041 wednesday november 3
lighthouse / packing list / spaghetti squash casserole / what to do with a roof
another wednesday edition brought to you by a weekend road trip. “sorry” it’s late. “sorry about that.”
last friday i hit print on a set of drawings for a house i’ve been working on for months now. it’s been pretty smooth as far as these things go, but towards the end a lot of little things started to pile up and deadlines started to ooze around, over, and through the little arbitrary checkpoints i had set up on my work calendar.
generally speaking i’m working on about three houses at once, ideally in different stages of the design / development / construction process, so this little deadline moment happens three or four times a year. and every time, i find myself getting curious again about what other ways i could potentially be paying my rent and putting food in my fridge. we all have to work, unfortunately, and i am not necessarily one of those people who believes that your job has to be the source of both your rent money and your personal fulfillment. but i do get curious about how other people balance those two things. and other things too, such as: is my job actively making other people’s lives worse? is it destroying the planet at a rate that’s significantly higher than other things i could be doing while still paying my rent? is it in a sector that’s critical to the world economy in a way that aggressive labor action and organizing might force the ruling class to give all of us rent-payers a few more crumbs from all the bread they’re stealing from us day in and day out?
everyone’s calculus looks a little different on that, i think. and so far, this particular job has done an OK job of balancing all those little weights. sometimes i think: well this isn’t so bad, i get to go to the coast for three days sometimes. and sometimes i think: my life could probably be much easier if i designed little boxes for people to click around in instead of little boxes for rich people to live in.
who knows!
one thing about thinking about these things in print (“print”) instead of in my own head is that sometimes people will read this and want to share with me how they think i should be balancing all those little weights around. have you thought about getting a different job? have you thought about moving to another city? have you thought about keeping your same job, but fusing yourself more solidly to the management structures and using those welds to bend various things in a direction that will allow you to rent a slightly bigger apartment?
and i sometimes appreciate those ideas but mostly the whole deal is working for a living sucks, generally speaking, and the whole fact that i have to do it at all is the problem. if you know of a job i could do for twice the pay that requires less work and doesn’t involve inventing new kinds of surveillance technology or imagining fun pastel colored ways of becoming a new type of landlord or extracting the kinds of minerals from the earth that somehow always require children being poisoned and dying, i am interested. if you know of a rich French heiress who needs a house husband, well, i guess i am also interested in that. but mostly these problems do not have solutions, i don’t think, and so mostly what i am doing is complaining.
it was also halloween this weekend, and for the first time in a long time i went to a halloween party. i learned how to make pom poms out of yarn and i made about thirty of them and connected them together with enough other yarn that the whole agglomeration came to resemble a crown of broccoli, which is good because that’s what i was going for. and it was nice to go to a little halloween party with my friends and new friends and acquaintances and new acquaintances from various spheres and drink semi-terrible beer in a semi-dark kitchen again.
ok let’s get into it.
1. painting
well this is something new, kind of. i was doing some doodling of rock shapes after i got back from the coast. trying to figure out how they fit together and how they stack up out there, and where you get grass and moss and slime and where it’s just rocks. all that kind of stuff that you can’t really figure out just by gazing at a photograph, you have to move your hand and wrist and arm and pencil around.
at some point i decided to do something a little more illustration-y this week. just felt like the thing to do. a muscle i haven’t stretched in a while or something like that. in some ways, life is about collecting as many analogies as you can.
here’s the evolution of the sketching. once i had the big general shapes the process becomes more subconscious. crawling around the page adding detail and gradually layering in the complexity. no real firm plans about any particular element, just adding things when i get there.
first colors laid in, and then more colors laid on top. these get put under the linework layer. keeping them separate allows you to tweak the linework later - the opacity, the color, the blend modes. all that stuff affects how clearly the lines show up, and fiddling around with it even slightly can dramatically change the look. so it depends on what you’re after.
for this one i didn’t do much erasing or re-coloring or complete re-working. i used softer grainier brushes and a lot of little smaller strokes, maybe like a colored pencil or pastel in real life, and just layered stuff up. things peek through from underneath, and if you don’t like a color you just color over it.
more colors, and more of those tweaks. i decided the light was too much so i dramatically simplified it for the final. also added some other little lanterns down the stairs and into the cave, and a guy walking down there to check something out. scroll up to see all that.
2. poem
“packing list” - winter* 2021
iced americano on an empty stomach
and stopping in thirty miles to smirk at a sign
fog, hopefully, if we leave early enough
water that doesn’t fit
music that doesn’t play
and the funniest stories about each of our exes
*when does winter 2021 become winter 2022. do you keep saying “winter” when it becomes january? do you keep saying “fall” until december? how do you keep it straight. and i am actually wondering this one.
3. spaghetti squash casserole
cooking is back, baby. it’s time to eat warm piles of gloop for three or four months.
this is an extremely basic recipe that i first made one of the handful of times i did Whole30 a few years ago. do you say “the Whole30”? do you say “that Whole30 thing?”
it’s an elimination diet that people do for all sorts of reasons but in my case i did it a few times as a way to check back in with what i was putting in my body and to see how much of it i really needed to keep putting in there. one of the perks of having a body to walk around in is you can do these little experiments on and off for the rest of your life and just see what happens. there are pushes and pulls.
i remember really liking this, but at the time i was not eating mostly vegan. do you say “eating vegan”? so i veganized it. it was very easy.
bake the spaghetti squash. people seem torn on whether face up or face down is correct. i don’t think it matters much.
while that’s baking, cook up some mushrooms and garlic, and lightly steam some broccoli. the casserole itself is not really going to be in the oven for long enough to actually cook much, it’s more just to warm it all up and set it together, so if you don’t like extremely crunchy raw broccoli you’d better cook it a little bit ahead of time. i also threw in some leftover soy chorizo i had in the fridge. why not!
once the squash is baked up, you scrape it out with a fork and it looks like spaghetti. why am i telling you this? you know this already. you know about spaghetti squash.
i made a quick roux with flour and vegan butter, then slowly whisked in coconut milk to make a thick coconut sauce. then gloop that into the bowl with your other stuff and mix it all around. toss it into a casserole dish and top with bread crumbs if you want.
ta da!
4. what to do with a roof
one of the fun things about the oregon coast — maybe all coasts, i don’t know — is the collection of small weird unique pieces of residential architecture. i don’t know if there’s something specific about coasts that leads people to take kind of a “fuck it” approach to their homes, or if people are self-consciously leaning in to some kind of perceived “coast vibe,” or if really this kind of stuff happens everywhere and i just don’t really spend much of my time cruising around suburbs to see it. i don’t know! but here are some fun things i saw this weekend that you can do with a roof.
you can swoop it around the one big round window in probably your living room. you can make the other end of it into your wall.
you can pace around up there waiting for your significant other to return from sea.
you can turn it into a boat.
you can put round skylight domes on it that match the roundness of the rest of your house.
you can make it an octagon, and pop just a tiny little segment of it up about eight inches higher than the rest and make that an octagon too. or make it jog out at right angles even though the walls and balconies underneath it are not at right angles. you can pop up a little part of it and put a round window in it and round the corners of that dormer too, to match the roundedness you have on some of (but not all) of your other corners. you’d better use cedar, whatever you do. you’d better put some shingles on there. and you’d better consider a nice round window to look at the ocean out of.
okay well i think that’s it for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.