been slipping a little bit on these. not really as prepared for each tuesday as i used to be. they’re coming out later and later.
hope that’s ok.
i saw the movie “the worst person in the world” last night and without spoiling things too much (it was a very good movie, so i do recommend you see it), one of the themes, loosely speaking, was self-identity. who you are, as it relates to what you do. it was a long and somewhat complex movie so i’m not 100% on that but i’m pretty sure that is a thread you could follow and untangle in the movie and afterward on the way home when you’re thinking about it.
increasingly i don’t think there’s much of a difference. i’m more and more of the opinion that “who you are” is not a meaningfully distinct category from “what you do.” at the very least our inner lives, however rich they may be, are completely subordinated to our actions, the physical manifestations (or often, not!) of those inner belief structures. you cannot be a good person if you do not do good things, in other words. you can’t be an accomplished person, if that kind of thing is important to you, without actually producing some accomplishments. but similarly, you cannot be a fuckup, a loser, a waste of space, if you are doing things that are productive, positive, helpful.
this comes up quite a bit in left-leaning circles, i think: for example, it’s not meaningful to call yourself a socialist if you’re not engaged in some kind of socialist-oriented political action.
but you can apply it in all sorts of other ways, too. if you go on a hike, you are a hiker. if you make even one person laugh, you are a funny person.
and if you end up not putting out a newsletter on the day you’ve told yourself you’re going to do it, for whatever reason, maybe you’re feeling tired or unmotivated or uninspired, well, you are no longer a person with a weekly newsletter.
so let’s get cracking.
1. forest park sketches
i went for a pretty long hike on sunday. more on that later. as i have written about before, the forests of this part of the country are very challenging for me as artistic subjects. there’s just so much going on. they’re a riot of wild, shaggy, chaotic growth. the greens are all extremely vivid. there’s scraggly underbrush everywhere, growing up way higher than you would think, obscuring sightlines and mucking up what might otherwise be compositionally interesting arrangements of trees.
the challenge, then, like a lot of art, comes down to deciding what you want to represent and what you want to omit. what’s important to capture the idea. but in addition to that challenge, in the woods around here, it’s kind of hard to figure out what the idea even is. or if there is one.
drawing a bunch of fiddly little plants is something i absolutely hate. i find it incredibly tedious and i am very bad at making myself do things that i find tedious. as you might remember, that was a huge part of the reason i started doing this newsletter project in the first place: a weekly commitment to get myself to spend slightly more time on the elements of painting i find tedious, than i otherwise would.
one thing i did take to heart from the 12 week long weekly drawing class i took in the fall and winter is that often it’s necessary just to let yourself slide one level past conscious action, if you can, and sink down so you’re not thinking too hard about what you’re doing or engaging in self-critique or dissecting every pencil stroke. that stuff is important, and it’s why writing about the artistic process can be helpful. but for the moment, if you’re approaching something new or frustrating or unfamiliar, it’s good just to look at your subject and just kind of… move your pencil around.
sometimes you start to hit a flow state where your subconscious (or whatever) is making connections with your hand and pencil (or whatever) and you can kind of like, peacefully take a zen shortcut into building up some muscle memory. or at least, establish connective pathways between seeing and drawing. is any of this scientifically accurate? almost certainly not. but if drawing all the little spikes and slivers and grit and greebles on logs and trees and branches and stumps starts to drive you insane, it’s an approach i recommend.
so despite the chaos of the subject, and despite having a million different things to look at in these woods, some compositions start to emerge there towards the end. some compositions that are, or could become, legible — much more legible than photographs, probably.
2. fairy tale
Once upon a time, in a land far away, tucked in a valley in the foothills of a great mountain range, there was a kingdom ruled by a wise king and benevolent queen, full of humble and hard-working folk, and occasionally terrorized by a dragon.
The dragon lurked in a cave high in the mountains, many miles further up the valley from even the smallest village of shepherds. The people lived in some fear, but the truth was, it was rarely seen except on the occasions it roared forth to hunt prey. And truthfully, besides the occasional stray goat, the dragon seemed to only have a taste for royalty. The dukes and duchesses who had once overseen the scattering of villages up and down the valley had mostly either retreated to the capitol or vanished down the gullet of the fearsome beast.
These were troubled times, but the king and queen had been blessed with seven sons, who had grown into seven fine young men, princes of which the realm could be proud. And so it came to be that one summer, when the youngest prince had reached the age of manhood, and the kingdom was starting to run desperately low on the type of mid-level nobility that is pretty much required to keep a feudal kingdom running, that the king and queen and all the princes decided that something must at last be done about the dragon.
The eldest son was the strongest and most courageous, tall of stature and brawny of arm. He mounted the nation’s finest steed and led a company of the kingdom’s ablest warriors from the great capitol gates one morning, thundering up the valley to the bright fanfare of trumpets and the roar of the crowd. As the prince swept through successively tiny villages on his way to the mighty peaks beyond, maidens swooned and men nodded firmly to one another at the sight of his manly brow, his flashing medals, and his impeccable posture.
But as mighty as the first prince was, the dragon was mightier still, and not a week had passed before one remaining soldier staggered into the great hall of the capitol, bleeding and exhausted, to inform the palace that the mission had failed and the eldest prince was no more.
The second eldest son was the cleverest of the princes, as shrewdly intelligent as his elder brother had been physically gifted. He hid himself away in the palace library for several weeks before emerging with a plan, and quickly assembled the kingdom’s stealthiest woodsmen and sneakiest poisoners. They made their way quietly up the valley to the dragon’s lair and laid their trap, letting loose a herd of goats with bells tied round their necks (to attract the beast’s attention) with woven collars soaked in the deadliest poisons known to the king’s spymaster. The second prince and his men left the goats to wander a high meadow and silently gathered around a stream in the woods for three days and three nights to wait, scarcely daring to breathe, until one morning, they all dropped dead, one by one, gasping and choking.
The third and fourth brothers, who had no particularly distinguishing talents but were generally reckoned to be stronger and cleverer than their younger princeling siblings, rode up the valley together several weeks later, having heard nothing from the second prince, and discovered the poisoned collars floating in an eddy just upstream from their elder brother’s campsite - with nothing remaining of the prince and his men but bloated corpses, and nothing remaining at all of the goats.
The third and fourth brothers took the opportunity to slip into an adjacent mountain valley and high-tail it into a neighboring kingdom, famous for its beaches, subtropical climate, and total lack of regicidal dragon activity. They were never heard from again.
The fifth brother was a gifted speaker, known even at his young age for his powerful oratory ability and compelling debate skills. He had already skillfully negotiated several treaties with neighboring countries, mediated fierce debates between lesser nobles, and convinced the king and queen to implement a series of economically liberalizing tax-incentive measures in the capitol that were already leading to an impressive series of architectural developments along many of the main avenues. Dragons were known to be intelligent as well as fearsome, and the fifth prince therefore set up the valley armed with nothing but parchment and quill and his wits. And a gigantic chest of gold, drawn in a creaking cart by four enormous oxen.
The prince fared better than his eldest two brothers, and was able to open a dialogue with the dragon, convincing it to come forth from its lair and treat honestly in order to arrive at a mutually beneficial agreement that would make everyone involved happy. The dragon and the prince debated fiercely over several days and nights, a battle of wits that the villagers nearby would remember to their children and grandchildren as “inspiring” and “inscrutable” and “kind of obnoxious.” Eventually, though, it became clear that the dragon’s ancient and cruel intelligence was more than a match for the fifth prince, and gradually the prince found himself trapped in stronger and stronger logical loops and rhetorical snares, making concessions, striking unwise but ultimately unavoidable bargains, until he found that he had signed his very life away to the dragon. He was never seen again, and all that remained of his attempt were three enormous oxen, milling around in a field.
The sixth prince flung himself from the tallest tower in the capitol.
Finally, it fell to the youngest brother, the seventh prince. He was tall, but not strong, and clever, but inexperienced. He did not possess the unerring instinct for self-preservation of his third and fourth eldest brothers, or the oratory ability of the fifth, but neither did he allow himself to sink into despair as the sixth prince had. Above all, what set the seventh prince apart was his generous heart, his love for not only his fellow man but all the creatures of the kingdom, and the forests and lakes and clouds and fields that made it up. His was a gentle and determined soul, full of benevolence for all living things but also a strong sense of righteousness and justice, that no creature should live in undue terror of another. He was loved by the kingdom’s women and some of its men and respected by the rest of the men, looked up to by the children and looked upon with respect by the elders. Privately, the king and queen wished he had been the eldest, for it was clear to all that he would make one of the finest rulers the kingdom had ever seen, if only the laws had been written to allow it. The seventh prince represented the best of what the valley kingdom had to offer, and it fell to his shoulders to save it from the scourge of the dragon.
Unfortunately, he was gobbled up by the beast about half a mile outside the palace gates.
Once upon a time, in a land far away, tucked in a valley in the foothills of a great mountain range, hidden in a vast cavern, there lived three dragons.
The eldest was ambitious and proud and sought to dominate the surrounding kingdoms through sheer terror and the force of his might. He strove too far, too strongly, and provoked several of the kingdoms into united resistance against him as a last-ditch effort to ensure their own survival, eventually being brought down by a sustained all-out assault of their combined military forces.
The youngest was ambitious but cowardly, and sought to appease the surrounding kingdoms by making himself useful and refraining from devouring their folk. Eventually, respect and admiration turned to indifference and eventually disdain, and the youngest dragon perished forgotten in chains below a local queen’s winter palace, having been coerced into lending his fiery breath to keep her bathwater hot in winter.
The middle dragon was cautious but not cowardly, and made it his business to learn the language and customs of the local peoples without giving himself completely over to their ways. He indulged himself on his favorite prey without giving himself completely over to his baser instincts, and by only eating the flesh of the nobility (and the occasional goat), never really gave the masses of common folk much of a reason to care that much about his comings and goings.
And after the whole thing with the seven princes was settled, leading to some serious political introspection in the kingdom regarding the way they delegated authority and handled their affairs, everyone pretty much lived happily ever after.
3. beef n broccoli
soy curls again!
these things are so great.
and broccoli, too, of course, what did you think this was?
first up, i made some homemade “beefless” beef-ish flavored seasoning. this method mostly comes from a woman on youtube (accordion warning on that link) whose video i found over a year ago when i was looking for ways to make vegan “corned beef” for “reubens.”
one appealing thing about this homemade flavoring, vs. for example store-bought vegan “beef” bouillon, is you can easily tweak the flavor, as well as the salt content. as i think i mentioned previously i’m sort of trying to start keeping a little bit more of an eye on my sodium intake. so doing it this way helps.
lots of ingredients you would expect: we have some dried shiitake mushrooms, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, mustard powder, allspice, Montreal steak seasoning (it comes in a jar that’s labeled like that) and then instant coffee and cocoa powder. blend it all up in a blender. you can add a dash of soy sauce too, at the end, which will give the powder a more brown sugar-esque consistency.
looks like this.
soak the soy curls in hot water. i added a tablespoon or two of the beefless seasoning to the water as they soaked, to impart some of the flavor to the curls, which are naturally very bland.
meanwhile, the sauce is very simple. cornstarch, water (not pictured), raw ginger, garlic, brown sugar, red pepper flakes, and soy sauce.
whisk it all up and let it sit while the curls finish soaking.
when the curls have soaked, drain them, squeeze as much extra liquid out as you can, then toss them in some cornstarch.
cook them in a big skillet with some oil, until they start to crisp up a bit. they stuck to my skillet, so if you have something nonstick that isn’t made out of some kind of known carcinogen, that might be a better bet.
sauce goes in, they cook for just a bit with the sauce, and then toss your (lightly steamed) broccoli in and stir it all up.
ta da! incredible. the texture on these is so great. and of course you cannot go wrong with broccoli.
4. it’s allowed
on sunday morning i went to forest park for the purposes of going on a hike.
i’ve lived in this little corner of the world for almost ten years now, and as i’ve inevitably gotten older i’ve begun to accumulate the beginnings of a mental list of activities that i might, someday soon, have missed my chance to get involved in. this list is a lie: if i am honest with myself, it won’t be too late to learn something new or to change lanes or to dip my toes into another pool for quite a while longer. someday, it will be too late. for now, though, it isn’t, but living here can make that hard to believe, for some things.
i’m probably past the exit i would have taken if i was ever going to try standup comedy, for example. if i was going to become involved in the poly or kink scene, it seems like it would have happened by now. if i was ever going to seriously get into cycling. these gardens are not yet closed to me, nor will they ever really be, i guess, but the hedges feel like they’re getting higher, and the time for jumping them is growing shorter.
the activity for which this feeling is the most true, out here in the pacific northwest, for me, a person like myself, is Hiking. there is a whole slew of people out here who are into Hiking on a level that feels increasingly remote, inaccessible. Unapproachable. whether they got into it in their 20’s, or they were into it since they were kids, it feels like these people have been Hiking for longer than they can remember. they know the trails around here, they know where to park their cars. they know where it’s allowed to park their cars, and they know what kinds of stickers they need in their windshields in order that their cars remain unbothered by the park rangers while they are parked.
they have a seemingly effortless ability to arrive at pristine alpine lakes i have never heard of. they are possessed of unerring internal compasses that guide them, instinctively, to hiking locations that are the perfect mix of remote, beautiful, accessible, and (somehow) completely uncrowded. their sleek waterproof pants whisper to each other as they disappear up valleys i would not even know how to google. the whispers, i imagine, are an in-group communication method, sharing Hiking tips, tricks, locations, secrets, with other Hikers whose pants are similarly able to communicate in that ultrasonic register.
they know which jackets are good, and which are bad. they know where to find pants that are somehow breathable and water resistant. they can tell you, for some unholy reason, how much their sleeping bag weighs, and they can keep a straight face while they express this fact to you with an air of profound regret. “i know” they mutter “i need to shave some ounces off.”
it’s intimidating. i have no problem admitting that. it’s perplexing, too. i will, from time to time, sit down and seriously think about trying to become a Hiking person, and i will inevitably, instantly, hit the kind of snag that is so basic that a Person of Hiking would be baffled by it. what do you mean, what kind of jacket is good for hiking? what do you mean, how do i find all these trails? REI has great sales sometimes, just look there? the woods is full of trails, try looking there, maybe i’m not understanding what you’re saying?
and let’s not even get into Hiking’s presence in the dating scene here.
this is, i think, one of my major issues with living in this part of the country. which mostly illustrates how great it is out here. and this is one of the major reasons i love hiking in Forest Park.
i can put on my trail running shoes and the same pair of shorts i wear to the gym. i do not run, but one time i asked on twitter what kind of footwear is good for hiking, and sifted through the torrent of mostly-inscrutable responses that were instantly over my head to find a pair of shoes that ended up being good for hiking. not that i have a basis of comparison. my previous pair of hiking boots was $44 at Fred Meyer. these trail running shoes are more than a match for anything Forest Park is going to throw at me, terrain-wise. and i will pass people on the trail who are wearing flip-flops, or skate shoes, or (once, astonishingly) heels.
i can throw a water bottle and a granola bar in my super slick ultra lightweight backpack which is very definitely overkill. in Forest Park, i will never be far enough away from my apartment that i need to educate myself on Hiking Food or Protein Carb Ratios or Eating At Altitude or All-Day Fuel. those are cans of worms that can remain unopened. and with a water bottle and one granola bar i will instantly be at least in the middle of the pack, as far as preparedness goes, of the users of the Forest Park trail system on any given day.
i can hustle up the trail at whatever pace feels right, jogging up hills, passing families with kids and middle-aged women gossiping with dogs, until my heart is beating so hard i can feel my pulse in my shoulders, my elbows, parts of my body i have never felt blood flowing before. i can also stop to watch a slug for ten or fifteen minutes, being passed by actual trail runners and dads carrying babies in expensive-looking Scandinavian slings. i don’t have to worry about Making Enough Miles or Setting A Good Pace To Reach The Reservoir Before Sundown or whatever Hiking people think about when they spring out of bed at 4am and carefully adjust their internal machinery to deliver optimum Hike results for that Sunday.
in Forest Park, i’m allowed to hike without a capital H. i’m allowed to suck at it, or mostly, to be sort of okay at it, without sticking out like a sore thumb, without spending evenings poring over guidebooks, without having to find a totally new set of friends. it’s an uncharacteristically low-pressure environment, when it comes to the outdoors in this corner of the world.
it’s the perfect place to peek over some of those hedges before they get too tall.
that’s about it for this week! have a good week, everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.