tuesdays on tour. here we are again, reporting live from chicago - they have tuesdays out here in this part of the country, too. it’s almost like home.
i thought about calling one of the sections this week something like “never meet your heroes” because over the course of this trip i have had the occasion so far to meet or re-meet a handful of people i admire in some capacity but only know from twitter or zoom squares or their writing. the joke i guess would be that for a split second, if they read this edition, they’d maybe be like “hey, what the fuck” and then in the next paragraph i’d explain that actually, i was just kidding, ha ha, it was great to meet everyone i met, no regrets, no tarnish. no downward adjustment of opinions.
explaining to you all that i almost made this almost-joke is, of course, much more interesting to read about than if i had actually done it.
i have been to minneapolis before a handful of times and had never been to chicago ever before this trip. and so far, my main review is: it is humid as shit out here. i came out here for several reasons that all sort of blend together at some level but one of the i guess you could say “through lines” is a growing sense that i want to change something fundamental in my life as it’s currently organized. something is missing, or incomplete, or put together slightly wrong, and traveling to new places and meeting new people can help with figuring out the exact shape of that missing piece, that gap. it’s another perspective, it’s a comparison point, it’s a mirror, it’s a new lens, blah blah blah, you get it. and as i hoped, the conversations have been enlightening at worst and probably fundamentally life-altering at best. and the riding around in trains and on bikes and thinking about rent and looking at buildings, all those little things have also been turning little gears and clicking little ratchet-teeth and shifting things ever so slightly into new columns and alignments.
and if there’s one truly major thing that i have learned even in this short not-quite-week of travel it is: i do not think i can handle being slightly damp and sticky 24 hours a day for the duration of a summer.
so in that sense, i appreciate my little life in oregon much more already.
let’s get into it.
1. painting
you thought i’d forget, maybe! you thought i’d be too busy doing other things. you thought: he’s probably too busy doing other things.
well, you were almost right.
this is a quick one but unlike most of the paintings i do at 12:15AM on tuesday morning because i feel my arm being twisted by the structures of this newsletter that i have established for my own self — i kind of like it. the colors are fun, at least.
one thing about being in chicago, an actual city, is there are lots of buildings around. that’s kind of one of the main things. and i have not really yet brought buildings into my comfort zone as a painter / illustrator / whatever. a-frame cabins are mainly the exception to this. but the composition can be tricky when it’s all blocks and planes, and i don’t have a fundamental understanding of the way light and color turns corners, the way i sometimes do with things like mountains and trees and wild places.
this is the backyard of a coffee shop i stopped into the other day. i was struck by how bright that yellow-painted fence was in comparison to the brickwork all around it, and the rest is history.
well it’s not quite history yet we still have to go through the process here. that’s kind of the rule. here’s the draft composition sketch. look at all those things that are working better than in the final. that railing. the people feel a little better. the layout of the patio. whoops!
cleaning up the perspective.
first pass at colors — the “before bed” pass. it’s mostly working fine, i guess. i didn’t really have any bright ideas about the back of that garage at the back of the patio there, and i didn’t really think of any by the time i got to the end.
more detail and lines turned off. see how the more rigid perspective-aligned layout of the patio tables is now working against me? there’s a big ol dead space in the middle of the patio there that didn’t have to be there if i went back and did one more pass at refining the sketch.
i think the bricks turned out okay though — always a danger zone — and the lights and shadows, also working OK. i like some of the colors.
for the final pass, i erased out some of the edges to give it less of a rigid feeling, and threw a very slight overlay on there to bring some of the tones together. which you will see if you scroll up.
2. poem
“meeting poem” - summer 2021
we only really knew each other from the cave
lighting our fires and twisting our fingers together
and stepping back out into the woods
for starlight and a smoke —
and you asked, so why are you here?
and what you wouldn’t know from how our knuckles fit
is how many times i’ve cut one thumb
and felt that old ache rising
for a bucket of seawater to drown it in
3. the things i ate
well, i was traveling this week. so i did not do any cooking. sorry! i’m sorry, OK.
one thing that i truly did not realize until maybe the instant i landed in minneapolis is how much i have been cooking for myself over the past year and how seldom i eat at restaurants anymore. for some obvious reasons. but even now that the pandemic is over* i still haven’t really gone fully back to the old me. which is good for my wallet and probably also my belly, but it does make traveling difficult all of a sudden.
being vegan in portland is pretty easy. it sounds like the setup to a bad open mic joke from 2012, in fact. “and i was like, vegan? what am i, from portland??” or “so i was in portland the other week, and this vegan comes up to me…” or something like that. you get it. not funny really but definitely the kind of thing a certain type of person has been amusing themselves / tormenting their friends with since 2012.
and if i was cooking for myself, i’m sure it would be almost as easy in the midwest. but i was not, due to the fact that i am on vacation and was staying in a hotel.
one of the main reasons it’s easier in portland is not the prevalence of specifically vegan restaurants there — there are vegan restaurants everywhere now — but the fact that most places i would ever find myself eating in portland would have one or two or more vegan things on the menu, other than salads. it’s more mainstream maybe. i have not found that to be the case here. so the seemingly simple question of, hmm i’m hungry, what should i have for lunch, that question gets a lot trickier here in the part of the country where they do the pledge of allegiance to a big bucket of cheese curds and a kielbasa instead of the american flag.
little political humor for you there.
so to the best of my recollection, here are the things i have eaten so far on this trip. some of these i happened into randomly, some took planning and effort and multiple bus transfers to get to. and i think i probably forgot some stuff.
i went to some friends’ place in minneapolis for dinner and grilled some beyond burgers. they also made a delicious salad of some sort involving corn and beans.
i biked to the herbivorous butcher, a vegan “butcher shop” in minneapolis that i have been following on social media for like a year now, and had a breakfast sandwich. it was pretty good but the tofu “egg” element of it was a little odd.
my brother and i had ramen at moto-i and their vegan version was very tasty.
i skipped breakfast (i think) and can’t remember what i had for lunch and then had some chips and salsa while i was waiting for a huge order of vegan soul food from a place called Trio in minneapolis. trio was amazing. the chips and salsa were good too.
after landing in chicago i met up with some friends almost immediately and instead of lunch had three or four beers. then, later, i think i had two slices of vegan pizza from somewhere called “pizza friendly pizza” but it could have been three slices. i had a lot of whiskey that night and was coerced into having some malort too.
the next morning i cheated. broke vegan edge. for the first time in over a year (i think) — i was ruinously hung over and needed an emergency infusion of eggs benedict. this is another example where, if there had been something vegan on the menu i would have gotten it, but a salad is not going to cut it for a hangover. i went to west town bakery and diner which thankfully was within walking distance of the place i’m staying. their potatoes are incredibly good.
later that day i tried to get a table at the chicago diner which i understand is pretty famous and, understandably, they were booked for the evening. i got a vegan reuben for takeout from them instead and biked it back home in the rickety basket of an e-bike. i’ve actually done their mail-order reuben kit in the past, i think, sometime during the depths of lockdown last year, and i’ve also tried to replicate it a couple of times to pretty good success. i don’t think i’ve written about that yet for this newsletter but i imagine we’ll see it before the year is out.
the next day i skipped breakfast again and eventually ended up meeting a friend at a coffee shop i think called jackalope somewhere in bridgeport where i had a surprisingly great breakfast sandwich called “the vegan orc.” it wasn’t on their main menu board but luckily i noticed a little printed off flyer for it taped to the wall near the cash register right before i was about to give up again and order something with real eggs. i’m still thinking about that sandwich.
rounded out the day with some delicious tater tots.
and today, i still have not figured out what i’m going to be eating but i don’t think i can skip breakfast again so i’ll have to do some sleuthing while i’m on the train. (you can just say “the train” here — that’s what the locals call it.)
boy, looking back on that list, is that enough food for a week? seems like maybe not. let’s hope i forgot some. although beer probably counts for a lot. maybe this will help some of you out! maybe if you live in some of the places i was visiting this will inspire you to check some new spots out. or maybe not! who cares. not me.
4. a powerful thought
well, once again we’ve come to the end of a newsletter and i haven’t been struck by any brilliant ideas for the fourth thing. i’ve been turning a lot of things over in my mind, certainly, thinking about a lot of things. that whole thing about the puzzle pieces etc. from the intro. reflecting on conversations about life and what to do with it and rules you set for yourself and how those are different than structures, or can be, and how you can be inspired, or instruct yourself to be inspired, or leave yourself open to being compelled by something in the world around you. or what it means to jump in with both feet, or what it means to make a mistake.
like i said also in the intro, i have had a lot of what i would consider to be great conversations about life over the course of this trip, which was kind of part of the point, and last night in particular i was talking at a bar with someone whose work and writing and general vibe i admire, and at a couple points during that conversation there was an indiana jones type moment where somewhere in the background, almost so you couldn’t hear it, more of a feeling than a sound, there was the grinding of stone against stone and a massive almost-unheard vibrating “clunk” as something improbably large shifted just enough to settle into a new position. and trigger something, back there, under there, behind there, in the dark.
in the case of indiana jones, this would of course end up being snakes, or spikes, or spears that go “whoosh” and a skeleton in a pith helmet drops out of the ceiling. and that’s where the metaphor loses a little bit of its luster.
but none of that’s ready to really write about, though! and maybe it’s not a good fit for this newsletter anyway.
so instead, this week i leave you with a very short and ultimately much more powerful thought that has been rattling around in my head for the past week and sitting in my little blue notebook for the past week-minus-one-day and that is:
going on vacation and bringing all your worst clothes
ok well, that’s all for this week. i’m excited to get back to my little corner of the world where things are so completely the opposite of humid that everything is always on fire, and will be forever. have a good week everyone! see ya next tuesday. bye.