anxiety & all his friends

As I type this, I’m starting to finally come off a 24-hour-long anxiety bender that served as what I can only hope was the peak of a month of paranoia, sadness, and anger that came about as a result of stress. I’m not sure what triggered my near-meltdown state or if it was triggered by anything. The only thing that I’m certain of is that this isn't the first time and that it won’t be the last time I face anxiety of nightmarish proportions for what feels like no reason and seemingly everything all at once at the same time. Even now that I’m no longer so deeply entrenched in my own anxious, paranoid ideations, I still feel a subtle sweat on my brow, I can still feel my hands shaking, and I know that I’m just a few of the wrong words with a fellow human being away from being a sobbing mess.

Oh hello there, dear reader. It’s been longer than usual since you’ve heard from me. This one is going to be less fun and flirty than the usual content because I need to get some shit off of my chest. If you’re one of the few people who actually got used to me posting weekly and were disappointed at my little sabbatical, my apologies to you are sincere.

Truth be told, I’ve actually written three articles to damn-near completion since my last post, but the chatter in my head has repeatedly shut down my efforts to take them to the point of posting until I just gave up at some point. Unfortunately, I’m really no stranger to this. Most of y’all probably don’t know this (and I’m cringing a little at the thought of there being anyone who does), but this is actually my fifth attempt at a consistent blog. I’ve tried to do this sort of thing many times and, without fail, life always gets in the way of my writing and creativity so I end up throwing in the towel time and time again. It wasn’t until this week that, when reflecting upon the disappointment I’ve been feeling about leaving my beloved blog to see no new activity, that it ever occurred to me that “life getting in the way” was likely not my primary issue in keeping any sort of consistency with this hobby of mine.

Were it only that simple and vague. To be fully transparent, my greatest fear and the voice in my head have the same name: inadequacy. Inadequacy haunts me at every conceivable opportunity. I am constantly followed by some paranoia of either not being good enough at whatever task I’m engaging with at that moment to merit any sort of reward or advancement with it, or of letting the treasure I’ve reaped from my efforts slip through my fingers. This has manifested itself in countless ways throughout my life. In my lowest moments, I have the warm trickle of tears rolling down my cheeks, while I try my damndest to squeeze the blood out of my paling hands after some menial social interaction. My inner voice will tell me that I wasn’t good enough, funny enough, smart enough, or quick-witted enough to be the person that I feel like I either should be, or am expected to be by others. This cowardice and insecurity that invades my bloodstream keeps my ventricles full of self-doubt and dissatisfaction as the primary agents of my ever-quickening pulse. And for what? Because I have some bloated expectation for myself about what the primary factors of my identity should be? Because I think other people care more about the idiosyncrasies of my personality more than they would ever have any reason to?

I’m regularly left to contend with this internal debate after some delusion-induced panic attack and I think that after all of this time, I have to just admit that it doesn’t fucking matter why this happens so much as it matters that I’m willing to and attempting to do something to mitigate it. A twenty-one year old Alexander once stood in a dumpster corral behind the Jack Allen’s Kitchen in Round Rock mid-Saturday double shift and shared a cigarette with a wise co-worker of mine who, in an attempt to assuage the misgivings I was having about accepting my chemical imbalance to be what it was, told me something that I’ll never forget: “you never cure depression; you just learn to manage it.” Tragically for twenty-eight year old Alexander, twenty-one year old Alexander took that advice and ran with it just to later look back and regret that I walked away from that conversation thinking that depression was something that you managed, but that anxiety was just a part of being an adult that never went away or saw any sort of significant relief. 

See, I’m sure that I’m not the only person my age that can relate to the memory of having parents that were too stressed about every facet of their lives to leave their children with any impressionable aspect of their personality that wasn’t superseded by stress-induced anger and sadness. Hell, a lot of our parents probably (definitely) need therapy and an anxiety disorder diagnosis, but the Gen X’ers and those who preceded them weren’t exactly known for their trust in clinical psychology as a vocation much less as a scientific practice. As with anything, we learn about the world as children through the lens of the world that our parents/guardians curated for us. Not to be an armchair psychologist, but seeing my father stress-cleaning instead of going to a friend’s wedding as an anxiety response to professional trouble couldn’t have possibly instilled any sort of value about effective and/or healthy stress management to me. The thing about my mother and father’s never-ending professional woes and how I took a front-row seat to them at way-too-young years old is that, as an adult, I can appreciate that aspect of adult stress as normal and damn-near inescapable. The problem that presents itself in juxtaposition to his, however, is that I’m routinely forced to put into perspective because of these sorts of memories how abnormal my constant low-hum of anxiety about everything else is. I’m twenty-eight so I’m not particularly inclined to have my career and professional life completely figured out at this juncture, but shouldn’t I have figured out how to drive to work and listen to music for fifteen minutes a few times a week without crying? How have I internalized this sort of anxiety as normal this entire time?

I think a lot of the relief that I experience in terms of having to reckon with my emotional ineptitude comes from the validation I get from others for performing well as an emotionally stable person and the way that I’ve manipulated my own behaviors and demeanor in order to pivot myself to receive said validation as frequently as possible. Nine out of ten people who know me will read this admission and be shocked that there was such a powder-keg of sadness and emotional volatility underneath my extrovert-presenting shell. At very least, I have to believe that they can’t see through me that easily because if anyone ever figured out that there’s a difference between me being an open-book, emotions on my sleeve sort of guy and the entirety of my personality being a character to mask the truth of my mental state, I wouldn’t be able to function around them without pining for their validation.

As someone who just read back through my work thus far on this page and gathered the same thing you did, let me just say: I agree: that was a lot. How much of my self-depricating musings are real and how much of that is inadequacy telling me that I’m too fundamentally flawed to have earmed the love of others being my authentic self? That train of thought doggedly leads to the suggestion that I must be liked for being someone that I’m not rather than who I authentically am and, at some point, I have to admit to myself that that’s no way to live.

I’m fairly satisfied to not dive any deeper into further detail about my anxiety and deteriorating mental state but rather to instead circle around to the obligatory silver-lining required after vomiting up a healthier dose of emotional honesty than any of my last four therapists have gotten out of me. The point is that I’m done with writing off my diagnosed anxiety as just routine necessary evils that are my prize for creeping up on thirty. I want to change. I want to stop sobbing because I’m afraid of my loved-ones dying. I want to stop self-sabotaging because I’m afraid that the affection I garner from my partner is unearned. I want to stop playing through relatively irrelevant conversations in my head because I’m upset with myself for not responding differently in the moment. I want to feel like I am enough. I want to accept my flawed nature as a side-effect of the human condition. I want to change even if that means I’ll present differently than the way I’ve accepted as being “the right way”. I want to look for another therapist and maybe take a pill that will make me feel like I don’t need to keep bleeding to be good enough.

There’s a freedom in admitting that I deserve better than the treatment I’ve given myself. Sometimes it’s not enough to be good; sometimes it’s even better to be good enough.

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oye chico: a revelation

Austinites are a fascinatingly territorial bunch. Despite the fact that I’ve resided in and about the Austin area for over twenty years, I don’t claim to be a part of the Austinite clique for two reasons. Firstly, even though I’ve been working in the city for some time, I actually only moved to Austin proper for the first time at the beginning of 2021 and I know how many big city natives feel about suburbanites claiming their zip code. The second (and arguably more notable) reason is that I was actually born in Miami, Florida eight years before my family moved us to Round Rock. Though this time of my life was brief - especially in comparison to the time I’ve spent in Texas - I’ve found that I have some unique cultural roots to contend with in comparison to many of my Austinite peers that came about as a result of the time I spent in Miami. 

Unfortunately, my biological father had some demons to wrestle with in regards to his family history and therefore, I didn’t even know that I was Cuban until after I was an adult. Despite this, I have fond memories of chowing down on Cuban sandwiches, arroz con pollo, and platanos as a Miami youth and I frequently find myself nostalgic enough about the food to consider buying a ticket to Miami for some food tourism. I’ve always detested the fact that I can’t get my hands on some high-quality Cuban food here in Austin. Everytime I catch wind of a Cuban spot, I find myself running to try it, only to be met with disappointment when my expectations aren’t met. The Cuban sandwich (or Cubano) in particular has been a real frustrating white whale for me in a town that’s known for hosting such a diverse selection of quality cuisine. With no desire to put down any business that’s made an attempt at my beloved sandwich, I’ll just say that I’ve tried many and been disappointed many times. What presents as a relatively simple staple of Cuban-American cuisine possessing only pressed Cuban bread, mustard, pickles, swiss cheese, ham, and mojo roasted pork is evidently a true challenge in execution for the people of Austin.

After Jon Favreau’s revelatory 2014 film ‘Chef’ that prominently featured cubanos through a borderline pornagraphic lens, there was a surge of chefs attempting to be the first in the city to have a cubano worth talking about, but the only ones who succeeded tragically didn’t survive (RIP Live Oak Market). There was always either dry pork, too liberal of an interpretation of what the ingredients should be, or bread that was too soggy to stomach. Everywhere I looked, only despondency awaited me. I was starting to feel like nostalgia was blinding me and that perhaps this elusive sandwich was just not as good as I remembered.

That was until Oye Chico showed up on the front porch of Better Half this week and proved to me that the impossible could be done by way of a damn near perfect cubano. I caught wind of this soon-to-be explosively popular food trailer the week before last by way of some random tweet that came across my phone and immediately began a heavy bout of anticipation that manifested itself by way of me harassing them on Instagram until they opened. After a week of delays from the originally announced opening day, I lined up early outside Better Half this past Wednesday with my partner and my kids in tow to get my hands on Austin’s latest foray into the cubano. Even if the sandwich was going to leave something to be desired, I was immediately inclined to commit myself to a return visit just based on how fun the space was. Between the pale pink benches sat a semi-covered container pool that I had to stop my fully dressed children from immediately jumping into and on the other side of a nearby fence was the always immaculate patio space shared by Better Half and Holdout Brewing which just screams “gratifying day-drinking spot”.

I walked past all of the tempting distractions and was greeted by a cutesy trailer sporting a neon white smiley face and a letterboard featuring only three items: the cubano, a cafecito, and cafe con leche. I’ve found in life that you can tell a lot about a food truck by how many - or I should say how few - items they carry. The initial interest I had about Oye Chico stemmed from the fact that they were going to open up shop with exactly one food item on the menu and, dear reader, if an establishment only has one item, you know they have the juice.While I waited for my sandwich, I sipped on my cafecito and pondered about how funny it was that even a cuban coffee that consists of just espresso and sugar could be so satisfying, yet so weirdly rare to find properly executed. Through the window of the trailer, I held my breath as I watched operator Carlos Suarez and his partner gracefully dance around each other in preparation of my cubano dreams. When my moment came, I opened up a brown to-go box to reveal a perfectly portioned mojo pork, ham, and swiss sandwich with thick, crunchy center-placed pickles, and mustard between the loving embrace of a crispy cuban loaf.

I was immediately smitten.

From the first bite, I was entranced. I remember only the ferocity in which I was swept up by the emotions that a quality, moist, supple mojo pork can evoke. The crispy cuban bread provided a perfect crunch and a delicate counterbalance to the tender meat. The cheese was perfectly melted, the mustard was spread on generously, and the pickles being perfect in flavor, cut, placement, and textural re-enforcement gave an extra point of finesse to the ensemble. The greatest tragedy that this sandwich fell to was how fast it was gone. Just as quickly as it met my lips, it was gone and I was left wondering if what I had just experienced was an overblown expression of nostalgia for finally having fulfilled my craving for the first decent cubano the city of Austin had to offer or if it was really that good.

I had to find out. So two days later, I visited Oye Chico for a second time to treat my partner and I to another go around for my birthday, this time dressed to enjoy my beer in the pool while we waited. When I arrived around 12:30, I ran into a friend of mine who had stopped in to try the sandwich after hearing me rant and rave about it, but was met with disappointment that they had sold out already; it would seem that the people of Austin had already caught on to the justified hype. But to my benefit (and to my poor dear friend who had to depart for work’s misfortune), the fine proprietors of Oye Chico simply had to go re-up on bread before they could come back and crank out more sandwiches before shutting down at 2 for their regularly scheduled break between services. I was happy to wait and so I did - literally right in front of their window so that I could be the first to get my hands on this sandwich-shaped masterpiece once more. As promised, a perfectly executed cubano was in my hands just a short time later. I made a distinct effort to savor it this time instead of consuming it as ravenously as I did the first time.

I can’t explain it, but it only got better. After churning out several hundred cubanos over the course of their first few days, it would seem like los chicos at Oye Chico were only getting better at this. I’ve since that moment taken every conceivable opportunity to spread the gospel of Oye Chico to anyone who will listen because I need them to be around forever. When (not if) they convert this thing into a brick and mortar, I’ll be the first in line, but I reckon that it’ll be a long one so, if you haven’t made your move to Better Half’s newest patio addition, I wouldn’t waste any time if I were you.

Oye Chico is open at 406 Walsh Street from 9AM to 2PM and 5 PM to 10PM Wednesday through Sunday

For more information, visit their website or follow them on instagram

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maybe you didn’t like ‘the bear’ because it didn’t coddle you enough

If you know me or at very least have assumed me to be similar to the majority of people in their mid-twenties who feel the same way, you’ve likely surmised that I’m not a fan of capitalism, but unlike most people who don’t like capitalism, I have a hard time these days calling myself a socialist or even a leftist as I’ve more or less given myself completely to being a full-on defeatist. I spent enough time running around with every brand of leftist you can imagine to have seen that leftists as a whole all share the collective achilles heel of being too petty and sectarian to ever effectively get out of the base building stage and into the organizational stage. Without that sort of forward momentum, I cannot force myself to pretend any longer that my ilk has any hope of victory against the most pervasively powerful empire that has ever existed. I won’t say that the people fighting for socialism are wasting their time, but I will say that they lack the most important tool to cross the gap between where we stand now and any semblance of victory: the resources to deliver any sort of material aid to the people who needs it most. Without that sort of material aid, we the people are regularly tasked to deal with the feeling of being powerless to help ourselves. It may feel only natural then when you are so powerless in a world that doesn’t care if you live or die to try and lash out at anything within your reach to make you feel as though you have some sort of power to make a change. A massive, systemic paradigm shift won’t happen overnight and it probably won’t happen in our lifetimes so while focusing on messaging is probably the best we can do right now, pretending that we’re doing much more than that feels a bit disingenuous.

It is because of said collective inefficacy and the seemingly inescapable nature of capitalism that I find the more liberal and/or performative efforts to do harm mitigation by way of social justice-related online content to be more than a little annoying. In the insular online communities in which we primarily exist as a collective, left-leaning people have done something supremely dangerous: created echo chambers in which we can eventually arrive at some pretty out there opinions and stances that we would have never arrived at if we had done what we should have been doing instead which is immersing ourselves amongst other working class people in real life. The way that this has shaped up for us in the public eye has been… less than stellar. Even people who we wouldn’t consider right-wing reactionaries are rolling their eyes at ivy-league liberals finding new ways to condescend to working-class people about articulating themselves “incorrectly” or not knowing that the origin of a word is somehow problematic in nature. What once started as black and brown people defending themselves from a never-ending stream of racist violence has now devolved into white folks turning it around to condescend to other marginalized people so that they too can participate in the oppression olympics. I know that I’m generalizing and I’m not one of those people who’s going to lament about how “everyone is offended by everything these days”, but the entire development of the phenomenon of being offended by such things has occurred in spaces that are completely removed from real working class people. I hate to be the one who breaks it to y’all, but the United States of America has some of the worst public education in the “developed” world so if you think that people who have decent access to public education (much less those who do not) are being taught all of the same things as those who would police their language, you’re harmfully mistaken. Tragically, it doesn’t feel like most people care about actually making a difference so much as they care about being right and it shows in the way that these discussions are conducted.

However, I am of the volition that one of the single greatest mistakes in normalization that we have made as a society has been, to quote my friend Genesis, the insistence on making violent exploitation palatable by attempting to soften the edges of every movie, show, song, article, tweet, etc. to our liberal likings. I’ve had this thought before, but never so vindictively as I did earlier this week when I stumbled upon an instagram post by the Chicago Hospitality Accountability Actions Database (CHAAD) that put forth some criticisms of a recent release that I quite enjoyed, FX’s The Bear. For those uninitiated, The Bear follows a young, brilliant chef who is struck with family tragedy and is willed by the passing of a family member, his family’s sandwich shop which he takes on and attempts to make better. As a lifelong service industry professional, I’ve waited a long time to see a film or show that could really capture the real grit and stress of working in such an environment and, though the show was definitely a bit bombastic and dramatized, it did a better job than anything else I’ve seen of making a show for us that didn’t feel ridiculous or cartoonish while simultaneously providing real entertainment value. That said, I can absolutely understand why some people couldn’t watch it because, as someone whose work as a chef helped nearly drive me to suicide, the stresses and pits of depression that were articulated in the show were, at times, almost too real. While I have worked through my issues and now feel like I could step on a line again without having a panic attack, I cannot speak for everyone who has shared a similar experience to me in that regard and I will not attempt to do so. That said, I took some serious issue with the content of the criticisms, but let’s get into what was actually said before we go much further.

The summation of the overall criticism against The Bear leveled by CHAAD was as follows:

“The service industry fosters traumas in many ways which is why watching The Bear may have been unpleasant for you. It is a fictional representation of very real abuses and traumas. The show normalizes abuse in hospitality spaces and at no point offers an alternative course or accountability for the harm caused.”

I feel like I have to ask here: when did it become the responsibility of artists and content creators to make happy, equitable stories that develop into representations of a moral effort to enact change into their real life equivalents? I’m sorry, but when you watch a show that contains anything remotely upsetting, is it necessary to the quality of the program to make you feel good about what’s happening? Just because we work in the service industry doesn’t mean that anyone has a responsibility to make us feel better about the aspects of our job that have caused us trauma and discomfort. Hell, I didn’t have any interest in watching a documentary about restaurant work when I started watching The Bear; I pressed play because I wanted a relatable show with good acting and a story that I found compelling and entertaining. If you don’t like the show for some other reason, I won’t sit here and say that you have to. You’re allowed to like things that I don’t and vice-versa. But this specific criticism seems a bit off to me.

I’ll ellaborate.

Call me obtuse, but, to me, it seems like any efforts to put pressure on a creator to make their content more comfortable for me to watch would be me making my trauma and mental illness (which I have plenty of, fear not) someone else’s problem. As much as I feel as though anyone who I know should be able to have an honest conversation with me about anything that I may say or do that is triggering for them, putting that expectation on strangers is weird at best and petulant at worst. The immaturity one must possess in order to expect the world to coddle you to this degree is at a level that I would expect from literal children - not adults who claim to be working professionals. Additionally, there is nothing that the show “normalizes” about the service industry so much as it just captures an experience that has been very real for a lot of us perhaps too accurately for comfort’s sake. To normalize the hostility and toxicity that many of us have experienced working in kitchens, the show would have needed to glorify it in order to justify its existence, but anyone who watches The Bear will tell you that the feeling you got instead of glorification was dread.

Listen, I know that there’s a line here. Maybe we could stop having graphic sexual assault scenes in movies and shows because it’s gratuituous and fucked up to subject people to one of the most dehumanizing things a human being is capable of experiencing. Maybe we can stop making borderline snuff films or at very least make them the niche genre that they deserve to be instead of a mainstream form of entertainment. But at what point in time do I get to evicerate a piece of media because I get upset seeing happy families with parents who love and support their children? When does my trauma become a valid centerpiece to an argument about if a piece of media is problematic? Rhetorical - I don’t want to put that on anyone else because I’m an adult who recognizes that my experience isn’t a ubiquituous one. I recognize that framing everything through the lens of my own level of personal offense is opening up society at large to adopt commentary that will exacerbate harm instead of mitigating it because we’ve run being offeneded into the fucking ground already. Because of such examples of liberal whining, we on the left are now the boy who cried wolf and the more we nitpick, the less anyone is going to take anything that we have to say seriously.

This isn’t to say that feelings don’t matter. A lot of people that I don’t particularly like or have anything in common with from an ideological perspective coined the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings” and, to an extent, this is true in some contexts. Where the point tends to miss is that your material reality is shaped almost completely by your feelings. If you’re saddened by someone’s absence in your life, you will likely exhibit behaviors that will exacerbate their absence. If you’re too scared to remove yourself from a situation that you don’t have any desire to be in, your feelings of cowardice and apprehension will keep you in that situation. These examples are meant to demonstrate that your feelings can inform your reality which is factually occurring in front of your very eyes if you put enough stock into them; there is an undeniable realness in the subjective. But when do we have to distinguish between an appreciation for the subjective importance of our feelings and trying to force objectivity regarding our personal stances on to those around us?

I can play semantics with this type of thing all day, but at the end of the day, I think that the biggest issue here is the entire reason that I opened up this article the way that I did: the simple fact that this issue is not a show normalizing trauma and abuse so much as the problem is that these abuses exist in the first place. You can quote me on this: I will never sit here and pretend that the restaurant industry doesn’t have a ton of problems that the workers who populate it face. Hell, I’ve touched on that a little before, but nearly every single “hospitality adjacent issue” that’s been described in this post is not hospitality-specific whatsoever as much as they are capitalism-specific. The overarching issue is that capitalism has turned the world into a place in which very few can survive without surrendering themselves to labor exploitation, violence and trauma in the name of paying their bills. This is the world that we live in and, despite what anyone may have you believe, we’re nowhere close to making any kind of change that will take us out of that.

Should we not be able to look in the face of the system that harms us and steal from us without being paralyzed by what’s been taken from us? I already have serious reservations about whether or not we will ever be able to rise above the money-hungry deciders who have decided that our lives and comforts are less important than lining their pockets, but I feel like we can say with certainty that softening the blows that we’re repeatedly taking will serve to do little aside from inoculating us to the harm we experience and, therefore, delay any progress - albeit infuriatingly incremental in nature - that we are capable of achieving. As much as I feel like my hope for breaking free of capitalist chains has diminished to the point of non-existence, we shouldn’t sedate ourselves from reality by demanding that any sort of representation of capitalism’s sins exist to make us feel better about our own anecdotal experiences with them. If a piece of art or media that carries broader connotations about society upsets you, then it likely did what it intended to do. If there was something unrealistic that tried to preserve the sanctity of a problematic aspect of its real life equivalent then I understand where this sort of vitriol comes from, but in this instance, I believe that restaurant workers who find themselves more prone to this type of criticism took the first thing they found that they saw a reflection of their own lives in and ran with it.

I know that this post by the CHAAD has served as a bit of a sacrificial lamb for my own musings, but it’s merely a drop in the ocean of content that’s been created to perpetuate some woker-than-thou, inaccessible, borderline-incomprehensible culture of performativity and caring without direct action. That said, the way that the criticisms that CHAAD laid out were presented as indicitments against the show and the restaurant industry at large that couldn’t be denied by anyone that considers themesleves progressive isn’t uncommon amongst your standard social justice instagram accounts that post ten page polemics rallying against a new percieved evil every week. There’s no way that I can coherently articulate exactly what it is about these sorts of accounts that make their posts read with this tone - and I’m absolutely open to writing that off as a personal reaction - but I know that I’m not the only one who feels like I’m being talked down to when I read stuff like this. If we want to actually foster a culture of caring the way that these detractors from progress say that they want to, we should be attempting to wake people up to their own suffering instead of protecting them from it. Though I do know that some people need that protection, those people are once again far outweighed by all of those who just claim that they do. Let’s save our pseudo-outrage about everything we have the chance to come across and start doing something better with our time. Alternatively, you could just pipe down and stop having a hard-line opinion on every fathomable thing, but I’m pleading with you to please stop making screaming on the internet the centerpiece of your activism.

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