Caught between avoidance mechanisms

Limits beget creativity.

I was caught on the edge between two avoidance mechanisms—avoid the anxiety of going to the supermarket, or avoid the anxiety of not having a food stockade sufficient to avoid going to the supermarket. I settled on first actually making a grocery list, including all the dry goods and basics I need, like Kashi breakfast cereal and bread, and including a few special dinner recipes. I thought first of a breakfast recipe: a full English breakfast (onto the grocery list go tomatoes and mushrooms). Then I thought of cotolette alla Milanese.

“I’ll go to the halal butcher.”

To get pork cutlets? No.

Cotolette alla Milanese is actually supposed to be with veal cutlets.

“I’ll go to the halal butcher.”

Or, wait—

“I’ll go to Bensonhurst.”

This was what M_____ S. was talking about: use the breakdown in society as an invitation to try different things.

J___ has that place he always goes in Bensonhurst when his Italian friends drive him there. And _____ from Julius’ lives down there. We could have a six-feet-apart rendezvous.

Social upheaval yields opportunity.

I watched Wolf Hall last night. England is about to undergo a huge social change, one which will destroy a lot of people, and make it possible for others to do things they never imagined they could. Cromwell has already been sleeping with the married sister of his wife who passed away. Would he have dared do this—and it’s such a natural thing for them both to want to do—if the King hadn’t been pushing to divorce his wife in spite of the Pope’s forbidding it? Cromwell also says to Henry Percy, who had been secretly engaged to Anne Boleyn and had had relations with her and now threatens to go public that Anne is not the virgin she makes herself out to be to stop her marriage the King. Cromwell goes to Percy, a titled earl, and tells him, “the world is changing. Decisions aren’t made in Whitehall and in castles. They’re made in the counting-houses, in Antwerp, Florence, Lisbon, anywhere a ship can sail west from.” Cromwell tells Percy he’ll call in Percy’s debts and ruin him. It’s the same dynamic as in Downton Abbey or in Italy in the early 20th century (the story of Il Gattopardo?) that the titled classes are overextended and the merchant and working classes are coming up. Henry VIII even says to Cromwell, somewhat insultingly, “Why shouldn’t the son of a blacksmith be in my service?” Henry VIII then says he can give everything to Cromwell—with the insinuation that this would put Cromwell in Henry VIII’s power. Cromwell has come up in the world as one who is clever and good with money—but he, like George Warleggan in Poldark, wants the esteem of the upper class. Different to Warleggan, who achieves this by financial treachery and throwing parties for the wealthy and living in a luxurious manor and even inventing for his family a coat of arms featuring a prominent “W,” Cromwell, in what will turn out to be his tragic flaw, seeks to append himself to charismatic powerful men he senses are in need of his cleverness—first Cardinal Wolsey, then King Henry VIII, and even, as he gets closer to Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn.