Contact Me! Look No Further For A Way To Get In Touch

For fans and critics of my writing, this blog, my book of poems (found here) or other verbal artistic attempts you have come across, this is the place where I tell you how you can get in touch with me, whatever your reasons, I accept them and I honor them.

Email is the best way.  Use this address:  Breathingfree206@gmail.com

Love to hear from you.

-Amanda

RISE Church’s Mac and Cheese Cook Off

What’s Good, Harrisonburg?

Annual RISE Church’s Mac and Cheese Cook Off, or, A Time to Laugh A Time To Weep

I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. 
Jack Handey

            “I think I'm having a heart attack.”  I wasn’t used to craving Pepto Bismal and after sampling only about half of the entries, I was done.

            I had arrived eager and curious, ready to judge noodles to the best of my ability.  And only yesterday I had had a beautiful experience in the same downtown pavilion, when Gramma and I’d visited the farmers market.  There, the conversations flowed from smiling mouths, lively figures gesturing in front of colorful produce.  I laughed and embraced old friends, baptized in the glow of local nutrients and blessed by the divinity of stunning art.  Friendship and Health: A Harrisonburg Saturday morning.

            This town is diverse, though, and there are six other days in the week.  One day later: Sunday 4 PM, the air is shivery.  I pay $12 to enter the same pavilion after standing in a bafflingly slow-moving line.  I am given a plastic spoon and four blue translucent chips to vote with.  Then I’m ushered into the crowd, alone amidst the masses.    Some crowds make me anxious.  Most Christians make me anxious.  This was a crowd of Christians and the regret kicks in long before my spoon touches any pasta.  I get in a line.  People are happy.  Too happy.  Freaking Christians.                 

            Beside me two first graders ask a chef, “What’s the green stuff?”

            “Spinach.”

            “Ewwww!”  they yell in unison and run away to their parents who console them.

            I hate lines.  I hate standing in them.  I hate waiting in them.  I hate paying to stand and wait in them.

            And people are butting!  It’s  middle school all over again and the scary eighth graders are hungry! 

            I try a few samples and realize that they’re all the same.  It’s all macaroni and cheese.  Every table.  So many things in my hands I fumble and drop a plastic bowl.  The only way to eat here is while walking and some people seem more practiced than others.

            The farmers market was full of all the people in town I love to see, but somehow this Mac and Cheese Off is saturated with all the people I don’t really want to see.  Ugh.

            People I was once Facebook friends with approach me and ask, with pained smiles and pitying tones “how are you?” as if quitting facebook is akin to public humiliation.  (It’s not; I’ve experienced them both)  “Are you doing okay?” as if I’m Rosanne a month after her Ambian tweet.  I think what they mean is “Is it safe out there for you freaks socializing in person?   We worry about you, you know.”  Yes, I’m great, better than ever.  I make unbelievable excuses out of the conversations: “I have to go pet that dog now!  Good seeing you!”

            In fact this crowd resembles my old Facebook crowd quite a bit, and they were half the reason I deactivated.  So many predictable followers of boring trends.  Democratic Socialist Christians.  People who post “I’m not sexist” 20 times a day even though nobody thought they were.  A few individuals scattered in the mix, oblivious to their anomalism, trying to make friends and hang out in real life.  I don’t miss it.

            I’m not a vegan myself but I’m starting to hear what they’re saying.  Picture a cow in a factory farm.  She has no room to move and she’s uncomfortable and sun-deprived all the time.  Everyday she endures machines roughly suctioned onto her nipples and her babies are taken away screaming to the slaughter as she wails helpless.  My guess is she’s thinking something like, “I hate humans and I hope they all die painful deaths”  every day, a thousand times a day.  Live cells are programmed with thoughts and so the liquid coming out of her and her brethren is coded with the simplified mission “kill humans.”  That is why dairy kills.  It’s on behalf of its makers, the millions of brutalized bovinian slaves.

            There’s a live band and the beat rhythmically reminds me of the oily mass sliding around inside my body like a slick ten pound pendulum.  Nothing about this feels good.

            I hope they have a team of paramedics on site.

            A teenager walks by me wearing a shirt declaring her intent to smash the patriarchy but the look on her face under sheared purple hair makes me think she couldn’t spell patriarchy if she looked down at her own shirt to try.   

           The church sponsoring this event, RISE, corners the local religious market on gay people around here.  They’re probably the only ones trying, besides the Universalists and we all know they don’t try that hard.  Boom!  All the do-gooders, phonies and fat allies are here insatiably sucking down comfort food, greasy spoonful after greasy spoonful, and then slapping on innocent looks before coming back for more.  Mac and cheese is not something you eat in public on a happy day – it’s something you eat alone when you’re sad and then lie about doing it, like heroin.  “Holy gluttony!”  I wish I made that up but it’s the event’s real tagline.  Jesus would be about as at home here as a gang of frat boys would be on electric scooters (a weird new trend in downtown).  Again, I think I’m going to be sick.

            I toss my remaining voting chips in my brother’s vote box, his table the only one with any art at all, and walk to my car, the unfamiliar taste of acid ascending toward my mouth.

            And God said: Clog Thine Arteries and for once the people obeyed.  It’s good to be out of the crowd.  These are the kind of people who honor God so much that even God is like, okay you can do your own thing now; and for my sake, eat some vegetables!

            That hot pounding glob of misanthropic dairy settles - I just want it out of me!  I haven’t felt this nauseous since they started building Hotel Madison.

            This Cook Off is some kind of fundraiser for hungry people and if they’re actually helping hungry people, more power to them!  May that $12 get them more than it got me.  But like every other aspect of our society, experience with organizations that help underprivileged people has only amplified my disillusion. 

            On the drive home I pass people holding signs.  Last year this town got panhandlers like some places get locust, descending all at once without any plans to ever leave our abundant city-in-a-valley.

            I’ve known a few panhandlers and I’ve known quite a few people experiencing homelessness and they’re usually not the same people. One guy I knew, Conan, used to ease his able-ass-body down into a wheelchair to scoot around Portland all day long with his cardboard slab, begging.  Some people will do anything for money!  (Except work.)  The whole town is hiring, you jackasses!  Yeah you get paid a lot more standing in Court Square feeding off the overflow of goodwill and bourgeoisie guilt but there are laws against fraud, I’m just saying.

            I’m sorry I’m sorry.  I apologize once more to my digestive system but it says it won’t forgive me for at least a week. 

            I shift into third gear and declare out loud my appreciation for the farmers market.  God or no God, they have the real food, people!  That’s where Jesus would shop! 

            Freaking scooter bros!  Get outa the road!  You look like babies!

            Anyway, this town is bleeping going bloody downhill, I’ve seen a few things in my time but this BS all you can eat macaroni and Christian cheese to feed the hungry just takes the cake, bah humbug and piss off alla ya!