Class Identity Jokes (food for sensing)
There is something quietly honest about the way food exposes class ... The things we ate growing up ... that we later learned were Poor Food or Fancy Food ... depending on who was encountering it ... The meal made from whatever was in a tipi or pantry ... Specific shame or pride attached to assimilation boarding school lunch or western world noon dinner ... Sensing instead of just analyzing with thoughts what feels true ... Class is not something we think our way into understanding first ... It is in the human body ... That hesitation ... The way we hold a tool or utensil ... Whether we immediately don't or do know everything about sacred bread
Seek that special ability shift on the spot and open completely ... Understand more about how class intersects with the lightness and darkness of being ... It is about whose knowledge counts ... regarding whether a certain food is wrong ... primitive ... and dirty or ... on the other hand ... a cut above everything middle class ... more refined ... and exclusively clean ... As also abstract fragmentary ellipses ... Breathing like sharp or foggy memory ... Inversions doing something different ... Sweet confidence of not knowing leading ... Assumed knowing of dominant colonial culture exposed as assumption ... Ink (elegant blood, crude oil) for pages and intuitive speaking for this Oyparaploo voice ...
Para parenthetical ... doing its own work ... Extraction ... What gets pressed out of something ... Living to make a hundred or more definitive marks ... that add up to be an individual or collective legacy ... Holding ... Race ... Class ... and ... Spirit ... all at once without preaching ... For an example ~ A human or animal (wild domesticated hybrid) body that walks into a room and is studied before ... she ... they ... he ... it ... even makes a sound before eating or drinking something ... The wild animal butcher's language is hidden in his aspiration ... We rank food the way we rank flesh ... Choice or not ... Grading system that only pretends to be neutral ... We ... Oyparaploo ... also find our medium in the silent mouth everyone now dating back to ancient times can see from where they are ... Ten second pause ... We all know which foods are jokes ... Ones we apologize for serving ... Ones we lie about ... Ones we pretend to know how to pronounce ... Bodies are punchlines belonging to something ...
The off cut asides carry the weight ... Stage direction living inside the text ... A middle eye reading alone ... learned to see both ways ... That is where ownership lands ... where membership becomes the joke ... We laugh at the body caught not knowing because we have been that body ... Relief when it is not us this time ...
Reading happens before taste ... before thought ... that sensing ... Class recognized in three seconds ... Not poverty exactly ... not extreme privilege ... but exposure ... The moment someone sees what you actually eat ...
Set up a split ... mind over here and body over there ... then affect both ... Eating is psychological ... Something chewing from the inside ... Worries ... Something we can't stop thinking about ... Verbs applied to our mind's troubles ... Bring it back to survival ... The question of ... precarity ... class ... access ... What sustains us ... What we depend on? Class ... food ... shame ... and knowledge ... live in the body before the mind is able to catch up ...
(jokes)
You can tell Class by how long someone stares at a menu ... The Wealthy decide fast because they have had it all many times ... People experiencing and from Poverty also decide fast because they already know what the cheapest items are ... People in the Middle need a minute or two because they are discussing and calculating what they can afford ...
Our people's food does not photograph well ... It is the color of getting by ... Brown ... beige and the grayness of stretching something into next week ... Instagram wants bold contrast ...
Eating hasn't been taken as a serious enough topic ... Maybe because it implicates everyone ... It is difficult to maintain a distance when it is dissolving on the tongue in our mouth ... Seeing lets us stand apart from what we observe ... We can close our eyes, and the world is still there ... waiting for when we open them again ... We cannot close our mouths and continue tasting something ... Eating is also sound ... The crunch ... the quietness of soft bread ... It is ... touch ... temperature ... texture ... the weight of a soup spoon ... Eating uses every sense ... Hierarchies need a top and a bottom ... Someone has to lose ... The senses we can share at a distance get promoted ... sight ... hearing ... and oddly the ones that require more closeness get demoted ... Intimacy becomes too suspicious ... Food is ethereal ... a strange word for something so material ... But it's true ... food is always becoming something else ... Becoming your identity ... Becoming ... after enough chewing ... gone ... We cannot revisit a meal the way we can revisit a painting ... Memory has to do all the work ... And memory ... like food ... changes every time ... It is perishable ... So is the body ... Food is thought about in the most serious terms ... by the people who do not have enough of it ... Philosophizing is easier on a full stomach ...
(jokes)
Here they are:
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(jokes)
Philosophy asks what the good life means ... The line at the soup shelter already knows ... One group has time for the question ... The other has the answer about absence in their stomach ...
The wealthy sit around a big feast and discuss extensively the food they are eating ... and then photograph what is there and not there from many angles ... Those who experience or come from poverty just eat the meal before them ... Distance between looking at it and tasting it is measured in what's in their pockets ...
Sub Nature ... Parts of the world we step over or around ... Nature that doesn't make it into the mainstream ... Sometimes it takes someone from an unorthodox discipline to see what we have been ignoring ... looking at what is used and what gets thrown out ... We want our favorite places in nature to be more revered ... Not the obvious ones ... Not the scenic overlook ... not the ditch or weedy edge ... Life doesn't hold still ... we just pretend it does so that we can frame it and snap a shot ... Mother nature's activity isn't waiting for us to notice anything ... The light on rot we chase ... the growth happening in shadows ... Cameras that make us feel like we are in the right place ... We like what we already know ... Recognition feels safe even when it is just preference dressed up as an instinct ... Parts of the natural world that we don't want to have anything to do with ... Parts that remind us we are stinky mud ... smells breaking down ... Becoming another useful and necessary dinner ... Unwelcome staining dirt at play ... That which gets on your clothes and hands and won't come off ... Evidence you are on to something ... Not every river runs clean ... Some water is weary and tired of the history it is carrying with it ... Aqua streams under smoke that contains poisonous carcinogens ... We make special exceptions for the right type of smoke ... Barbecue bomb? ... Incense whip? ... Depends on who is breathing it or taking it in ... Are wild weeds plants nobody asked for ... causing ... for some people ... concerns ... unreasonable fear ... of what we cannot categorize ... What might be medicine ... or poison ... and cannot tell the difference ... Glass facades that shield a forest scene ... sealed windows ... that keep the wild and able out ... The question we have been building toward all along is ~ A loosening ... A hierarchy that is soft around the edges ... Mud sounds precious if it is plated correctly ...
(jokes)
We judge and rank food the way we judge and rank flesh ... Choice ... Select ... The hemp tattoo tells you what something is worth before you taste the sodium chloride ... Same with a queen walking into a great room ... The grading already happened ... You just do not see the luxurious silk gown sweeping the floor ...
A body walks into a room and is already read ... before a mouth opens ... We pretend the conversation matters but the grade is always assigned at the door ...
Legacy is just marks that add up ... A hundred small choices together ... What we served ... what we apologized for ... what we lied about ... what we ate when we were alone ... Extraction of what constitutes a life ...
The dandelion is a weed only if you do not know what to do with it ... Knowledge can turns bitter leaves into a dinner ... People on a ship approaching a shoreline that has behind it a vast meadow of wildflowers ... Everything from a distance is beautiful before you land ... We say O ... The first reading of smoke ... Life ... Activity ... People who know best how to feed themselves ... That may or might not be a positive thing ... Depending on what happens after an arrival ... Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution and fire is invading cities ... Same smoke different source ... No one is cooking because machines do not eat ... Some people use smoke to preserve their foods ... An old answer to a new question ... How do we make this last? Smoke can also cause cancer ... The thing that preserves ... The thing that kills ... Institutions come from poisonous smoke ... Follow the money backward and it smells exactly like tobacco funding ... Libraries ... Hospital wings ... Names on buildings that stole oxygen from bodies ... Taking the narrative along with the territory by renaming what already had names ... Reappropriating cycles and stories through our lands ... Not just words ... Every body remembers what was done to it ... Those who talk abstractly about ... Class ... Identity ... and Food ... are at a safe distance ... In conference rooms ... Luxury of theory is no joke though ... They are what they are ...
Honest working class ... Identities that have more texture than others ... Hard to comprehend frustrations now also have anchors ... Falling concrete catches the visitor in a sore spot ... Before they drift over mud ... These are handholds ... This logic is not very linear ... More associative ... One thing leads to the next thing through feeling ... That is a different kind of making sense ... Some folks can live there naturally ... Others need a little time to adjust ... The jokes help to punctuate denser parts with recognition ... The receiver gets to think Yes ... we know that ... and then are able to relax into the next passage ... Each section closes on something clear ... We keep returning to the physical ... Abstraction stays tethered to flesh ... The readers and listeners who scratch their heads are also looking for thesis statements ...
(jokes)
A professor asks her class to define hunger ... She writes three theories on the board ... Kid in the back who skipped breakfast knows the answer but does not raise his hand ... He is too busy daydreaming about a vending machine ...
Polished is for the person who can afford to sand things down ... The rest of us have to deal with grit and other textures ... My hands could exfoliate a spa full of customers ...
My aunt Zelda never floated above her body even once ... Couldn't afford the altitude ... She stayed low ... close to the stove ... Kept her middle eye on the pot and the other eyes on who might be coming through the kitchen door ... That's an example of what surrealism looks like when the rent is due ...
