Susan Hwang

I have five baggies of turmeric in the top of my luggage right at the zipper.  They are tucked into another ziplock baggie, because if the bags break… everything I own will be a different color.  Plus I’ll have to run and get more turmeric, which I do on a constant basis anyway, because, you know, like everybody, I’m living my life, and I take every avenue to avoid pain.  Like, you know, you might have a friend who likes to talk about how mercury’s in retrograde all the time because some kind of planetarily-inspired chaos is more exciting than the pain of the deep sadness for the connection he doesn’t feel in his daily life and his inability to take in life’s basic pleasures.  I inherited my mother’s trick of keeping myself very busy, and you figure if you run around doing a bunch of stuff, you won’t feel the pain of your own uselessness.  Honestly, it doesn’t always work.  Self loathing is bad, but self loathing and being over scheduled is worse.  If you’re going to hate yourself, you should do it lounging on a beach.  Sipping a margarita.

What does work, however, in terms of pain management, is turmeric.  For me.  It’s something that works. I need it to work.  If it doesn’t, the I go back to my old routine, which was as follows:

— open my eyes.

— go the bathroom to pee.

— stand at the sink to brush my teeth for as long as long as I can before the pain gets so bad shooting down my lower back and left leg and through to the bottoms of my feet that I run back to my bed and lie down.

— lie down until the pain subsides enough for me to get up and go downstairs to make coffee.

— stand there making coffee for as long as I can until…

That’s kind of how it went.  And then I’d take advil, and I’d eventually be able to move around enough to do fun things like walk to the medical center down the block from the pawn shop to wait hours to see someone who wouldn’t have any idea what was going on with me and send me to someone else who would give me tests and tell me to come back to see someone else who you’d have to re-explain everything to so you could be told that you would be in pain for a long time and you should take large horse pills of ibuprofen until you decided on cortisol injections into your spine, and when that stopped working, you could have surgery to cut the nerves in your back that were giving you all the trouble.  Hooray!

And you know, in between, I would do my experimental paleo cooking and worry about money.  And write songs and record an EP with Charlie and schedule shows and edit video for BookClub and wonder what the big deal was about being alive anyway.

I had a running joke with myself that the dirtiest part of my body was the bottom of my right foot, because my left foot and leg was in so much pain that I couldn’t stand on it long enough to lift my right foot and wash the bottom of it.

So you see, this turmeric thing is important for me and for the cleanliness of my right foot. 

It’s kind of a turmeric anniversary for me, because Charlie and I are headed to Seattle to play Bushwick Book Club and Lusterlit shows on the west coast for about a week.  We did this last year, and in the bucket seats of our cheap rental Hyundai is where I really made the connection between turmeric and normal, pain-free functioning.

I had been using turmeric in the paleo cakes I ate daily, and I was taking less and less advil, and feeling better and better.  I didn’t realize it was so connected to the turmeric until I stopped cooking those cakes on my trip, and the symptoms returned.  Sitting in the car was excruciating.  I couldn’t stand up straight without being in pain.  It was hard to walk.  It was hard to be.  It scared the shit out of Charlie.  I told him to run to the Safeway and get me eggs, cocoa powder, flaxseeds, coconut flour, stevia and a shit ton of turmeric.  I returned to the cakes.  The apartment we were staying at was a bachelor pad with minimal cooking utensils, but I found a milk frother and frothed all my ingredients together.  It worked, sort of.  It worked enough.  I was on my way back to relatively normal functioning!  I found ways to keep baking and baking the whole rest of the trip.  I’d sit in the car and shove turmeric cake in my face looking at the Red Wood forest, stretches of that farmland in California where all that gorgeous produce comes from.  Those strange Star Wars oil pump crane things.  The west coast is turmeric tinged for me.

So, that’s the long way of saying, look, I want to share a recipe with you.  And I want to let you know, in case you were on the fence about it, that um, yes, what you eat affects you.  What you put into your body matters, and there are ways of giving yourself what you need.  And what you need may not be a cortisol shot that you wait half a day at the medicaid medical center office for.  It may be cake that you make in your oven that smells great each morning.  It’s amazing that what you put in your mouth affects everything, even the cleanliness of the bottom of your right foot. 

Here are some turmeric cookies I baked in Don and Monique’s kitchen.  Don’t they look great against a Seattle back drop?

Here’s a video of cooking turmeric cakes I shot with Larry Krone in his kitchen in the East Village.  We used a dozen eggs.  I forgot to mention that.

Tonight is the third Bushwick Book Club show for Chuck Palahniuk’s LEGACY – An Off-Color Novella For you To Color.  It’s at The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.  Please come out and hear the new songs about books!!

I’ll be the one wearing turmeric-colored shorts tonight held up by Lusterlit/BushwickBookClub tour buttons because the zipper broke.