Election Reflections & The Pizza Curse
Hello friends! It's been a minute.
It’s tradition. Election night pizza. It is self explanatory – every 4 years we pair our nerves with a hot New York slice as we huddle around our TV watching election results. Some years were less stressful than others.
In 2012, I drifted to sleep even before the results for Obama were called around 11, rousing to catch Q munching on crust while confetti dropped. It’s always the same pie – large and round, cut into foldable triangles with grease dripping down into the plate. The earthy feeling of crust pairs with a shifting mass of sauce and cheese, and a couple slices are wrapped in foil and stored in the fridge, even yummier the next day.
This year, the presidential election rolled back around and we decided to deviate from the local spot around the block. Much like our lives, we had become burnt out by the routine of the local pizza joint. Further down the street is a Two Boots Pizza. Its “holy turf” East Village location was the backdrop in the early years of me and Quincy. It brings back memories of our first dates and feelings of growing love, warmth, and safety–something we desperately needed this election night.
I sent Q down to pick up our pie, as I had already gotten quite comfortable on the couch with my blanket and plethora of election night group chats. My screen was illuminated by the worries of my friends while I tried to remain calm and spread a feeling of hope I wasn’t sure I had myself. Around 8, I got a text from Q that he had ordered a personal pan by accident. I didn’t see what the problem was.
“It’s small,” he said, “It’s like, really small.” I suggested getting back in line but Q reported it was full of free election night pizza voters and stretched around the block. When he came home, I saw what he meant – it was more like a piece of bruschetta than pizza.
“That’s more than enough for us,” I fibbed, once again trying to fabricate a feeling of hope. I knew he was thinking exactly what I was: This pizza is a sign. The next day we quietly poured our morning coffees until we finally admitted what had been on our minds all night.
“The pizza cursed us,” we declared. There it was, a relief to say the quiet part out loud.
It cursed us. I sat with that for weeks, desperately trying to remember what life was like before the personal pizza debacle of 2024. As the horrors continued to unfold abroad and at home, as Donald Trump’s cabinet continued to take its shape in a series of nauseating headlines, I wondered what a curse really is.
Over the summer I got sick. I had my first manic episode in nearly 20 years after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in my twenties. Like the return of Trump, the return of my illness left me with an unshakable shiver, a haunting reminder that this thing still looms in my life.
I have recovered since, and I’m learning to see bipolar disorder as something to live with rather than cast out, but that persistent superstitious feeling overwhelms me sometimes, that somehow I did something to trigger this. “Step on the crack, break your mothers back” Turns out, it is very hard to walk this way, to exist while fixated on the ground. You move slower in an attempt to dodge the curse. The reality is that you miss your life completely.
Curses are comforting. Even if dreadful, they offer an uncomplicated narrative, one that both denies the confluence of events that lead us to a particular moment of time and likewise our ability to do anything about them. Curses pray on our sense of stigma and shame, they keep us in our silences and keep our sense of revolution small and inoffensive. Curses are simply ambivalence by another, sexier name.
Earlier this month, I went to an event with Isabella Hammad, for her second book Enter Ghost. The book, among other things, chronicles the staging of Hamlet in the West Bank by a very motley (think Franchise) cast of actors across Palestine. We happened to talk a lot about ambivalence - Hamlet being iconic in its ambivalence and how that “internal state meets hard political reality” in lives of her characters. Towards the end of her talk Hammad shared her own hesitations, namely her difficulty with writing directly about now, as in Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people occurring right now. She offered us the trick of “writing at an angle” rather than “direct,” a reasonable way of taking on something that is bigger than you “without it doing you in.” I’ve found this very helpful in the process of writing my memoir (i.e. Shithole Country Clubs) and even now as I begin to write about my mania. I think the truth is we need stories to break the curses.
We need pizza too.
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I'm happy to have found your Substack. I, too, have a bipolar diagnosis, though mine is technically schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. I just tell people it's bipolar. Same thing minus the stigma associated with anything "schizo." Yes, it's a curse, I guess, but pizza always helps! I'm writing a coming-of-age memoir, my first. Happy Holidays or Whatever-You-Celebrate.