Everything except

The short ribs were on sale. That’s not always ideal — when a butcher puts something on sale, it means it’s at the end of its useful life. You don’t buy sale meat for some future meal, hoping it keeps in the fridge. You buy it for now, because you’re going to cook it as soon as you get home, immediately, before it spoils. The request from my wife had been for “something meaty,” and short ribs — these short ribs — were an easy, tried-and-true fulfillment of that order.

The rest of the shopping trip felt equally perfectly in sync, something that rarely happens these days, with all the supply chain issues since the pandemic. There were pork cheeks, perfect to hold until Friday for tacos. The liquor store that was out of Cappelletti, which they had told me last week was on worldwide backorder, suddenly had it back in stock. The distillery opened right as I arrived, perfect timing to grab some white rum for the frozen pineapple and leftover coconut cream in the fridge for piña coladas once the heat returns this weekend. There were blood oranges for our favorite version of chicken thighs, a good Thursday night meal. There were giant artichokes to go with the leftover ramp pesto, to be tossed with the box of bucatini in the cabinet, a nice way to break up the meat-heavy week of dinners.

There was the brioche, not always available. Same with the Scandinavian Swimmers, a great snack during hard rides on the Peloton. Some fun impulse buys, like vanilla mochi and some glazed donuts, because, hey, why not? In all, it was one of those shopping trips where you almost feel like you’re getting away with something, suddenly stocked up with lovely options for the rest of the week.

I even caught a pretty smooth set of lights through the worst intersection in the city, maybe the worst in the country, despite it being rush hour. But then again, there isn’t really rush hour anymore, not since everyone’s work schedules changed, so nothing really hits the same rhythms as before. Except for one thing.

At a red light, I open the fresh horrors device, and there’s the latest fresh horror. The reminder that everything is broken and that we’re incapable of fixing even the smallest thing, much less this, the biggest thing. Down in the state where they love their guns and hate seemingly everything else, more than a dozen elementary school children are shot dead. They are — they were — young enough to not have lived through the last time this many children were shot dead, after which nothing happened to prevent this, nor any of the literally hundreds of mass shootings in between.

So, then, I’m not very hungry. And it seems like a dumb, selfish reaction, to think about the particular way you are going to feed yourself, with all the plentiful options available to you, while more than a dozen children lie dead. But that’s the cognitive dissonance of living in America. You have everything you could ever possibly want, beyond the wildest imagination of those who came just a couple generations earlier. Six brands of ketchup at the store; countless channels and streaming options; two-day Amazon Prime delivery. Everything, of course, except healthcare, an energy industry not insisting on destroying the planet, an affordable housing market, a policing and carceral system that doesn’t disproportionately kill and imprison, a non-crumbling infrastructure, and a society where you might be able to go grocery shopping or send your kids to school without the small, but very real chance you might never see them alive again.

Everything except a political class actually beholden to its constituents, rather than to the people with the money, who are happy to pay those politicians a little bit of their money in order to keep much more of it.

Everything except the will to create a country where this isn’t the daily reality, where you won’t have another mass shooting before the memorial services can even happen for the victims of this one.

Everything except the underpinnings of an actual, functioning society, not one so completely broken that the masses turn against each other in fear, reduced to the same talking points over and over again, while the people who want business to carry on as usual ensure just that.

So you better hurry up and cook and eat your short ribs, before they rot like everything else.