Chantrelle Hunting and Net Cleaning

One Jack O Latern is eating the other, smaller one. They're both smiling. "Do we light another candle in the little one?" One hopes that question is anachronistic.

The icy water gives me a hollow ringing in my head, but my numb hands burn up. It shocked me at first, this feeling that my hands couldn't stand going back in the water. Not because it was surprising that cold water is cold, but because all I could say about it was that it's really cold, pause. He suggested gloves. It's a common complaint that men hear complaints as repair requests, one I am too happy to deploy, but it was a good idea. I think I haven't looked for gloves because that would be giving up the part of the job I look forward to.

Can one be blunted? At the least, one needs bluntness sometimes. "Do you enjoy these things?" No, but I need them. Is enjoyment fair to ask?

The flavor of chantrelles is hard to define, but umistakeable, maybe even a little grotesque. Raw, they're reputedly "peppery and upsetting." They're supposed to smell like apricots, which sounds like synesthesia.

The hills look golden these days, but those same oak leaves up close are a dull ochre. Looking and being might be the other way around. The leaves are all precious anyway, rotten spots and all, until they wash down into the net. Left alone, the net becomes a dam, the water overflows. Why clean the net?

Why find new ways to faint? I have forgotten to say that cleaning the net is work. The question of whether it's worth it--the degree to which work releases from work--is replaced by the fact that I have to do it. I said I look forward to it, but I try to avoid it. I'm sick of the monotony of the routine that surrounds it, but I'm sick of my routine being interrupted by scraping every leaf-clogged surface of the net.

Hunting for mushrooms is actually two things, searching and finding. It's almost annoying to have to stop looking to get down on my knees and collect the trove. Greed turns into the work of brushing off dirt and needles, plucking each mushroom and deciding if it's too damp, too dry, too moldy, too difficult to clean. Soon they're all uprooted, and I'm once again interrupted to go back to looking intently at the forest floor. It's no wonder that after only an hour of this, it's all ennui. Mushrooms as good as those jostling around in my backpack are no longer perfect enough to bother with. Even a largish patch just looks like effort.

That's the trouble with eating them, too: Given the hour-long drive on a sick-inducing road, it only makes sense to gather them in large quantitites. And what does one do with that many chantrelles? It's not a flavor I want in every meal, but there they are. Supposedly they freeze well, but freezers require trust, and I suspect them of mangling the texture of everything. The only option, really, is sharing them as widely as possible. It's not altruism it's ventriloquism. I imagine their taste is more appreciated by those who aren't stuck with them.

After I wrote this I realized the fruit cake is delicious.

Eraserhead is a nightmare of fatherhood, but its problem is matter. For the moment, mine is persistence--"nothIng's more changeable than a young man's heart," as Mrs. Patmore puts it, before a cut to a young man carrying flowers. I would say that Downton Abbey's scene-to-scene cuts have gotten less subtle, but it's been pointed out to me Downton is the model of consistency. It's true, or at least, one has to get one's bearings somehow.

First let me say that Nigella's choice of fruit cake fruit are a stroke of genius. But I only realized this at first glance, and then later, when I tasted my one slapdash substitution. I convinced myself that figs might actually be better than pears. Figs are twofaced. Fresh, they are lush; they carry just the right hint of exoticism requisite for winter sweets. But dried, I can only taste fig newtons. These ones had me confused: they were a cheery yellow on the outside. How could they taste like the filling of a mealy cookie? Nigella's choices had worked all this out to arrive at a consistently sunny tone, by eschewing both the obvious tropical choices and the somber traditionals. Apricots, pears, and golden raisins (in her parlance, sultanas, which sounds as good as the figs looked).

But dried pears were nowhere to be found, and my "contribution" started to sound better, in retrospect, because it was there, because I wanted the fruit I had already bought to matter. This bizzarre aspect of my heart became apparent when I took a bite of the cake.

Fruit cake is so dense it takes more than a night to cool, so to arrive at this point involved about twenty-four hours of zig-zagging. My baking partner had her doubts and therefore I did. Making the cake was the reverse of a Sarah Waters novel: every step made me more uncertain it was a good idea, so that the end result only confirmed my suspicions. No, that's a lie, I had never smelled anything so good as dried fruit simmering in rum and butter. I was in love until I held its weight. It was one in the morning. It had been cooling for several hours and it was still hot (more evidence of its superpastry density). I suddenly felt very tired. Or maybe I had been yawning the whole time?

In any case, the evidence of one's own self-servingness, however obscure, is never very welcome.

Pressure Systems

Seasons are a ploy. A New season can fall instantly (in this week's case, like a grey blanket), yet it sneaks. The beginning of every season is an opportunity to toy with forever: what will life look like from now on? There's an "until," but ignore it. Three months is a lifetime. Except when you hear a date six months in the future, and realize it's almost here.

It's 60 degrees and drizzly, and I'm already calling it Winter. Fall and Spring are intermediaries; Winter and Summer allow me to cultivate delusions of time depressurized. The difference is the setting: inside with endless cups of tea, or outside under a tree. There seems to be a presence there, in the seasonal rescue from the current. Holing up or getting lost.

Hence, Christmas cookies. Making them is a tedious ritual lasting several days. The point isn't the cookies themselves, but the needless work. If I'm lucky, I can get lost in the tactile kingdom of dough. Is this more, or less difficult alone? It can be a social event, cookie-making, but company is only a means to an end. If the weather is just right, it's easier to forget in company. It can despine conciousness, which can get like a cactus, cooking alone.

Winter is supposed to be the season of gluttony, but when it's me who has to cook, it ends up being the season of neglect. Tea for breakfast, because it's as a ritual it calms rather than disorganizes. It's not that food is so distasteful in the morning, but the thought of thinking about food is too much to bear. I get desperate sometime in the evening, but if nothing is at hand, hunger transmutes into simple exhaustion, and I can go to sleep.

Also, hunger and restlessness and intimately related. Being sick of something feels like hunger. Hunger can coexist with involvement, but it's almost soothingly far off, like thunder.

So you can imagine the appeal of this to me. I don't particularly want marzipan fruit, but I imagine the required attention to detail will save me. My habit is to call this kind of focus a rest from language. But restlessness also falls away when I'm working on a piece of code, which is as symbolic an activity as I can imagine. On the other hand, writing prose is a performance, so self-consciousness cannot entirely leave the picture. The difference isn't quite the addictive properties of playing god. Restlessness might recede in the imaginitive part of writing fiction, but one doesn't come away in quite the same clockwork daze. Someone I know drifts from conversation into engineering drawings. The need to tinker persists as an insulating itch. Rather than starting far away, writing tends to overknead its relation to the world. It's much like conversation: everything that could've been put differently comes back like sports commentator video loops. (Maybe that's the redemptive dream of watching football, a sport that spends a lot of time considering very short plays: that anyalsis and second-guessing have value?) Post-programming, my head fills with everything I will do next--the red shoes of the mind.

Phenomenologically, programming is thoroughly technical. It has more in common with home improvement than prose or cookie-making. Cookies seem like they might save me from both. Where writing involves an fraught distance/intimacy with oneself, and programming liquidates experience for products, a craft takes the air out of the self and is only productive as an excuse.

But that's just how I imagine it. I'm not that patient. Every little tectonic shift in experience, like the seasons, are there to negate. A few hours meticulously painting marzipan, and I can feel like never doing it again. That's the product: being over it.

Cake is never for later.

I boil the apples in the sugar and butter. The peaches I throw on top of the caramel once it's done. They crackle and hiss like my fingers those times I accidentally grab hold of the skillet's handle without an oven mitt. My fear is if I cook the peaches like the apples, the peaches would release so much water that by the time they caramelized, they would become a sticky, undifferenciated goo. I suppose there's nothing wrong with jam.

Two days later, the peach cake tastes like mildew. Normally, the whole thing gets eaten within twenty-four hours. This last 1/3 of the cake two mornings later is like stumbling on hidden treasure. I congratulate myself for my restraint, before I take a bite. It wasn't really restraint, anyway--I just didn't eat much cake. My apetite for it dimmed after I pulled it out of the oven.

My friend is trying to stay away from gluten--"I've become one of those people"--but still has a mania for baking gluteny things. If anything, she bakes more when she doesn't eat the products. Dozens and dozens of cupcakes. "I like baking."

My father made turkey soup. "What should go in there? Potatoes, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, sour cream, cabbage?"

"Mostly I just like the broth."

Now there's a massive pot of soup in the fridge, shiny and cold. I just stare at it.

My brother has developed a tamarind habit, which is another way of saying he bought some blocks of tamarind mass. "Mass" and not "paste" because you have to soak it in hot water, mash it with your fingers, and then strain out the husks and seeds. Maybe if it were at home I would never bother to make tamarind water (tamarind, water, sugar), but over at his house I love squishing the debris-filled muck. It's like playing in mud--something adults have generally decided they're above. Scatological comparisons are obvious, but, obviously, unwelcome if spoken.

I make it concentrated, so that it can be diluted to taste, like Russian tea. My brother's girlfriend likes it very dilute--"refreshing." He likes it fairly concentrated. I can't decide. Dilute, I drink glass after glass, because every swallow is unsatisfactory. Concentrated, I drink half a glass and leave it on the table. Its cloudy solids settle to the bottom. You'd think there would be a happy medium, but I haven't found it.

There are those things that I repeatedly vow never to eat again, like eggs on toast. Then I look in the fridge in the morning, and think what else am I going to make? There they are, greasy as ever. It would be reasonable to conclude that eggs on toast are, like anything else, something to have sometimes. But I only seem able to think in always and never.

Watery Cookies

The day before yesterday, it rained. Not an everyday occurance in summer, so the everyday shifted. In the middle of the day, my hair still shower-damp, dark clouds became something to plan for.

Some were very excited. They opened their windows to its smell and sound. At the same time, they hoped they wouldn't have to walk anywhere.

I ran from the car to the coffee shop, and inside I gulped a few glasses of water. My shirt was well hydrated.

I went to dinner with a friend. I decided it was a day for hot soup, but I also ordered iced green tea. I gulped at the tea, even though it didn't taste right.

"What's that?"

"It's odd."

She tried a sip. Neither of us could identify the flavor.

In May We Be Forgiven the secret to good (read: indestructible) cookies is a tablespoon of warm water. The narrator suspects his soul is made of brackish water. Having read him for the past three hundred pages, his suspicions seem well-founded.

In summer it's a pleasure to have hot coffee in the sun. Though I know someone who drinks gallons of juice at all times of year, instead. One can imagine his body as a water feature. Nothing could remain insoluble. And yet he suffered for weeks with kidney stones.

Variety

Apparently, astronauts suffer from "food boredom," or are hypothesised to. I like the idea that someone could die from lack of variety, but only because it assumes the importance of the kind of thing often thought of today as not real. The other hypothesis given sounds more like science fiction: "their sense of smell changes as microgravity shifts fluids around in their heads."

I'm entertained by this inversion of credibility, but I think the food boredom hypothesis is believable becauses the need for variety is already pervasive. I would say it's not usually matter of life or death, but in the sense of wasted life or the nonlife implied by expressions such as "you're not really living," it is. If you live in an abundance of variety of food, eating the same thing is a little death. It is as if we try to live life in imitation of our market's plethora.

There is also a chicken-and-egg problem in this life of variety, especially if you cook for yourself. I often say I'm in a rut. It's a kind of trench warfare--all the action happens on the brief, perilous run to the next rut. At all other times the rut leads back to the rut: Making and eating repetitive food dulls the spirit, and you need to be in high spirits to even think of cooking something outside whatever rut you're in.

There's something bizarre about feeling one must always be consuming something novel. After all, the most ritualistic foods are often great pleasures. Okay, that would just be coffee and tea, for me. I know someone, though, who decided she didn't need coffee, she just needed the ritual, and began making smoothies in the morning. It doesn't matter that the preparation literally never changes, just that it solidifies into a ritual, and that it continues to convince you of its efficacy.

Efficacy is the thing, isn't it? We rush from one "ethnic" restaurant to the next because we imagine it will have more oomph than the last. We travel around the world (our own place is not a part of this world, of course) in hopes that life elsewhere is more intense than it is where we are. Travel snapshots look best with impossibly high color saturation. Memory can be sanctified if never revisited.

MFK Fisher once quarrelled with her then husband over this. He refused "to back to a place where once he had been happy." (The place was a town in France, unshockingly.) He thought it was "foolish to try to recapture happiness." She "wasn't trying to recapture anything." The two come to an equitable solution, of sorts. He can have his precious memory; she went back with her sister and had a lovely time.

This isn't a matter of knowledge versus happiness. Fisher didn't go back with the intent of ruining a beloved thing by revealing its underbelly--the investagatory renunciation of pleasure that academics (and I) get off on. It is foolish to try to make the same cup of coffee another morning. The coffee wasn't what was good. This doesn't mean one shouldn't try to make another good cup of coffee, perhaps even the same way.

Kitchens

In college I only learned that it's dreadful for a stranger to live in your kitchen. And this only at the very end. I was never much concerned with kitchens. I had no need to be. Like the socks my parents always gifted me for Christmas, most of the necessary implements and space were just always around. When landlords rent to summer vacationers and students, the kitchens are never quite empty. In houses in small towns, kitchens are rarely cramped.

It took moving to an apartment (a word that became more ghastly with every week I lived in one) to realize how lovely the kitchen of my childhood and current home is. Not because it has the latest doodads, but because cooking there doesn't feel like a perversion.

Between a house on a hill and a shoebox of a converted hotel room, I became an aesthete of kitchens. Oddly, the top and bottom of this relief were built in the same year, 1905. But where the house's kitchen has always been the kitchen, the apartment's kitchen was added in 2003 in a slobbery effort to turn a dilapidated building into rent revenue.

If the windows are eyes, the apartment's kitchen is hidden in the dark. The fact that it's as far away as it can be from the windows, and only connected by a narrow doorway, gives the hot air it generates the longest, most arduous escape. There's a fan, but it doesn't do much. To cook there is to steam in my own cooking.

The excreta of cooking is all close enough to touch. I must be vigilant in cleaning, and prepare ingredients in just the right sequence, because there's only enough counter for one cutting board.

For all of its visual obscurity, the sounds of cooking can be heard by all. If I can hear my neighbors watching a movie, or the incomprehensible mumble of their conversations, they must be able to hear me whipping cream in a metal bowl at one in the morning. That's the thing about an apartment--it's apartness is shouted for all to hear. Tolerance belies antagonism, and an apartment is specified amidst intimacy.

Everything in the pantry I bought for myself. While at home I grumble about having to put up with other's neuroses, in an apartment all to myself there is nothing but my own neuroses. It's nice not to encounter someone else's dessicated oatmeal or molding bread, but it's needful to find ingredients I didn't think I wanted. Despite and because I hate excess, I take pleasure in making something out of my father's neglected, nearly-rotten vegetables.

At home, the kitchen is porous. Light comes in the windows, air flows. The counters are usually a mess, but they can be cleaned if I need more room. With space and food going to waste, I'm not intensely aware of time passing. It's not a pod in which to carry out the necessary task of making something to eat, but a place to do whatever.

By aesthete I really mean I admire and am jealous of kitchens. Like yards, they seem of a better life. Not every kitchen, of course. But sometimes my eyes grow wide and I say "what wonderful light." And then they tell me about their plumbing problems, their mice, or how the height of their sink has given them chronic spinal pain.

Cherry Preserves

For all its sugar, according to its packaging, jam needs to be refrigerated. A fridge collects of all those things that would otherwise spoil. It puts side by side items that would otherwise have nothing to do with one another. You may object that food has to be stored somewhere, next to something. The fridge is not remarkable in this way. True, but what it brings together is particular to refrigeration.

Another property not at all unique to the fridge is its extension beyond the practical need it fulfills. Some things go into the fridge not because they'd go bad otherwise, but because they go in the fridge. I want to say there's paranoia in storing eggs in the fridge, but that hinges on the "rationality" of leaving eggs out. Gross. I'll keep that for later. Or maybe for never. An uncanny consequence of having a receptacle of instant preservation is that more ends up going in than gets used. Cleaning out a fridge is an archeology of desires never acted on. Or more often, incompletely consumed. At some point they go bad, and even if they haven't, ancient jars are easily shunned for the possibility they might be spoiled.

Going in the opposite direction, the taste of cherries is smelled more than tasted, and anticipated more than smelled.

The trouble with the essay is its preoccupation with putting things together in sequence. One comment about refrigeration becomes a thesis, which is a kind of smell. If I say, for example, that sometimes I think there are no thoughts, only images, I must insist upon why this is relevant. Of course, you could say that my trouble with the essay is my insistence on turning it into a fridge. Rather than a thesis I have a theme, overextending into everything that happens to fall under my preoccupations. Then again, who is to say my preoccupations are unrelated?

If not necessarily related, a 92-year-old man tells me that his life's stories, between them, have everything. "Everything's in there," he says. He thinks his job as a typewriter repairman in New York extended into every cranny of life. "There are over 200 stories in there," he says, patting his tome. If his life is his job, as he says, then his job is also as he says--a survey of every form of life, or at least every job. That made use of a typewriter. His book at once has demographic ambitions and is contained by a peculiar circumstance.

He also tells his life as an ideal example of the universal possibility of the American dream. He began impoverished; now he's comfortably retired in the city of retirement. The way he claims himself as an example is, of course, an awfully exemplary example of a common idea. Is the idea of his life as a proof of an idea related to his life? In one of his stories, the woman he later marries calls him a crook, because instead of going to dinner he goes to repair a typewriter. The joke is, as it is in situation comedy, that he's a victim of circumstance, not a crook. He's not much of a crook, but the name "the crook" stuck.

It's the same with lemons. You know what I mean? You can't really intend something to be uncalculated, can you. Even absolutely nothing can insinuate itself. Forget essays, this is the trouble with being awake--everything has to be related! If late at night in the dark you happen to be thinking of haunting, it's hard for any subsequent screaming not to be related. I thought I heard the screamer scream "WHO'S THERE?!" but surely not. I'm not convinced that doubt isn't a kind of faith. Obviously the noises following the screaming, of rustling and clanging and thumping and creaking were the noises of other doubters waking up, and walking down the hall to investigate. Everything turned quiet soon, but I kept the lights on until it got light out, and only then slept. It's not that in sleep nothing is related, but is relation even a question? What goes in a dream journal without the idea that dreams mean something?

What is the life story of a successful young entrepreneur without his belief in the positive effect of a positive outlook? What else might've brought together these incidents? With his girlfriend & business partner he traveled across country, sleeping in the car, washing in university bathrooms. It can't be a coincidence that his business is gift wrapping. His favorite form of anecdote is pride wrapped in incredulity. "They flirt with me for hours, but they won't have a business meeting with me!" "When they hear me talk about gift wrapping they ask me 'you're straight?' Seriously!"

Hold on, there's a spider on my desk.

The Men In My Mind (In Theirs, Too)

Innovation is a gross word. It probably gives Evegeny Morozov hives and/or an erection (a critic's diptich of conditions). The same cake is on the stove as four months ago, on another stove. I persist writing mood pieces about cakes.

Has Mad Men ever changed the way it does what it does? I doubt it. It's just intensified. These days it's a series of Mad Men Moments and setups for Mad Men Moments. Is it slapstick? Arrange things so that characters stumble into saying something unwittingly wise or prophetic. Last episode, the poetic phrase (and image) was "Why are you being punished?" "Because the wallpaper doesn't line up."

It sounds like a Don line, but this MMM belongs to his son, and suddenly he loves him. He says so to Megan, and she hugs him because oh my god, a man is having an Emotional Experience. (Much like the show's spectacle of whites spectacularly emoting over MLK's death. I'll give you one guess what two colors the wallpaper was.)

Don is more interested in his son's emergent familiarity than how he might be different. The show couldn't care less about its subject, only that it's poetic. Don is in love with himself, and the show is in love with itself.

Why do I care if I make new cakes? This one's delicious. Are there fruit other than apples?

Once, MMMs were delicious. They sustained interest. (A much messier word.) I'm always trying to decipher what made one meal delicious and another unremarkable. Odd--delight in eating is a terrible index of delight in anything else. My latest theory is to eat well is to take interest. A meal of variety is exemplary (there's always one), but even a lone bowl of broth may hold interest.

Interest is as suspect to Rectify as thought is heroic. One of the first things Daniel says in public is that in prison he developed a routine intended to avoid thinking. When he wasn't trying to stamp out thinking with chants, he read books, and thoughtfully conversed with the man in the next cell.

His half-brother, Ted, is calculated to make us as uncomfortable as Daniel, suspected of rape and murder, makes everyone on the show. Ted's problem is that he's as thoughtless as he is self-interested. He distrusts Daniel because he assumes Daniel will take his job. He thinks Daniel is guilty because Daniel tells him about being raped in prison. Presumably, he feels raped by Daniel's story. That's his epistemology.

"Never seen so many dumb Georgia crackers descended upon egg rolls and sweet and sour chicken in your life," Ted says. "That's interesting," Daniel says. "I guess." Ted has too much interest to find anything interesting. Daniel finds everything interesting and tries self-flagellatingly hard to not be interested in himself. This impersonality embues him and his thinking with an aura of goodness.

Verlyn Klinkenborg posits interest to be a way of bargaining with abudance. Being interested is the thing he urges us to recover from underneath our education. The bargain he proposes is: trust in the abundance of your interest, and receive the abundance of your interest. If I say I'm not sure about this, he can say that's why. I'm not sure whose circular logic it is, but still, I'm not sure. I'm the sort of person who can be engrossed by a novel for hundreds of pages and never read the last fifty. (Or reverse those numbers.) I routinely commit Klinkenborg's sin of being anxious I'll lose interest in a piece of writing. Not because the piece is a terrible idea, not ultimately worthy of interest, but because I'll make cake, watch television, worry about those things that impetuously solicit worry. Thinking that I'll think about something in the future is pretty much meaningless. My calendar and to-do list are records of futile promises. This is so apparent that, like Alison Bechdel repeats "I think" in her diary, I append question marks to half of my tasks.

Actually, they're all terrible ideas. Given enough time to mull over anything, I'll come to the conclusion it's stupid. (Which, yes, is a stupid conclusion, but what can I do?) We would have nothing if this logic reigned. Robert Creeley's introductions to his own collections of work are graceful for letting their contents be. But they would never have been written if he always took the long view. Creation is a process of outrunning understanding, for me at least, I think.

Which is stupid. What's wrong with making a cake I'm not infatuated with? Klinkenborg critiques the notion of writerly genius, in which all writing comes in flashes and unstoppable flows. Because his is a self-help book and everything has to be about doing better, the problem with needing to be infatuated with what you're doing is that it's deterimental to doing. It's also a reaction to the danger of fantasy, to being in hot, precarious relation. Interest appears as an appealing alternative to infatuation because it's cooler, more reliable.

There are relations other than detached tepidness and compromising intimacy. I know that I placed those adjectives to show their misplacement, but the motive is dim.

What's that about cake?

Same Old Story

Some cultivated accents of varying distance across the Atlantic. I dragged a thermos of tea to every class. I've repeated this several times, so feel free to tune me out. In addition to the tea, I made a point of being very tuned in, even if (or because) certain teachers in elementary school thought that looking out the window meant I wasn't. Drinking tea in class seems like an ostentatious distraction, but it's a beverage of alertness, something imagined to bring about clarity. I did imagine. I was drinking it to bring the world into focus, and with it the teacher's instruction, confirming my general teacher's petness. Conspicuously, I do not recall ever drinking it to wake myself up during Geometry, whose whirring projector, dim lights, and instructor all lulled me just shy enough of sleep not to draw attention to myself.

The tea, though, was of a particular character I was obsessed with then, but today I would call overbrewed. It had no milk, yet often, it was just the sort of tea that cries out for milk, like an infant does, by being unbearable. But unbearable, too, can be bearable. Assam was made to take milk, but that doesn't mean its wanton manipulations stop after it gets it. It wouldn't be so pleasurable to drown its unpleasantness if tannic intimations did not remain underneath all that soothing milk.

Such tea is its own drowning, taken in small sips as if it were something stronger, drying out the mouth, seeming to close off the oriface entirely, even if liquid continues going down it. In any case, while tea flows the rest is slowed. (Which is a funny bit of selective attention, really, because when tea dries you out, it's because you're pissing every five minutes.) Intake slows to a sumptuous constipation (meanwhile, the bowels liquidate). It may still be possible, however, to regurgitate if asked. The flavor does tend to give that sense. However, as I've said far too many times, it gives way to sweetness, what at first tastes like soap.

There's nothing so posessive as negation, and here I am after all these years, continuing claim this counteringestive gesture. Carrying a bottle of tea around high school was a way of putting a seal (pun intended) on my terror and hatred of the place, but it was also something exuberant, a way of bringing elsewhere with me. Of course, you could argue exuberance has no need for all this holding--neither absence in nor presence away. But never mind that thing that others seem to, for lack of a better word, have. I have tea.

One could also argue--and some have--that people get repetitive and boring--as I keep accusing myself of--precisely because of this melancholic retentiveness. But what exactly lies beyond attachment but more attachment? That, I suppose, is their point: One ought to forget that one is repeating oneself. Change is less substantive than it is imagined or recounted. But don't think of it that way. The point is to tell an entertaining story. Something fresh, something new. So that those listening feel fresh and new. It's a kind of juice bar, out there. Everyone's dying to see something squeezed that'll get them trimmer.

Hunger

"Usually temperature was a battle," but every once in a while one gets smug. One finds "the particular ecstacy in greeting" the perfect temperature. Then again, is it the knowledge that one is in perfect temperature--the posession of which is smugness--that gives such ecstacy, or the lost time of not knowing, of not being aware of temperature at all? Irina is witnessing--always, happily, worryingly, a bit too late--the dissolution of both consciousness and control. It's perfect and it's a bit frightening.

The same could be said of food. I'm constantly wondering if I've eaten enough to stave off hunger hours later, and this worrying feels a great deal like hunger, if it isn't in fact the feeling itself. I say hours, but I think of it as forever. The point of eating becomes to create an infinite duration of not worrying about eating. Perfection is quite a load to burden eating with, making it something to worry about, and such heavy expectations tend to make the act itself awfully light, hardly noticable.

Once in a while, though, I'm overcome (or rather, I just barely perceive that something is barely perceptable) with smugness. Too exhausted to worry about eating, the hours in retrospect seem not to have been counted. I did not interpret the restless gnawing an hour after a large meal as hunger, as I tend to.

Of course, I have to say that when I was thinking "I'm not hungry" with an air of accomplishment, I was sitting down to a snack. This was not a contradiction, in part because the snack was inedible. Yet I was eating it. Are samosas gross, or were these gross samosas? Old, greasy pastry thick with dry chickpea mash. Their disgustingness was more comforting than off-putting, though. I only felt compelled to eat them out of a pointless, neurotic aversion to waste. But the fact that they were nasty was so--what? Undemanding? Time did not expand or "stop"; it was already more than one could ever need. It was inconceivable that it ever wouldn't.

Which is why I missed reading Lionel Shriver, I think. We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Post-Birthday World are different in form, but they share a pervasive distaste. It's like the astringency of tea at the back of the throat, absolving one's mouth from consuming food. It's not that Shriver's irritable characters don't swallow, so to speak, but things come back up and don't go down easily. The nausea is an oddly permeable prophylactic.

Irina's discovery of her lack of appetite for a better temperature comes when she's getting what she wants, even if she didn't know she wanted it. My moment of equanimity seems at first not to involve such crisscrossing of appetites, but then, I had given up on the day being useful or productive in any way, and not as a decision. Irina gave up on her non-marriage of nine years, and, indeed, the whole lifestyle that surrounds it, without intending to. Reading her "go wobbly" with slice after slice of chocolate-cappucino cake from Tesco, brandy, "a secret packet of cigarettes" and blasting Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes is an unattainable wish-fulfillment, not because any of these things sound particularly pleasurable themselves, but because she has so much rigidity--"trout and broccoli"--to make a mess of.

My attempts to impose rigidity on my life (no, I'm not saying I'm free; I'm saying I'm lazy) can only be endured with constant snacking, or rather, constant worrying. Otherwise, the thread of the next thing and the next thing is lost, and I suddenly realize how exhausting it all is. The drain seems to have come to the same realization; it has stopped draining. The stagnant water festers. But finally--finally--it has stopped stoppping-draining-stopping-draining. No more gurgling in the middle of the night.

Fire

I had a professor who demanded that I have "fire in the belly." I still don't know what that is, but slices of jalapeno steeped in chicken broth has a certain feeling. I have had a cold for the past two weeks, and I disingenuously tell myself that hot hot chicken soup with fresh lime juice (for the vitamin C of course--certainly not a dubious "fusion" impulse!) would help. It does have a medicinal quality. I can't decide if drinking it is tasty or a chore. In lieu the symptom, the broth makes me cough, which is cathartic in its way, like crying while chopping onions.

The gas range in my apartment has the opposite problem that an electric has. "2" is enough to caramelize onions, and the only possible utility of "Max" (right above "8") is boiling water. A month and I still misgauge just how hot it is, always worrying that "Min" cannot possibly be hot enough, bumping the dial up a bit and then back down and back up again, and rationalizing that it's at "Min" if I look at it without bending down to see exactly where the mark lines up.

The cast-iron pan I have has a concavity in the middle--what might be called a "dip" on a road sign. The lower the heat, the more the flame heats the middle, which is exactly where the pan is lowest and thinnest. Turning it down sometimes does exactly what I mean to avoid, yet at the same time heats everything less. So a low flame sometimes both burns and fails to heat. This leads to for example burnt grilled cheese with not-quite melted cheese, or still-gooey pancakes with a burnt spot. I exaggerate, but if I didn't there wouldn't be much to say about it.

Grilled cheese and pancakes are of course not foods that should be made, and the grease that flies off them accumulates on the stove, the fridge, the walls, the fan and the air. The windows may be opened, the fan may be turned on, but a certain not entirely unpleasant smell persists. The smell of the oven when it's on is far more intense and acrid, yet it can be evacuated out the window within an hour, and does not affect what's baked inside.

Robo Taco

I refuse to photograph these tacos. Not because they're so horrible to look at, although I'm not keeping much from you. They come on a paper-encrusted tray, with a troubling amount of space between each flat taco. I refuse to out of self-consciousness, not wanting to be one of those people who photograph what they eat. Nausea toward unceasing aestheticism does not stop aesthetically mediated decorum, nor does it stop the internal spewing of judgements that so offend an anti-sensibility sensibility. Note that above I noted that the space between the tacos is troubling. What kind of eaters note such things? What kind of eaters, indeed, take notes? What kind of people are "eaters," when there is nobody who does not eat?

Apple Cake

The older you get, the more of a pedant you become. You start saying "you" to describe yourself. You repeat the same point over and over.

Every recipe is more than a record. There's always something that needs tweaking. You write the recipe you'll make next time--the ideal recipe.

The following recipe began by following Joe Pastry's recipe for Apfelkuchen. It was too much like cake. Too vanilla, too soggy from embedded apple chunks, not enough intensity. "You didn't add cinnamon?" asked she whose birthday cake had had cinnamon. She later revealed that her cake-baker also covered the cake in caramel sauce, after I had begun caramelizing my cakes, because anything without caramel is lacking, because caramel is a centripetal locus, like Jordan Catalano unsexily describes penetrative sex. This description hovers in ahistoricity. I'll be forward about how this recipe came together: a Google image search for apfelkuchen, an image of a thin square cake with all the apples on top, a cupcake pan that was uncovered by a kitchen cleanse (not mine), a pan of syrup left on the stove for too long, a scourge of lemon gigantism at the supermarket. It turns out cupcakes are difficult to get liquid caramel to stick to, as they are shaped like hills, so all the caramel ends up in rivers going into an ocean in the most unfortunate place: the flat space between the cupcakes. Flat pan then. Also turns out cake flour doesn't exist any more, or it does, but for $5 a pound, so really it doesn't, and that whole wheat pastry flour is not much like cake flour, tastes strongly, and lends a dandruffy texture.

I would not advise adding two tablespoons of cinnamon instead of one. I just had a piece, and it left a flavor of wood. Cinnamon is the bark of a tree, you counter. Yes, but we ought not to be reminded of this. That's the whole point of spices, maybe the whole point of baking--to transform ingredients into something forgetful of its roots.

Apples

• 2 lbs. apples (half golden delicious, half granny smith)
• 2/3 cups sugar
• 2 lemons' juice

Peel and core the apples. Slice each apple quarter into lengthwise thirds. Fourths if they're particularly large apples. Collect the slices in a large bowl. Pour sugar over them. Cut the lemons in half and juice them into the bowl. Wait an hour.

Cake

• 9 oz. all-purpose flour (really do measure it if possible, otherwise, Joe Pastry says "scant 1 3/4 cups")
• 10 tbsp. butter
• 3 large eggs
• 2/3 cups buttermilk
• 2/3 cups milk
• 2/3 cups sugar
• 2 lemons' zest
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tbsp. cinnamon powder
• 1/2 tsp. cloves powder
• 1 tsp. ground nutmeg

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Beat together the butter (soften it if it isn't soft) and the sugar in a large bowl. Add the cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg. Zest the lemon halves and add the zest. Whisk in the eggs until smooth. Add flour, baking powder, and salt, and mix until fully combined. Add buttermilk and milk, and mix until smooth (I used a fork, then a whisk). Pour into a buttered 9x12 rectangular pan. Shake to level the batter. Arrange apple slices gently on top of the batter (do not push them down). Conserve the juice in the apple bowl. Bake for roughly 45 minutes, or sometime after a fork comes out clean and before the sides burn.

Glaze

About fifteen minutes after putting the cake in, pour the juice from the apple bowl into a small pot (scrape the bottom of the bowl to get all the sugar out). Bring it to a boil on high heat and then reduce to medium-low heat. Take it off the heat to check it every five minutes. When it has just turned medium brown, remove it from the heat. This should be about ten minutes before the cake is done. Take the cake out of the oven, pour the caramel evenly over it, and put it back into the oven until done. If all this timing is too aggravating, just make the glaze after the cake is done. I'm not sure baking the glaze for ten minutes makes any difference.

What is in a Name

Presentation isn't everything, but sometimes it tells too much. When a dessert is presented as an upscale soft-serv twirl of whipped cream with a peacock's tail of green apple slices, you have good cause to worry. Of course, you could have just as easily been tipped off by another presentation that is best left free of fluff--the name: Italian apple cream tart. One thing jumps out: Italian? If there's anything Italian about it, we might be trusted to recognize it. And if not, so what?

One ought to be leery of any restaurant that has a vested interest in the nominal ethnicity of its food. "Italian restaurant and grill" will do; specifying that each dish is indeed Italian is not only redundant, but troubling. What makes a tart Italian? Not to worry, this mystery was revealed to me with the first bite. Sogginess.

One of the pleasures of pastry is the contrast between the filling--wet, smooth, sweet--and the crust--dry, flaky, a bit salty. Replacing the crust with stale cake shows a lack of understanding, not to mention appreciation, of the nature of a tart. So maybe, despite its name, it isn't a tart, but just a very confused, cylindrical trifle comprised of whipped cream, apple mush, and dense, buttery cake. Wait, a trifle wouldn't have such a rich cake. Eschewing categories is fine, but experiments put on a menu I think should at least taste good enough to justify themselves.

I'm becoming more of a staunch traditionalist with every sentence, and accordingly I ordered the least adventurous thing on the menu--bolognese. We know what that is, right? Encouragingly, the menu did not call it "Italian bologense", and even describes it: "slow-cooked meat sauce." In other words, it's a ragù, with additions of cream and wine. Simple enough.

Calling something Italian is misguided, but at least I understand why it's done. The pasta dish that arrived plunged me into a crisis in the philosophy of language that until that moment I never took seriously: How do words connect with things? The ground beef mixed with vodka sauce before me suggested an answer, too: They don't.

If you have been to Cicily's (the name says everything, doesn't it?), you might rightfully wonder why I expected anything but exactly what I got from a restaurant in a shopping center. Such places are not concerned with food, but with purveying class markers. They're where the middle class comes to feel high class. But I am an unrealistic utopian. Mood lighting, glitzy bars, and muzak can coexist with decent food. Who's with me?

Beers Queued At Your Feet

In Clue, you must travel from room to room. Each turn you must leave a room, enter a room, or make progress between rooms. You can't stay in the same room, even when you're certain it is the right room. The game requires you not to give away your certainty.

Some players of clue hmm significantly, others throw sidelong glances that appear sly to the degree that they aren't. These acts make a theater of thinking, but are adjacent to thinking. Adjacent, yet sometimes you find yourself looking hard at your notepad, as if looking hard forces deductions from check marks to avail themselves, or as if deductions furrow the brow. It isn't clear there are deductions at all, yet a certain arbitrary boldness of logic often seems necessary to play. You look at everyone's movements as if they're significant.

Are movements more or less significant after two beers? Principally, these movements are to enter beers into the beer app. Principally, these beers are drank to enter them into the beer app. At least, so the drinkers claim. If there is suspicion about the drinkers' motives, only consider your ambivalence towards Life, which--third beer--is what you're now playing.

Already you appear to be roughly 50, according to your position on the board. You have passed all the forks, at each of which you may take the longer path or the shorter path. You took all the shorter ones, finished second, and ended with the second most money. Your score is how much money you end with. You thought it was better (in the game) to go as slowly as possible, to accumulate as many Life chips as possible to cash in at the end. But going faster--which somehow reduces your chances to get into costly accidents--appears to be more lucrative.

However little time Life takes to complete, it is a boring game, and you often get distracted. You forget to take a pay day or two. You fiddle with the beer app. Was that beer a two or a three? Would you recommend it? Your friend toasts you, or rather toasts your addition and rating of the beer, or rather your friend pushes a button, across the table. It is unclear what the difference is between this act and the clinking of glasses.

There is a large bag of chips. The players crunch, slide pieces, spin dials, roll dice, drink. Each time you grab a handful of chips from the bag, you imagine it will be all you'll need. This turns out to be true, for a short period of time. The period gets shorter when there are not other actions available. The game is a distraction from chips; the chips are a distraction from the game. Distraction: stopgap.

When the chips run out, the drinkers have another reason, besides unlocking the acheivement of drinking 12 beers of the same brand. They can't enter that they have drank these beers without having drank them. What makes games fun is rules. Does following those rules also make the game fun?

Fun and useful are different; the beer app mixes. (Minimally) fun choices taken in game are paralleled by useful choices out of game. Then again, are short paths fun and reticence, useful? Actually, ending the game soon seems safe, and safety, ruinous.

Turkey Nouns

Turkey

Thighs. Thanksgiving.

Turkey Skin

Grease. Brown. Armor.

Turkey Gravy

Grease. Brown. Mushrooms. Neck.

Turkey Soup

Turkey. Bones. Bits. Potatoes. Translucence.

Turkey Dinner

Turkey. Knives. Vegetable. Potatoes. Opacity. Mass.

Turkey Sandwich

Mayonnaise.

the war room

Cooking with someone is to encounter the division of self and other. It's even more acute, I think, than stepping into another's home. In another's cooking I can't avoid that each has their own habits, anxieties, superstitions, and turn-ons. It would seem logical to suggest that infatuation softens the perception of another's culinary peculiarities, but actually I think those peculiarities are among the most difficult to sop up with a romantic narrative. Sexy food movies have it all wrong; the kitchen is not where you fall in love, but where love is strained. It's where pet peeves exert their strongest impulse, and you're forced to realize that the other is a person, and that you might also be one. Or maybe it's just me.

For the same reason, if one is inclined toward psychological or anthropologic curiosity, the way another cooks is an object of fascination. The most interesting discoveries are made, as in those two fields, when one's position as an observer is most compromised. When you discover that those slices of onion are too large, that blenders are not used that way, that no not a big on salt, that hashbrowns must have the liquid squeezed from them before fried, that you must not mix anything together before everything is measured and ready, that certain ingredients are equivalent, that shrimp must be veined or you must burn in hell, etc.

Little Bags of Crisps

I just ran out of toast. There is the potential for "real food," I guess, but why properly cook when I can buy more snacks? Detectives, it seems, agree, but they are on the other side: They have no time for anything but snacks, and so they idolize meals. Watching them, and having plenty of time to cook meals, I lust for snacks.

I'm really just talking about one detective, though snacking is part of the genre. She crunches on little bags of crisps, and I salivate for all things snacky. Her face shocked me on the Hitchcock poster. I tried to emulate her haircut. This too was a grass-is-greener phenomenon.

Yesterday I had at my disposal an odd thing: a snack that I labored over for hours. I baked it because I ran out of topics that might interest a guest--ran out of talk altogether, actually--and turned the kitchen instead into a stage, where I performed Tarte Tatin. "Real pastry," he said, "good for you," and went back to reading coupons on newsprint.

When the morning came with its disappointment (consciousness) and relief (the guest gone), the previous night's labor allowed me to avoid one of morning's major groanings (cooking breakfast). All I had to do was coffee. Late afternoon came, and I ate more tart. It was not snacking in the way that chips provide an action for anxious cogitation. It was snacking in the I'm-too-lazy-to-cook way, and in its nutritional content: flour, butter, sugar (and a bit of fruit). Its rejection of all things "substantial."

One thinks one is allaying the passage of time by refusing to spend it cooking, and by lazing around with tart, coffee, book, and computer, but now it was already dark. It was time to go, and I had not eaten anything but tart all day. I ate another piece of tart, so that I wouldn't be hungry (I would be gone for three hours).

My guts undulated. I recalled an exchange with last night's guest. "Not much sugar you put in, did you?" "2/3 of a cup. Lots of butter though--a whole stick in the crust, and half a stick in the filling." (As if sugar and butter are interchangeable by virtue of being considered unhealthy.) There was a certain advantage, though, to filling the stomach with butter and coffee: I didn't want to put anything else in there. Guts had been inverted.

Those are the extremes of snacking's see-saw: I either don't want to eat anything, ever, or I want to eat ALL THE SNACKS (as Hyperbole and a Half would put it) and to never stop. Eating is either a bother or a never-complete transubstantiation. These might sound opposed, but both are attempts not to move forward--either through outright refusal or by the rapid lateral motions of a hermit crab. Detectives snack wen the case isn't going anywhere. When they're stuck. At a narrative level, an investigation consists of long periods of frustrated stuckness and desperate grasping punctuated by sudden leaps forward.

Meals punctuate. To eat a meal is to admit that one needs to eat, ergo to admit that time has passed since one last ate. It is especially difficult to admit that time has passed when one has done so little during that time now gone, and when one thinks that something has to be done with time, otherwise one does not deserve it.

Detectives who have not cracked the case eat "one of those frozen chili con carne things" one night and "one of those frozen chili con carne things" the next night. They do not appreciate someone butting in to cook "proper food" for them. Begrudgingly they will eat what is cooked for them, but they will not allow its punctuation. The cook will get angry and leave; the detective's problem with this meal (one of many) will thus be side-stepped.

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.