okay buddy boy (christmastime in petaluma)

It’s Christmastime in Petaluma, town of 60k, home to chicken farms and creameries. Outdoor planters downtown are shaped like eggs to pay homage. The name of the town comes from the indigenous Miwok (Péta Lúuma). You wouldn’t know it, walking around. Almost everyone in the coffee shop where I start writing this is white. A mom behind me says to her kid, “Okay, buddy boy.” Yesterday at a bakery in the town 15 minutes south a bubbly worker who looked plausibly semi-Asian said to my mom and me, “Do you guys live in Petaluma? I think I’ve seen you around.” I complimented her memory. On the way out I thought, there aren’t that many of us; you don’t forget seeing a person of color in Petaluma. (My sister makes a declaration to me, stage-whispered, when she spots brethren in the wild.)

My parents’ home is an immaculate hoard site, like if Smaug the dragon had Clorox wipes and ceramics instead of gold. On display, among many other items, are:

• Framed baby photos of my sister and me. Her: dark, lean, pitiful aura, scrapes of mysterious origin. Me: fat, white, gleaming, a burrata of a baby;

• 3 different TVs, one in the kitchen and never used. 2 of them were free;

• Easily over 1000 books;

• Two coffee tables in the living room, placed in close proximity to each other and at such an angle that passage to both couches is impeded;

• 5-6, possibly 7 couches, 3 leather and the rest upholstered, 1 (free) outside and lightly sprinkled with mold (not designed to be an outdoor couch), indoor couches covered in thick layers of other fabrics, like the massive armchair that faces the TV — on it are:

  • a crocheted blanket;

  • 2 bandanas (one on each arm) branded “Mashable”;

  • lace doilies;

  • another blanket

• several dumbbells, all wrapped in socks and/or underwear, so would-be lifters must glean their weight by approximating from the lumpy shapes;

• bright green shampoo by the kitchen sink in lieu of hand soap, until I visit, when the McEvoy Ranch rosemary and clary sage hand soap ($18.95, glass bottle, delectable scent, my referral link here, JK, unless?!?) is duly brought out for its star turn. I gave it to them last Christmas;

• dish soap, many times diluted with water;

• 2 refrigerators, 1 in shed and 1 in the main house, house fridge reeking of various stages of allegedly intentional ferment, everything inside swaddled in either nondescript containers or actively misleading reused consumer packaging (e.g., inside of an old plastic bag that reads “Superfood Powder,” three sweating cheeses);

• approximately 300 dried pumpkin seeds for human consumption, homemade, spread across several jars (mostly bearing labels of their previous inhabitants);

• a plastic tub stuffed with bags of superfood powders like a filing cabinet. Here, the bag names do accord with their contents. The names would make for a fun jingle (Eat your beet! Mesquite is neat! Maca for better caca!)

The house is not only an explosion of stuff but of color — the dark red of the living room walls, a bejeweled Indian elephant wall hanging, 2-tone purple in the guestroom, my bed with its imperial Chinese red silk sham and bright yellow duvet featuring printed birds.

I regularly bite down comments to the effect of “Why do two people have seven couches and two fridges?” or “Why do you cover every goddamn surface with stretched-out old clothes and tablecloths you found for free?” because the answer is probably some alchemical mix of socialization, brain chemistry, and trauma that gets turned into “I just like it that way.”

Another contributing factor: my sister and I have (in what Marie Kondo definitely said, in her decluttering book, was an asshole move) left the clothes, gear, and artworks we can’t fit into our transient lives with our parents, so the house becomes a palimpsest of all the stages of our lives. Encountering objects I’d long forgotten, I find myself yanked back into the body of a self my present one cringes at. When I find something like that — say, hypothetically, a saucy Hillary Clinton campaign t-shirt or Pink by Victoria’s Secret undergarment, two sizes too small — I try to donate or toss, but my mom often protests and says, “I can do something with that.” (A thong may not have a soul, but if I was one I would prefer an honest death, maybe immolation, over the Promethean experience of being wrapped around an object and picked to pieces.)

My parents’ house does give me some insight into why my dream home is an anchorite’s cloister — no, not quite, but something empty, something clean. Wood, stone, muted neutrals. Here is a fantasy of mine: I imagine a thirty-foot giant approaching my parents’ home. The giant is Gwyneth Paltrow, wearing elevated basics. Giant Gwyneth Paltrow smiles with her face that exists on a plane beyond age as she sticks a hypodermic needle into the house. The needle sucks out all the stuff and most of the color, a bloodletting, until what’s left are walls a shade paler than a robin’s egg and maybe a few carnations inside of a clear glass column vase and undyed organic linen duvet covers from Coyuchi on low wooden beds.

In the real house, I am making blueberry pancakes because I am so hungry for carbs the morning after eating a dinner of mostly bok choy and tofu. My mom gives one of her pancakes to my dad and chooses to eat warm purple slop (microwaved yogurt and superfood powders). At night I put on The Naked Gun (2025) and my dad putters off to the kitchen to eat a slice of bread over the sink because he’s not allowed to eat in the living room (crumbs). I’m so hungry because I don’t know where anything is in the fridge. I crave empty space in the refrigerator and an accurate labeling system in the same part of my brain that wants sex or food.

When my parents die I’m going to feel like a cunt for writing this but I think I’ll feel like a cunt when my parents die, regardless, and thinking this is pretty liberating. Also, to be clear, by the same logic that my mom uses after she says something devastating and non-actionable about me/my sister and follows with “only your family will tell you the truth,” this isn’t me talking shit, it’s a love letter.

I tell my friend A. about my parents’ fridge, how it’s like an escape room in there, a real problem-solving exercise, and she says that she thinks children develop the way they are in reaction to their parents, because A. has ADHD and a chaotic house while her mom is obsessive and a neat freak. A. says her own fridge probably looks like my parents’.

NON SEQUITUR:

I’m talking to my mom about something and with barely a pause she starts telling me a long story about something unrelated. I ask her if there was a connection I didn’t catch. Then I Google “is my mom autistic” on my phone, read a Reddit thread, and ask my mom questions from the RAADS-R in the car on the way to the city 15 minutes south. As I’m doing it I think about my dad and my sister too. My sister and I take the test for fun. I text her:

“Dude i was thinking

Maybe the problem with our family is that the four of us are all autistic

But in completely different ways”

Tag yourself!

• THE ONE WHO IDENTIFIES TREES: Preternaturally good sense of smell, command of esoteric facts, is unable to wear certain textures, watches YouTube videos on topics like “What happens if you jump into the sun,” is thrown off kilter by interruptions (e.g., finds it difficult to drive while people are engaged in a conversation);

• THE ONE WHO YELLS “DID YOU HAVE DIARRHEA YESTERDAY?” ON THE DEATH-QUIET SUBWAY IN TOKYO: Prone to saying or doing things in public that cause embarrassment to other people, insensitive to social censure they do not perceive as warranted, unable to comprehend or pretend interest in certain mainstream topics;

• THE ONE WHO CAN’T MAKE EYE CONTACT BUT WILL ASK “HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU MAKE A YEAR?”: Socially anxious, stressed out by groups, asks very direct questions, easily overwhelmed by noise, smells, activity, very into a couple things;

• THE ONE WITH THE SPREADSHEETS: Rules, order, trying to blend in, Christmas cards, the systematic cataloguing of human behavior and norms precisely because of everything about them that is unintuitive and nonsensical

As a group it’s a particular kind of mayhem, whether or not any of us are neurospicy enough to meet a diagnostic criteria. I think it’s probably not an accident that we are having an extremely small Christmas and almost always do, and that I feel self-conscious about it (I’m Spreadsheets) but possibly slightly less out of a putatively universal human need to be In Community With Others and more like, Damn, I would love to design a table for 16 people, with matching plates and an undyed linen tablecloth and maybe a terracotta-colored table runner and some handmade namecards, which is to say it’s hard to tell when one wants to be around people because you love people or because you want to look like the kind of person who has people because that seems like the type of person you should be (and because you want to acquire some goods).

NON SEQUITUR 2:

A final parting anecdote, which will make you think I’m either a gastronomic snob or justifiably being driven to insanity here: this morning, I go to get my dad a cheesecake for his birthday, but at the last minute, my mom texts me.

“Hold off the cake

Dad wants the grocery outlets cheese cake”

We go to Grocery Outlet, where my mom grabs an assortment of items, including a brie flavored, ominously, “Tropical.” The back of the tropical brie reads “Fun Flavors for Kids!” and while it advertises a mango on the front, the only possible connection to fruit comes from the vague “Natural Flavors” in its ingredient list. I ask her, “Are you sure you want this?” She looks critically at my bag of individually-wrapped sharp cheddar snack bites, which I have snatched in order to put some midday calories into my body, and says, “Lots of packaging.”

I waltz nostalgically through the frozen aisle, a place that was once my safe harbor when I wanted options that weren’t my mom’s cooking. Eating her food is a game of roulette: she has the deranged genius of a newly off-campus undergraduate, by which I mean she stir fries a lot of ingredients, sometimes it works really well, and sometimes things should not be cooked in combination with each other, like week-old leftover papaya salad from a Laotian restaurant alongside an unrecognizable duck. If you’re a person who likes to know what you are eating you will also have a rough time, since her throw-it-in-and-see-what-works mentality doesn’t lend itself to thorough answers to the question “What is this?” For instance, I realized while eating rice noodles tonight that there were also crunchy pieces of shrimp exoskeleton. One man’s cross-contamination is my mother’s flavor. She has never followed a recipe.

At Grocery Outlet, fog rises up romantically from the open cold case of DiGiorno’s pizzas and bright orange boxes of Dino Nuggets. My mom grabs a frozen cheesecake.

In the car, I ask my dad why he wanted this mass-produced item instead of one made this morning. He says he thinks the frozen cheesecake comes from a local company. I Google the “Jon Donaire” brand and find that it is not at all local, but a brand owned by Rich’s Food Corporation. There is now, on the counter, inside a luridly colored cardboard box, a four-flavor cheesecake. The strawberry flavor has artificial flavors and Red 40. I bet it’s going to taste great.