Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious. And you are here now, and you must live—and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home. The warmth of dark energies that drew me to The Mecca, that drew out Prince Jones, the warmth of our particular world, is beautiful, no matter how brief and breakable. I think back to our trip to Homecoming. I think back to the warm blasts rolling over us. We were at the football game. We were sitting in the bleachers with old friends and their children, caring for neither fumbles nor first downs. I remember looking toward the goalposts and watching a pack of alumni cheerleaders so enamored with Howard University that they donned their old colors and took out their old uniforms just a little so they’d fit. I remember them dancing. They’d shake, freeze, shake again, and when the crowd yelled “Do it! Do it! Do it! Dooo it!” a black woman two rows in front of me, in her tightest jeans, stood and shook as though she was not somebody’s momma and the past twenty years had barely been a week. I remember walking down to the tailgate party without you. I could not bring you, but I have no problem telling you what I saw—the entire diaspora around me—hustlers, lawyers, Kappas, busters, doctors, barbers, Deltas, drunkards, geeks, and nerds. The DJ hollered into the mic. The young folks pushed toward him. A young man pulled out a bottle of cognac and twisted the cap. A girl with him smiled, tilted her head back, imbibed, laughed. And I felt myself disappearing into all of their bodies. The birthmark of damnation faded, and I could feel the weight of my arms and hear the heave in my breath and I was not talking then, because there was no point.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  And then there's sushi, and the sushi bar. To say that chefs have always been well disposed toward sushi and sashimi would be an understatement. No single development in Western gastronomy has changed our lives as drastically or as well as that first moment when Americans and English-speaking restaurantgoers decided they could let go of their instinctive wariness of raw fish—that sashimi and sushi were cool and desirable and worth paying for. From a marketing standpoint, the spread of sushi lifted all boats for all chefs. Now that there was always a Japanese chef willing to pay twice the going rate for quality seafood, standards shot through the roof. And more importantly, the choices of ingredients we could reliably expect to sell our customers expanded. Customers willing to eat eel, sea urchin, belly tuna, and monkfish liver meant that French and Italian and American chefs could now offer the neglected, nearly forgotten traditional items once almost impossible to sneak onto our menus; we were now free to serve the oily, bony, squiggly, and delicious delights like octopus, mackerel, rouget, and fresh sardines that we had always loved—and that had always been essential parts of our various "mother" cuisines. Just as importantly, chefs liked to eat sushi. It was a flavor spectrum markedly different from what we were elbow deep in all our working days. Freshness and quality were immediately apparent—just look in the display—and gratifyingly devoid of disguise or extravagant technique. And after a long day dealing with waiters and floor staff, chefs could avoid further contact entirely, ordering the good stuff directly from the sushi chef. Raw fish also gave us a nice, clean, healthy protein buzz that went well with all the liquor we'd likely been swilling and made us feel better about the ravages of our various lifestyle choices.

• From Like Family

  Walking over to where Cordelia sat like a stone in her wheelchair, Teresa took her hands and serenaded her, filling in the parts she didn’t know with rousing da-dah’s. Cordelia was one of our favorites, though she didn’t speak, walk or feed herself. Senile dementia was her diagnosis, but that was a catchall on three-fourths of the patients’ charts; it didn’t mean anything. No one really knew why Cordelia stopped functioning. She was old, but so were lots of people out in the world, driving cars, baby-sitting their grandchildren. Cordelia was old, but that day, Teresa was singing vibrantly to her about cockroaches, and her face woke up. She began to sing back, mumbling at first. Teresa and I were shocked into silence, but Cordelia went on without us, her voice louder and clearer by the second. She knew the words Teresa didn’t. Her song grew so passionate, some of the other nursing assistants came in, and the shift RN and the director. The family was called. Within two weeks, Cordelia was up and walking the halls, going into the dining hall for her dinner, choosing her own clothes. After that, no one could tell us that music was not a powerful thing. 2. On another day, Teresa and I took separate cars to work because she had to meet Marcus right after. We left at the same time, but I made a light she didn’t and lost her. Halfway through passing out the breakfast trays, I realized I hadn’t seen her yet and hurried to the time clock to see if she’d punched in. Nope. Something had happened to her, I was sure of it; it was the only explanation. I went to the shift supervisor, a bitter pill of a nurse named Catherine Birch, and asked her if I could leave for half an hour to go out looking for my sister. She couldn’t spare me, she said, and besides, Teresa was likely just blowing off the shift. It happened all the time; I should just go back to work. When I insisted I had to leave, she insisted I had to stay, and finally I ran out in tears. So what if I lost my skanky job? This was my sister. Before I’d even driven a mile up the road, I saw Teresa walking against traffic, her white jumper spotted with blood. Her tights were ripped, and her knees and legs looked banged up. She’d totaled her car not five minutes from home and had been hobbling to get to me ever since. We hugged like people who had saved each other, which was true. Had always been true. 3. Spring found us in lawn chairs, working on tans in our ratty backyard. You only had to say the word sun around Teresa and she was brown as a berry, but I had only two shades—pink and red. It wasn’t fair.

• From Action (2014)

  So, since you’re going to be giving a LOT of it, it’s time we delve into some specific ideas about how to grant someone consent—and how to decisively withhold it. The ideal time to talk about what your sexual limitations are: prior to becoming embroiled in a physical situation where someone might be straining them. If you’re able to have a conversation with the person you’re potentially going to be intimate with before acting on whatever that means for you, you can tell them exactly what you do/don’t want to do. When I started seeing one long-term boyfriend, we spent a lot of time talking before anything beyond entry-level kissing took place between us, and while most of that conversation probably concerned our differences of opinion about what the best episode of The Simpsons was, we also asked each other plenty of questions about where to pause and check our sexual mile-marking systems to see if we were on the right track. Our answers were given candidly: I told him that at the time, I was inclined to wait a bit longer before having sex, among some other things that seemed intense to me. In turn, he told me about his history with sexual trauma, which made me rethink being too rough with him in ways I would have otherwise thought were playful when we actually started going far together. We knew each other’s deals, and we didn’t try to abruptly broker new ones mid-hookup without first considering them aloud while wearing clothing. Learning to ask and respond honestly to the question, “Do you want to try [whatever new thing]?” then actually taking heed of what was said, was probably what made the sex we had after a few months so brain-dominatingly incredible—we were both stoked and comfortable—and faithfully aware that the other person was, too. We still had our Milhouse–based differences, but all the other important approaches to compatibility, we agreed on. Not every sexual situation is going to come out of a relationship. Though that one was awesome while it lasted, I also find that, Whoa, so is attaching my face to people whose middle, or even last, names I don’t know! Those experiences proved the plentitude of frank, direct, flirtatious, and gentle ways to make consent a part of every hookup, regardless of how well you might (not) be acquainted. How you decide to approach the babes of your consensual and highly sexy future is up to you, but here are some pointers on how to score and feel great about it, how to make sure dreamboats-to-come are equally jazzed about what’s going on, and what to do if things take a too-intense turn and you want to set them back on track.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  My favorite position was something called a "heart opener," in which I lay on my back with a pillow under my spine so my arms hung limp on each side of me, my chest spread wide. The feeling of perfect cool air flowing over my open palms transported me to a meadow on a spring day. The feeling of my chest stretching wide made me feel courageous and whole. My back felt devoid of pain, my waist felt heavy and warm underneath the heavy blanket. Even my breath felt fresh and clean coming in and out of my body. [...] I was surprised to find tears streaming off the sides of my face. This pleasure—as intense as staring into the sun—didn't have to cost anything. It was available to me anytime. I was overwhelmed by my discovery of a rapturous new drug that also happened to be free and legal and noncaloric! But at the same time, I was crying because a small part of me was sad: How had I not known, until this moment, the pleasure of breathing? How had I not known that feeling air on my palms could be so comforting? How much pleasure had I missed because I was too in my head to pay attention?

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  [image file=image_rsrcR1.jpg] That was a moment, a joyous moment, beyond the Dream—a moment imbued by a power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill. This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello—which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. Even the Dreamers—lost in their great reverie—feel it, for it is Billie they reach for in sadness, and Mobb Deep is what they holler in boldness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying. We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here at The Mecca, under pain of selection, we have made a home. As do black people on summer blocks marked with needles, vials, and hopscotch squares. As do black people dancing it out at rent parties, as do black people at their family reunions where we are regarded like the survivors of catastrophe. As do black people toasting their cognac and German beers, passing their blunts and debating MCs. As do all of us who have voyaged through death, to life upon these shores. That was the love power that drew Prince Jones. The power is not divinity but a deep knowledge of how fragile everything—even the Dream, especially the Dream—really is. Sitting in that car I thought of Dr. Jones’s predictions of national doom. I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  The most important thing is not to have sex when you feel uncomfortable about it; your partner can wait. If you have a date and you anticipate some heavy duty kind of penetration, use common sense and don’t eat a big meal just beforehand. If you know you tend to feel a little bloated in the morning, then don’t have sex in the mornings. Take care of your general health: eat well, and make sure there is plenty of fiber in your diet. Do whatever you need to do to feel comfortable, and remember, we all urinate and defecate, so neither you nor your partner will die if you come into contact with a little bit of pee or poop. Anal sex can be enormously erotic, both because the anal canal is full of sensitive nerve endings, and because it leads to a level of vulnerability that can be very rewarding. For me, anal sex is a pathway to ecstasy. It makes sex so much more intense. The orgasms I have when I’m doing anal sex involve more of my body. They crawl up my spine. Don’t do it unless you are willing to be vulnerable, and you know that your partner will appreciate, respect, and care for you when you are in that state of vulnerability. Some women actually prefer anal sex to vaginal sex. The G-spot can be stimulated through the thin rectal wall, and the perineal sponge is stimulated directly during anal penetration; both of these have highly erogenous erectile tissue. A very few women are able to come from anal penetration alone, and a few more say they come more easily when they are doing anal sex, as long as they are getting some other kind of stimulation as well. Some women seem to find that stimulation of the anal area relates more directly to clitoral stimulation than vaginal stimulation does, which is not as outlandish as it seems, when you consider that there is a much greater concentration of nerve endings around the anus and the clitoris than in the vagina. I wouldn’t say I come more easily during anal sex; it is just different, I am more “out of control” with it. Orgasms from anal sex come from a different place. I feel them deep in my first chakra. I don’t know if it’s the naughtiness taboo, but I find anal sex intensely pleasurable and come a lot quicker. When I was with men I used to prefer anal sex as it left my clitoris more accessible to my fingers. Also it didn’t dull sensation, which is what happened during vaginal penetration with men.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Over the years, chefs have accumulated many happy experiences at counters. We liked them. We wished we could have one for ourselves. Maybe the earliest, loudest shot across the bow—and the one that caused the widest ripples—was the opening of L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris. Robuchon, of course, is one of the very best chefs on the planet, one of the French masters, and L'Atelier was, then, a radical departure. The elegant but casual space in Saint-Germain is almost entirely kitchen, with counter space and seats snaking at angles around its perimeters. Black-clad counter "help" act as combination server-sommeliers, clearing and setting, suggesting and pouring wines, and chatting informally with customers, as one would expect at a favorite diner. The precisely plated and delicious food would be perfectly at home in the dining room of a traditional three-star restaurant, but in fact benefits from the more comfortable ambiance. I recently sat alone and had a nine-course menu decouverte and never felt the awkwardness of the solitary diner. The servers were friendly and talkative, and the usually jaded, seen-it-all Parisians on both sides and across from me were positively effervescing with pleasure, as if recently released from prison. Eating jewel-like fare such as La Langoustine dans un ravioli truffe au choux vert, Le Cepe en creme legere sur un oeuf cocotte au persil plat, and Cochon de lait en cotelettes dories (accompanied by Robuchon's ethereal yet butter-loaded mashed potatoes)—even an ironic tribute to the classic Le Riz rond —was a joy. Gone was the stodginess, the ceremony, the invisible straitjacket that usually accompanies a meal like this. Customers felt free to tear at bread from the baskets placed above them on the sushi-style display case and mop sauce with abandon. It felt liberating. I left feeling as if I'd seen the future. (Or at least very much hoping I had.)

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I've been a fan of Paul Kahan's Blackbird in Chicago for years. Unlike some of the Second City's other practitioners, the place never seemed full of itself, as much a bar with surprisingly good food as a destination restaurant. With the opening of Avec next door, however, Kahan and his chef de cuisine Koren Grieveson moved into even more customer-friendly territory. The long, honey-colored cedar-walled room holds five communal tables and a long wine bar designed to encourage a "convivial atmosphere." Avec intends (as its name implies) that its impressive collection of wine be "best enjoyed with food, with friends, with company." From a wood-burning oven and single stovetop just across the long counter, an astonishingly good assortment of house-made salamis, artisan cheeses, and large and small plates like slow-roasted pork shoulder, smoked quail, lamb brochette, and whole roasted fish are slapped down by energetic and spectacularly knowledgeable servers who seem positively exuberant in their detailed descriptions of wine, cheese, and cured meat options. It's a great meal—and again, fun. As at L'Atelier, you look around and see people smiling, actually talking to each other, nicking food off each other's plates, and having what has been missing from so many moribund and pretentious dining rooms: a good time. There was a "well, what were you waiting for" feel when Mario Batali and his chef Andy Nusser opened Casa Mono in New York. By now, it seemed entirely right that we needed a place to eat perfectly wonderful small plates of Spanish-style tripes and cockscombs, blood pudding, and cured hams at a bare lunch counter. Great ingredients done right, by cooks standing a few inches away. Order a lot and dig in. That Mario himself is often to be seen happily picking from plates with his fingers sets an inspiring tone.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  A. Kolandavellu Pillai, C. Lachhiram, Rangasami Padiachi, and Amad Jiva. Parsi Rustomji was of course there. From among the clerks were Messrs Manekji, Joshi, Narsinhram and others, employees of Dada Abdulla and Co. and other big firms. They were all agreeably surprised to find themselves taking a share in public work. To be invited thus to take part was a new experience the community, all distinctions such as high and low, small and great, master and servant, Hindus, Musalmans, Parsis, Christians, Gujaratis, Madrasis, Sindhis, etc., were forgotten. All were alike the children and servants of the motherland. The Bill had already passed, or was about to pass, its second reading. In the speeches on the occasion the fact that Indians had expressed no opposition the stringent Bill was urged as proof of their unfitness for the franchise. I explained the situation to the meeting. The first thing we did was to despatch a telegram to the Speaker of the Assembly requesting him to postpone further discussion of the Bill. A similar telegram was sent to the Premier, Sir John Robinson, and another to Mr. Escombe, as a friend of Dada Abdulla’s. The Speaker promptly replied that discussion of the Bill would be postponed for two days. This gladdened our hearts. The petition to be presented to the Legislative Assembly was drawn up. Three copies had to be prepared and one extra was needed for the press. It was also proposed to obtain as many signatures to it as possible, and all this work had to be done in the course of a night. The volunteers with a knowledge of English and several others sat up the whole night. Mr. Arthur, an old man, who was known for his calligraphy, wrote principal copy. The rest were written by others to someone’s dictation. Five copies were thus got ready simultaneously. Merchant volunteers went out in their own carriages, or carriages whose hire they had paid, to obtain signatures to the petition was despatched. The newspapers published it with favourable comments. It likewise created an impression on the Assembly. It was discussed in the House. Partisans of the Bill offered a defence, an admittedly lame one, in reply to the arguments advanced in the petition. The Bill, however, was passed. We all knew that this was a foregone conclusion, but the agitation had infused new life into the community and had brought home to them the conviction that the community was one and indivisible, and that it was as much their duty to fight for its political rights as for its trading rights. Lord Ripon was at this time Secretary of State for the Colonies. It was decided to submit to him a monster petition. This was no small task and could not be done in a day. Volunteers were enlisted, and all did their due share of the work.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Kuchera knelt and said, “Kenny, you’ve got to turn the gas down sometime.” They were so beautiful at that moment it made me feel like I was pretty neat just because I was their friend. And then I had it again this fall watching Wide World of Sports . Pelé was playing his last soccer game. I don’t know anything about Pelé except what everybody else knows—that along with Muhammad Ali, Pelé is one of the world’s best-known human beings and greatest athletes. He’s supposed to be from humble beginnings and all that. I probably wouldn’t even have watched the program if it hadn’t come on right after football and if Balldozer, whose stepmother is Brazilian, hadn’t threatened to kill me if I switched the channel. So about a quarter into the game—right in the middle of the action—Pelé whips off his jersey and starts to jog around the stadium. All the players stop and the crowd wails and freaks out. The camera came up close on Pelé, and he was waving his jersey high and flashing his ivories wide and crying like a baby. Then they switched to the actual sound inside the stadium, and unless you understood Portuguese you couldn’t hear a thing but foreign and semi-insane screaming. They had a guy trying to translate, but you couldn’t hear him. It didn’t matter to me, anyway, because all I could think about was Pelé’s face. And my eyes filled up with tears for him and all his great days of playing. I wish every human being in the world sometime in his life could know the glory of tears like Pelé’s. And I hope I can, too. I walked home from the movie happy as a fish and about two feet off the ground, just psyched about being alive and aware of all the possibilities. I stayed about that high through the evening and finally came down on the way to the park when I began thinking about Mom and Dad and another year going by and all the possibilities. A person sure doesn’t have to be a great athlete or politician or doctor or artist or entrepreneur or performer of any type or degree of greatness to find challenge in life. About half the time I think it’s a great victory just to be able to smile semiregularly, to keep your head up, to keep from giving in and getting mean. I’m not ashamed to admit I need regular transfusions of confidence to keep me going. I need some examples that remind me, by God, it can be done. When I got home from the park I polished all Dad’s shoes and oiled Carla’s boots even though they didn’t really need it. I didn’t think I was sleepy, but I figured I should go to bed because I didn’t want to be tired the next night and fall asleep in the middle of seeing the deer.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  After the cats were killed, we took a break from pets for a while. Then we got dogs. Dogs are cool. Almost every black family I knew had a dog. No matter how poor you were, you had a dog. White people treat dogs like children or members of the family. Black people’s dogs are more for protection, a poor-man’s alarm system. You buy a dog and you keep it out in the yard. Black people name dogs by their traits. If it has stripes, you call it Tiger. If it’s vicious, you call it Danger. If it has spots, you call it Spotty. Given the finite number of traits a dog can have, pretty much everyone’s dogs have the same names; people just recycle them. We’d never had dogs in Soweto. Then one day some lady at my mom’s work offered us two puppies. They weren’t planned puppies. This woman’s Maltese poodle had been impregnated by the bull terrier from next door, a strange mix. My mom said she’d take them both. She brought them home, and I was the happiest kid on earth. My mom named them Fufi and Panther. Fufi, I don’t know where her name came from. Panther had a pink nose, so she was Pink Panther and eventually just Panther. They were two sisters who loved and hated each other. They would look out for each other, but they would also fight all the time. Like, blood fights. Biting. Clawing. It was a strange, gruesome relationship. Panther was my mom’s dog; Fufi was mine. Fufi was beautiful. Clean lines, happy face. She looked like a perfect bull terrier, only skinnier because of the Maltese mixed in. Panther, who was more half-and-half, came out weird and scruffy-looking. Panther was smart. Fufi was dumb as shit. At least we always thought she was dumb as shit. Whenever we called them, Panther would come right away, but Fufi wouldn’t do anything. Panther would run back and get Fufi and then they’d both come. It turned out that Fufi was deaf. Years later Fufi died when a burglar was trying to break into our house. He pushed the gate over and it fell on her back and broke her spine. We took her to the vet and she had to be put down. After examining her, the vet came over and gave us the news. “It must have been strange for your family living with a dog that was deaf,” he said. “What?” “You didn’t know your dog was deaf?” “No, we thought it was stupid.” That’s when we realized that their whole lives the one dog had been telling the other dog what to do somehow. The smart, hearing one was helping the dumb, deaf one. Fufi was the love of my life. Beautiful but stupid. I raised her. I potty-trained her. She slept in my bed. A dog is a great thing for a kid to have. It’s like a bicycle but with emotions.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  The sensory integration clinic in Watertown, Massachusetts, is a wondrous indoor playground filled with swings, tubs full of multicolored rubber balls so deep that you can make yourself disappear, balance beams, crawl spaces fashioned from plastic tubing, and ladders that lead to platforms from which you can dive onto foam-filled mats. The staff bathed Ying Mee in the tub with plastic balls; that helped her feel sensations on her skin. They helped her sway on swings and crawl under weighted blankets. After six weeks something shifted— and she started to talk.[26] Ying Mee’s dramatic improvement inspired us to start a sensory integration clinic at the Trauma Center, which we now also use in our residential treatment programs. We have not yet explored how well sensory integration works for traumatized adults, but I regularly incorporate sensory integration experiences and dance in my seminars. Learning to become attuned provides parents (and their kids) with the visceral experience of reciprocity. Parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT) is an interactive therapy that fosters this, as is SMART (sensory motor arousal regulation treatment), developed by my colleagues at the Trauma Center.[27] When we play together, we feel physically attuned and experience a sense of connection and joy. Improvisation exercises (such as those found at http://learnimprov.com/) also are a marvelous way to help people connect in joy and exploration. The moment you see a group of grim-faced people break out in a giggle, you know that the spell of misery has broken. 5. Getting in TouchMainstream trauma treatment has paid scant attention to helping terrified people to safely experience their sensations and emotions. Medications such as serotonin reuptake blockers, Respiridol and Seroquel increasingly have taken the place of helping people to deal with their sensory world.[28] However, the most natural way that we humans calm down our distress is by being touched, hugged, and rocked. This helps with excessive arousal and makes us feel intact, safe, protected, and in charge. [image "Drawing by Rembrandt van Rijn titled 'Christ Healing the Sick,' depicting two figures kneeling and holding hands in a gesture of comfort and connection." file=image_rsrc77T.jpg] Rembrandt van Rijn: Christ Healing the Sick. Gestures of comfort are universally recognizable and reflect the healing power of attuned touch. Touch, the most elementary tool that we have to calm down, is proscribed from most therapeutic practices. Yet you can’t fully recover if you don’t feel safe in your skin. Therefore, I encourage all my patients to engage in some sort of bodywork, be it therapeutic massage, Feldenkrais, or craniosacral therapy.

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  125  The Acts of Peter ends with the cruci fi xion of Peter. It is often thought that Peter was cruci fi ed upside down, as recorded in the Acts of Peter. The episode is preceded by the famous “Quo vadis?” o Peter had been preaching an ascetic message in Rome, telling even married women that they should maintain their chastity. The prefect of Rome arranges to have Peter arrested and executed. o When Peter learns that he is to be arrested, he goes into hiding. Eventually, he is persuaded to leave the city, and as he does so, he sees Jesus approaching, walking toward Rome. Peter asks, “Quo vadis?” (“Where are you going?”), and Jesus says that he is going to Rome to be crucifi ed. o When Jesus says that he must be crucifi ed again, Peter realizes his true meaning: that he, Peter, must be cruci fi ed, and by this crucifi xion, Jesus will be crucifi ed again. Peter returns to Rome rejoicing and praising the Lord. o Peter asks to be cruci fi ed upside down, not because he feels unworthy to be killed in the same manner as Jesus but to teach the people around him a lesson. What he tells these people is that the world itself is upside down. What seems good in this world—pleasure—is bad. What seems bad in this world—the pain of cruci fi xion—is good; suffering for the faith can bring eternal life. o The irony in this story is that we all are looking at things upside down, even though it looks to us as if Peter is the one who’s upside down. Only the one who dies for the faith can see the world properly. The Acts of John  A number of passages in the Acts of John describe John’s encounter with the historical Jesus; interestingly, these passages embrace a Docetic Christology.

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  27 experiences of Jesus after his death by his followers in a new mode of existence: As resurrected from the dead and exalted to God’s presence, Jesus is “Lord” and “Christ.” • Paul’s letters provide evidence for the claims made by the first believers, which are all the more startling because they were at odds with believers’ empirical circumstances. o First, believers claimed to have been saved; this salvation is not, in the New Testament, a future or a hoped-for state but a present reality. o Further, they claimed to be saved from negative conditions, such as slavery, law, sin, and death itself. o They believed they had been established in conditions of right- relatedness to God and other humans that could be described in terms of peace, joy, righteousness, and freedom. o They claimed new capacities of speech and action, both external (the working of powerful deeds) and internal (in moral dispositions). o At root, they claimed an experience of ultimate power that came from another and that transformed them. The symbol in the New Testament for this power is the Holy Spirit. The term “spirit” here refers to the medium of this power, which touches humans in their human capacities of knowing and willing. The term “holy” refers to the fact that the power comes from God, the Holy One. • The source for the earliest believers’ claim to empowerment—to being in possession of the Holy Spirit—was the conviction that Christ himself had been empowered by the very power of God. This is the Resurrection (exaltation) of Jesus. This combination— that Jesus had been raised and that believers possessed the Holy Spirit—was the fundamental conviction and experience of the earliest believers and the birth of the Christian religion.

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  28 Lecture 4: The Jesus movement and the Birth of Christianity o The early believers’ claim was not that Jesus avoided death, or lived on in some fashion in the memory of followers, or was resuscitated for a time. None of these equals “the good news.” o The gospel message (“the good news”) is that after his death, Jesus entered fully into the power and presence of God, that he was exalted—enthroned—to a full share in God’s own life. He is, therefore, “Lord,” sharing the designation of Israel’s God (Kyrios). o The Resurrection of Jesus is not an event of the past but a condition of the present, not something that happened only to Jesus but also to his followers, not a weakened form of presence but a more powerful form of presence of Jesus among his followers through “the power of the Holy Spirit.” o Because of this experience, believers saw themselves “in Christ.” They saw themselves not only as a “new covenant” within Judaism but as a “new creation” and a “new humanity.” Jesus was not simply a messiah for Jews but was the “image of God” for all humans. • This claim to the experience of divine power in an immediate and transforming fashion marked the first Christians and accounted— much more than their moral teaching or manner of life—for their appeal to others. o That a human being had joined the divine realm as a “son of God” and was a lord and benefactor to humans would not have seemed strange to Gentiles. o To Jews, the claim that Jesus was a messiah was not theoretically a problem, but the claim that he was Lord made his followers appear as polytheists and, therefore, as heretics.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  In today’s world, sex involves much more than our genitals and is about much more than procreation. To limit sex to making babies is as absurd and unrealistic as deciding not to use a motorized vehicle because God gave us feet to walk with. Sex can be merely functional, but it can also be an art form that gives us infinite pleasure. Who wants to live in a world that is purely functional? Beauty and joy are very important aspects of life. The variety of ways that we can express ourselves sexually is a gift, an offering from the universe. A woman can have as many different kinds of orgasms as there are ways of having sex. An orgasm can come and go in a second, or last for hours. It can be an electrical feeling on the surface of the skin; it can be a deep, pounding internal sensation; it can occur in the upper body, the lower body, or throughout the whole body; and can be accompanied by an out-of-body experience. It can shake your entire being, or pass through with barely an external sign. There is no one definitive experience that we can call orgasm—there are many. Nor can we limit what arouses us sexually to a physical touch, or to a sensation in a certain part of the body. There is no one right way of being sexual. Anyone can choose to claim her passion, and translate it into creative play, sexual or otherwise. The exceptions may be people who have been severely traumatized so that they are unable to recover positive feelings around sexual arousal; and people who suffer from severe chronic pain or illness. In general, what prevents us from embracing the full potential of our sexual desire is our fear of not being normal, and it is this, more than anything else, that we must overcome. There is no such thing as an abnormal desire. What’s more, there is no such thing as a normal desire! The concept of normality does not exist when it comes to what turns us on. There is no one right way of being sexual. On the contrary, there is a huge variety of sexual activities and responses, some of them stranger than your imagination could dream up, from foot fetishism to sadomasochism. A safe environment, one where the key concepts of consensuality and negotiation are honored, can be created to play with the oddest desires. What matters is that you don’t allow yourself to be swayed by the opinions of others, and that you do not harm yourself or others. Go for what you want; don’t censor yourself or anyone else.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  But the boldest, wackiest, most reactionary of the defectors to casual counter-style services has to be Montreal's enfant terrible, Martin Picard. At the crowded, chaotic, and giddily retro Au Pied de Cochon, he's stood everything on its head. The one-time chef of the city's "best restaurant," the more twee and traditional "big plate/little serving/cappuccino of whatever" Toque, Picard broke entirely from his precious, haute roots and opened a rude, crude, over-the-top fabulous ode to excess, specializing in insanely mammoth portions of Quebecois sugar-shack-style indulgence. You know from the very beginning what you are in for: Bar snacks are oreilles de crisses, ear-shaped tidbits of fried pork rind. Picard himself, usually unshaven—looking more lumberjack than chef—is to be found, usually in food-stained T-shirt, presiding over the madness by a roaring wood-burning oven. Dino-sized plates of pot-au-feu (a whole game bird, four marrow bones, stacked with boudin noir and foie gras), cassoulet, pig's-foot stew, duck "in the can" (a half duck breast, foie gras, and cabbage, slow cooked in a can and poured over a crouton topped with celeriac puree), and poutine —the Picard version of the classic Quebec guilty-pleasure fave of frites drowning in demi-glace and cheese curds, topped with a thick slab of melting foie gras—all are prepared in front of you by Picard's fellow transgressors, a crew of T-shirted and funny-hat-wearing cooks with similarly impressive resumes. There are a few tables, stuffed between wall and counter, but the fun is to be had watching the dedicated but underdressed cooks in the crowded, nearly unworkable-looking open kitchen, gleefully lopping slabs of foie and throwing them around like cheap shortening. The signature dish of stuffed pig's trotters is exactly that: two enormous pig's feet, absolutely jammed with foie gras and sauced with a rich onion cream sauce. It's too much. It's too loud. The kitchen looks like a train wreck. The portions are crippling. You won't want to think about foie gras for weeks after eating there. And it's an absolute joy to experience. Everyone—from customers, to cooks, to service staff, to the chef—seems happy to be there. The cooks will tell you so themselves, as they race to fill orders from postage-stamp-size work spaces, elbowing each other to get at one of the endlessly refilled crocks of mashed potatoes. There's no "attitude." It's about food—and company—and the enjoyment of both. It may well be the antidote to every other restaurant in North America. A LIFE OF CRIME "Why didn't you give him a beatin' then?" "Well, 'cause . . . uh . . ." "I told ya. Forget this other shit. Give him a fuckin' beatin'." "Well, the uh . . . I was waiting to hear from you." "I told you yesterday . . . What are you, Chinese? Hit him. This guy's nobody, and if he's somebody, I don't give a fuck." —John Gotti, former Gambino crime family boss , discussing debt restructuring with an associate

• From Action (2014)

  In gay male culture, cruising signifies a casual process of selecting and catching onto a temporary sexual cohort—if a guy is cruising, he’s testing the currents of all his potential sexual options, looking to see what strangers out there he might take home with him. That verb’s meaning for all people, in a slightly different sense, is also the general shape of my attitudes and manner when I am feeling most like myself: I drift, I pass through easily, I shred along the pathways of my life delicately and with joy, I travel forth in a manner that’s generally steady, if circuitous. I see how wide and sprawling the world is as though through a window of a plane that is cruising at 40,000 feet, and I am able to observe the interstellar-feeling smallness of its landscape’s dappled towns and cities, each light a cosmos of faraway people, direction-inversion: all those stars down there. It feels something like this idea from Audre Lorde: “There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself—whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.—because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. But once you do that, then you’ve lost… Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.” Hovering in this way, I feel like a spacecraft. Part of that is shucking off any one orientation. I am not a lesbian. I am not straight, nor am I bisexual. Not identifying feels luxurious: It is professing the right to visit with each of the coruscating dots I admire as I travel, rather than deciding a single, fixed star as my home. While this works well for me, many people with more discrete gender identities and sexual proclivities have felt unmoored inside of communities of people unlike them for their whole lives, and so find great power, camaraderie, and newfound convenience re: finding boneable people, and other blessed benefits in identifying. After all, to “orient yourself” is to affix your meaning, and your place—a right from which non-straight, non-cis, and trans people have long been disallowed. You have a right to decide your own name—to settle into a home rather than take to the streets, or to the space between bodies.

• From Escape (2007)

  The next morning we found not only candy canes and fruit in our stockings but a present under the tree. My father let us have candy once a year—no more. My mother was clearly disobeying our father in giving us sugary treats. And she let us eat them before we had our breakfast! Linda and I were old enough to realize that Mama was going to have to pay for her disobedience, but we loved feeling so spoiled. We had pancakes for breakfast and then went to the house of Mama’s friend, who’d also given her children a Christmas. These children told us Santa Claus had brought them presents, but we said ours came from Mama. My father came home the next night. I went to sleep listening to them fighting and screaming. The next morning, our Christmas tree was gone. Mama was crying when she fixed us breakfast. When we finished eating, Linda and I went outside to play and saw the Christmas tree lying under the house, stripped of its glittery lights. My mother was a beautiful person when she was happy. She glowed with delight and laughter the night we put up the tree. During these good times, Mother carried herself with poise and elegance and realized that she was a woman worthy of love. In Salt Lake City, we had been very happy and Mother was engaged in the world around her. In Colorado City, she was locked into a world of constant pregnancies, a loveless marriage, and a rural community strung together with dirt roads. My father criticized her constantly. The house was never clean enough, her children never well-mannered enough. Even after her babies, Mother was still thin, but my father felt she wasn’t thin enough. Mother sank into a deep depression after our first and last Christmas. She stayed in bed all day and stopped cleaning the house and doing the laundry. After a few days, the friend who had been her Christmas co-conspirator came over and told her to stop feeling bad about herself. If her husband didn’t want her to have fun with her kids, that was his problem. Mother rallied, but she never again did something with us in defiance of our religion. I did notice that she became more demanding of us and insisted on more perfection after the Christmas episode. I’m sure she would have preferred to play games with us instead of spanking us, but her own mental slavery prevented her from being who she was.