bad fried chicken is my bitch (and other thoughts on managing stress)

Also: What I am cooking, listening to, and reading this weekend.

It’s a strange thing to be someone who often writes about the sanctity of the table and what it means as a holy place of refuge and gathering, and then to eat shitty fried chicken in the car while sitting in the grocery store parking lot, when no one’s looking.

One conjures up all sorts of images: I’m reminded of the scene in the movie The Good House, where the Sigourney Weaver character, fresh out of rehab and right under the noses of her ex-husband and his new husband, her adult children, her friends, and her Border Collie, tops off her virgin Bloody Mary with vodka and then winks at the audience, who are the only ones able to see her do it. Or the anti-pleasure French Protestant mayor in Chocolat, who is found one morning passed out in the window of the local chocolatier, played by Juliet Binoche. Or my father, who, in the throes of a fight with my mother, lie in bed with a box of Mallomars, slowly eating an entire sleeve — one after another after another, crumbs everywhere — in front of her, which drove her completely bonkers. Those, he didn’t conceal; that was reserved for his beloved lunchtime pastrami on rye, forbidden after a massive heart attack, and evidenced by a small spot of Gulden’s mustard on his tie. Hiding is a strange land, linked intimately with security, pain, and the possibility of no solace.

It is fair to say that my country is up to its eyeballs in stress right now, and extreme stress does strange things to us and to our dopamine receptors, which want only one thing: relief. After which, they want more, and then more after that. (No one writes better about this than the neuroscientist, Anna Lembke, and this conversation is a good place to start if you’re interested in her work.) But the disconnect between reality and action is profound; if it wasn’t, you would never see people at the airport bar at 7 am, because, they will say, nothing counts in airports. Time suspends, and everybody knows that.

I’m not supposed to be eating, much less hiding, fried chicken. But fried chicken is my bitch, as they say, much like a nice crisp glass of Vin de Savoie on a hot summer day, which I am also not supposed to be drinking. When my stress needle hits the red, I lose all sense of reason and proportion; the mechanism that controls what I should and shouldn’t do becomes disabled, like an engine in need of an oil change. And everything screeches to a halt.

With each passing year, I get my fair share of admonishments: I have a long-time liver issue (which I’ve had since I was in high school) and a wonky heart for which I’ve been medicated for years. My father had two quadruple by-passes fifteen years apart, his father had five heart attacks, my maternal grandmother died of congestive heart failure, her grandfather died of sudden cardiac death at 42, and my svelte mother — she barely eats anything — has unmedicated cholesterol in the 600s. Recent bloodwork shows that I am the lucky recipient of a positive genetic marker for a body that cranks out bad cholesterol like Starbucks cranks out lattes. In the last year, I’ve dropped twenty pounds, and my numbers and risk factors have come way down, except for the one affected by the marker. But the stress and my inability to safely deal with it? This is not an anomaly. So many of us are in this same place, where we wake in the morning not knowing what is next, what the next cruelty is, and who it will affect, and, well? Fried chicken in the car.

And then, I look at my wife and my dog and our home, and I listen to good music and write my books and play my guitar and feed the people I love. I move on to the things that sustain and give life, and I have to hold tightly to those things, at least for a little while, until the next attack of fried chicken.

This weekend, I’ll be cooking:

Thai-style fish cakes (recipe by David Tanis)

I’ll be listening to:

The late, beautiful Andrea Gibson’s Letter to My Dog:

The wonderful Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, The Spell Singers, and The Lost Words Blessing

and

The Hard Rain Collective: The Kronos Quartet + Allison Russell, Iggy Pop, Satomi Matsuzaki, Stephin Merritt, Tanya Tagaq, Dai Wei, Gustavo Santaolalla, Laurie Anderson, Asha Bhosle, Slowspin, Zanai Bhosle, Peni Candra Rini, Sara Parkman, Lollise, Willie Nelson

I’ll be reading:

Ocean Vuong’s breathtaking, stunning, words-fail-me The Emperor of Gladness

(Also, if you are inclined, listen to or read Ocean’s gorgeous conversation with James Shaheen, in Tricycle)

Fergus in the garden.

If you need to reach me, I’ll be in the garden with Susan and Fergus, planting and planting and watering for my life, and staying away from the chicken. Have a good weekend, and be safe.

xE

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Upcoming events:

8/1/25 - The Hotchkiss Library, Sharon, CT: signing

8/7/25 - East End Books, Provincetown: reading, q&a, signing

9/16/25 - Zibby’s Bookshop, Santa Monica: in conversation with Annabeth Gish, q&a, signing

9/18/25 - Book Passage, Corte Madera: reading, q&a, signing

Workshops:

8/4-8/8/2025 - Castle Hill/Truro Center for the Arts: Permission to Write the Story You Must Tell (WAITLIST available)

Spring 2026: Kripalu: Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create - stay tuned for final dates and sign-up