Florida, Folks.
Still vegan.
I’m flying as I write this. I have to be honest. I requested vegan meals on JetBlue going to and from Florida and they were good. I mean, they felt like they had a little heart in them. Like someone had to focus. I should have been ordering them for years.
I’ve been feeling different in the morning because of the vegan thing. I’m not sure if it’s actually a physical feeling or a mental feeling. I just feel cleaner inside. Like I’m not processing something awful. If the whole gut-brain connection is true, if the gut bug garden has any bearing on mental disposition, I think I’m feeling it. It doesn’t seem like just righteousness. It seems more organic, actually. No joke.
I spent some time with my mother. I don’t always know exactly what to say or do when I go to see my mother. I don’t have grandkids to talk about. The life stuff talk goes by fast. The conversation kind of craps out pretty quickly. Over time, I’ve come to realize that seeing your aging parents sometimes means just sitting there while they flip through their phone or watch tv or putter around the house or talk to their dogs or do nothing. It’s okay just to be. It’s logging the time.
I saw John, my mom’s bf, who I respectfully made fun of on my newest special. It took a lot of refining to make sure it wasn’t mean. I hadn’t talked to him since he’d seen it. I wondered what he thought about it. It took a day or two, but he said he liked it. He said it was some ‘Lenny Bruce stuff.’ That was very nice of him to say. He had seen Lenny back in the day. I also noticed I didn’t hear him say, ‘It was a different time…’ once.
I also watch John putter around their little patio which he has cultivated into a well-tended little garden with potted plants. He replaced a small pinwheel ornament on the fence while I was there. It was one of four. We watched them spin a bit. Logging time.
There are a couple of caveats to the talks this week. I’ve been festering about both of them, which I don’t often do. Today I talk to Rachel Weisz. I love her. Who doesn’t? I was excited to see her. That aside, I watched the entire Dead Ringers series she’s out promoting. I remember the Cronenberg film it’s based on. It’s a disturbing horror movie about twin gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons. In the new one, Rachel plays the twins. It’s a totally different approach and I was kind of blown away by the whole thing because it landed as a very deep, very powerful feminist piece of art. It’s fucking gnarly though. So, I was pretty excited about talking to her about it but I don’t think I was very clear how to break down my experience with it. I’m not now, either. I tried though and I may have been a little too excited.
On Thursday I post my talk with Ice Cube. I had no idea what to expect. I had no sense of him as a person. I knew the scowl. That was burned into my brain. As with most of my talks, I seek to connect. I know Cube has some dubious tweets about Jews. I know he refused to get the Covid vaccine. I thought maybe the Jew thing would come up but once he got loose we just talked about the work. At some point during the talk I realized there was really no way to approach the Jewish stuff unless I sandbagged him at the end. I chose not to, because I enjoyed the talk and I don’t really think it would’ve changed anything or if he would’ve even engaged.
Clearly, he didn’t have a problem with me, a Jew.
All that said, these are both great conversations.
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron
A Well-Tended Garden.
