alias Bruce.

#WaitingAtStarbucksWhileBlack.

You may have already heard – see Melissa DePino’s Twitter feed – about two innocent black patrons being forcibly hauled away from a Starbucks by Philadelphia’s finest. Bulldozer-through-the-drywall ambushes like this, day after routine day, decade after lived decade, are what white privilege really, truly looks like

Driving/walking/shopping/dining-while-black are intolerable clichés because of their insane normality: they happen constantly and brutally to people of color who are not believed when we report them, and they never, ever happen to white people to whom these experiences sound like some impossibly dystopian nightmare.

One of the redeeming qualities of cell phones – which have done plenty to deaden us to the immediacy of our surrounding human company – is that they can now instantly and globally deliver video of happenings that non-affected people have previously found easy to dismiss as mere stories. No more. Today, the only remaining people who will defend what happened on April 12 to two black men awaiting a white friend at a Starbucks in Philadelphia are those who would eagerly wait on a hearth on Christmas Eve for a Ku Klux Klan Santa Claus to descend though the chimney bearing personal gifts for white supremacists.

Handwritten note to American white people: Awful things that have never happened to you happen every day to black Americans, and they happen with the authority and approval of official institutions of public safety, including Philadelphia’s police department, led by a black chief.

We black and brown citizens, however, will not tolerate this. Will you, as a white citizen, remain silent? Or will you join us in the imperative to do unto others as you would have done unto you?

The supreme irony is that Starbucks’ notoriously bitter brand of roasted coffee is nowhere near worth getting arrested for in the first place.

A Slate piece on Major League Eating,

the big-money competitive sport that now has corporate sponsors (Coke, Netflix) and millions of TV viewers, is a ruthlessly good read if you can stomach it. Before you shrug off gluttony-for-money as "just a joke," consider 1.) Its stature as a deadly-serious big-time business, and 2.) What it says about us that we cheer on competitors who eat 60 hot dogs in 10 minutes while people starve. Another big fat nail in the extra-large coffin of industrial supremacy. Read it and _____ (insert gastrointestinal verb of your choice).

Thanks to Jenny for the heads-up.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Our nation's annual November dinner sermon about being thankful for the yummy spoils of conquest can give appetite a bad reputation. Not only that, its habits of mind can push the outrageous pleasures of unhurried sensual ritual -- the deliciously slow riot of food or sex or song or whatever is on your menu -- off the table for the remaining 364 days of our year, starting with the morning after Thanksgiving, when crowds of shoving shoppers converge at dawn at the barred gates of big-box stores.

Pablo Neruda is a great treatment for this appetite disorder. Here is his "Ode to Conger Chowder." Happy Thanksgiving.

Ode To Conger Chowder

In the storm-tossed
Chilean
sea
lives the rosy conger,
giant eel
of snowy flesh.
And in Chilean
stewpots,
along the coast,
was born the chowder,
thick and succulent,
a boon to man.
You bring the conger, skinned,
to the kitchen
(its mottled skin slips off
like a glove,
leaving the
grape of the sea
exposed to the world),
naked,
the tender eel
glistens,
prepared
to serve our appetites.
Now
you take
garlic,
first, caress
that precious
ivory,
smell
its irate fragrance,
then
blend the minced garlic
with onion
and tomato
until the onion
is the color of gold.
Meanwhile steam
our regal
ocean prawns,
and when
they are
tender,
when the savor is
set in a sauce
combining the liquors
of the ocean
and the clear water
released from the light of the onion,
then
you add the eel
that it may be immersed in glory,
that it may steep in the oils
of the pot,
shrink and be saturated.
Now all that remains is to
drop a dollop of cream
into the concoction,
a heavy rose,
then slowly
deliver
the treasure to the flame,
until in the chowder
are warmed
the essences of Chile,
and to the table
come, newly wed,
the savors
of land and sea,
that in this dish
you may know heaven.