I love feeling righteous.

God, it feels good. Or rather, It feels GOD! When I am righteous I connect to omniscience in my ability to judge others, and I wield the lightning in my sparkling blue eyes, like fat Thor. Truth is, I get tired of feeling unsure and unstable in an unstable world, so grabbing this lightning feels more caffeinated than chugging three cans of Diet Cherry Pepsi. (Which I do not recommend doing after you turn forty.) With righteousness, I get to feel so many feelings:

Rage.

Improved rage!

The thrill of angry surprise when I say, “how DARE they–”

I feel that silver-smooth-refrigerator-feeling of vindication. I love vindication! I get to lift my triple Thor chins to the heavens, crying out, “Called it!”

Did I mention rage? Rage almost always feels dangerous like skidding out of control but not when righteous rides it like a bronco! Nope. Then it’s fine to buck you, buck you, and buck you.

I get to feel the satisfaction of pointing at anti-BLMers and shout “WHITE PRIVILEGE,” which, if I’m loud enough, gives me permission to ignore my own white privilege. (Blogging my opinions and not worrying about the consequences to me or my family, is in fact, using white privilege to scream at white privilege. It’s dizzying.)

Righteous indignation promises to absolve me of past sins and blinds me to the knots in current ones.

When I am righteous, I do not get sloppy. Opposite. I get precise. I get small, beady tarantula eyes, two in front and three on each side, scanning the landscape in every direction for infractions. I make sure my words are accurate. My tone may not be jovial, but it is not unfair. My anger is righteous! Knowing I may have to account for my words in two weeks when tempers are less hot, I take care. I take care.

When I am righteous, I am on Facebook with my greedy spider eyes.

Last week on Facebook, I. Was. Righteous.

I’m not in the same place as then and I’ll try to articulate the difference. In some ways, nothing has changed. I want impeachment for the out-voted president and prison to follow. I want the domestic terrorists jailed. I want Republican Senators prosecuted for incitement. I do not want to tolerate Nazis. This is not a post about forgiveness.

This is not their story.

This is a story of miracle spaghetti. My sister and I ate it the a few nights before my mom’s wake.

Mom died in May of 2018. Family friends brought food. Theresa brought spaghetti, foil covered, and in one of the good baking dishes you only loan to people you know will return it.  I drove from Minnesota for the funeral and Theresa’s spaghetti was already in the fridge.

While it heated up, my sister and I discussed Mom’s favorite meals, ones we’d miss. We’d miss mom’s lasagna. Turkey dinner. Sister grieved the loss of Mom’s chop suey and I did not. I always hated that one. But her roasts! Her potatoes and gravy were second to none. Her spaghetti! Oh, that was a hard one to part with.

The spaghetti.

When she entered her sixties, I realized Mom was not immortal. When I was visiting from Minnesota, I’d make spaghetti with her, plying her with questions, like, “Why only two shakes of that, why not four? And why did you just add flour? You didn’t add that last time.” And then she’d ask me things like, “Why put the silverware on the table in a theme we have to guess before eating?”

My sister had shadowed the spaghetti-making as well. When we compared notes that sad Tuesday, one of Mom’s ingredients that surprised us both: the cheapest brand of ketchup still legal to purchase. Ketchup? Really? Clearly, Mom’s spaghetti recipe definitely included “the secret ingredient is love,” because the actual recipe was not a generations-old hand-me-down. It used basic Aldi-purchased, generic-spices ingredients.

That didn’t diffuse the sadness of knowing we’d never–in this house– eat amazing spaghetti again. We could both make our approximations of it, add the ketchup, the two shakes of Italian spice, etc. But spaghetti wouldn’t ever taste amazing and we both knew it.

Oven timer went off.

We felt gratitude for Therea’s spaghetti. Smelled good but thanks to our bummer of a happy hour, we felt sure there could be no more Mom deliciousness coming from this kitchen.

I scooped up a noodles and meat. Chewed it up.

Took a second bite and realized this spaghetti–

Looked up.

My sister’s eyes were wide with surprise, just like mine.

Theresa’s spaghetti was fan-FUCKING-tastic.

Normally, I reserve the f-bomb for discussing cheese fries, and sometimes gyros, but to experience surprise and delight literally four minutes after discussing how we’d never experience surprise and delight in this kitchen again…well, what can you say when a new color of love touches you? I experienced a moment I would describe as the Sparkling Spirit. My sister would say God’s grace. And muted by the miracle, we did not have to argue religion or terms. We just let this experiences be true.

The spaghetti wasn’t chock full of artichoke hearts or tons of fresh rosemary, or a goat-cheese crumble. All of those sound good to me. This was classic mom spaghetti. Meat, sauce, noodles. Tasted astonishing! We cheered our glasses again. Toasted Theresa. Ate more. Toasted mom. Sister quit eating. I helped myself to thirds. Stuffed with garlic bread and thrilled by the momentary escape from grief, we toasted spaghetti miracles that can happen on ordinary, sad Tuesdays.

Since then, we partied with Theresa and her family a couple times. We laugh loud on Mom and Dad’s sun porch with the windows open. Theresa’s husband loves my “Insanity Peppers of Guatemala” vodka, so we drink it and say, “Holy shit” after we swallow (when we can speak again). Last time, a neighbor texted my sister, ‘sounds like you guys are having a party.’ Sister texted back, ‘come over.’

During the first of these get-togethers, Theresa’s older son, maybe eight, wanted me to watch him play a game on his phone. I said, sure. I was sitting in a big comfy chair and he asked, “Okay if I lean back?” Nervously, I said, sure. I watched him play for about seven minutes, his body resting comfortably into my shoulder until he left to go antagonize his brother. I was so honored by that trust. I’ve never experienced it from a a child I didn’t know well. I was a bit shocked. It made me assume Theresa and her husband are fantastic parents if this kid felt so loved and safe.

Theresa and her family matter to me. When I visit my home town, I leave jars of my hot stuff on their back porch.

Theresa is also a Trump supporter.

I got righteous on her ass on Facebook. She deserved it. Then again, everyone deserves it when I feel righteous.

Righteousness feels like I just worked out. Righteousness feels like a college professor said to the whole class, “In his essay on this topic, Edmond compared…” Righteous feels like the lawn mower starting after one pull. Righteous feels like getting all my shit together. I don’t know why, but it feels that way for me, like I’m connecting the dots with exceptional clarity. If you don’t see the clarity, that’s on you.

(Speaking of clarity, I want to emphasize I believe justice must occur. My politics haven’t changed. I believe treason happened. I’m not over it–we’re still in the middle of it. I blog–am blogging–will have blogged if you’re reading this later– about my own personal experience of righteousness this week. There are no lessons here for you to learn. You don’t have to soften your stance on anything.)

Theresa posts a lot.

I only got through a day and a half’s posts and I responded with my tarantula precision and accurate words. I delivered some real zingers while remaining 100% embedded in facts. I refreshed several times waiting to see if she DARED respond. I hadn’t sought to troll her. I saw an early-morning post and responded with genuine compassion and gratitude for a question she asked. Sometimes I love posts on Facebook. I started exploring her posts the day after the insurrection. By then, my sword of righteousness had been scrubbed clean in a bubble bath of shadenfreude.

Later that same evening, my sister texted with news she had assumed I had seen on Facebook. (I had not.) Theresa’s father had died on Sunday. All this week while I carefully baited her on Facebook (with verifiable data and judicious wording) she kept silent. While the whole world was having a shitty, shitty week, Theresa included, she was also experiencing one of the worst weeks of her family life, grieving a man she’d never see again. Grieving her own version of lost spaghetti.

She was a queen in my life when my mother died. A spaghetti-making queen. I could have been a king to her during this hard, hard week. And while I didn’t say any words that I had to regret, I was a jack of asses.

I’ll tell you right now, I won’t publish comments to this post which say, “Fuck her, fuck all of them, and fuck you for being friends with…” I get your anger. I share it. I support your boundaries. If I see Nazism in her posts, I’m out. White supremacy posts, I’m out. I can’t even believe how far this Trump insanity has gone. I will demand justice. I am just as outraged it took this long for two more cops involved in Breonna Taylor’s death–killed in her sleep in her apartment–to be fired. Not prosecuted, just fired. This incident is very much related to insurrection at the capital. Very much. Your outrage is welcome.

Maybe I’ll blog about outrage another time.

This post is about love.

It is hard to love me when I am righteous.

It is hard for me to love when I am righteous.

I wept when I found out Theresa’s father died. I cried off and on or two hours. For my self-congratulatory behavior, for Theresa, for feeling sad and helpless, for losing my folks, for the world, for cops left to fend for themselves in the capital, deliberately unsupported in their need for backup. I cried for kids losing their grandfather, for how shitty it is to buy a casket for someone you love. For Breonna Taylor who was sleeping. I cried over my arrogance. I cried about righteousness. I thought about all the COVID deaths, all those people dying alone. I cried because I needed that release of my rage.

Is there a place just short of righteous where I can demand justice, feel angry, say, “no fucking more?”

I need to find this place inside myself. I want this. I don’t enjoy my tarantula eyes. I must find this place. Not because the world needs it (though it does) but because *I* need this in my life and in my heart. When I am righteous, there’s no room inside me for spaghetti miracles.