happy tuesday everyone.
to those of you who are just joining me after my little rant last week: hello. they aren’t all like that. sorry / thank goodness. also this one is long. sorry for that too.
this weekend instead of doing the traditional burning of the american flag and the traditional posting of one million infographics, a couple friends and i found a park where they could put their paddle boards into the willamette and i could rent a kayak for a cheap hour of paddling around. it was hot but not too hot, and crowded but not too crowded. lots of people grilling etc.
the river was a little narrow at that particular corner and tan beautiful people in expensive jet boats towing tan beautiful people on wakeboards were out in force. so the kayaking was not exactly peaceful. but there’s something very nice about a kayak - you point yourself somewhere and zoom towards it. you’re right down by the water but still very definitely separated from it, more so than on a paddle board — it feels cozy, like a sleeping bag, or the hood of a nice sweatshirt.
and of course you have a constant stream of water sliding down your paddle into the inside of the boat to remind you that while you’re technically separated from the river you’re practically speaking only a breath away from tumbling over and having to roll yourself out.
this week i was also listening to a lot of french, uh, pop, i guess you could call it, a musical pool that i dip in and out of but never stray too far from. i have never really been a “lyrics guy” and with some exceptions (good and bad) they usually take a back seat to the actual music. or a third row seat, sometimes even. like the seats at the back of a mini van.
anyway this isn’t really a developed thought, but i think that part of the appeal of this specific area of french music is the fact that while i can usually understand all the words that are being sung, by now my french has degraded to the point where i’ve lost most of my grasp on slang and idioms. so there’s the music, which is usually great, and then the lyrics into which i can only catch little glimpses. little flickers of meaning. not enough to get the full sense but more like looking through a steamed-up window. and certainly not enough for clunky turns of phrase or embarrassingly mundane observations to ruin the songs for me.
specifically i was revisiting fishbach’s 2018 album à ta merci — from which came one of my favorite songs of the past decade. (when i played this music video for some friends a couple years ago, and flora fishbach appeared on screen, one of them pretty well skewered me with the line “wow, brian, what’s one step further than having a type?” unfair! and mostly inaccurate.) i had never really “gotten into” the rest of the album (music term) — i don’t know music reviewer terms very well but i would call it “experimental” or “unusual” or maybe just “kinda weird.” but there are some other good ones on there, including my second favorite, y crois-tu - a song that’s at that perfect point of incomprehension for me. also: good for singing in your kitchen!
another artist in this general audio region that i really like is kid francescoli. with those two data points and an app like spotify i reckon you can do some good triangulating onto some other great contemporary french music types.
ok that’s it for the music corner. it’s really not that kind of newsletter. let’s get into it.
1. painting
lots of ghosts involved with today’s issue.
sometimes ya just gotta have fun, you know. sometimes you need to sit down and think about stuff and do a bunch of sketches and studies and compare how the light falls on tree trunks at 3pm vs 4pm. and sometimes you can just do some fun ghosts. there’s one for each cabin. wonder what’s going on there. huh!
one sketch was all it took on this one. some things adjusted slightly over the course of the illustration. the river. the size of the mountains. etc. i also started off not quite knowing where the cabin was going to sit.
i can feel myself getting better at not painting flat drab colors but as you can see here there’s still room for improvement. i think the time of day i work on these impacts that, since i’m painting on an illuminated screen. usually i’m getting the first pass of colors down at night so i can sleep on it and come back to it with fresh eyes in the morning.
the refinements from here are pretty much all in the scale and positioning of the background mountains — i cut out a pic because substack was yelling at me. the magic of digital art, babey!
ok here i’ve kicked the colors into overdrive and things are looking much more the way i want them. i think i recently linked to an illustration i did 3 or so years ago of a similar subject (ghost, woods, A-frame cabin) — it’s startling sometimes to look back on old work and feel like you’ve regressed in some ways. i don’t think i actually literally have regressed, pretty much the opposite, but there are definitely phases and periods in my life where i’ve felt painting and illustration come to me more naturally and i think you can always sense that feeling in a final piece.
from here just a slight color adjustment layer, and adding a lot of foreground detail, which you will see if you scroll up to the final piece.
2. poem
dream poem - summer 2020
i finally had a dream
and you weren’t in it —
i was so surprised,
i thought of you all day
3. hot dogs I
hopefully we will see part II next week and it will be overall a little less gross. these weren’t gross exactly to eat — they were very tasty — but they were not what i was really hoping for.
i’ve dabbled in making homemade vegan meat substitutes here and there, sometimes very successfully (in the case of the vegan reubens i don’t think i ever wrote about in this newsletter) and sometimes much less successfully (in the case of every kind of imitation seafood i’ve ever written about).
for the holiday weekend, i figured it would be fun to try homemade hot dogs. there are some great ones you can get at the store — the vegan sausage field has really expanded recently, it feels like — but making them at home seemed like it would hit a sweet spot between fun and challenging.
there are a couple techniques i wanted to try that i think are actually pretty critical to the final product here, that i was not able to try since they require some special cooking ingredients that i had to order online. ideally we’ll see those next week or the week after.
the basic idea here is very simple: flavor up some TVP (textured vegetable protein, and that’s all i really know about it), add some fats, and try and bind it all together somehow into something approximating a sausage texture.
here we have our TVP, our fats (coconut oil and some vegetable oil), some liquid smoke and soy sauce, a little potato starch that i was hoping would be a good binder, spices (all kinds, go nuts), and ‘beefless’ bouillon and fennel to flavor up the broth for the TVP.
i just kinda took a guess on this but i figured simmering the fennel into the broth would help bring out its flavor more than if it was just tossed in at the end. who knows. i’m not a chef.
1 cup broth to 1 cup TVP, and then the TVP needs to rehydrate for about half an hour or so and soak up all that liquid and flavor. i also added a little bit of pea protein to the TVP at this point because i’ve heard that can improve the texture a little bit.
once it’s rehydrated, the fat, liquid smoke, soy sauce, and potato starch go in and it all gets mixed up. i do not have a stand mixer but i do have a food processor with some kind of plastic blade on it that looks mostly useless but did an OK job of blending all this together.
then it’s time for the seasonings. same deal. i mixed it by hand until my arm got tired then i threw it in the food processor again, then kneaded it together a little more by hand. it’s kind of a paste at this point. i’ve never made actual sausage so i have no idea how close i am to being correct.
i also added some rehydrated flaxseed as a binder because it seemed like the potato starch was not really cutting it.
i rolled up the paste into sausage shapes with the help of some saran wrap, then let them chill and solidify in the freezer for about 30 minutes. it became clear that they would not hold together on their own (weemp womp) so i rummaged around in my cupboard of various vegan supplies and found some rice paper wrappers.
they were a little too thick but hey. beggars can’t be choosers. and they crisped up pretty well — just not in any way that was reminiscent of actual sausage casings.
then i dressed them all up as you will see above. they were very tasty but the texture was way off. i think they might want to be steamed first before going into the cast iron. oh well! better luck next week.
4. ghost story
the attic was empty, dark, and hot. strictly speaking she was not sure if it was even technically an attic - the intermittent glow of her phone screen showed the tops of the rafters peeking out just above a dim sea of fluffy insulation. plywood nailed across them in a few places where someone might have to step. or might have had to have stepped. plywood used to be cheap and it was probably easier just to leave it once they had finished installing the vent or whatever.
five thirty. the room underneath the rafters and insulation and plywood and her shoulder blades was a bedroom, jess was pretty sure, one of the kids’ bedrooms probably which meant probably it would be empty still for a while. she couldn’t really remember if these kids had soccer practice or something after school but they were definitely the type of people whose parents would make sure they would have soccer practice after school, and therefore, she would be waiting above the bedroom for a while yet.
bzzt. faint glow by her side then a pool of light around her head as she brought the phone up.
still working?
a green bubble on gray.
yeah theyre not home yet
oh ok. if u get done in time i think we are going out for first thrusday
*Thursday
jess sighed a little bit, or blew some air out her nose and closed her eyes briefly. one foot started jiggling.
bzzt.
marco’s new guy is showing some stuff i guess. free wine at least
and then a woman shrugging emoji.
ill let you know when i leave
it must have been 45 minutes later when a distinct rumble below told her the garage door was opening. voices filtered up through the ceiling, happy voices. or at least loud. things thumping onto tables or counters. cabinet doors opening and shutting.
she rolled up to a sitting position and carefully felt around for the strap of her bag. the app didn’t specifically require you to bring any kind of extra gear and in fact there was a little blurb on the last screen before you hit “accept job” where in tiny gray print some lawyer had advised them to advise against it. but the print was pretty tiny. so it seemed like one of those things where, you know. covering their asses.
there were a couple haunters jess knew that worked totally unassisted, but only a couple. she zipped the zip down slowly, reached into the bag, and slowly drew out a length of chain. careful not to let it clank around too much. or not yet anyway.
louder voices underneath her now - the kids were upstairs, it sounded like. almost time. she twisted back around, a little awkwardly and pulled out her phone one last time, swiping up with her thumb, flick over to the left, three quick taps as muscle memory got her into the app. some details of the current job up on the screen, an address, a grainy scan of a floor plan that they must have pulled from the city offices or something. wonder if they can just do that, or if they use another name or something? maybe they can just do that.
a list of names, totally irrelevant to her except as a way to know how many people ought to be in the house, and she couldn’t even tell by the names who were the kids and who were the parents. four people.
and at the bottom, a bright red button the width of the screen with no text on it just a white check mark. her thumb hovered for another couple seconds as the voices underneath her got a little louder. a quick look over her shoulder to make sure she knew the way out. this was probably her thirtieth haunting but still there was always that little thrill deep in her guts right before she started.
exhale and tap. the screen flashed into the orange that meant confirmation but she had already locked it and shoved it back in her pocket almost before her eyes registered the change. the attic was pitch black now, or nearly - as her eyes adjusted little cracks and slivers of evening sunlight filtered in. not really enough to see much but now there wasn’t much to see.
a few awkward half-crouched steps forward along the plywood towards the wall in front of her — not really a wall but some kind of corner where one of the dozens of ridges and valleys of the overly-complicated McMansion roof folded itself into another angle. she could never really make the outside geometry she saw on the app’s aerial view to the actual insides of the attics. but she’d figured out quick that those corners and walls usually meant walls below, too, and sound carried down them pretty well.
she brought the chain around and ducked under one last joist and the slope above her allowed her to almost stand up now and stomp her feet a little. the trick, one of the tricks, was not to overdo it. you wanted to be heard but it still needed to be a little ambiguous. that was the whole point.
and sure enough, the voices in the room below cut off sharply. they really were right there, this was definitely above one of the kids’s bedrooms. she had almost been able to make out individual words. whispers didn’t travel through the ceiling very well. maybe the two kids were still just staring at each other, startled and a little afraid but not really showing it yet. she held completely still for another four deep breaths, and just as the voices started up again underneath her, lower and slower, she dragged the chain forward across the plywood and around into a slow circle in front of her, adding a couple more shuffling-in-place steps.
it was really more of a dragging sound than an actual truly spooky clanking sound, but if she sort of spun it in a little circle the chain clattered against itself enough that she figured it was audible in the room below. it shut the kids up again, for sure. a couple more quick stomps and then freeze.
bzzt
bzzt bzzt
silence still from below. or were those footsteps? hard to tell.
bzzt. bzzt bzzt.
she had forgotten to mute the group text. everyone must be getting done with studio or something. jess had thought she was going to miss having another painting studio this year but to be honest, her personal work had been doing much better without it. or just as well, anyway. when she had time to work on it. when she wasn’t out haunting houses. she did miss the camaraderie. but she saw all those guys almost every day anyway. five of them lived with her.
the voices had started back up and her phone was still buzzing. she was reaching the critical point of the mission, as she thought of it. the big finale, some of the others called it. she couldn’t really totally mute the phone in case the app needed to get ahold of her urgently while she was bailing out — she’d had enough jobs that got sticky real quick that she wasn’t going to take any chances there.
so. a quick rattle of the chain and a few more stomps, louder this time, louder than she usually would have gone for but it bought her enough time to pull out her phone again and thumb it open. sure enough, the group chat was blowing up as her friends made meetup plans and took cracks at each other and laughed off the stress of the senior painting studio they’d just gotten out of. but addie had texted her again on the side, too.
is this a new one or the same spot? i can come get u and give u a ride if u want
a little awkward to text back with one thumb.
yea its the same one as last week. dont worry about it i was gonna grab the bus down
addie texted back almost right away.
wow you’ve been at that one for like a month how long does it take??
im already in the car and im gonna be over that way anyway picking kevin up. u sure?
a door slammed downstairs. shit. she hadn’t been paying attention. no voices in the room right underneath her anymore but it sounded like footsteps on the stairs, maybe. the kids had probably run downstairs to tell their parents. maybe they were younger than she thought. she really, really did not want to screw this one up - addie was right, she was sick of working this house and it didn’t usually take this long to convince unsuspecting rich suburbanites they had a ghost living in their attic.
ok ill meet you at that starbucks same one as before ill be there in 20
slipped the phone back in her pocket and crept a couple steps closer to the corner in front of her. she could hear water running but it was always hard to tell what floor that was on. it sounded like a sink, not a shower, but still kind of loud. maybe the kids hadn’t gone running to their parents after all. and sure enough, the water cut out a few seconds later and the kids voices were audible again - she definitely heard something that sounded like “goal” and something else that sounded like “no way, YOU suck.”
time to wrap this up. like she had last week, she crept right up to the wall in front of her, an open row of two by four framing that went up to the plywood slope of the roof above and disappeared into the gray cloud of insulation below. leaning forward to brace herself with one hand on one stud, then deep breath, exhale, and she brought the chain up around fast and clattered it all around the empty cavity between two two by fours in front of her and stomped both feet and even let out a low warbling moan.
and there was the shriek from downstairs. no mistaking that one. running feet, and the slightly different tone of feet running down stairs, and the even fainter vibration of larger adult feet hurrying toward the shriek of the kids. and now the bigger feet hurrying up the stairs. a lot of other haunters would have been halfway across the yard by now but the real trick, in her opinion, one of the real tricks, was for the adults to hear the noises too. easy to write kids off, especially younger kids, but when the grown-ups heard it too, that’s when the real seeds of doubt and unease got planted. that’s what started to get families convinced, against their better judgment, that maybe there was such thing as ghosts and maybe it was worth asking the neighbors if they had heard anything funny going on and maybe, ultimately, looking around for another neighborhood with nice lawns and beige houses with too many roof folds and equally good schools and, importantly, fewer ghosts.
especially when one of them finally got the nerve to poke their head up into the attic and she was long gone, no sign she’d ever been there, no sign anyone had been there since it had been built. that’s how cookie cutter 25 year old suburban neighborhoods full of cookie cutter 35 year old suburbanites got interesting things like haunted houses. which, the app claimed, actually then drove interest and demand in these neighborhoods up as the layer of bullshit jess and other haunters like her got thick enough to start to actually simulate some kind of real neighborhood history. that was the pitch, anyway. and it wasn’t all haunted houses, of course, but jess did not fuck with the darker stuff and the smaller stuff didn’t pay shit. sneaking into the identical attics of identical cheaply built houses for a few days a week and rattling two feet of Home Depot chain around was the perfect amount of danger.
doors opening and closing below. no creaking, these houses were all too new, but she could definitely tell. the footsteps below were heavier - hard to hear, more of vibrations, but definitely adult. she waited until they had moved into the other bedroom, a little farther away, and flicked the chain around for one last rattle. gave a couple really good stomps and one more loud low moan. and that grown up voice had definitely yelped something that sounded an awful lot like “fuck!”
chain back in the bag, quick but quiet, zip it up, and then carefully slipping along the plywood, across rafters, over the insulation, lower and lower as the roof sloped down overhead, just barely able to see where she was putting her sock feet, until she got to the corner where she had carefully scooped away some of the insulation to expose the soffit underneath. she’d detached one of the soffit panels a few weeks ago during the day when everyone was out, and left it leaning up against a rafter when she came in this afternoon. this part of the house was facing the narrow side yard and she knew for almost certain that nobody ever came around the house this way. and the neighbors had a pretty tall fence.
she poked her feet down through the hole until they touched the over-decorated trim piece over the window below and she could just barely stand on it with both feet sideways, parallel to the wall. half-in half-out of the attic now, she scooped the pile of insulation back towards her and pulled the soffit board back down into place, crouching awkwardly as she nudged it around until you couldn’t tell it had ever been moved. this was always the thrilling part, getting out of there as quick as she could, undetected, but covering her tracks so that people poking around the attic wouldn’t have any idea she’d been there at all.
shifting around until she could get her fingertips around a particularly large and hideous piece of fake stone trim, she swung one foot then both out and around and lowered herself down as far as she could, then dropped the rest of the way, landing in a crouch. bag open, grab the slip-ons, quickly put them on, then she was up again and, keeping low enough to stay under the windowsills — even though she was pretty sure nobody would be in the rooms on this side of the first floor right now, they were probably all upstairs in a nervous huddle — she hurried toward the street.
there was a gate in the cedar fence but she knew by now it wouldn’t be locked, it never was, and ten seconds later she was out on the sidewalk. one last quick check for dust or debris or stray insulation caught in her hair and she was practically in the clear. with her hair up, her fake-expensive workout outfit and gym backpack she easily passed for a college kid visiting home. or, maybe more realistically, a second wife to some tech VP.
she couldn’t resist turning left and walking by in front of the house she’d just snuck out of, half smiling. no outward signs of disturbance but then there never was. small thrill of adrenaline as she noticed the Nest camera by the front door, but she looked like she belonged in the neighborhood and anyway, the app said they had some deal with Amazon that had apparently led to a lot of footage being conveniently corrupted when homeowners got too suspicious.
the neighbors up the street were out front, though, a man and woman not much older than she was. they were looking politely concerned back at her house from their sidewalk, trying not to be too obvious about peering over the cedar fence. the woman caught jess’s eye as she walked past and awkwardly raised a hand
“hi there! did you just — were you walking by when. did you just hear anything?”
jess stopped and smiled up at the couple.
“hear anything? i don’t think so. like… what kind of thing?”
the man frowned as if unconsciously.
“oh. we thought we heard, well, my wife thought she heard. sounded like a scream, i guess. or shouting?”
he trailed off a little at the end and shrugged.
“nope, i didn’t hear anything like that, i don’t think —”
jess widened her smile just a fraction
“— maybe it was a ghost?”
ok well that’s all for this week! i’m hopping on a plane to minneapolis tomorrow and then checking out chicago this weekend. hopefully that will be fun. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.