The more things change the more they stay the same.

I've moved. If you want to skip everything not food-related, you may.

Frozen Peaches

What does one do with frozen peaches? The underlying question, of course, is what does one do with peaches? There are so many of them, and they go so quickly. Can't have them rotting on the ground and yet if brought home they melt into the counter within a few days. Their already fuzzy skins bloom with white and black. They leave behind a goo, the underside of their ripeness. To capture them ripe without catching the toughness and putrefaction that define the borders of ripe is the passion of autumn, for some.

This passion can take two forms: anxiety and hoarding. These may sound like the same thing. But while the anxious is obsessed with wasted peaches (those on the ground are failures, or if not too rotten yet, rescues) the hoarder has a more generous outlok. The hoarder sees the peach season as an opportunity. Noteably, the anxious has trees in the yard and is tasked with caring for them (i.e. using them), whereas the hoarder rents others'.

The anxious picks as many as possible ripe off the tree and uses them immediately. Uses and not eats beause eating is only one use. Other uses include baking in a crisp and pairing with ice cream. Not so much pleasures as ways to cut losses. One does not so much taste the presence of peaches as the absence of the loss of peaches. One feels less a failure.

The hoarder, having access to far more trees, picks and picks. It's not much work, picking peaches, and so boxes and boxes fill up quickly. Here we return to the second question: what to do with all those peaches? One can't eat them quickly enough, even in a crisp. No matter. The hoarder believes ripeness can be preservered. Peaches can be frozen. Fleeting pleasure can be had throughout the year. As the anxious tastes the mitigation of failure, the hoarder tastes shrewdness in frozen peaches. Having given perishability the slip, one tastes oneself.

Now we come to the first question: What does not do with frozen peaches? Much as one would like to believe they are peaches, they're something else when they thaw. As they thaw, they release their liquid. They divide, much like curdling milk, into liquid and solid. A bowl of thawed peaches is a bowl of sweet, orange soup. One can ignore the soup, cover it with oats, butter, and sugar, and bake it, but the oats turn soggy. The peach-solids boil into near disintegration in the oven. But it is crisp, in it are still technically peaches, and one may still revel in the simulacric bounty of refrigeration.

One may also acknowledge the soup, and treat its two components different. One then pours off the liquid into a pot, covers the solids with oats, butter, and sugar, and bakes them. One boils the liquid with more sugar and spices, down to a thick brown sauce, and pours this over the crisp. This necromantic trickery makes a less soggy crisp, but still, soggy, and the peaches, if indeed they are peaches, sad, deflated, and oddly flavorless without their sauce. Some things cannot be fixed or solved. To solve them is to change what the solution was meant to preserve. It would be smug, however, to suggest that the lack of a solution is a solution. It's not as if the gesture of stepping aside causes the peach to leap forth with its true flavor. On the unyielding terms one lays out, one has never tasted a peach.

Figs & Toilets

Is eating fruit a perversion? If you're bored, it's a cheering thought. While picking figs the other day, I heard it articulated like this: "these trees must be so unhapppy--they spent all this energy putting on fruit, just to have us flush the seeds down our indoor plumbing." The assumption is that trees produce fruit for a purpose: to reproduce. This seems obvious, but it is also untrue.

Evolutionary thought, oddly, seems to undergird this assumption of fruit's purposiveness, in the same way that the tired image of basket weavers and hunters is mobilized to naturalize the most thoughtless gender prescriptions. I do have to assume that fruit evolved because trees that grew fruit begat more reproducing offspring than trees that did not. However, the accidents of evolution--canny as they might be--do not assign or come from any purpose whatsoever. (A tautology--but honestly, do you want to read an argument that evolution is accidental? Suffice to say evolution is a misleading term, because it's not a system.) Fruit just happened.

Besides, if trees are people, then who are we to say they insist on the reproductive use of their fruit? And even if they insist that their detachable flesh only be chewed for the furthering of the race, who is to say they don't enjoy wantonness for exactly the same reason?

I know, I'm reaching. But when I heard it said matter-of-factly that figs are "like balls" the train of thought was inevitable, wasn't it? No, actually--that's my point. I think you'll agree that just because I heard that statement and now I'm writing this post, this post was not its purpose. Yet I am enjoying this particular use. Because it is excessive, or just because?

On the same outing, as we exerted ourselves jumping to and climbing on branches, I posited the dreariest view of food imaginable by saying that we certainly were not doing this for the calories. Of course not. If you have the chance not to, why do something out of necessity?

So no, eating fruit is not a perversion, flush toilet or no, because there isn't one thing fruit are made for in the first place.

It's not as if anyone is all in a tizzy over orchards (all those "virgin" trees). Then again, isn't this exactly what pastoral beauty is all about--the sublime channeled into production?

The fruit does fall, and I must admit I looked away from the figs smashed into the ground, and I hesitated yet was excited by the squishy give of the overripe. The fallen (that word cannot be an accident) figs stuck unpleasantly to our shoes. Importantly, figs will not sprout in this climate. Whether I think so or not, it appears I'm uncomfortable with flesh not trained to produce or reproduce.

some incredibly sloppy theorizing

It is said that western civilization sprang from wheat. These days, although it remains staff of life to many, it’s often called junk food, or if you’re a paleo dieter, just plain evil. And what is considered junk by the pious is also a comfort, or even more: an indulgence.

This is guaranteed by the degree to which its emptiness is insisted upon. How else could a dry Starbucks scone constitute pleasure than by the reflexive tut-tut that it’s “just empty carbs”? This sense of their substancelessness makes baked goods palatable in unique ways.

Though if 1890s London is as Sarah Waters imagines it, then perhaps bread needn’t be saturated with health-food discourse to go down like nearly nothing. In Tipping the Velvet, bread products are all that its protagonist, Nancy, can handle after a catastrophic breakup. She lays in a dark bedsit for weeks eating nothing but “bagels, brioches, and flat Greek loaves, and buns from the Chinese bakeries” and cups of tea, “which I brewed ferociously strong, in a pot on the hearth, and sweetened with condensed milk.” God, if that ever sounds familiar.

(I have spent weeks alone eating little but toast and tea. When anything substantial is nauseating, toast will do.)

I wrote that Sarah Lund’s diet of mostly bread, butter, and coffee was deeply appealing to me, for similar reasons. Baked goods can be passed off as almost not food at all. Lund is perennially, functionally depressed, and Nancy is suddenly becoming acquainted with depression. The will to live and the will to eat are connected in this way. When I say “will to live,” I do not mean it literally, though the sense does not disinclude that. Nancy’s post-breakup melancholy is the instructive example here: she can’t move on from her former lover, despite (or because of) the fact that she is clearly and acutely gone. Letting anything else in–even a bit of food–is abhorrent because it would mean letting go of this nothingness.

Which sounds self-defeating, and it is. But I do not want to fall into the judgemental prescriptiveness of phrases like “let go” and “move on.” In the pop-psychologic vernacular, these imperatives lie (pun intended) firmly on the side of productivity. They prioritize orienting oneself to the future. But what’s in the future? More moving on. One moves on to float in an endless deferral.

Contemplation is possessive, i.e. depressive. Indeed, depression is to be blocked from acting by the sheer bandwidth of cognition. Writing is thus a bizarre balancing act of thinking and not thinking. Don’t think at all and you’ll have nothing to write; think too much and you’ll never be able to write it down.

One cannot eat a feast and at the same time possess it. But the world–and oneself in it–turns on consumption, and so it is generally thought advantageous to advocate eating.

When this helpful prescription turns sour, there are ways to mitigate the bile–to keep distance from both life and death. To not have to take on the burden of having hope (the backlash from which Nancy suffers), one takes in whatever unwholesomeness is available. Bread, being neither food nor not-food, will do nicely. It is an imperfect antidote to the illness it makes possible–civilization.

What will happen to a civilization that demands productivity from its citizens and also demands that they keep themselves healthy by not eating “empty carbs,” not smoking, not drinking, and absolutely no other vice, save sex, which has been deemed healthy.

Yes, of course all these vices are the opiates on which civilization functions, and some more revolutionary souls would say it’s better to renounce them.

I’m not trying to say that society’s prescriptions ought to self-consciously indulge us. You can’t go back. But rather that there seem to be increasingly fewer blind spots. Which is a bit scary. Everything is a lifestyle choice.

What, are we all going to binge on naughty kale chips?

Pini Fruit

My family always jokes--and joked--that we travel to eat. It's a tendency that has, according to us, been passed down to the younger generation (my brother and I). The family trait appears to install itself as a constraint in the scope of memory recall. When asked about the trips that our parents took us out of school and country for--to Bali, Mexico, Cuba, Canada, Borneo, and Japan (one of which I, I admit, is a lie I added to fill out the list)--we recount the food. More convenient, sometimes, than recounting the rest.

Likewise, the images from books that really stick with me--and hopefully you distrust me by now--are of food. This is especially true Ursula Le Guin's sci-fi, which are "safe trips"* to various worlds. They chronicle the intergalactic Ekumen's (a kind of postcolonial Federation) encounters with aliens.

I remember the pini fruit from Four Ways to Forgivesness, a "curious orange-brown" globe that falls into perfect little radial segments, like a mandarin or a mangosteen. Consumed almost entirely by the slave-owning class, its smooth, finely textured flesh seems almost artificial. The Envoy from the Ekumen is treated as an "owner" (rather than an "asset"), and thus is given these fruit. She eats them--popping out the segments delicately with a small knife--with a mixture of guilt and delight.

True to our familial mythology, my memory of the fruit glares out all others. I have mentioned it many times in conversation--a strange habit, ass even those who have read the book don't remember what I refer to--always with a reverent stare into nowhere, mouth watering for a fictional fruit. And that's what it's for--to be desired and consumed. Even for fruit it is oddly suited for civilized consumption--the segments bite-sized and so neat, eating them not at all messy. Even for an inanimate object, it lacks otherness. No spines, fuzz, juices, seeds, or pits. It doesn't even bruise easily. It's completely purposive, the asset qua asset--what the assets (slaves) can never be. Having no incidental qualities, no ontological leftovers, it is pointless to consume it (though inevitable). Being so well suited for consumption, it is nothing to consume. Nothing about it can be had because everything about it is to be had, a priori. As its whole purpose is to be eaten, to be had, to be taken pleasure from, and therefore, in its relentless felicity, utterly fails--passing through its owners, as it were, and leaving nothing but another dim desire for another--it is, more than anything, viral. A benign virus, it doesn't threaten its host with death, or even give rise to any unpleasant sensations.

This is what the owners dream of owning. But if they did, their world would fall into silence. No energies would need be expended upon elaborate systems of opression and suppression. There would be nothing to be better than, to own. The lifeblood of aspiration and delusion gone, the culture of the owners would wither. In this sense the fruit does leave behind one thing: It gives the owners an ideal to strive for, one which is actually their destruction.

Generally, however, the food in Le Guin's fiction is more Eros than Thanatos. It posesses a presence that food, in my experience, never does. There is a bottle of fruit juice in The Disposessed (on Annarres, the anarchist planet, of course). While the pini fruit is the epitomy of Capitalist object relations, Le Guin seems to elsewhere wish for the healing of that relation. The fruit juice is precious in a way that things can never be in a well-oiled, affluent consumer society: One gets a tiny ration of fruit juice, per the limited amount that can be produced on dry Anarres. About a liter a year. So this stuff that's so mundane (because plentiful) to us on the receiving end of industrial agriculture's boon is transformed by scarcity into something to be savored. They save it for a special occasion, and sip it in tiny cups. The liquid becomes luminous. While Le Guin calls this world "an ambiguous utopia" and is as interested in finding its faults as its idyllic qualities, here she seems to salivate. Life on Anarres may be hard, but it is very real. The scarcity is romantic. Anarres has not solved material ills, but seems to have solved the ills of the soul. This is the end of Capitalism as imagined in Capitalist terms: Things are precious and full of substance because rare. In this, the people of Anarres sound more like bohemians--who quest ever for authenticity, i.e. an escape from consumerism--than socialists.

Foodies

Just now a Noble Coffee barista described to me for the umpteenth time the coffees they're serving today. I realize this is part of her job, but as soon as she began enumerating flavor notes, my eyes unfocused and her words became a soup to my ears. I've been here often enough that I've technically heard detailed descriptions of each one of their coffees, but I can't remember anything about them. The only knowledge that has stuck is that their dark roasts nauseate me, whereas everything else is nice.

There has been an explosion of gourmandise in the past decade. It has been an extremely verbose reboot of food as an aesthetic object. You might think that someone who never shuts up about food on this blog and who has stopped bothering with the nondescriptive language of recipes would be pleased with this revolution in gastronomic discourse. More and more people talk about food. But what do they say?

Dylan Moran has this bit in his standup, on wine. (He is, too.) It's the model of what I just said about Noble's coffee: There are two kinds of wine, he says--the kind that make you go "mm, mm, that's ok, let's have eight of those," and the other kind: "jesus what is that?!" An uncle of mine calls the former kind "drinkable," and indeed, this is the highest compliment that one can give a wine. Moran's wine bit is exactly what this new logorrhea about food is not. The baristas at Noble are trained to go on about caramel, white peaches, charcoal, and fresh earth, but not to say anything about how the coffee hits you. These endless descriptions are pure cognition. Anything visceral gets lost. This is not taste for the sake of pleasure, but taste for taste's sake. Foodies are to food what birders are to birds. They discern, identify, catalog, and record.

I have two friends who in their adolescence dated. One is a food snob, and the other is an aspiring food snob. They're still friends, and when they see each other they argue. He repeatedly tries foods he doesn't like to get himself to like them. She finds this ridiculous; if he doesn't like something then he doesn't like it--that's his taste. He counters that some things are acquired tastes, there are foods you don't like as a child but like as an adult. Yes, she argues, but you don't go out of your way to force yourself to try those foods again. She implies that her tastes are entirely natural, but she cultivates them. For both of them taste is mimetic, but for him it has a unidirectional relation to the body. He wants to like things because he's heard that people with taste like them. His body is supposed to behave, not speak.

You'll encounter this muteness if you ever dine with a foodie. He'll reverse engineer the dish for you, dissect its flavors, tell you if it meets his standards. It's a kind of magic trick, but while those performances appeal to the part of us that doesn't think and longs to be confounded, this is the babble of one cogito to another.

Slicing Bread for Pudding

On the rare occasions I engage in the kind of conversation that is to scroll through the participants' respective stores of Things to Talk About ($5 app), I find that I've already discussed in some gaudy blog post everything I would bring up. Yes, the person who would hear my recycled story probably hasn't read the blog post, but still I stop myself from bringing up the subject again. Nobody would know how limited my repertoire of potential entertainments really is, but I feel pathetic repeating what I wrote publicly. Like pulling something out of the back of the closet and wrapping it as a birthday gift. No, it's more than that; I'm preemptively ashamed of being that elder who happily and seemingly unwittingly repeats the same rotation of stories over and over. Except in this case over and over is twice. It also goes against this notion of mine that the dignified thing to do is to write one thing and live another, to forget what I've written when in conversation, or at least pretend to. And don't certain kinds of thought thrive in secrecy, or at the very least at an address the route to which is circuitous and indeterminate?

Having said this, I may as well reverse the phenomenon that causes me such egoic anxiety and say what I repeat everywhere but in writing. Which is nothing special, really, although clearly I'm excited enough by what it says about me (what?) that I tell everyone every time I cut my finger making bread pudding. It has happened twice, but I think it has happened thrice. As with all injuries that are minor but more than a scratch, when the knife slips (predictably by now--I know that this knife and I are bound to meet in exactly this way yet every time I begin slicing I think that somehow, through no tangible precaucion, I will avoid it) there is a rush not just of shock and blood, but the thrill that what's happening now I can later report.

It's quite simple, the way it happens. Holding together sliced bread, especially stiff, stale bread, is a precarious thing. I cube the bread with a serrated knife. First I cut it one way, then another, and finally a third way. It is this third angle, when I am pressing the shifting columns of bread down so that they may be sliced finally into cubes, that something slips. I'm not sure what, to be honest, so maybe it isn't so simple. This last time I screamed, not so much in distress as in frustration. That growling scream of things escaping your ridiculous designs of control. (Equally ridiculous: I sometimes take it upon myself to disagree with the maxims of advertisements. The other day a car ad said "the highest form of power is control," and I was like, yeah, as if!) Part of the scream was that--god damn it--things went exactly as I expected but refused to admit. I have a friend who engages in many semidangerous activities and his reort to his worried mother (I'm equally worried, but usually say nothing) is that he takes deliberate precautions. It sounds very rational, the way he explains it. There are somethings you can't avoid, he admits, but most things you can reduce your chances of by thinking about, devising habits or plans of action around, and making a point to carrying those out. Yeah, sure, I always say, resigning myself to the impossibility of safety. Dealing with the details of trying to control fate gives me a headache. Hence I continue to cube bread in the same manner.

When I tell this tiny story, the humor I'm so thrilled about is the irony that bread pudding, something so innocuous and not at all difficult to make, is the most consistent source of bodily harm in my life. (At the moment that's not true; there is work, which provides a generous helping of scratches, small punctures, torn nails, and callouses on my hands that I must say I'm not at all a fan of. Those rock climbers that intentionally sandpaper their hands for extra grip must be vain in an entirely different way than I am. But then it's less about the appearance of my hands than it is the feeling, or rather the lack thereof. I rub my fingers together and get a thick nothing. This is disappointing.) This sense of humor is almost immediately tiresome to me, yet I repeat it.

Just like my recipe for bread pudding. Despite my slight disappoinment with the results every time (a bit too goopy and the egg is not very well integrated), I never really change the way I make it. Every time I go back to look at the recipe in my previous blog post on bread pudding, letting it tell me the proportions of ingredients, although I never follow them exactly. It did turn out fairly well this morning, because there was no milk last night and I turned to condensed milk, which my father keeps cases of about the kitchen. I turn my nose at the use of the stuff in tea or coffee, but for bread pudding it is apparently superior to milk.

I was very happy with myself for thinking to soak it overnight to bake it in the morning for breakfast, but I must tell you, in case you become enamored of the same plan, that bread pudding takes a long time to bake. How long? Long enough that coffee on an empty stomach began to feel like a kind of implosion of the viscera before the pudding was done. You will open the oven door frequently. You will dawdle on the computer as if in an airport. You will salivate. You will look at the time obsessively, although you will not know at what time you put the pudding in the oven, nor for how long to bake it. You will worry at first that there is too much liquid for the bread to absorb, and that it will turn out inedibly soggy. Then it will rise like a cake, and you will know that all is well. Wait, though, until it browns on the outside, because you never know what's going on on the inside.

Bread is surprisingly resiliant; fingers are more fragile than you might expect. But fingers are not in any danger, really. It will only feel like danger, and though you will curse when something beneath the skin is torn, and every time in the future you make bread pudding you'll be afraid of it happening again, you also watch horror movies. (I don't, but not because I'm immune to their pleasures--after all I've stayed up in a terrified trance of episode after episode of the The X-Files until I finally fall asleep from sheer exhaustion. Which is another thing I repeat orally.) A hasty if self-consciously allusionary and untheorized explanation.

Anya's Thai Bistro

Some are silent because they're silent, others are silent because they have high expectations of speech. My cousin is afflicted with this taciturnity in all communicative acts, including cooking. He lives therefore suspended on his way to a perfect utterance, a perfect dish. Well, perhaps the former is my own particular problem, whereas his metaphysical ambition plays out culinarily. For now he's the pastry chef at Amuse, and in the same kitchen makes all of the ice cream for Mix. He was recently asked by someone who has a tendency to imbue everyone with (extra)ordinary ambitions if he would like to one day start a his own restaurant. He reworded this wistful inquiry into something certain: "I will." I laughed because I was won over by the earnestness of his ambition

His face is stern, yet vulnerable with youthfulness. He asked for a beer when we were out for dinner at Kobe, and the waitress shot back "are you old enough, honey?" His pale skin made his blush all the more raw. His temperament--which some interpret as easygoing calm--is such that after a moment he said "that's quite a 'tude," and when asked, said that no, he would not hire her.

Asking such a serious soul for his opinion of a restaurant is a treat. He considers judiciously, and is careful not to taint his answer with what he considers to be personal bias. He said of the new Thai place in town, furrowing his brow and lowering his voice (though it already rumbles low from his narrow frame), that it has a small menu of "simple food" that's "very authentic." By "simple food" (a phrase he uses often) he means to distinguish it from fine dining, but also to commend its decency. There's a bit of a passive-aggressive jab in calling it "simple food," yet his aesthetic, I gather, is something like simplicity. For a recent family gathering he made a sauce of slowly sautéed slices of red pepper and onion in olive oil, something that is also done at Amuse. At amuse, he said, they use a lot of spices, but he just used salt and pepper. He didn't give any indication which he preferred, but personally I'm for his version. From anyone else I would've rolled my eyes at "authentic", but I sensed he meant something specific rather than magical. He simply meant that the food was closer to what he tasted in Thailand than it was to Thai Pepper, a restaurant that strains to be innovative and upmarket. Then again, maybe my brain was mush. While his short oral review was not glowing, exactly, a considerable excitement for this place had been transferred to me.

Because of what he said about Anya's, I walked in to its low cavern of a dining room with a kind of serenity. The space appeared to me through a mist of sentimental trust, as in at that stage of infatuation when anything the other says is beautiful. Following this simile, you'd think I'm about to say that in retrospect everything was crap and the things that mesmerized me, empty. Not exactly. But then I have yet to have a second date, which I plan to. I have a rendezvous planned with sticky rice and mango.

I developed an amused affection for the place. Surrounded by empty shops, the room had a quiet romance to it. There were a few other full tables, none of them exasperatingly boisterous or scarily quiet. The lighting seemed soft, in part because of the sizzling sounds from the kitchen, which soothed. The kitchen was just behind a counter that reached up to the chef's waist, and from my seat I had a view of vegetables searing in small rounded pans.

As far as I can tell, they have a crew of three: Anya the chef, her husband the waiter and host, and a large man in chef pants and Crocs, who I assume assists Anya. The arrangement doesn't fit easily into the roles that divide the labor of a restaurant. Anya apparently takes orders when she can (or perhaps when she feels like it). Her husband does all the service: greeting, bussing, taking orders. Their assistant must do dishes as well as helping cook. I think we met Anya. She was efficient, as her husband theatrically exclaimed on his way back to her behind the counter. He eagerly came to wait on our table, apologizing that we hadn't yet received menus, only to discover that we had already placed our orders with his wife. "She's so quick!"

The husband (I didn't catch his name) in his somewhat flustered way was eager to please. I couldn't help but read this as the desperation of someone treading financial water. Businesses down here never last for long. They're easily forgotten. Only when I heard that Anya's was here did I remember that I had heard a couple years ago that The Underground Market existed. Now it's gone, along with everything else except for Anya's. The emptied out shop spaces that surround the tables give the place a certain allure just as they made me worry for its fate. Here I was happily removed from the normal functioning of Ashland's commercially saturated downtown. It was a bit like being backstage.

Through my misted gaze I was enamored of the food, although it helped that there was variety to sample between the four of us. About halfway through my ample bowl of pad thai, its flavor was no longer a flavor. But that's true of just about anything you eat that much of. Everything, I thought, had a freshness. Thai restaurants have this tendency to devolve into rich, slightly sweet masses of whatever. You begin piling oily glue into your gullet. Here the flavors remained distinct, and the vegetables crisp yet piping hot. The chopsticks had a purpose other than making Americans feel cool, allowing you to pick up and sample individual chunks of tomato, bell pepper, chicken, broccoli. (Yeah, I heard that somewhere, and it's not specific to Anya's at all. One could do the same thing with a fork, but we have a tendency to use that instrument as a shovel.) The Thai tea seemed to cater to the tastes of Ashlanders, who say "not too sweet" as praise. I wished for overpoweringly syrupy tea on principle, but then I had to admit I enjoyed this modulated stuff.

When we left, Anya's husband made sure to send us off with "see you next time!"

Lunch

I hate my lunches.

Every other time I've worked (seldom) it's been somewhere far-flung enough that if I din't bring a lunch, I was fucked. (That's how I put it to my coworkers; that is how one puts things in a hard hat, apparently.) On jobs in the middle of nowhere, I worried constantly about lunch. Afternoons driving back wondering if I needed to shop for tomorrow's lunch; evenings taking inventory of the kitchen, either literally or mentally, from some horizontal pose; nights re-cataloguing the evening's information into something to eat; mornings trying to remember not to forget to prepare and pack; lunchtimes eating not to want to eat later and overdoing it, turning my guts into a pendulous weight, splashing excess up into my esophagus. Of course, the future tense's reign over my consciousness gets periodically overthrown while regularly employed. Worrying about lunch turns quickly into falling into lunch, lapsing into going out the door, remembering, maybe, eventually, to sleep. Waking up becomes the bends, when the excesses of this slippery new relationship with time slap down all at once.

Nonetheless, lunch was one of those unavoidable realities. Working within two blocks of downtown and two blocks from a supermarket, it isn't really. I don't bother to pack lunch from home. Whatever. Instead, I walk to the store, and among a plethora of options get more or less the same thing every time, and I'm beginning to loathe it. But then, you know I love to loathe. Every time I get a roll, a piece of cheese (there's a bucket of leftover small pieces to save me from letting a larger block rot in my backpack through the afternoon), and some kind of fruit: a smoothie, a couple of plums, a banana. Unlike the nervous gorging of before, this lunch programme is never quite enough. Yet what small item do I fill it out with? I never know. Chips? A soda? A carrot? With a few small variations (whole wheat roll vs sourdough roll, havarti vs cheddar that sticks to the top of my mouth vs tiny wedge of brie) I still keep eating the same thing every day.

And my written prose spills disgustingly into my speech, like the smell of the mold spores puffing out of the rice cooker when the door is opened for the first time in weeks. Others' spillages, too, resemble what is new yet ossified. Nevermind 'technology', cyborgs can be of habit. Imagine not Locutus but those cheesy Torchwood lumberers as speech orders itself with a giveaway jitter.

Then again, who cares what spills and hardens into brittle? (It's rhetorical, but: clean freaks.) The compulsion to aestheticize needs to die, it's so ugly.

Sneha Rajaram Posts

I am no cook, but sometimes I get a mad scientist urge to try out something new. Being on a diet for my apparently stagnant liver adds enough challenge to interest me.

My boyfriend has a liver problem too, and we get all diseases together, which some would say means my liver isn’t the only stagnant thing in this story. So when he started salivating at all the cupcakes and sponge cakes out of our dietary reach in the supermarket, I decided to Bake a Cake.

First problem was sugar, which I wanted to substitute with jaggery (I seem to remember something about molasses in my sixth grade project about the “American Revolution”, but I could be mistaken). So the possibly historically significant jaggery, combined with racist-Gerald-Durrell’s-Corfu-conjuring olive oil (monounsaturated fatty acid, a term I learnt yesterday) instead of butter, and egg whites only. So far so good.

For the flour, I decided to use ragi (finger millet) flour, which however when eaten by itself, tastes too organic even for my pretentions to rural, traditional, “natural” food. Ragi balls are the traditional South Indian farmers’ and labourers’ food, fêted now by New Age dieticians, and hence politically deeply suspect to me. Not to mention their dense undifferentiated texture makes them cleave to the roof of my mouth and disallows mitigation through any kind of spice or sauce, making my paranoid mind think someone wants to out me as the spoilt urban refined-flour-eating inverted snob that I am.

I looked around and found some lentil flour, which I added confidently because I once mistook it for refined wheat flour and the cake that emerged thereof was edible. And a bit of oats for good measure.

Oh, and I mashed some bananas with my hand because I love to feel the stuff ooze from between my fingers. Added those too.

Then I “beat” the batter with my hands again in the absence of a blender, and it came out way too dark brown (damn ragi again), like it was the very organic Mother Earth that sustains us all. Trying to ignore my cake making fun of me (no mean feat), I proceeded to pour it into a stainless steel vessel (ungreased, of course, I forgot), and put it into a pressure cooker, this being the closest thing I have to an oven.

Having always steamed stuff in a pressure cooker before, I wasn’t sure whether to put water in or not. More worrying for someone who grew up with a physicist parent was the rubber gasket that expands with heat and makes the thing airtight. I see rubber gaskets and think of the O-rings of the Challenger, which Feynman’s post-mortem team found were responsible for its crash. I wasn’t sure if the gasket would burn if I didn’t use water. I put the gasket in, sniffing for burning rubber in the first few minutes.

But apparently cake (if I may call it that) burns faster than rubber. Smelling it beginning to burn, I put in water and took out the gasket so I wouldn’t get steamed cake. Then a rattling, poltergeist racket penetrated to the bedroom and I rushed to find my best stainless steel vessel dancing an angry jig inside the cooker, tossed by the boiling water.

I haven’t used my cooker recently, so I hadn’t predicted this. The expensive organic brown basmati rice my sister very sweetly bought for my diet turned out to take forever to cook in it, and by the time I figured out I had to soak it first, I was tired of using the cooker. My boyfriend suggested I try it on the squirrel outside, and I said no, it only eats peanuts (this was my vanity speaking, it actually ate half a peanut when I tried to give it a handful, and all my Enid Blyton dreams of squirrels and nuts died an early death). However, the squirrel ended up eating a handful of that expensive brown basmati rice faster than I’ve seen anyone eat anything. So now I’m reduced to the dilemma of worldly wastage of expensive food vs. unworldly satisfaction of our gourmet squirrel.

The last question: what to do with the egg yolk? I cooked it very crudely on the gas without oil just for solidity and hence portability, and packed it to appease the stray dogs in the neighbourhood who let me through in the daytime but get really territorial at night.

Anticlimax: Protection money taken care of, the cake was done and it came out okay. A bit pretentious-tasting, and a bit dry, but otherwise pretty good. The secret? I used very inorganic, toxic to the liver, good old baking soda. That stuff’ll make anything into a cake.

Sneha may also be found on Bite & Dribble, in her other post on this blog, and over here.

Potatoes Fried in Fat

There are rules to cooking, but you can't follow them. Foremost among them is: Nothing ever goes according to plan. Understanding this rule is not precisely fruitful. Planning for plans to go awry is futile hubris. The best you can hope for is flexibility of some sort; to stick to the plan is generally worse than making a new one. The original plan, however, isn't so easily left behind.

On my way home today I had an impulse, brought on by the sweet-spoken words of a "Chopped" contestant from Texas: "nothing's better than potatoes fried in duck fat." I doubted I would easily find duck, and if I did, I doubted I would want to pay for it. Duck, in my plan, became chicken. I would find either chicken drumsticks or chicken wings, melt the fat from their skins, and fry potatoes in that grease. At the store, however, the only chicken parts for sale with skin attached were drumsticks in huge, 5lb packages. (Having already that day visited The Food Co-op, where chicken parts of all kinds come in small packages, I went to Safeway--too embarrassed at the prospect of returning to the Co-op.) Instead I bought a pork shoulder steak. It appeared well-endowed with fat.

At home, I chopped potatoes and half a yellow zucchini. I salted the pork steak and seared it on both sides, thinking that the latter would lead to an effusion of grease, but the pan remained dry. What was the best temperature for melting fat? I wondered. It was at this point I had to give up my dream of potatoes soaked in hot animal fat. A few tablespoons of olive oil went in, along with the potatoes and a splash of water. Covered with the heat low, it became a braise. Some fresh thyme leaves, salt, and black pepper were sprinkled.

After about ten minutes the zucchini was in. Not long after, the meat was out--it was already done, and--sliced into--it was good. I wanted to eat the whole thing before any of the vegetables were done. I held back, wanting still to have a semblance of what I had imagined: everything together on a plate. To the imagined dish I still clung. I removed the lid, trying to boil off all the liquid and thereby return the potatoes and zucchini to frying. It was taking a long time, but it was working. Everything was browning and sticking to the bottom of the pan. The zucchini became soft and that was my cue, in my impatience, to eat.

The flavor was marvelous. Well, sort of. The pork had an unidentifiable, sickly taint, but the potatoes and zucchini were coated in something delicious. The zucchini was overcooked, mushy, and falling apart--while half the potatoes were undercooked and still unpleasantly hard. Biting into my first unexpectedly raw chunk of potato, I thought again of potatoes perfectly crisped and cooked through in duck fat. (Which is not something I've ever eaten, mind you.) This mess of textures in front of me wasn't what I had in mind, but in its shortcomings the ideal kept resurfacing. A bite of potato blocked by unyielding flesh is perhaps better than a bite perfectly cooked.

There is this moment of eerie stereoscopy. Yes, the plate before me is there, and I eat it, but the other plate, the one I imagined, is there too, its golden potatoes generously shiny. The mind refuses to acknowledge what is before it, and goes off chasing a ghost. Which isn't to say it's less real. I couldn't tell you what the real dish I cooked tastes like any more than I could the dish I saw on television.

Chopped

In Magic: The Gathering there is a card called Meekstone. It makes life difficult for anything large. It manipulates the rules to privilege the small, the creatures you wouldn't expect to make it or to do much of anything. An oddly negative card for the righteous (it's white, the color of piety), it does so by punishing the bold player who puts down something quite clearly intended to win. Winning must be done cryptically, through a guise of defense.

In this cutthroat world some of us morally-inclined goody-goodies might wish for a Meekstone, something to make effective our agonizing qualms. We think, by way of self-justification, that the concept of humility is not still at work in the wider moral culture.

Nowhere is this more apparent than "Chopped". The show, I am fairly sure, encourages its contestants to boast on camera. Then they get chopped. There are gradations and flavors of vocal hubris. The first episode I watched had a young Boston chef whose cold eyes glowered out from deep eye sockets. At every moment he told us how confident he was of his cooking. While one of his competitors--a French woman with an earthy aesthetic--flipped out, vocalized her every worry and mistake, and thought out loud in French-accented English, he excercised a rigid, aspirational control. He was constantly saying he was in control. It was such pleasure to watch him get chopped.

Not every boaster is so clearly straining. Some really seem to believe their self-aggrandizements. These are the sort who tell us in the mandatory post-exile interview that they disagree with the choice to chop them. They tell us that they're the better chef. Usually these are older men, curmudgeonly and arrogant. I love to dislike them, and the show gives ample opportunity to ridicule them. A worthy chef does not say how great he or she is. A worthy chef is humble.

I can't decide whether my favorite winner is the taciturn lawyer-turned-chef whose poise was immaculate, neither boasting nor caving under pressure, maintaining a calm poker face, or the Hannah Horvath of chefs, who moved to New York penniless with culinary dreams, and lives with her friend. Of course, Hannah wouldn't burst into tears at everything and anything. This contestant was not shy about describing how her anxiety felt. She said she felt like "throwing up" or "crying in a corner" or "I was having a nervous breakdown." She cried in interviews, she cried when critiqued, she cried when she won.

In Private

For exaltation my memory is effectively very short. Anything that is good is The Best Thing Ever until there is something else. The nicest meal I've ever had is, I suspect, something only to happen and be appreciated in solitude.

Some would find the presentation too artful; they insist that all food be slopped on a plate (or piled into a bowl) without intention. To them, artifice is to be sniffed out and slandered, and they posit that absolute accidence is possible, like a grungy teenager trying to find the zero-degree of unkempt. They would ridicule the way the egg is nestled carefully atop a mound of yellow zucchini, but they would not say so outright. "Oh, very fancy," they would say, beaming at their plate and emitting hyperbolic oohs and ahhs. They would not intend to mock, but haplessly it would slip through the surface of their praise.

Others would poke at the oily squash distrustfully, smiling, wondering where the meat and potatoes are. But they, too, would not say this. Although vegetarianism has passed through several phases of It and Not, they wouldn't want to be so far behind the times as to dismiss it entirely. Some of their best friends are vegetarians. One must embrace all things; nothing is bad or wrong, not even personally, just different. Trying to prove themselves adaptable, they would grab hold of a sturdy rung of relativism. "Mmm, it's quite good," they would say, "I like zucchini," leaving half their portion of that vegetable on their plate.

Still others would find a dish of just two items--dividing food into items as they do--unfit, following the rigid, contemporary notion that what makes a meal is a protein, a starch, and a vegetable. Always this prefix of "a". Without starch what is it? A snack perhaps. They would finish their sunny plate with gusto, finding it charming, amusing, and then expectantly wait for the next course. Maybe, if I had any, I would find them some bread.

So it is not a dish I would serve. I wouldn't make it in company either. It wouldn't occur to me to do so. With others my imagination doesn't reach to pleasure myself with things untried, but scurries among the staid for something that might displeasure everyone least. On the other hand, if I were trying to impress rather than comfort, I would do something flashy--which sauteed zucchini and poached egg is decidedly not.

If I served it to me, though, I would think it has too much olive oil and would prefer butter, I would want another egg, would revel in the simple seasoning of salt and black pepper, congratulate myself on the softened but not mushy zucchini, delight in this newfound pleasure, the poached egg, which happily lacks those automobile qualities of the fried egg--rubber and grease--and I might make it again sometime. But that's always a questionable urge.

More Short Recipes

On a hot day, chill a peach. Cut it in half. Remove its pit. Slice it thinly. Pour lightly whipped (not stiff) cream over these slices. Is any slice not mealy? Eat it.

Squeeze twenty small lemons. In a large sauce pan, sear some tender meat on both sides and remove quickly to a plate. In the same pan, sautée onions and garlic. Once golden brown, deglaze the pan with 1/2 cup of stock. Add lemon juice. Thicken with a tablespoon of flour, and cook down to desired consistency. Plop the meat back into the pan and remove from heat. Salt to taste. Let stand indeterminately.

Grill several chicken legs. Ensure that the grill is very hot. Every five minutes, flip them over, and pour a generous layer of barbecue sauce over each. If excess barbecue sauce does not cause flames to leap from the grill, use olive oil. Keep flipping and lathering until the legs develop a thick, black crust. Meticulously scrape off this crust with a knife.

Coq au Vin

I tried cooking coq au vin. I know I could've just asked you for the recipe, but that would've defeated the point. Besides, as I kept harping on while we ate, recipes are useless without instruction of another sort. You can't exactly show me how you made it. So I did what I always do: impatiently skim the first few Google hits, omitting any ingredient I don't understand. Most noteably in this case, tomato paste. Isn't tomato a bully of a flavor in a sauce of wine? I think the vocabulary a restaurant critic might use is that the tomato would "deepen the flavor", or perhaps "broaden". These spacial metaphors. Well, my sauce is an empty room then, with a puddle of wine on the floor and some greasy chicken splattering the walls.

I don't mind the supposed minimalism in the mouth, though. It was, admittedly, filled out (there's another one, caprciously sprinkled to goad your characteristic optimism that spacialization isn't integral to language) with carrots and celery. But tasting my sauce now, in retrospect I detect the fullness of tomato in yours. The wine you used was also, I think, less fruity. The bottle I used was brought by my uncle, and its label described its final blast of berries as "elegant", which makes me suspect they know it isn't.

In sum, while I was quite happy with my hapless foray into coq au vin, and was in some ways pleased with how it deviated from what I remember, it seems that yours was expertly executed. In fact, having perused a few recipes, your rendition seems so to-the-letter that I wonder if you actually bought it from the hot deli of Whole Foods. They have such things, don't they? If this is the case you might be amused, if not I imagine you're at least a little offended. You've never really been one to let anything get to you, although I suspect you're just very good at acting unperturbable. Which may be the same thing, really--something has to bother you in the first place for you to have any hand in keeping it at bay. Blissful ignorance is quite different from deliberate control, and I think with you it's probably the latter. This faithlessness on my part is usual, but only because I'm compensating for my gullibility. The truth is I'm just as dubious of doubt as I am of easy verity, which is another way of saying I'm utterly lost. I've never been sure how one might think or even intuit these things through, leaving me with wide-eyed credulity on one side, and hysterical doubt on the other, with not much in between but hand-waving.

It's quite possible that the same nostalgia for the dish you served me--completely new to me--that made me try to recreate it also has me funneling the memory of its taste into an ur-coq au vin amalgamated from what little I've read about it. The more I try to taste it through what I have here, the less I realize I remember of it. I remember a feeling, and to put that down would be folly. At the moment of the most precise reconstruction, the memory slips away. Which is what one wants, really.

The loss is there already, though--reconstruction is not necessary. I won't try to find the same brand of stoneware, paint my dining room the same color, eat at the same time of day. No matter how I try to hold my fork in the same peculiar way you did--with only three fingers and no thumb, as if uncaring that it could slip out of your grasp--I will not divine the moment or you through a fork. For one thing, my hands aren't small enough.

Anyway, what have you been cooking these days?

Short Recipes

Cover Your Ears
Shuck two dozen ears of corn. Pile the husks in the center of the table. Drop an indeterminate number on the floor.

Cherry Cherry Pie
Pit a pound of cherries and collect the pits in a bowl. Crack their shells under a towl with a hammer. Run the nuts through a food processor until they become a fine meal. Add an egg, half a cup of sugar, and a tablespoon of flour, and mix to create a paste. Smear the paste evenly in a shallow tart shell. Eat half the pitted cherries. Place the other half on top of the paste. Bake at 350 F until the edges of the tart are brown.

Salade de Dents Longues
Toss together a large salad mainly consisting of lettuce. Eat as much of it as you can. The rest conserve in a clean yogurt cointainer in the fridge. Two weeks later, open the container and serve.

Redfish
Prehead oven to 300 F. Place two salmon fillets in a large baking pan. Pour 3/4 a bottle of Merlot over them. Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Bake until fish flesh is firm. Remove fillets to a plate. Continue baking the liquid in the pan until it is a viscous sauce.

Fried Green Tomatoes
Chop the roots from a tomato plant and wash it. Pick the leaves into a large saucepan. Add a tablespoon of olive oil and fry the leaves on medium-low heat for a minute. Juice a lemon into the pan and add 1/4 cup of water, a pinch of salt, and a sprinkle of black pepper. Cover and increase heat to medium-high. Boil until steam spits from the sides. Uncover, and reduce the liquid until flavorful and manageable. This is a well-known point, the elaboration of which is outside of the scope of this blog post.

In the Spirit but not the Method of Molecular Gastronomy
Pick any number of large, fragrant roses with many petals. Cut as close to the bottom of the flower without removing its integrity. A pile of petals will not do. Roll them in flour, then in egg, then in bread crumbs. Deep fry them. Serve hot.

Fireworks in a Bowl
Mix together half a cup of flour with half a cup of water. Place in a shallow bowl. Cover with a translucent lid, and leave outside for a week on a sunny table in summer. Do not lift the lid until the moment it is about to be consumed.

Everything I Write is as Over-the-top as Richard Klein's Cigarettes are Sublime

Cigarettes are Sublime has emboldened me in my love of infusions of bitter aromatics in lemonade. I've often wondered why I add rose water or cloves to lemonade when essentially it makes the lemonade taste worse. The smell of roses or cloves may be pleasant (although whether they go with lemon is debatable), but they taste bitter. You may object that bitter is sometimes a good flavor, and I would agree, but I must first posit bitter as essentially an unwanted flavor to explain why it can become desirable. Klien is insistent upon the point that tobacco smoke has never been reputed to taste or even smell good, and that nicotine addiction is insufficient to explain the particular pleasures of smoking or its role in the production of 20th century art. He is insistent on this, he says, because of the pervasive witchhunt on smoking (it's no longer 1993, but this persists). The bitter taste of rose water doesn't carry the same stigma or the same genuine threats of poor health and death. It would be going a bit far to describe all bitter tastes as sublime, but Klein's account of the pleasures of the consumption of unpleasant things suggests an explanation of all the vile things I like or liked: coffee, the overconcentrated tea I used to drink as a teenager, chocolate, lemonade with rose water.

Being an academic, Klein has to explain, too, the hyperbole of his discussion of cigarettes, and he does so hyperbolically, in the wordplaying convolutions vagueness of someone who has waded deep into post-structuralist prose. There's something absurdly reverent about the way he writes about cigarettes. He paints portraits of modernists smoking to commune with the unrepresentable beyond that modernists reach for. Instead of the philosopher contemplating his chair, Klein gives us Sartre contemplating his cigarette. Cigarettes provide "little terrors in every puff", or an "intimation of mortality." He also terms the "negative pleasure" of smoking "a blockage", and it is in this sense that I enjoy bitter lemonade. On this point it becomes apparent that my pleasure in bitterness is as invested in a beyond as Klein is. Or is it? Is my pleasure in bitter things as simple as that, not because bitterness forces an encounter with a barrier I can't cross, but just because bitterness tastes good to me? Do I simply desire bitterness--something within reach--or do I desire an impossible infinity through bitterness?

I think I add far too much rose water. More overpowering than the scent is the causticness that lingers in the throat. It slows me; rather than gulping the lemonade, I sip it, savoring and at the same time keeping at bay the flavor. The cominbation of floral and bitter is much like chewing on a lavander spring, another of my habitual negative pleasures. The lavander-chewing dries out my mouth during precisely the hot weather in which I want to be quenched. During the summer, rose lemonade is at once refreshing and dehydrating. It pickles. There's a luxury in drinking something that does not taste entirely wet. I should be keeping myself hydrated, but I'm not doing much about it. Plain lemonade, on the other hand, may be drunk like gatorade. It disappears alarmingly quick; its passage is easy.

It's just this lack of blockage that makes this post so malformed. Not needing to write it all now, I keep deferring the difficult parts. I leave threads bare, promising to weave them in later. The whole thing becomes frayed and unfocused because I still think it can be better than it is, eventually. Not accepting the mediocrity it's bound to be, it becomes worse.

Giseppi's Pizza

To begin with self-referenciality, this blog is beginning to resemble my now defunct autobiographical coffee shop blog, Psychocafegraphy. I was more distant then, but the mystical, hyperbolic, half-baked wisdom is returning. To write anything at all these days I have to push myself up against gears, grind myself a bit. Not because I love making it difficult (well, okay, maybe), but because it's easiest to mine solipsism for a topic, and because I don't know how to muster the attention for any other kind of writing than the bear-my-soul variety, even if (often) through a layer of metaphor.

What emerges in the confessional I've turned this blog into, though, is a sense of having bullshitted. Ursula le Guin's complaint against the written medium is that once you've written it down, you can't change your mind. She was troubled enough by this to publicly disagree with her own novel (The Left Hand of Darkness), and capitulate to critical interpretation. In autobiographical writing, what's troubling about the written word becomes uncanny--all these ghosts of yourself floating about wily-nilly. It brings me to yelling profanity at myself on a daily basis. But along with the megalomanical shame that comes with putting an intimate picture of myself into permanent language, there is an odd kind of relief. Even though niggling tendrils work their way out of it, the door has been shut on whatever subject I just wrote about. But actually, if I shut the door firmly enough, I find that it's wide open again. Writing Psychocafegraphy, the doors were literal and geographical as well as personal. I was closing off whole areas of the town to myself, revealing my ways of inhabiting each and (eventually) every coffee shop. It didn't matter that almost nobody read what I wrote. The glimpse of myself in the mirror was enough to make me avoid certain places and to multiply my already obsessive self-consciousness. Eventually I just shifted. The coffee shop I vehemently loathed on the blog became the one I frequented most--a new secret to inhabit.

I bring this up because there's this pizza place. There's nothing about it I like, and the pizza is, well, grody, but I go there habitually. I don't mean I go every day, or even necessarily every month. There's nothing regular about my visits, but they have a certain consistency.

It began with my visits to the University library. That library and the whole end of town that surrounds it have come to signify independence for me. It was on the university campus after all where sanctioned independence was first given to me in the form of Academy, a kind of academic summer camp for the "gifted and talented" (whatever that might mean). I can't remember how long it lasted. It may have only been a week, but for the duration we slept on campus in dorms. I think. I can't remember the dorms either, only vaguely the cafeteria, or merely that there was a cafeteria, that illicit items could be found there such as donuts, and that my friends and I indulged in them accordingly.

In high school, before the library was remodeled and it was decked-out in dingy browns and dark, pebbly concrete, I went there with lofty ambitions of soaking up the knowledge that the shelves were stuffed with. For some unknown reason the subject my whims landed on was astrogeology. It was literally and conceptually far off enough. I read about the geology of other planets, understanding hardly a word. It was the sheer reaching I wanted, to be in that position of trying desperately to understand something that vast and impressive, of looking up at it in longing incomprehension--a more or less religious experience.

Unsurprisingly, it was a girl a few years (or two, or one?) older than me who I held in a very similar regard to astrogeology who drew me there. I can't remember exactly how the two of us ended up in the library at the same time. Maybe I accompanied her there, on some errand for a book or to use their computers, or maybe when I went there to research my project on Buckminster Fuller I ran into her. In any case the place became hallowed in connection to her. She had read wider and more earnestly than I, and here was an opportunity to reach toward her. The library had become a shrine.

In my last year of high school, the library was the place we met to study for our comparitive government AP exam. The university was also where AP Chemistry labs took place, and where the video production class was held. It felt kingly to leave the high school campus. In my precociousness it was like being given another year of age ahead of time. At that time age was something I wanted.

I went to school at that university, too, for a year, during which time the library was being loudly renovated. But it wasn't until I left for Maine and came back with late essays to complete over College of the Atlantic's winter break that I found myself spending so much time at the renovated library, and going to Giseppi's pizza for dinner. I did so out of a desire not to go home just yet, despite being hungry. I found I craved it, the disgustingness of it, the assumption that my brother would disapprove.

In the summer I stayed out of the house for as long as possible by coming to the university and when I got hungry taking a Giseppis lunch special on a paper plate to the wide lawn next to one of the university dorms. The grease soaked into the plate. The lemonade or iced tea that I always got (a drink comes with the lunch special) was acrid, and the pizza itself was overcooked and sometimes stale. But I loved it, sitting there in the grassy shade of a tree, eating my nasty lunch and reading a book. I always wanted either to take my pizza to the dirty picnic table just out the door under the awning (if raining) or to the field across the street (if warm) because the inside is so abomidable. A cramped space with long bench seating on either side, bright red oilcloth covering the tables. It's filled with a few old arcade games and a teleivision always turned to some variety of sport. The walls are covered with photos of local sports teams, and loyalty to the high school football team, the Grizzleys, is declared loudly by stickers and logos painted on the walls. It is, in short, an utterly alien space for me to sit in.

Today I choose to sit inside, despite the warmth outside, contemplating fading photos of footballers. There is a picture of three teenagers atop a snowy mountain (either Mount Ashland or Mount Shasta), holding up a Giseppi's pizza in a box, showing it to the camera and to Giseppi's--we took your pizza up here! I wonder how cold and hard the cheese was.

The people who work at the counter have always intimidated me. I always sound stiff and out of place in the (to me inaccessible) comfort of brusque manners and dingyness. Coming here is for me an exoticism; it's an encounter, just a little frightening. For a timid yuppie in Ashland, this is as close as its gets to the titillation for slumming it.

Ruts

When you see relatives infrequently enough, each meeting isn't just catching up, but reacquainting. You don't remember exactly who this vaguely familiar person is, and you don't know how they've changed. They may not. Years put a fog around people, which oddly makes it possible to see them clearly. Getting a first impression anew. You don't necessarily know those you live with, work with, see every day, but you no longer try to. You do; they've calcified to you. The air is particularly clear in San Francisco when the fog clears, the light painfully bright. (Look, I'm romanticizing a place I felt dull towards.)

We were in a bit more of a sheltered place--Oakland. "You're a good cook, right?" Am I? "I get stuck in ruts." "We all do." Remembering she's fifteen years older, her sociable persona younger. Matured past what she can express breezily to an uncle, an uncle's girlfriend, her father, a cousin. That's the flattering way I'd like to think of my cooking, too: It's evolved away from everything I cooked, to the point of hardly cooking anything. My repertoire diminished to nothing. Nice way to save yourself, but it's not cooking. No growth can happen without trying anything. What's growth but destruction? There's nothing I even want to eventually be rid of. Every dish is gross to imagine. What I do cook just mitigating disgust.

I know there's more than what I can imagine (bake-fried potatoes, sautéed zucchini and tomatoes, roast chicken legs, pizza, eggs and various oiliness, salad, pancakes), but I want newness to appear from nowhere otherwise it's not new. Perusing glossy cookbooks involves gusto and an ability to discern what might tantalize the palette enough to bother making, a talent shrewd shoppers possess, not me. Only writing this gives me the impression I even want to cook anything other than what I do. Otherwise don't mind eating whatever's around, or whatever fumes left of imagination hit when I slump into the supermarket. What's cheap and not too depressing.

Was once one of those recipe-mongers, devoured the Internet of recipes, salivated, filled my head with an ever-shifting list of what I wanted to cook. Recipes are shit, lowest form of culinary communication, do not tell the dish, give no sense of what's involved or what's appealing. Wrote a recipe for a friend two weeks ago. Wish I could show instead, not because I don't trust her or because my roast chicken is so great, but because it's all in the neurotic details, the mothering of it, what makes me irritably shoo away others' hands--they don't understand my baby. I pretend nonchalance in the kitchen to most people, but I'm murderous.

What I want is for a friend to proselytize to me, to reveal their beloved to me. I'd understand if nobody wanted to though--what they love I may well hate. Or, slowly, to love. It took a relationship with an avocado-lover to get me to like them, and then only really after the relationship ended, after there was no interest (in the derogatory sense of paranoid political philosophy) in liking avocados, eventually finding that a good avocado is something to search for.

More often, though, what I cook is defined by what I no longer cook. Thin amnesiac practice of a few dishes supposedly embodying years of learning. It's not me, just some things I cook, honest. What I can't imagine my way out of now. In "Justified", the central character's defining thing is his hat. "Why the hat?" "Honestly? I tried it on and it fit." A lie. The rhetorical recourse to pure practicality or happenstance that's a blushing cop-out. Ego cutting its losses: No, I was not here. I am not here at all. I am somewhere else, expanding to the infinitude of the withheld.

I D E A L

I like to remind everyone I meet that swallowing is not natural. A characteristically exasperating conversational habit, especially during meals, which is just when I bring it up. Like saying during coitus that biological imperatives have no intrinsic normative force. Mood breaks when necessity falls away (and with clunky academic diction). When small you can choose not to swallow. You would starve.

It's preferable to glide over such things. Pleasure in spinning the primal. The centrifical force of the everyday considerable; it's a wonder we aren't always dizzy. A restaurant on the beach in Santa Cruz endeavors to fling its customers into the breakers. With wide-set capitals it declares itself IDEAL. Its menu more specific, the cover a black and white photo of a shapely woman in a bathing suit, holding a tall salmon in each hand, her pose bent at one knee, her eyes smiling (as the photographed must be). My uncle, drawn by the $4.95 breakfast special, says "look at the size of those salmon." Inside the restaurant the gaze is deflected in the same way. Look at the size of those plates (carried by waitresses no older than eighteen in mandatory short shorts). One jump over two messes. Do greasy eggs, potatoes, and bacon go down easier when served by nubiles? That would be IDEAL, crossing its fingers.

(Don't Pretend This Makes Sense)

Years ago, undoubtedly following a link from anthro girl extraordinaire, Ashley Olive, I watched a youtube video of advice on giving yourself (your female self) you-time. You were to go out with yourself (to a restaurant for instance) without your phone. Like in a notice in a movie theater, the girl reaching empowerment in the video turned off her phone. She then sat down with her journal, of course. It's good advice, but significant that (lame phrase to open a line of inquiry) the noblest dreams of those of us who are soaked in digital communication revolve around the absence of cell phones and computers. (Truism.) I fantasize about spaces in which I can focus, where reflection is possible, and time expands from its usual dull rush. That time is something I spend has become all too real of an idiom. We do indeed appear to be living in an economy of attention, and so the fantasy of escape has become not having to pay attention to anything. The desire is to get to the practice beneath the performance, the being underneath the sign, the experience under the appearance. (Which connects to not paying attention to anything how?) Great nostalgia there. Life "outside" grows large in the imagination; "living in the moment" becomes virtue itself.

My version of this fantasy would never be complete without gastronomic underpinnings. It is in precisely these predigital conditions that eating can be best appreciated. Solitude is not necessary, but the company must be perfect if there is to be any at all, otherwise the food goes untasted. It's difficult to savor food. Take chocolate. There are two ways of eating it. You can munch it hungrily, swallowing the shards before they fully melt, or you can let it sit in your mouth, releasing rich liquid. ("Releasing rich liquid" isn't even good erotic writing.) Usually I don't have the patience for the latter, and it's pointless to force myself, to mix virtue with pleasure.

Many of my fondest memories of eating take place on the back porch in summer. It's quiet and secluded by tall trees, but with enough of a vista for the mind to wander. Just taking a book or a notebook out there is not enough, though. There must be at the very least tea. It used to be my habit to take a cup of heavily spiced chai, to sweat triply from 90 degree heat, an excess of white pepper and ginger, and hot liquid. Last year it was bread and soft butter ("soft butter?" "yes, soft butter" could be dialog in a Fry & Laurie sketch), and grilled meat and vegetables. Grilled zucchini with balsamic vinegar and olive oil was a favorite, something I'm sure A.A. Gill would scoff at. Outside, eating takes on a sensuality that can't be found indoors. (In lieu of anything else to say, circularity works.)

There's nothing revelatory about it, but as long as we mythologize our time away from the information streams of digital gadgetry, let us admit that food is the perfect fetish, that the world blooms from taking apart a piece of cake, and that what I'm really talking about is reading M.F.K. Fisher on the back porch in the shade with slices of pork, a saucer of salted olive oil, and some chunks of bread. (The food doesn't actually sound at all good does it?)

It's tempting to believe in the utopian potential of removing oneself. Rarely do I think of it as a break--instead I'm always making a full-blown resolution of asceticism. One of Kate Millett's friend-lovers in Flying, Claire, does little else but read "like nobody has since the nineteenth century" in her cheap apartment. She doesn't just read. She reads in themed binges. One month it's the stars and science fiction, another, philosophy. She styles herself a mystic, and is capable of such flight of idealism. She is at once who I wish I could be (I have always idealized the kind of person whose life is reading) and a sober reflection of that idol (there's something neurotic about trying to remove herself so entirely). She is also, in particular circumstances, someone with whom I identify. She can only handle a crowd briefly and has to flee. She's the one in hiding behind reading material at a party. She toys with asceticism, swearing off "the pleasures of the flesh," probably for different reasons. It's in precisely this wistful spirit of brushing away, though, that my short-lived resolutions are.

It all falls apart rather easily. As soon as the self-congratulatory thoughts come--"isn't this wonderful? I don't need anything. I feel so relaxed and content, I could stay out here reading all day!"--I itch to check my email, for someone to call me or text me, for something to happen on the Internet.

Miso Gravy, or Dramatic Short Sentences

You know what the worst food in the world is? Food trying desperately to be other food. Servility isn't a good taste.

The basket case of slavering self-erasure I have in mind is, of course, vegetarian food trying to be carnivorous. Specifically, vegetarian gravy. No, not gravy in the sense of hearty sauce, but actually the juices extracted from parts of dead animals. The brown stuff you pour over mashed potatoes. A certain excitement pervades those vegetarians who feel they have conjured meatiness. The pride with which this recipe was related to me, the ecstasy its consumption reportedly gave. It's recipe that can only be described as brute-force cookery. (Brute-force in the sense of hacking, wherein a massive number of passwords are sent to the target, until one of them, hopefully, turns out to be the right one. The problem in this case is that the sheer volume of data constitutes a denial-of-service attack in the mouth.) Here are the ingredients: garlic, onions, nutritional yeast, mushrooms, miso, vegetable bouillon, and white wine. Basically every possible non-dairy source of umami mixed together in a pot.

I might love the stuff on popcorn, but nutritional yeast is particularly offensive. I shiver (for several reasons) at the memory of the dinner pap I cooked up on the week-long solo segment of my bicycle trip back from the coast some years ago. I brought with me tons of tiny macaroni elbows, a kind of hippie instant pasta (I brought it in the bulk section of the local co-op). This I would boil in a tiny pot over a tiny stove just outside of or sometimes inside my tent, damning what I'd heard was a risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, because it was raining. Once cooked, I poured out most of the water, dropped a pat of butter on top of it, some salt, a pinch of an all-purpose spice mixture I had concocted for the trip, and a mountain of nutritional yeast. This was supposed to be protein. For the same reason I would sometimes chop cheese into it, too. It was wonderful, but then everything is when you've pedaled yourself to exhaustion the whole day.

The best part is, at the time, it wasn't just calories to assuage my gullet and cramping legs, it was decadence. I had hoarded these ingredients. The first half of the bicycle trip was with company from whom I hid such naughty items as pasta. "Company" isn't quite right--I wouldn't want to give the impression I was going on this trip anyway and these two guys wanted to tag along. I was one of the tag-alongs, and tag-alongs are never really in the company of others. It's just out of reach. I spent the month before we left agonizing over whether to go or not. It was crazy, I wasn't ready for the physical exertion or the socializing, my bike was in a state of disrepair. In the end, though, there was no use fighting it. He was irresistible. He knew everything, like which dumpsters were good, where the best abandoned fruit trees were, and that women's legs were just as hairy as men's. In the house where in the yard he currently had an arrangement to live, there was a photo of someone with his or her back to the camera, and I made some remark about "him". He laughed that laugh of his, the one I still steal, with the multiple joyous gasps for air at the end of it, and said "yeah, because a woman could never have legs that hairy." He was in good humor, but still I stammered, making some attempt at a defense, though perhaps that memory was only esprit de l'escalier. I can't remember if my face did, but I certainly burned with shame. That after all is the best glue, and I felt it just being in his presence. He knew how to live; I was just a pathetic bourgeois impostor. I had to go with him.

So it was he who determined what could be said and could not, what should be done and should not. For the trip he was the horizon, above which was reality, and below, the underworld. Without him just a jumble, no crust of potential happiness, and no heat and pressure below. Not that he wanted to determine anything. He was one of those people who tries draw others out, like pupils. And surely it was lonely, looking into our eyes and finding only a wall of subservience. If there was any resistance it was ultimately rescinded, tucked away. What to do instead?

He had a passion for water. Thus the coast, I suppose. The easiest way to the coast is to follow a river. The highway along the river is dangerous, more so for bicycles. Winding steeply down, on one side cliff, one side sheer drop to the water, precariously held by an intermittent guardrail. There's no shoulder, only a white line where we tried to place our wheels, the cars squeezing past us at fifty miles an hour. Caution was not possible; safety meant not hesitating.

Sometimes his passion for the water would take him (and us) where there was a convenient ramp to the river. His passion was infectious and the immune system could not quite identify it. He was impulsive, open, exuberant. We his companions were both pensive, quiet, found it difficult to jump. (Though it was less of a jump, I think, for the other one of us.) He jumped. He whooped. I stood with my shirt off, crumpled inward, staring at the ice-blue water rushing. While I thought the water roared. I could enter but I wouldn't. The water would chill me, and it did. I was in the water but I wasn't. I smiled. It was an action. I looked at him smiling, drying off, and I was envious. To me water was just water, to him, something more.

So with food. I always wanted more quantity. I wanted to gorge myself. One of my happiest moments on the trip was when he suggested we all get ice cream from a gas station. I say suggested; to us it meant we were allowed. Ice cream was an indulgence. I devoured mine looking at my bike saddle, exhaustion at the prospect of again mounting.

If the fact that he willingly was going to bicycle from Oregon to Alaska doesn't tell you, I'll tell you that he had a passion for punishment. We reached the mouth of the river. The land flattened. The road eased and quieted. He stopped. There was a patch of stinging nettles on the roadside. On his birthday he had run through a gauntlet of friends spanking him with brushes of stinging nettles. Standing in the nettle patch, gathering them for a meal, I discovered there is something undeniably tantalizing about them. In my shorts I daintily avoided their leaves, but I was drawn deeper and deeper into where they couldn't be avoided. I wanted to trick myself into being stung. Their threat a ticklish promise. He barreled into the thick of them, grabbing handfuls. I was disgusted.

That night we boiled the nettles in seawater. It's the only time I've ever eaten them, and I remember them as delicious. I wanted more, but that was the whole of dinner. The nettles were supposed to sustain us. He wanted to live his dream of gathering the food he ate. He did. I tried. My hunger bubbled up against the diaphragm.

It was with a mixture of fright and pleasurable anticipation that the third of us left. It was just him and I for the next few days, until we too parted. I had him all to myself, but then I lacked a buffer to hide behind. My anger and longing became more apparent. Glaring at him pedaling ahead of me with ease. Intimate talk was suddenly, frighteningly, possible. As we rode I would tell him things, and sometimes it seemed like he was lifting things out of me like a pickpocket, but they were things I wanted to let go. When I had released them, though, they were wrong. What could I do about the false things I had given him? Correction or silence? The latter only held so much.

At night we shared a tent. I had my own, but I didn't like what using it said. Then I wondered if he wondered why I didn't use mine. Enclosed on both sides. I remember his smile in the mornings, ever jovial. Such warmth there. I hate sleeping with others. Every sound I make redoubles in my imagination of their ears.

Sleeping alone is just as bad, in another way. When I began my trip home, I was elated. I was free and I could do whatever I liked. But nobody knew what I was doing. Miles and miles of the prison of the freedom of my mind. Talking to myself. When night fell there was nothing for my thoughts to bump up against, no other mind to speculate. I could eat all the macaroni-and-yeast I liked, filling my belly to sickness. I did have a book. One can only read oneself out of oneself so far.

In the shadow of a carnivorous cuisine, vegetarian has the same options: futile mimicry with an undercurrent of frustration, or empty, desperate freedom. The only way out is to find different company. The straining hurts and hurts to witness. Vegetarian gravy is this strain liquefied. It has the flavor of aspirational pain.

More Efficient than Essays

Barbecue Sauce
That obnoxious loudmouth without whom the party is not a party.

Coffee
The giddiness of infatuation, the sickness of rejection.

Bacon
Thermonuclear war.

Chocolate
Monks pretend not to sneer at those who indulge, who just can't handle 100%.

Alcohol
And we look down on glue-sniffing.

Butter
What was enough yesterday is stingy today.

Salt
Piety, ignorance, and health are no excuses for bad taste.

Sugar
Some think pleasure will land them in hell, and some think they can feel hell burning up into them, into their teeth--what flattery is that.

Sunscreen
I knew a man who grew obesce from eating spoons and spoons of canned frosting.

Wheat
We all need someone to hallow and to rage against.

Rose Water
What about the taste of smell?

Swiss Cheese
You might not want to shake hands with me because I pick the stuff between my toes.

Turnip
You know those grimacing people to whom others only speak out of a sense of duty, guilt, or pity?

Canned Bread
When I asked him if we as a country would ever get over the second world war, he said "I hope not!"

Cucumber
No outward signs of bitterness; you have to slice it and taste.

Berries in the Dark

Those croissants. Lily went to great lengths to transport them from the upper east side to Brooklyn, and there they are, piled on a platter, perfectly browned. I have never seen anyone bite into one. Every episode morning breaks with a Protestant chirp, bracing helicopter shots of the sun rising over Manhattan, and a table set to the brim with inert Continental breakfast foods. Orange juice, coffee, pastries, fruit, yogurt. As you would expect from someone like me, I find the pastries maddening. They look so good, and they're not eaten.

I'm not sure about the others, but Chuck and Serena have signiture gastronomic props. One might even call them familiars. Chuck can reliably be seen draining tumblers of brown liquor in his hotel room. It seems he runs on the stuff. Perhaps his peculiar way of moving can be ascribed to the lubrication of his hydraulic limbs. Without whiskey he might--who knows?--become Nate.

Berries, it appears, are Serena's substance. They are somehow both a diet and a comfort food. While others consume theoretical croissants, Serena breakfasts on mixed berries. When she pulls off a scheme (don't worry, it will fail by the end of the episode) by posting as Gossip Girl, she is luxuriating in bed, feasting on berries, smirking. Finally, when her life has run dry, her fantasies evaporated, and her imagination halted (which by the way never happens to people in this show--there is always a new angle), Dorota asks her "why you eat berries in dark?"

Stawberry Shortcake

During that time that I reference all too often, the winter break in Bar Harbor I spent alone, I was obsessed with strawberry shortcake. It's one among many foods that I have fetishized, fussed with, and found lacking. I always had to add something to strawberry shortcake. Nutmeg wove its way sucessively through each piece of it: the biscuits, the whipped cream, even, oddly, the sugared strawberries. I put rose water in there, one time. Vanilla in the cream, another. I may even have tried cinnamon somewhere. I did not try any sort of booze, which probably would have been the only thing worth trying.

I don’t remember exactly how many times I made strawberry shortcake, but sometimes it seems that all I did during those three weeks was eat strawberry shortcake with cheap Chardonnay and watch “Absolutely Fabulous”. I kept hoping it would be more decadent and less sickeningly rich. The strawberries deceive me into thinking that I’m eating something light and fruity, not a pile of butter and cream. Of course, that is the point of the dish–that the wet, fresh, mildly sweet berries compliment the heavy, dry biscuits and the rich cream. I kept thinking well, it’s almost perfect. Part of the trouble was that by the time I actually took a bite of the stuff, I had already eaten a few biscuits. And having had just eaten dinner, my digestion was already weighed down. The shortcake was putting me to sleep.

Decadence is by definition excessive, but one wants it to be, somehow, a needful excess. A lush does not wish to drown in pointlessness, to have everything and anything. He wants to get that particular thing, to stretch out fulfillment like taffy. To be decadent is to delay endings, which, really, is to delay time’s passage entirely. Unfortunately, strawberry shortcake leaves you sedated, gurgling, and not freed in the slightest. The worst part is, after one deadening plate, I still want more of it. And I’ll make it again. Decadence may be impossible, but I can try again and again, creating the appearance of decadence. I can try to create a tiny opening of the present, but each attempt takes me further away. Strawberry shortcake, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know, is not transcendance.

That doesn’t stop me from wishing. The only excuse I need is a new angle. This time it was an impetus thinly veiled behind the scent and flavor of strawberries. Someone told me she was eating strawberries, that the flavor was unparalleled, that nohing beats the taste of a good, fresh strawberry. I could never have what I imagined her experience to be, but I could sidle up as close as possible to that red, sylvan jouissance. I immediately bounded to the store, of course, and found that strawberries were on sale. Thrilled, I told her that I got them, that the package of strawberries was in my hand. “Smell them,” she told me. I did. “Oh yes,” I said, the air through the vents of the plastic box perfumed with promise.

Strawberries, through, unless they’re ridiculously good, are improved by sugar and stewing. These strawberries were not quite ripe enough to be best alone. This time strawberry shortcake would be foremost a vehicle for strawberries. I wanted to distill them to purer version of themselves. There would be no distractions: no nutmeg, no rosewater, no vanilla. Just sugar, biscuits, and cream. In the end, same story: nausea, second helpings, remainders of desire.

Slice some strawberries, remove their green tops, and put them in a bowl. Cover them with about a tablespoon of sugar for every two strawberries. Stir them about. Set the oven to 425 F. In another bowl mix together two cups flour, three teaspoons baking powder, and two pinches of salt. Put in a stick of cold butter. Coat it with flour and slice it into chunks, then cut it finely into the flour using a pastry cutter. Add one egg and nearly 2/3 a cup of milk. Mix with a fork until a dough is formed. Roll out the dough, dusting it with flour so it doesn't stick. Fold it once onto itself. Roll it out again to roughly 1/3 inch. Cut out small discs with a cup and put them onto a baking pan. Bake until risen and lightly browned on bottom. In yet another bowl whip some heavy cream to very soft peaks. Warm the strawberries in a small pot until all the sugar dissolves. Cut one of the biscuits in half, putting the insides up on a plate. Cover the halves with strawberries and whipped cream.

Springs Eternal

The first thing I reach for is the tea kettle, and at least half the time, no matter how I brew it or what I do with it, tea is insipid. It’s not enough. Not only does it leave me falling back asleep an hour after waking, but it fails to deliver its promise. The truth of it plunges me from the thin plane of possibility back into reality: It’s noon, and all I have is a mug of lukewarm brown liquid. I ask a lot of it. Not only is it supposed to wrest me from unconsciousness, but it also has to somehow allow me outside my life.

Therefore sometimes I escalate to coffee, and suddenly there is an arms race of morning aspirational imbibations. Coffee, though, has its problems: burning at the back of the throat, diarrhea, heartburn, sickly taste that cannot truly be scrubbed out of anything. And as much as I need coffee, it can leave me so agitated that everything becomes nearly impossible, even behaving civilly. Every time I switch to coffee I switch right back to tea the next day. (This is the kind of thing that passes for excitement for me.) It’s not really an escalation or an arms race, and coffee is not superior to or more than tea (except technically in caffeine content, which in the end is irrelevant). What I’m actually doing by switching back and forth is searching for novelty.

To this end I also mix up tea preparations. I boil it in milk with ginger, brew nicer leaves, add sugar or do not. I can fiddle all I want, in the end its futile. Novelty comes only out of the blue, and rarely because I decided to drink something different that morning. It grabs me unexpectedly on mornings when I’ve resigned myself to the same damned thing, and suddenly the same tastes different. It’s hotter, fresher, more precise.

On such lucky mornings I sometimes convince myself that the perfection of the tea (or coffee) can be chocked up to some subtlety in the way I prepared it. I try to replicate it the next day, and it comes out the same old garbage. Too this, too that, a drink to be waded through, not greedily consumed.

Faced with the pointlessness of tea and coffee, some would give it up entirely, become like monks. These people are just as afraid of intractability as I am. To opt out of the idea of stimulating beverages would take so much maintenance. Maintaining control over the desire surely means being ruled by it. Who manages it completely, anyway? Sounds just as much a longing as what I have for the supposed powers of caffeine. Besides, I could not possibly give up my crutch. This is not something that should ever be uttered at an AA meeting.

Potatoes

You know, I have no idea what the Irish Potato Famine was. All I have are some ideological props lamely disguised as history. It was the lack of biodiversity, you see, that did them in. Or more honestly the first thing that pops into my head is: Didn’t they know that potatoes are just empty carbs?

The point is, the only way I can think of the victims of the famine is as poor fools. Too bad they had to learn the hard way what we now know! I mean, I guess. They got what was coming to them, right? When you think about it, the holocaust only happened because we didn’t yet know to kill every goose-stepping kraut on sight. After seven decades of deliberation, we’ve come to the conclusion that that’s what fascism is--martial dance moves and fermented cabbage.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, what even the Irish knew: Always keep potatoes in the dark. I say this, but I don’t do it. A whole army of them are spread on the kitchen counter, bearing obscene green protrusions. The poor things don’t know that there’s nothing for them to grow in. Expose them to the sunlight and they’ll just start sprouting, unaware that once they’ve used themselves up to make green shoots, there will be nothing to support them besides sunlight. Their roots will scour the counter for water and nutrients, and they’ll find nothing. They’ll wither and die. Which is probably for the best. Imagine if you were born into a vacuum. They keep clearing your mouth of mucus, but there is in fact nothing for you to breath. There is only one way to act on this knowledge, and it will happen anyway: you must die.

Speaking of, I need some creative ways to preemptively exterminate these doomed spuds. I was thinking an oven. It’s an act of compassion. Sure, I could put them in soil, but come on, do you think there are enough holes in the ground for all of them? Besides, it’s so much responsibility. I have better things to do, like write this shit.

I’ve spent a lot of time waiting in vehicles for the driver to complete some errand (you know who you are), reading. The material varies. On better, less amusing days I’ve brought something with me, but sometimes it’s a pocket technical encyclopedia filled with trivia, sometimes it’s a tossed-aside (for good reason) magazine, and sometimes it’s a paperback, also tossed. When the driver gets back into the car, he inevitably gets an earful of whatever I’ve just entertained myself with during his absence. Imagine yourself the driver. One time it was the first chapter of some post-apocalyptic sci-fi. I think the premise was something like “and then the machines went kaput, because the nanomachines went berserk and murdered them, because nanomachines are evil, and, damn, now there’s a whole swarm of them, but only at low altitude, because real Americans live in the mountains.” As vague as The Road, but more torturously rationalized. In any case, our story centered around a small group of survivors, who of course were fighting amongst themselves. The author had taken the post-apocalypse as a perfect stage to set his vision of The Way Things Really Are, which I understood to be men posturing a lot, heroically saving their perceived inferiors with Hard Leadership Decisions (the kind Bush made), and filling the air with a lot of self-justifying talk. Stuff like “Lucy, I know it’s hard, but we can’t cuddle just now--we’ve got to cook the dog.” Paired with potatoes. Apparently when the apocalypse comes, we’ll all be eating a lot of meat and potatoes. Not because that’s what’s around, but because that’s Real Food.