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.