Tilda Wine Bar

“I am hungry. I have been hungry. I was born hungry. What do I need?” - Mitski, “Abbey”

“I am hungry. I have been hungry. I was born hungry. What do I need?”  - Mitski, “Abbey”

Joined by a friend of the Philosopheaters, sat at a sidewalk table, we ordered a variety of cheeses. Olives, almonds, figs, flowers, crumbly sheepy cheeses, grapes, honeycomb, bread drenched in olive oil, these things earnestly move something within me, carnal and ancient. And that makes sense because human people have been making cheese for thousands of years.

According to nationalhistoriccheesemakingcenter.org (yes, real) Greek myths speak of “the art of cheesemaking” and cheese imagery is featured on 4000 year old Egyptian tomb murals. In the Roman Empire, “literally hundreds” of different types of cheeses were being made, sold and exported. I had one single incredible cheese experience in September of 2024 and to keep it short, my cheese love was reawakened, and I then became fixated on having cheese in as many places as I could, as often as possible. To our luck, charcuterie boards have maintained their popularity throughout time immemorial and even gained perhaps an increased relevance in the past couple of years. We sought out Tilda after a journey to several cheese bearing locations, craven for our dream plate. 

It is my personal belief and conviction that I want harder, more intensely, than all most other people. Just kidding. Everyone I know has some sort of complicated relationship with their own desire. My own experience of craving in this life has been intense and obsessive; a seemingly unending sprint towards maintaining constant pleasure and good vibes. The numb ease of constant wanting, of yearning, is what has kept me in pleasurable agony for most of my adult life, and proved very difficult to move out of. 

My memories of yearning span back for, kind of alarmingly, as long as I can remember. I recently scrolled through my tumblr I’d used religiously in high school; coastal Skins inspired adventures, the tiny apartments I’d wanted to live in, exposed brick and cold wooden floors, men who wear peacoats, for some reason. Posts like; “concept: 90s. New York City. cocktails with friends after work on a friday night dressed in gucci fw 1995,” and “in my future i want to live in a house full of love and play soft music on Saturday mornings and make banana pancakes and the rest of the day i’d paint and when the sun started setting i’d drag everyone out to watch it and i’d bask in that warmth.” The theme being my deeply held belief that there was something out there I just hadn’t felt yet. The semi-unconscious conviction that any dissatisfaction would always be contextual and always temporary, especially if I stayed wanting, stayed yearning, everything happened in the “maybe…” in “to be continued,” in the most promising place of all.

As cute and adorable as this seemed to me at the time, carrying over to adulthood it has made me slow to commitment, shirking of responsibility, quick to find my exits, avoidant of my own inevitable boredom, gladly loyal to that which wouldn’t hurt all that much to lose. It has made me direct my life towards the avoidance of pain, in the direction of maintenance of pleasure, but not really in the direction of any sustainable fulfillment. 

I am still coming to terms with how to sit in boredom, the mundanity of everyday life, the Sisyphus-tic quality of accumulating laundry, of cleaning plates just to use them again, of showing up to the same place every day for the same amount of time, no windows and no doors. I am still coming to terms with the fact that I, that people I love, that strangers, suffer for no reason. That deeply makes no sense to me. 

It’s human nature to try and avoid pain and boredom in pursuit of happiness. It’s probably one of the oldest tenants of humanity there is, next to cheesemaking, of course. And, sometimes, buying a vintage leather bag or seeking out a chocolate chip cookie with just the right amount of salt does make me feel like I will never die. But. Until these things emerge with clear answers - if I can sit in inevitable discomfort, if I can know discomfort will come without waiting for it or inflicting it, if I can grieve without losing the ability to take action, if I can ask for what I need without also making it unavailable to myself or weaving it into a story, if I can allow pleasure into my life without squeezing it with my hands - even if I get lost in desire, I can find my way back to my own humanity. Even if it takes three different cheese plates to get there. 

CHEESES 

MIXED OLIVES 

BREAD AND SALTY BUTTER 

CROQUETES