check it out: good thing they got that boat unstuck, because this newsletter would have been late otherwise. every week i take this down to the docks and load it up into a shipping container and then cast it out onto the surging splines of international commerce. the guy with the crane loads it up actually and the boat captain does most of the casting. but they let me sit up in the little office until the light starts coming in the corner window and i’ve run out of coffee rings to push around with one finger on the crappy plastic table. and then: toot toot. off it goes. onto the splines.
and luckily, they got the boat unstuck in time.
this week has been very interesting, mentally speaking. we had the collective joy of the stuck boat, obviously. that’s in the plus column. and then there was also an incredible surge of minor annoyances in my own life, some work related, some self-inflicted, some of which i may write about in part IV of this newsletter edition, i haven’t decided yet, washing over the gunwales (boat term) and threatening to submerge the good stuff in a very shallow skim of being-pissed-off.
i can’t really tell where it ended up (just like that metaphor) but maybe by the time i get to the end of this newsletter i will have a better idea. sometimes that happens.
ok here we go.
1. painting
wow that looks very blue.
this week my family did our yearly tradition of completing our guesses for the nenana ice classic - a competition / guessing game / raffle for alaskans only, in which you try to guess at which exact minute on which exact day a wooden tripod on a frozen river south of Fairbanks will capsize. i don’t know why the tripod is on there in the first place. i’m guessing at some point in the past it was useful to know when the ice on the river went out, and it was somehow connected to that, but i still don’t really understand why you couldn’t, for example, just look out your window at the river and see if there was ice in it. not looking it up either.
anyway every year we each do 5 guesses. you have to get the exact minute right like i said and there are enough guesses these days that you will almost never get a minute to yourself. if you win you will be splitting it with at least a half dozen other people. and some of the more popular minutes (april 20th at 4:20pm, just to pick a random example) well - you might as well not even guess those because they’re so popular.
my family claims to have won one year. i think it came out to a couple thousand bucks. i think the deal is that if one of us wins, everyone splits the pot, but actually now that i’m typing that out i am not sure if that’s even true. it feels like it’s probably true.
composition sketches. looking back on this i think i chose the third best one to actually go with. but that’s life. in these i am thinking about:
where is the bridge
where is the horizon line, are we looking up, down, or straight ahead
how accurately should the tripod be scaled
how much sky
how much mountain
color blocking. this is actually the second pass at color. the first one was really pretty atrocious. i dove right into it right after the composition sketches, rather than taking a break or letting things settle, and for that reason maybe, or maybe another reason, it went really really badly. but in painting maybe more than a lot of other things, that thing they say about making mistakes actually is true.
also, if you look at this, in some ways it works better than the final! let’s not think about that too much. i didn’t stop here because i wanted to spend some time painting the little fiddly pieces of ice and stuff i usually skip over. the next stop would be to do this once again from scratch and pay careful attention to the things i don’t like about how the final piece turned out.
2. poem
“flattering poem” - winter 2020
i bet you say that to all your boys
and honestly
it’s an honor to make the list
short one this week so i will expand a little bit on poetry (the sentence you just love to hear.)
about a year ago, a little more than a year actually probably since it was pre-lockdown, i started reading more poetry. poetry is something that in the past has occupied positions in my life ranging from “vaguely interesting” to “i never think about this” to “this is really stupid.” i never studied it, read much of it, thought about it much, certainly did not consider ever writing it. let’s also leave aside for the moment whether you can consider the little snippets i put in this newsletter to be capital-P Poems.
there are two exceptions i can immediately think of to the thing i just said, though. two pins around which at least some of the threads of my life wrapped themselves. one: an open mic poetry night that used to exist in Boulder Colorado when i was at school there. this was the first time i saw poets having fun, and the appeal was just as much about the community that showed up every week as it was about the material itself. one guy would read poems about Sarah Palin over a bed of metal music he played from the amp he brought. i never read anything but for about a year i would be there almost every week with a sketchbook, doodling and listening. the 28 year old in me is sure rolling his eyes at those memories but the 31 year old in me is mostly ok with that now.
two: Robert Service. i don’t know how well known this dude is - the book i have of his describes him as “the great Klondike poet” and i think it’s likely that if i did not grow up in Alaska i would have no clue who he is. but my mother knew one of his poems almost by heart at some point, i think, or at least read it to us often-ish as kids. so it stuck. check this out:
oh to be whooping it up with a bunch of the boys in the Malamute saloon.
this stuff is not what i would consider beautiful or particularly stirring. it doesn’t do that thing that some poetry does where it slides quietly right in to some part of your brain and then twists sideways and tangles itself. it doesn’t really make you want to sit down, or stare out a window, or realize you’ve been holding your breath.
but boy, he really nails the rhythm! no idea what this meter or structure is, technically speaking, but this is the shit that’s meant to be read out loud around a campfire with the stars whistling by overhead and the first snowfall just a few short weeks away. i have done this, in fact, and i guess it’s a credit to my friends that i am still invited on camping trips.
all that to say, it turns out i have been re-evaluating my relationship to poetry over the past year and thinking about my assumptions about that relationship. i’ll talk about it more some time but for now:
3. teriyaki tacos
yes! more good food! no vegan seafood! that’s two in a row, baby! get ready for some real appalling shit next week probably!
quick one this week. not much too weird going on here but these turned out very delicious.
here we have: cabbage, green onions, cilantro, lime, ginger (for the slaw) and tempeh, avocado, lime, cilantro, some spices, some vinegar, some maple syrup (for the tacos)
i don’t cook with tempeh much and actually it’s surprisingly hard to find. i don’t know why it’s the vegan protein that gets the short end of the stick.
steam for 10 minutes. rig up some kind of steaming contraption on your stove.
marinate for a while after that. this marinade is veggie broth, soy sauce, some apple cider vinegar, garlic powder, and something else i think.
meanwhile you can prep the slaw. about a cup each of the two types of cabbage, a couple green onions (cut them diagonally so they make little strips, if you want), some ginger, lime, cilantro. rice vinegar. and most importantly: sesame oil! this really gives it a great flavor. and no-mayo slaws are really bright and light and nice for cutting heavier saltier richer flavors.
mix it all up and toss with sesame seeds too.
after your tempeh marinates a bit, cook it quickly in some oil, then remove it and toss in your teriyaki sauce (soy sauce, maple syrup, a little liquid smoke, corn starch, some garlic and onion powder, i am completely blanking but i think there’s one more thing, maybe rice vinegar, maybe lime juice??)
then use a slotted spoon to put the chunks back in the hot pan, cook for another few minutes until the sauce thickens up, then remove from heat and pour in the rest of the sauce you just took the chunks out of. add some sesame seeds.
boom! i added some of that cashew ricotta i made last week. and some avocado chunks.
4. cats! cats! cats!
this week i will really be leaning into the idea that this fourth chunk is just a place for me to hash out some thoughts that have been kicking around in my head this week. sometimes i work hard on this section because something caught my eye and i want to think about it and work up some kind of quasi-analysis or understanding or connection and go “oh isn’t that neat” and so forth.
sometimes it’s just a place to point at something.
as i mentioned in the intro seven thousand paragraphs north of here, this week more than a lot of other recent weeks i have been feeling annoyed. there are macro reasons for this obviously. there are countervailing forces, too (boat stuck.) interestingly i have already had much worse weeks this year - but this one has had a special little sour flavor for some of the following reasons: i got a slight sunburn, my back has been stiff and sore from doing some garden work, the CDC is now going “uh oh” after going “it’s perfectly safe to open schools, wink," some people i am working with on a project at work have chosen to ignore the multiple times i’ve told them that a specific element of our work together is out of my hands and are now acting surprised that things are not turning out the way they have been pretending to themselves they would turn out. my hair has gotten too long.
and also: as i like to torture myself by doing every few months, i re-downloaded a dating app this week - something i have not really done since quarantine started, with a couple of days-long exceptions. every time, there’s a run-up that lasts days or weeks, in which the part of me that would like to maybe kiss a pretty lady again someday gradually convinces the part of me that feels a bone-deep weariness at the idea of setting up some kind of profile that makes me seem fun but not too fun, is somehow simultaneously honest about the way i see the world and brief enough to be interesting, funny in a way that is calculated to be minimally calculated, and doesn’t lean on “things i hate” being a personality while also communicating my deep belief that you need more in common with someone than liking an NBC sitcom.
as you might have guessed, as usual, i am not enjoying it. using these apps reminds me of how important some level of superficial physical attraction is to me, make me self-conscious about feeling that way, and spike a rich blend of condescension (which i don’t like) and insecurity (also bad) directly into some cortex in my noggin.
but one thing i have noticed - maybe you have noticed this too - is that these days, everyone has a fuckin cat. sometimes a dog but usually a cat. i actually looked this up: pet ownership in the US is up like 20 percent in the past couple decades. in some areas it’s like 70%. it’s not your imagination. for some extra fun, you could consider how this maps agains declining fertility rates in this country and how all those factors might relate to the fact that this is an extremely difficult part of the world to live a pleasant life in unless you’re rich.
and in addition to all the other unpleasant dating-app gunk outlined above, i am allergic enough to cats (and dogs) that living with one is about as close to a deal-breaker as things get. it could probably work, to some degree, for a while, but even spending the night in a place where an animal lives is a tough sell. and asking a pretty lady, at some point, to choose between me or their cat, well. that also seems like a tough sell, pardner.
pets are great of course! and jealousy is surely the lattice on which this specific layer of being-annoyed has propagated itself. sometimes it feels like they’ve become as much of a personality crutch as the Office but that’s probably not charitable. sometimes i wish Big Science would announce, hey, we’re sorry about all that cancer stuff, still working on that, but we have here a $7,000 shot that will let you live with a dog without wanting to sluice the insides of your eyeballs with frigid glacier runoff every 2 hours. but of course that’s not likely either.
so for now, i think i will be once again deleting these apps from my phone (“designed to be deleted!”) and falling back on a previous tried and true dating method of mine, which is to bumble around living my little life and sometimes being funny and eventually catching the attention of some cute gal who would like to be more than strangers. i guess it’ll do for now.
another long one this week! hope that’s okay. if not, you know where the unsubscribe button is. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.