10/29/2024
Bruce Springsteen, Ice Cream, and Bartimaeus the Blind
I turn thirty-three years old today. For the first time in my life I feel, on the day, differently than I did. I feel older. Thirty-three is the first time I see a clear drift between younger people and me. I suddenly feel a ravenous hunger for connection, for community. I am going to more concerts. I am playing more shows. I am going to church. I am going to Bible Study. For whatever reason, being as old as Christ purportedly was for his crucifixion weighs heavily on me. I crave community. I crave ministry.
At this past sunday service we heard the story of Bartimaeus in the gospel of Mark, the blind beggar on the road from Jericho who called out to Jesus to restore his sight. Jesus tells the man that his faith has healed him. Bartimaeus could see again.
The homily was quick to remind us that, in the gospel of Mark, this was Jesus’ final miracle before Jerusalem, before the garden and his sacrifice. Bartimaeus is given sight just in time to follow Christ and bear witness to his death. From a humble son to a blind beggar to apostle to witness. A miracle is a promise as much as a gift. It is an invitation. What will you do with this?
I am given thirty-three years today. I am given my third as a woman. I am given a tongue and a desire to write. What will I do with this?
Last night I performed for free to a sparse crowd in a variety show about spreading joy in dark times. These are dark times. Standing on stage reading a piece about ice cream and Bruce Springsteen I heard laughter and joy and whoops and applause. I used my gifts. I found community and ministry. I found a miracle onstage, like I always do.
Yours with an open mouth,
-B
PS. If you’re curious, I’ve included the full text of the aforementioned Bruce Springsteen piece below. Enjoy!
Eating Ice Cream With Bruce
I don’t even like Bruce Springsteen. As far as I’m concerned he’s got two songs worth hearing and plenty to press skip about. Not my genre, not my flag, not my red and black flannel. I don’t get it. But here’s how he changed my life.
I heard somewhere that Bruce Springsteen buys himself an ice cream cone every time he gets a gold record. This could be a lie, but the best kind of lie, where it sounds so true and immediate that it’s accepted. Like Richard Gere and the gerbil thing the press put out to discredit him after American Gigolo and during his full-throated defense of Tibet. You hear it. You picture it. And your brain accepts it.
The boss, using the same tongue that sung “Born to Run,” to slowly erode the sweet cliffs of a waffle cone until it drips down his fingers and he wipes it on his blue jeans. Picture it. You’re welcome.
I think about this a lot. About the boss and his two scoops.
It’s the only logical reaction to something so huge and inaccessible and ephemeral as 500,000 people buying an album of something you thought up (at least partly) on the toilet somewhere. I can’t picture more than 35 people at a time. 500,000 is a number so big it feels stupid. That can’t be real. 500,000 people sitting in their living rooms or bedrooms with headphones or with speakers at full volume, humming songs you almost threw out because the bridge wasn’t working.
The ice cream cone, I think, is a way to make that real. I have no idea what it feels like to have fans like that. I don’t think the Boss really does either. But we both know what ice cream tastes like. And from now on, it tastes like 500,000 people screaming about “Dancing in the Dark.”
When I started taking hormones I bought myself a crawfish boil. It’s my favorite food and it felt like the only thing I wanted in my body besides slowly dissolving sublingual estradiol. That night, while I pretended to already feel the changes coming, I broke beautiful things out of their shells until all that remained was soft and prepared perfectly.
I ate the hard boiled eggs last. Something about the way they greedily stuffed themselves with crawdad guts and old bay seasoning and everything else in the bag (because BAG FOOD IS THE BEST FOOD (fight me)) made them the best part. From now on, even two and a half years later, transition tastes like cajun food.
These little sensory metaphors for the impossible ways our dreams can come true matter. They give us access. Wedding cake. Birthday cake. Retirement watch. We need totems. Mementos. We need to make true love smell like red wine when it’s half price at the Tapas place you both like. We need to make victory taste like champagne. I needed to make leaving my apartment and throwing out my last pair of boy sweatpants sound like the crinkle of a White Castle bag.
I’m not the Boss. The best thing I wrote was a really good joke about cassowaries which we don’t have time for tonight. But the best times in my life still feel like a crowd of 500,000 reasons to remember them exactly as they were, down to the taste and sound of them.
You deserve ice cream and firework smoke. You deserve aquarium gravel running through your fingers. You deserve to fill the stadiums of your hearts with applause you’ll remember.
Make this night, this show, this moment, an unforgettable memory, catchy and complete as a Bruce Springsteen song. When you find the one you love, eat an olive right out of the jar. The day you decide you are done being anything other than the beautiful woman inside you, feel the delicate, chitinous crunch of a crawfish shell snapping in your hands.
Record sales can plummet. They can take away my hormones tomorrow through a stroke of the pen. You might lose the next race or game of Mario Kart, but I will always taste the truth of my body in cajun food. Bruce will always smile when he eats ice cream for reasons he doesn’t have to sing about in front of 500,000 people. You can still remember a Cheetoh melting in your mouth because you’re smiling too big to chew.
Dreams do come true, sometimes. We are always awake when they do, even when we’re not paying attention. Pay attention. Pick something to remember them by. Make them small enough to fit in your pocket.
Sweet enough to melt in your hands.
