When You’re Here
It’s their civil war episode, and the coup is fully on.
Just showed up to stage today, and the sous says, you’re doing family meal, it’s in 20 minutes.
I’m in a panic, only vaguely recalling the baker’s ratios for olive harvest bread. I try to google a quick-rise recipe I can hybridize, grabbing some starter that is already half-baked sitting near the French top. I’m grabbing wheat germ and canned olives from the shelves behind me. The germ spills across the counter. Why are the olives so gargantuan, like fuckin’ mangoes!
As I’m trying to chop and mix and bulk all at once, a TV is blaring behind me.
“The Bear” is on. It’s season 4, and I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m trying to ignore the dialogue for spoilers. But my ADHD is all no, you are now going to forget to salt the dough—pray there’s enough in these olives—but will hear every single goddamn second of this show.
It’s their civil war episode, and the coup is fully on. Everyone’s in the kitchen blowing gaskets because the new dictator just decreed that Reagan once had a fever dream of living with the Founding Fathers. So now everyone that can’t trace their ancestry and land rights back through 1776 or who isn’t military is deemed a loser criminal and an enemy of the state.
Carmy is somewhat cool—maybe dissociating—and trying to keep everyone on sandwiches to feed the 1968-looking Chicago streets outside. Cousin, though, he’s going berserk, saying he has to report to his base commander. Syd is like, that wasn’t even you, that was your dad. “But I’m legacy, they gotta take me!” Fak gets in Cousin’s face, begging him to be adopted so he can get in, too.
I am out of time yet dividing the floppy bulk into proofing baskets. I wake up screaming, I should’ve done a tapas spread.