One reason I’ve hardly been blogging at all these past few months is that I’ve had a series of interesting, and fairly lucrative, freelance gigs on the side that have taken up what writing time I had. I like these. They’re interesting, and provide me a tiny bit of financial cushion, and keep me from being entirely dependent on my day job at the Big High Tech Company Who Keeps Laying People Off. The downside to this has been that I’ve been working too much. My weekends are pencilled out for the Freelance Gig, and there’s always that low-level deadline panic. I finish one, and then it’s off to research the next one. My last one is due the end of this month, and I feel myself limping toward the deadline like a marathon runner who is way at the back of the pack.

Even writing that I’m wearing out, that I’m running out of gas, scares me in this economy. I’m freelance now, which feels to me like a steady drumbeat of Take All the Work. There might not be more. It might be the last job I ever get. In this economy, Take All the Work, an be grateful you have it, even if you feel a little like you’re a car that’s been going down a long long grade, and your brake pads are heating up, and starting to smell, and you’re just not sure how long you can keep up the pace.

The Occupy Wall Street protests feel to me like a large-scale eruption of this same panic and exhaustion. It’s not just me. We’re all worn out. We went through the appropriate channels. We got the degrees and went to the cubicles and bought the houses and paid the mortgages until one day, the corporate overlords decided that the Big Corporations no longer needed, for example,  tech writers (or newspaper writers, or magazine writers, or programmers, or web designers or fill-in-the-blank). That what had been a real profession, with salaries and bonuses and which was considered an integral part of product development didn’t matter anymore. Gone. Don’t need you all anymore. Here’s a parting gift, have a nice life, and if you want your job back you can take it on an hourly basis as a contractor, with no benefits. Because workers bring down the stock price, and our Big Corporation, like all the other Big Corporations no longer really cares about the actual product, the actual product is just an excuse to sell stock, which is where the real money is. Especially for the executives. Who are not being outsourced to China and India. Who still have bonuses, and stock options, and health insurance.

I came down with a sinus infection this week. It started as laryngitis, which I figured I picked up at my 30th high school reunion by being short, and having to shout to be heard in noisy rooms. It felt like a virus, and seemed to be running its course when it took a left turn on about Wednesday, and lodged itself in my sinuses. Then I felt sick. Sick sick. I have fairly crappy health insurance, but I have some, so I went to our local clinic, saw a doctor and got some antibiotics. They’re starting to kick in, which is good, but I can’t help but feel that it’s in part a symptom of living the way we’re forced to live these days. I only really ever get sick when I’m forcing myself down a path that isn’t working (like the Victorian Illness that plagued me through my PhD program).

And I have it pretty good. I actually got what I’d always wanted out of the Big Corporation — a part time job. I’m also grateful to have the Interesting Freelance Gigs. But I’m tired. I’m tired and I havent’ done anything creative in months, and we only even managed to get out and go camping once this summer. We’re both Taking All the Work, because it’s there, and we’re grateful to have it, and in this economy, there might very well not be any more work tomorrow.

Which is, I think, part of the thrumming background panic that’s wearing me out. That’s wearing us all out. Having no job security is why people are taking to the streets. Because this is not unforseen — this is the result of systemic financial decisions that prioritize short-term gain at the expense of all else. At the expense of teachers and schools and fire departments and plowing the streets. At the expense of our communities. It’s the result of 30 years of systematically pitting Americans against one another, rather than calling on us to band together, which is the only way we’ve ever accomplished anything. That people seem to have remembered this and are gathering, in groups all over the nation is giving me great hope.

On the small scale, I’m going to try to be a little brave as well. I think I’m going to take a few months off from the Interesting Freelance Gigs and put my energy into finishing the novel I started last year. I let myself get discouraged by the publishing situation for too long, let myself believe that writing another book was futile because no one is buying anything and even if they do, who can make a living that way (and the darker, more subterranean idea that because my first book was only a very modest success it must mean I really have no talent after all and who do I think I’m kidding)? I bought the cynicism and despair and let it be my excuse for derailment.

And so, just as I’m going to dare to hope that a real movement for economic and social justice can grow from one public space to another, I’m also going to dare to believe that putting my own energy back into my own creative work might not just be a fool’s errand. Here’s to hope, something we’ve all been bereft of for far too long.

When Patrick died, my manager at work said to me “Welcome to the club no one wants to be in.” Her first husband had dropped dead one day after carrying the groceries into the house. “I knew he was gone before he hit the floor,” she told me the time we talked about it, late at night, stuck in a bar in the Denver airport after a missed flight. She had a two year old at the time.

One reason I grow impatient every year with the 9/11 coverage, is that it’s predicated on the idea that Americans had never suffered before, that we’d been living in some prelapsarian paradise that was violated out of the blue and now everything has changed. It’s just bullshit. Like a lot of people I know, like most of the people I know, I’ve always been in the club. My youngest brother died of cancer when I was eight, the same year my parents divorced, we moved off our farm into town, and I was thrown mid year in to a mean class of 4th graders. I was an easy target, half a year younger than the other kids, tiny and heartbroken, so making me cry was a cinch. So it’s not that I don’t feel bad for people who go on about how terrified they were on that day, about how their whole world changed, about how they’d always felt safe until that morning, and now they feel violated and unsafe and frightened — it’s that I don’t know who those people are.

Really? You felt safe? Existentially safe? You thought your life was supposed to work out the way you planned? Who the hell are you people?

When I was in college my mother ran a swimming and tennis club, and she hired a lot of people I’d gone to high school with. My mother likes young people a lot, and one thing you learn once you’re in the club, is that other members show up, sort of like feral cats. She had one guy working there who was just out of college, and his mother was dying of cancer. His father had already died, so he was looking at being an orphan. My mother decided Tom needed to learn to cook and so that fall, she invited three or four of those kids who weren’t going away to college to come over once a week for cooking lessons. Once a week she’d teach them all how to make something easy — a roast chicken, a stew or some pasta plus a salad and, because Tom had a sweet tooth, a dessert. They got together once a week and made something together, taught Tommy some life skills he was going to need (I think they had to teach him how to do laundry too), checked in on him, and most important, had some laughs during a dark time. It kept everyone’s head above water.

My mother and I have often had a fraught relationship, but I have to say, one important thing she taught us was to gather the members of the club, the broken toys, together and to feed them. We always cooked together. She taught me to cook and taught Patrick to cook and taught Tommy to cook. She took in orphans, and taught us to do the same. It was as much about being together, as much about having a common activity in the kitchen as it was about learning how to find a place where you could make the world feel a little bit safe again. When you’re all hanging around together, conversations happen, you wind up talking about things you might not have if you didn’t have something to occupy your hands. The first Christmas after Patrick died, I went to my friend Hope’s house. Hope lost her sisters and father in a plane crash when she was a teenager, she’s a card-carrying member of the club, but she’s also someone I’ve always cooked with. That year, we did an elaborate, multi-course Austrian Christmas dinner out of Saveur magazine for her mom, who is Swiss German. We cooked all weekend together, which mostly kept me from weeping, and we played with her kids, and her mother was happy to have a Christmas dinner from her childhood. And we got past that first Christmas.

So perhaps that’s my wish as 9/11 rolls around again, and the big powers use the event to gin up all sorts of unsettling feelings in the population. Go home. Cook a chicken with your family. Teach a kid to chop an onion or let them play with the mixer and make a cake. There are so many things we can’t control in the world, but with a little practice, we can control dinner. Maybe it’s the lapsed Catholic in me, but I do believe in the sacrament of dinner, of feeding one another, of standing around the kitchen chatting and making jokes and catching up on the day. So there’s my 9/11 wish. Go home. Cook dinner. Be together. Turn off the TV.

This month at Bookslut, I review three terrific books about making your own. Click here to read my review:

• D.I.Y. Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food from Scratch
• Home Made
• Tart and Sweet: 101 Canning and Pickling Recipes for the Modern Kitchen

Although we need more rain, I did manage to find about a pound and a half of chanterelles this weekend. Now it’s still so dry that there weren’t very many but mushroom hunting was cut short by the very dramatic collapse of one small dog. Granted, he has no achilles tendon on one side and wears an orthotic, but he went full tilt until we were about a mile away from the car, then sat down, panting, and wanted to be carried back. After a refreshing cooling off period in a creek, we walked, very slowly, and very limpily back to the car. He got limpier still when sympathetic people passed him on the trail. So much so, that one guy in his 20s, with a toddler in a backpack, offered to carry him. Oh Owie! Have some pride!

Anyhow, we did score a nice little haul of chanterelles, and I experimented with the Fungi all Olio recipe from My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy’s Undiscovered South. This is one of my favorite cookbooks I reviewed last year, and while I did her green tomatoes preserved in oil, by the time I got the book, the mushroom season was over. The green tomatoes were so delicious that I’ve been waiting all year to do mushrooms. In short, the method works like so: you salt the item you’re preserving, in this case the chanterelles, then boil them in vinegar for about five minutes, then dry them overnight on towels. What you want is for the surface to be a little tacky, but not leathery. Then you chop up some garlic and aromatics (I used chiles and summer savory) and submerge it all in olive oil. As you can see below, the chanterelles shrunk up a lot, I wound up with just over half a pint. (I also kept about a cup or so out for cooking fresh.)

Here’s the caveat though — garlic in olive oil can, according to the USDA, create an environment in which botulism can grow. They recommend refrigeration, which will solidify the olive oil. On the other hand, the author says her family has been preserving food this way for centuries. So, preserver beware. I have the mushrooms hanging out in the pantry for now, and if I don’t eat them all right away, I’ll probably put them in the fridge by the end of the week. I just wanted a chance for all the flavors to meld. I’m thinking these are going to be delicious on toast.

Oh! and another by product of this project was a bottle of lovely golden chanterelle vinegar! I bottled the vinegar in which the chanterelles were poached and used it to make mustard this weekend. It’s both lovely and delicious.