Massa Mãe

"Massamãe is wild yeast, spontaneous. Perhaps even impulsive, which in a human being can bring misfortune. Not in yeast. Massamãe is a continuous life process, full of lives within itself, where millions of invisible microorganisms form the whole. And you keep adding flour and water to the life, you adjust it with salt. Perhaps it was too much, it was impulse. You readjust. And it grows, keeps growing somewhat misshapen, with setbacks, but consistent. Massamãe is the beginning of ancestral bread, what fills the deepest depths of our core. The center of the center. And it also extends beyond us. It goes from us to others, it reaches everything. It seems like I'm announcing that I'm about to open a post-modern existentialist hipster bakery based on respect for millennia-old tradition, but I'm not. It's my new stand-up solo. And between orgies in Lisbon and make-outs in Rio, my masculinity and sexuality hanging somewhere on a spectrum, my terrible activism and my constant mishaps — thank you, impulsiveness — or even between the fear that very soon we'll all be slaves to AI, and the omnipresent awareness of my finitude, perhaps we'll reach my center. We add more water and salt together, and we pray to some god that it keeps growing more or less with dignity. Welcome to my Massa Mãe."