Heroic Chocolate

Amanda Palmer is in Australia, where she met Lance:

i owe you a treatise on chocolate, and love, and good, and bad.

here it
is:

good things happen and bad things happen. and also, bad things
happen and good things happen.
it is always like this.

when i got to
sydney, i stayed with lance.
lance is 31, and just came out to his parents
three weeks ago. after living a completely gay life forever that they were
totally oblivious to.
his boyfriend of a while is finally moving in with him
in new york. it’s significant.

his parents aren’t talking to him.
they say he’s going to get AIDS.
they say he’s going to go to hell.

it’s hard.

lance also found out something.
his mother told
him that he was allergic to chocolate when he was a little boy.

he’s
not, and he just found out. she was lying.
i kind of hate her.

there’s more poetry in this than can possibly be expressed.

so
lance has been eating chocolate every day since he came out, trying every type,
every incarnation and savoring like a madman.
in his hotel room there were
bars and bars, we had every kind of chocolate bar floating around, it was like a
drug den, and i helped the cause by eating chocolate first thing every morning.

we went to the fancy fancy chocolate shop on the circular quay in sydney
and we just bought shitloads of praline (the kind shaped like seahorses….i got
to bust his praline cherry, that was exciting)
and truffles and whatevers
and we sat there and we ate them all, one by one, in solemn gratitude.
chocolate had become a full-on symbolic oral celebration.

lance is
lucky, he will always eat chocolate like a kind of a hero, i think.