031 tuesday august 24th
cliff cabin / smoke poem / general tso's leftovers / the secret of flight
still counts as tuesday if it’s tuesday where i’m at.
i’m on the downhill slide today. sometimes you hear this and you think, yikes, things not going well recently? sometimes that’s what it means. but today i mean it in the sense of slopes steepening, momentum gathering, and the wind whipping in your face as you pass the point of being able to stop without even realizing it. and you’re half sliding half running down the scree field and simultaneously thrumming with energy and praying to whoever is listening that the next step doesn’t twist your ankle and take you down in a blur of limbs and redirected inertia and rocks.
things are gathering speed. i’m moving out of my apartment today, and i’m going to alaska tomorrow. originally when i booked my tickets i had another place to stay lined up, a continuity of leases, an overlap, even — an overlap so luxurious i should have known it would be too good to be true. three whole weeks to move! three weeks of quick trips, of gradually emptying one pitcher to fill another, and full of enough pauses to consider what would stay behind and what would continue on. metaphorically i mean.
but that didn’t work out, and my new lease doesn’t start until the second week in september, so i’ve been quickly but carefully making alternate arrangements — a longer stay in alaska, a storage unit, a little cabin to stay in for a few days — and finally got everything lined up and launched myself down the side of the mountain.
and then realized my initial travel plans had given me an extra day after getting back from alaska to clean out my current place and finish moving out in a nice and orderly fashion and by spending more time in alaska, well, i had to get all that shit done before i leave. like tonight. like over the past few hours.
but i finally got everything into storage and everything out of my old place and found my plants some babysitters and packed way more clothes than i’ll need for two weeks just because i didn’t want to think about putting them somewhere else. i have too much stuff now, somehow, despite living in a very small apartment for the past year.
and my flight doesn’t leave for another 7 hours, so, plenty of time to finish this up and get a good night’s sleep.
let’s go.
1. painting
stylized trees! wow.
this is another quick one. how many weeks in a row can i say that before it becomes clear that maybe this format i’ve created for myself is not really fundamentally working for me. well, who knows. probably at least one more week.
here’s a sketch. i did a lot of sketches this week, actually, but nothing was appearing that was really that appealing. this big swooping hillside up to a cabin got me going a little bit, at least. check out the background on the left — starting from sketches like this quite often puts me in a place where i have like, one core idea, and then have to fiddle with the entire rest of the composition to make that one little thing fit in. so you can see different ridge lines, different angles back there as i goof around with that.
initial colors. one thing they tell you when you’re learning art is that you should always know where your light source is. in this case it’s not really clear, which i realized down the road. i think i fixed it a little bit. i am consciously keeping the trees nice and loose after last week’s debacle.
… and “keeping it loose” was the name of the game the whole way through. there’s a theory in painting that says you should keep things pretty loose or impressionistic in most areas and then really dial in the detail on the areas of focus. kind of like if you had a camera lens that could focus on multiple places at once. maybe such a thing exists. i have no idea. but anyway i spent more time on the cabin and the near ridgeline, and let the rest of the stuff just kind of do whatever.
this one is also sloppy, but compared to where we ended up last week, i’m much happier with some of the things going on here, and could start over from some of those particular places and arrive at a place i thought was at least fun.
i’m going to be at my parents’ house for the next couple weeks and i don’t know that many people in alaska anymore, so i have a feeling i’ll be spending more time on the next couple. but i think i also said that last week.
2. poem
smoke poem - summer 2021
all of my notebooks are in boxes somewhere
little craters, washed-out bridges —
— that creek water so low it’s practically mud
and another bumper sticker i forgot to ever ask you about
it’ll all grow back, they say
although we may not live to see it,
and hell, they say, imitation smirk, would we even want to
(like it’s a new thought pushing up green on the ridge)
well, i would.
and if the sky’s the color of a mimosa by then,
we can poke straw holes in our gas masks together
3. general tso’s leftovers
one of the things about being on the downhill slope (from the intro, remember?) is that you have a lot less time to plan ahead for interesting things to cook. and one of the things about moving to a new apartment is you have a lot less desire to schlep a bunch of pantry items around when you’re moving. so once again, we are cleaning out my fridge.
the plan is simple: make some crispy tofu, cook some veggies, and whip up some kind of sticky-sweet glaze from scratch to toss it all in. very easy! hard to fuck up! and yet.
i broke the tofu into chunks, and then tossed it in a light marinade and let it sit while i chopped up all the other stuff.
once the tofu has sat for a bit, toss it in cornstarch. my friend M (to steal her anonymizing technique because i’m in a hurry and didn’t check in re: name dropping and if you’re reading this you might know her anyway and when i posted about a similar tofu on twitter a little bit ago i shouted her out there) sent me an oven baked crispy tofu chunk recipe / method that she highly recommended and i tried it myself and it was amazing and this is similar to that.
but this is not that. this stuff, i want to fry in oil. and get nice and crispy.
the veggies i roasted for about 10 minutes just while the other stuff was coming together, and then i heated up some oil in my wok and threw the cornstarch-tossed tofu in and it, well, it did not do what i wanted it to do. i went too light on the oil and didn’t let it get hot enough and the result was that the “skin” of the tofu kind of sloughed off and caramelized in the bottom of the pan and stuck.
also i wouldn’t have roasted the carrots beforehand but i am allergic to raw carrots. so if you ever want to try to make one of these dishes, just remember that. your carrots can be crunchier.
anyway while i was tossing all this in the hot wok with one hand, with the other i simmered up some glaze for the top - 1 part vinegar, 1 part soy sauce, 1 part sugar, 1 part water. and 1/3 part cornstarch, and some five spice, and some red pepper flakes.
also i roasted some peanuts and topped it with more of that ginger scallion sauce i had. just about used all that up. perfect timing.
4. the secret of flight
flying sucks, i think we can all agree. i’m not sure but i do think so. i know we’re supposed to all agree and so i agree that flying sucks. on an airplane, i mean — i’m not in a position to speak to any other kind.
there’s a method, though, a secret, to enjoying your flight as much as you are able. enjoying it to the point where you feel a little guilty like, hey, this was supposed to suck. i guess it is more of a method than a secret, one secret, it’s a series of them, and so: method.
the first thing you’ll want to do is never check any luggage. if you’re checking luggage you have already failed. you don’t want it enough, you don’t possess the clarity of purpose and vision you’ll need later in your journey, you should stay home and kiss your wife and be a good father to your kid / dog. one bag and one personal item is all you should need. they have laundry machines where you’re going. and the personal item is another bag, i have to imagine. two bags!
step two is to get to the airport with plenty of time to spare. probably 15 - 20 minutes before boarding. your formative years were spent in an intensely more paranoid culture — those wild feverish mid-aughts — and you have misremembered how long it takes to get through security. and you only have two bags! one bag, one personal item. and your boarding pass lives on your phone, and you are otherwise unencumbered. you wore a belt even though you will be taking it off immediately. you might have to untie your shoes, or you might not, it’s hard to tell what act the security theater has entered by the time you arrive. and forget that stuff earlier about your wife and kid/dog. they’re not coming with you, obviously.
step three is to keep everything in your bag (personal item) and roll the dice on security not really caring that the x-ray shows you clearly left all your toothpastes and gels and ointments inside your bag. they won’t care. it’s part of the method.
after that, you’ll want to hustle down to the gate just in time to be one boarding group late. and now you can practice your humble little oh im so sorry smile, your little ah i was in a hurry but all i have is one bag and one personal item and no wife half smile, and you don’t even have to tell the middle aged lady scanning boarding passes that you did not check a bag — your clarity of purpose will be shining through.
you are sitting in an aisle seat. this is not part of the method but it should be assumed. it’s not included in the method the same way that recipes do not include the air you will be breathing during your cooking experience, or the wine you will be drinking off to one side. it’s a baseline.
as your eventual neighbors filter down the aisle apologetically and the plane fills up and your neighbors arrange to seat themselves apologetically next to you and your “noise cancelling” headphones are playing pop music and the plane rumbles and hurls itself into the air, you will remember that you used to be a very nervous flyer. you will recall a series of statistics that you’ve heard from various friends, and friends’ girlfriends, and aunts, and coworkers, regarding the absolute cocoon of safety that is modern air travel. you will idly think about what body of water you would shortly find yourself floating in, should a Sully-type situation occur, and should you be fortunate enough to be piloted by a Sully-type individual. step seven is to turn the pop music up and think about a famous actress instead, or a work deadline. or what kind of pants would actually look good on you and not just like pants.
you will cease being nervous at this point, in some part due to the pop music and the pants and the actress, and in some part due to a series of events several years in your past that were so terrifying that flying doesn’t really even register. you will remember when you thought you were actually going to die, or when you spent almost a year living with a dissociative disorder so acute that you have never been sure whether you came back out of the well or went out through the bottom into whatever cavernous spaces exist under the bottoms of wells.
by now the beverage cart should be coming through and the final step is you can get yourself a nice ice water with some cubes that will be perfect to chomp on. and the rest is pretty straightforward from there.
okay i believe that’s it for this week! have a good week everyone. sorry this was almost a wednesday edition. god forbid. see ya next tuesday. bye.