against neighbors — if that meant preserving perfection at Marble. 

Glanville says his own children went to Marble’s leadership and told them that he was skeptical of their intentions and teachings. By the summer of 1994, he says, “My kids and wife had been totally brainwashed.” He continues, “They were turning me in to Marble for negative talk.”

But even he didn’t understand how quickly he’d lost them: When he finally decided to leave, Glanville was shocked that his wife and family refused to come with him. “My wife filed for divorce when I left. And my kids basically all signed the divorce papers,” he says. 

“I could do a lot of things in this church,” Barry Byrd said in one 1994 sermon. “I have the authority. I could misuse it. I could manipulate you and intimidate you, which you know, I’m sure we’ve done some of that. Not meaning to, but that’s just part of the deal.”

The pulpit too, was Barry Byrd’s megaphone for talk of a country ruled by Biblical law, of the sins of the government, about the entire reason Marble was here at all.

“We’re fighting for something that much blood has been shed for, beginning [with] the blood of Jesus,” he said. “If the spirit of the Lord does not reign supreme and this book is not the law that governs all of life and living, then there is no peace and there is no liberty!” He spoke of righteous anger and “holy hatred” for those getting in the way of “the government of God.”

Byrd even glorified martyrdom as a way to achieve the church’s goals: “So you see, I don’t have any problem being martyred if I know it’s what God’s called me to. If I know that my blood is going to water the tree of Liberty and build for future generations, I would gladly give my life today.”

Two decades since he left Marble broken-hearted, alone, Glanville still sometimes hears the Byrds’ words in his head, nagging at him, pulling him back to that time, making him question how he could have fallen under the place’s sway. 

His mind goes back to the moments he still blamed himself for not being perfect. Times when Marble convinced him he was the problem, meetings when Barry Byrd stood over him shaking a fist, making him believe he was lucky they were being so patient with him.

“And you could say ‘well why did you put up with that?’” he tells me this spring. “A lot of people who are trying to leave a cult have magical thinking. That if they just could say the right thing, or do the right thing, the leaders will suddenly see the truth and repent and everything will be alright.”

***

Back in 1988, when the Byrds’ band was on tour, Anne Byrd’s own brothers, too, were positioning themselves as chosen ones. 

The Bullas were a family of prophets. It was as if they believed their ears were calibrated to pick up the unique pitch of the Lord’s voice.

Anne’s eldest brother, Art Bulla, at the time, was living in Utah and had converted away from the family’s Southern Baptist roots to his own racist interpretation of Mormonism. He found himself maligned from the mainstream LDS church in the early 1980s when he called himself “the one mighty and strong,” claiming he was receiving revelations. He also expressed his belief in polygamy, but admitted he’d had trouble recruiting women to marry him. He split from the church when it started ordaining blacks. 

Art Bulla, who I reached by phone at his Baja, Mexico home, says he visited his siblings Anne and Brad Bulla, and his brother-in-law Barry, in the early days of their Marble community. And though he says his sister and Barry were still practicing racist Christian Identity beliefs — which he points out he actually agrees with — he thought the couple seemed to be controlling the people who would form Marble. 

“Barry had a very strong personality, and Anne did too, and so they were able to hornswoggle if you will, the gullible,” he says. “I had suspected that Anne had gone too far with the controlling thing.” 

Art Bulla tells me he’s the only prophet in the family — not Anne and not their brother I found who pastes notes that say “God’s only priest” to cutouts of naked women and posts the pictures to Twitter. Art says he is the chosen one. 

“[Anne] always felt that she had to be in competition with me. And since I’m receiving revelations, then she’s got to receive revelations, too,” he says, “You see what I’m saying?” 

***

By the late 1990s, Paul Glanville, the doctor who had come to Marble hoping to bring God into his medical practice, was hardly the only person questioning Marble’s leadership, and the Byrds’ true intentions for the community. According to letters written during this time, between 1997 and 1998 Anne Byrd excommunicated her brother and Legacy bandmate, Brad, and his family. (Requests for comment by Brad Bulla were not returned.) 

The excommunication drew the attention of Jay Grimstead, an evangelical scholar who had briefly lived in the Marble community and become known for pushing dominionism. Grimstead wrote several letters to the Byrds detailing his concern for what he saw as the community’s increasingly authoritarian structure. 

In one letter to Barry and Peacocke, from September 1997, Grimstead wrote that Marble “is a clear, ‘top down’ monarchy that is governed primarily by a queen, ‘Queen Anne,’” he wrote. “The people at Marble live in great fear of displeasing the Byrds, particularly Anne.” 

Grimstead also excoriated Barry for not publicly condemning Christian Identity, which he referred to as “weird, unbiblical stuff.” He was even being told by Marble members that the ideology was still being discussed in 1997. 

In January of the next year, he wrote to Anne and Barry: “Please respond in some way to the letter of grave concern wherein I told you I was receiving an increasing amount of evidence that Marble, under your leadership, was fast becoming an authoritarian cult,” he wrote.  Read more…

How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight

Longreads Pick

Lisa Miller makes a compelling argument that the male-dominated sexual revolution of the ’70s and the group-think it engendered led to the silence and tacit acceptance around Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of girls and young women. “A generation of entrepreneurial and ‘brilliant’ men took the job of defining the ‘erotic’ for everyone else,” she writes, “without consulting or including the interpretations of women, and then purveyed to the masses an eros that degraded women and girls while pitching it as ‘healthy.’”

Source: The Cut
Published: Jul 15, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,305 words)

American Green

Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Ted Steinberg | American Green | W. W. Norton & Company | March 2006 | 43 minutes (7,070 words)

 

Although there are plenty of irrational aspects to life in modern America, few rival the odd fixation on lawns. Fertilizing, mowing, watering — these are all-American activities that, on their face, seem reasonable enough. But to spend hundreds of hours mowing your way to a designer lawn is to flirt, most would agree, with a bizarre form of fanaticism. Likewise, planting a species of grass that will make your property look like a putting green seems a bit excessive — yet not nearly as self-indulgent as the Hamptons resident who put in a nine-hole course with three lakes, despite being a member of an exclusive golf club located across the street. And what should we make of the Houston furniture salesman who, upon learning that the city was planning to ban morning mowing — to fight a smog problem comparable to Los Angeles’s — vowed to show up, bright and early, armed and ready to cut.“I’ll pack a sidearm,” he said. “What are they going to do, have the lawn police come and arrest me?”

Surprisingly, the lawn is one of America’s leading “crops,” amounting to at least twice the acreage planted in cotton. In 2007, it was estimated that there were roughly twenty-five to forty million acres of turf in the United States. Put all that grass together in your mind and you have an area, at a minimum, about the size of the state of Kentucky, though perhaps as large as Florida. Included in this total were fifty-eight million home lawns plus over sixteen thousand golf-course facilities (with one or more courses each) and roughly seven hundred thousand athletic fields. Numbers like these add up to a major cultural preoccupation.

Read more…

The Martha Stewarting of Powerful Women

Illustration by Jason Raish

Ann Foster | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,613 words)

On March 5th, 2004, Martha Stewart was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to investigators. At the time, she was one of comparatively few female CEOs, and she was irrevocably tied to her company’s success: her smiling, serene, WASPy perfection thoroughly entwined with her company’s numerous ventures. When she first faced charges of insider trading, news media and the general population reacted with schadenfreude, or as one New York Times article coined it, blondenfreude: the glee felt when a rich, powerful, and fair-haired business woman stumbles.” And stumble she did: In the wake of the scandal, Stewart voluntarily removed herself from most of her roles at the company, and as part of her sentencing she was barred from involvement with the empire for five years. Stewart re-joined the Board of Directors in 2011, but the company never truly bounced back from effects of the scandal.

Read more…

Food Injustice

Longreads Pick
Published: Jul 16, 2019
Length: 19 minutes (4,985 words)

Why “Florida Man” Really Isn’t All that Funny

Getty Images

It all started in 2012 in Miami, Florida when Rudy Eugene, high on bath salts, was shot dead on sight by police while attempting to consume Ronald Poppo’s face. Poppo barely survived, losing his nose and his eyeballs. What was it precisely that had started? As Logan Hill reports at the Washington Post Magazine, it was the Florida Man meme — a sometimes humorous, mostly pitiful, ongoing series of events in which Florida men are discovered in bizarre, often criminal circumstances. What the media coverage and the internet fails to report, however are the addiction and mental health issues that spark the strange behavior in the first place.

Since Florida Man was first defined on Twitter in 2013 as the “world’s worst superhero,” many men (and it’s almost always men) have assumed the mantle. He is a man of a thousand tattooed faces, a slapstick outlaw, an Internet-traffic gold mine, a cruel punchline, a beloved prankster, a human tragedy and, like some other love-hate American mascots, the subject of burgeoning controversy.

At its most comical, the Florida Man phenomenon encapsulates the wildness of both America and the Internet. At its most salacious, it’s a social-media update on the true-crime TV of “America’s Dumbest Criminals” and the gallows humor of tabloid headlines. At its most insensitive, Florida Man profits by punching down at the homeless, drug-addicted or mentally ill.

For Florida Man to evolve from the primordial swamp-gas of the Internet, the environmental conditions had to be just right. Florida is the third-most populous state, so it naturally has a lot of everything — good, bad and weird. The state’s sunshine laws, passed in 1967, make public records — mug shots, arrest reports, video evidence and 911 calls — available to anyone, with the ease of one-click shopping. Then there’s the state’s strange geography: swampland infested with alligators and pythons, the most sinkholes in the nation. As for law and order, the state counts about 2 million concealed weapons permits, 1.4 million felons, and “stand your ground” laws. Thanks to the temperate climate, there’s no offseason for criminals or pranksters or nudists. And, as local writers from Carl Hiaasen to Dave Barry to Lauren Groff have noted, the water table of weirdness is just naturally high in Florida. Strangeness seems to bubble to the surface.

Read the story

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Three: The Widow’s Tale

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (7,518 words)

Part 3 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB

I.

I have seen LaVoy Finicum die and die and die. 

Log onto YouTube and watch Finicum’s end, spliced, paused, and dissected by people who never knew him but who, too, have again and again watched it happen.

When Finicum was killed, law enforcement officers were acting on an opportunity to arrest the leaders of the weeks-long Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in Oregon. Finicum was one of just a few actual ranchers who joined the Bundys’ occupation. Ranching was Finicum’s dream — something he’d only started doing once he turned 50. He didn’t grow up a rancher, but he intended to die one.

In the final seconds of his life — on the very last day of his 54th year — Finicum proved to be even more of a true believer in the purpose of the occupation than the Bundys themselves. 

 

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

That frigid late January day, an informant tipped the feds off that cars carrying the Bundys and other leaders would be traveling to Grant County, Oregon for a meeting with citizens and the area’s sheriff, who was allegedly sympathetic to the cause.

But the group never got to the meeting. Before they could arrive, members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and Oregon State Police SWAT team stopped the cars on a remote bend. Ammon Bundy followed law enforcement orders to get out of the car with his hands up, kneel on the ground, and crawl towards the officers. But Finicum refused to surrender.

Suddenly Finicum, who some viewed as a grandfatherly voice of reason back at the refuge, was yelling at the officers from his driver’s seat. He told them: “Back down or you kill me now.”

“Boys, you better realize we got people on the way,” Finicum yelled. “You want a bloodbath? It’s gonna be on your hands.”

In his back seat, the other occupants of the car — Ryan Bundy, a grandmother named Shawna Cox, and 18-year-old gospel singer Victoria Sharp — frantically tried to call people back at the refuge, but realized they’d been pulled over in an area with no cell service.

“I’m going to be laying down here on the ground with my blood on the street, or I’m going to see the sheriff,” Finicum yelled out the window. Finicum told the occupants of the car he would leave, try to get help. “You ready?” he asked. 

“Well, where’s those guns?” Ryan Bundy responded, telling the other passengers to duck down. 

“Gun it!” Cox said. “Gun it!” 

Finicum slammed the accelerator. Driving at over 70 miles per hour, careening around a bend, the sound of bullets pecked at his truck. Up ahead, the FBI and Oregon State Police had blocked the road. 

Finicum jerked the wheel — either to avoid hitting the road block, or to speed around it altogether. “Hang on!” he said. The truck crashed into deep banks of snow, sending up a white wave that made it look as if he’d plowed over an FBI agent. Finicum leaped from the truck, hands raised. All around him, officers yelled, “Get on the ground!”

This is all on the internet: Cox’s cell phone captured the conversation and fear in the truck, drone footage shot from above shows the lone white Dodge Ram pickup. 

You can see the crash, see the driver’s door fly open. You can see Finicum hop out as he taunts at the police that they’re “gonna have to shoot me.” You can hear the three bullets — bang, bang, bang. Dead. 

Every time I watch the video I think I’ll hear some new intonation, some missed revelation, and yet Finicum always dies the same. Three pops. He doesn’t jump or yelp. He simply crumples: a body tense and alive one second, a heavy sack of bones dropped to the ground for eternity the next. A puppet without a hand. Gravity stronger than spirit.

As Finicum stumbled in the snow, he yelled to the officers to shoot him before reaching multiple times toward his jacket. The overhead video captures that. Later, official reports said Finicum had a loaded 9 mm handgun in his inside jacket pocket. The shooting was ruled justified.

And yet now, three years later, a movement of people across America see his death another way entirely: As an assassination. An execution. A carefully-calculated hit on a lifelong member of the LDS church and short-time associate of the notorious Bundy family. Finicum is seen as a friend to men whose favorite part of the U.S. Constitution is the line about well-armed militias. The snowy road where he died is Finicum’s own Golgotha. The FBI roadblock is referred to, in some corners of the internet, as “the killstop.” Read more…

Whole 60

Evgeny Buzov / Getty

Laura Lippman | Longreads | July 2019 | 15 minutes (3,660 words)

1.

When I was in high school, I would walk to the Waldenbooks in the mall near my home and read novels while standing up. This was the 1970s, long before bookstores became places that encouraged people to sit, hang, browse. There were no armchairs in that narrow store on the second floor of Columbia Mall in Howard County, Maryland.

Reading while standing up felt like stealing, a pathetic thrill for this straight-A goody-goody. I had money — I babysat, I eventually worked at the Swiss Colony in the same mall. I could buy any volume I truly desired. But my stand-up reads were books too embarrassing to bring home. I remember only two.

One was The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, a British novelist perhaps best known today for inspiring the name of Bruce Willis’s and Demi Moore’s oldest daughter. It now strikes me as a perfectly respectable book; I could have forked over $1.25 for it.

The other one was — I couldn’t begin to tell you the title. It was a slick psycho serial killer tale that began with a young couple parked on Lovers Lane, where they were attacked by a man with, if I recall correctly, a metal hook for one of his hands. He used his hook to slash the roof of the convertible, or maybe it was a knife, and as the metal blade (or the hook) pierced through the canvas, the beautiful, vain sorority girl — it was implicit that she deserved to die if only for her smugness — thought: “I should have had that slice of cheesecake at dinner.”

It has taken me more than 40 years, but the singular achievement of my life may be that if I am attacked by a serial killer on a deserted Lovers Lane, I almost certainly will have had dessert. Not cheesecake, because I don’t like cheesecake. Possibly some dark chocolate, preferably with nuts or caramel, or a scoop of Taharka ice cream, an outstanding Baltimore brand, or one of my own homemade blondies, from the Smitten Kitchen recipe.

Maybe a shot of tequila, an excellent digestif. Maybe tequila and a blondie.

But only if I want those things. Many nights, I’m not in the mood for anything sweet after dinner. Every day, one day at a time, one meal at a time, one hunger pang at a time, I ask myself what I really want. I then eat whatever it is.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.
Read more…