okay, an edition that’s actually coming out on tuesday, and before noon? now this i gotta see!
it’s been pretty dreary around these parts recently which ordinarily i don’t mind at all, i am firmly on the record as not minding when it rains because basically we have two seasons out here anymore, rain and fire, but this week it’s a little annoying because i got a new bike for commuting to work and commuting to work on a bike in this kind of dreary weather is a total pain in the ass.
we don’t even really get that much rain rain here, it’s more like this mist that just sort of hangs in the air and instantly drenches you when you try to move through it. like you’re a celery at the grocery store and that little nozzle is just always turned to On. i think they used to have a thunderstorm effect that played over the speakers in the produce area to warn you to get your hands out of range of the sprayers but i can’t remember hearing that recently. just another health and safety feature that’s been trimmed out in the spiraling search for greater and greater quarterly profits, i guess.
the new bike is great, though, when i’ve taken it out for spins in the little clear pockets between drifts of mist. i finally caved and got a bike with gears. seven of them. wow! too many. after a lifetime of riding single-speed and fixed gear bikes i really only use the top three for now and the shifting process still makes me a little nervous. and in some ways i do feel like a pampered spoiled little child for having gears at all when i’ve been doing just fine with one gear all this time.
but of course having gears makes going up hills much more pleasant. so there’s probably some kind of life lesson in there about the imaginary virtues of self-inflicted asceticism and so on and so forth. who knows. i remain committed to never learning lessons.
let’s get into it.
1. sketchbook stuff
i got a bigger sketchbook than i usually do and i have been trying to be better about filling it with stuff. that is, trying to be better about being less precious about what i fill it with. sometimes it’s a challenge with sketchbooks to overcome the urge to carefully plan out a composition, balance the white space, etc. and so on, to the point where the pages just stay blank because you don’t want to spoil them.
which is kind of the opposite of the point. so i’ve been trying to remind myself just to dump stuff in there when i see something interesting.
recently i have been noticing a lot of very fat round eaves on houses. i think they’re very weird and interesting. i guess the water just rolls off the edge and drips down, maybe that’s okay? i wonder what the backstory is but i have done zero research into it as of right now. i’m sure the answer is not that interesting. if i was a teacher this is the point i would say “well class why do you think these eaves are rounded like that?” and take a 20 minute break while the class wrote 1-2 paragraphs on why they thought the eave edges were so round.
i see a lot of very cool sketchbooks because i follow a lot of artist types on social media and people love to post sketchbooks. i’m working up the courage to start using color more in mine but the pages of this one are very very thin (as you can see by this pic) and i don’t think they would hold up to anything much more robust than a colored pencil. of which i currently have zero. but maybe i’ll steal one from work and see how that goes.
i like the combo of pen-that’s-not-too-thin and soft pencil, though, for sketching. very flexible combo. you can add shading with hatching of course if you’re just working with a pen but it’s nice to also be able to lay down just kind of a tone with a pencil.
trees, roofs, gadgets, gizmos.
2. hill story
The second time we walked up the hill behind the creek was when you told me life was pretty well meaningless. The third time, you’d already made a name for yourself and we haven’t been back since.
I’m not slow like how you’d say it but sometimes I do like to take my time with things. I need to focus in. Whether that’s doing up the math on the ticket at the bar or crossing off my lists at the grocery store. I look up sometimes and see people’s eyes get soft, they look away quick, but it doesn’t bother me, they see what they see but it doesn’t have much to do with me.. I walk up to the store by my place pretty often and do some of my thinking along the way and when I get to the part where the big overhang comes out part way over the sidewalk sometimes I’m too busy thinking to move out of the way of the drips that come off the end. So when they see me walking and thinking and getting dripped on I understand they see me a certain way.
“No way there’s a point to this. Whatever this all is.” you said at the time. We were leaned up against one of the big trees up there. You forgot a blanket to sit on or maybe you had just assumed I’d bring mine. “I mean, look at the way things are going. Look at how they are. You’re telling me this is the ‘plan’ or part of the ‘vision’?” I wasn’t telling you that but I’m pretty sure you weren’t really saying it that way. I could hear the quote marks when you said “vision” and “plan.”
“We spend our whole lives making someone else rich, if we’re lucky, and meantime everything just gets worse and worse.” It was still a couple hours to sunset I remember but the creek was already changing color, becoming more orange. I couldn’t quite hit it with a pebble from up there and anyway there weren’t any pebbles left in reach. At that time I had never really thought about how the creek changed colors every hour of the day until I saw some of the paintings you were working on in your garage. Now it’s one of the main things I look for when I’m out in the woods is how different things change colors. I don’t really paint but I try to squint and think about what tube I would use at what time. I think about laying them out in a line to represent the day and I can almost picture the first couple of tubes and how they change colors or the last couple but I can’t hold the whole big line in my head at the same time.
“I guess maybe the point is just to do the best with what you can maybe. Like try to have fun, or, make things a little better where you can?” I had said and not very confidently I kind of trailed off at the end because I wasn’t thinking about it, hadn’t thought about it and was just kind of saying something to fill up the pause and contribute a little bit on my end and I remember you snorted instantly right away. “Did you get that off a Hallmark card or what?” you said, and “Okay but what does that even mean, do the best. I mean what does that mean to you?” and you scooted around a little bit so you could look at my face and see if I was joking, you had that look where you weren’t sure if I was making fun of you. You had a whole range of looks back then and at that point I was pretty well smitten already and that look of kind of surprise and are-you-serious but also being ready to share the joke, I admit I did my best to provoke that expression as often as I could. Then we were both laughing at how serious we were pretending to be, not really pretending anymore at that age but still the seriousness didn’t fit on us quite right like a thrift store jacket, we hadn’t really made it our own yet. And to be honest I didn’t really know what I thought about life vis a vis its inherent meaninglessness, at that point in time definitely not, so I just leaned in to kiss you and that was that.
I did see how things went for you after that, it came up a lot at first, after you sold that first big one, kind of a surprise, and then things just kind of kept going “up” for you after that. Or I don’t know maybe you wouldn’t call it “up” not at first you wouldn’t have but after not too long I think you did start to think of it as “up” definitely. Some times at the bar around that time, between the second and third times up the hill, someone would pull up a post or an article about one of your paintings or about your life or the public part of your life anyway and we would all talk about it and share stories and talk about how cool it was and how glad we were that you were making a name for yourself. I admit I did not read many of the articles at least not in full. I have a hard time reading something like that a lot of the time unless it’s a book that really hooks me in and drags me onto the couch but for smaller pieces like that I make it a little ways and then I’ll just start to think about other thoughts. But the posts that were mostly pictures, I did like to see those.
Something people like to say about art is that it grapples with a lot of fundamental questions. Or wrestles with them or something like that, something combative a lot of the time but the third time up the hill I don’t think you really saw it that way or at least it didn’t really come up to be discussed in that sense. I did hear people talk about your paintings that way but we never really talked about the meaning behind them you and I. Sometimes when I’m walking over to the coffee shop I pay attention to the wet concrete of the sidewalk and how it changes colors and I try to connect up some of those ideas, like how you choose a tube of paint for a certain thing on a certain time of day but then also how those colors can represent big fundamental questions or help with the grappling but I have a hard time connecting up those ideas into a loop or a big circle. I guess I never really asked you about that but maybe you would be able to explain it in more of a way that made sense.
The third time up the hill it was a pretty quick trip because you had to leave town again in time to make it to a show that evening so we kind of hustled up our legs and lungs were strong from working to make other people rich. I was thinking a lot about what you had said the time before about how life was pointless or meaningless I wasn’t sure the difference but it was sunny and warm and we both had enough stories of our lives to share now that we were living in different places and doing different things, bright funny stories that even though I was thinking about it a lot in the back of my head I never really had a good time to bring it up and ask what you thought. And it didn’t seem like bringing it up as a joke would be very funny in that moment for some reason. So we just sat down for a couple of minutes right on the grass and looked down over the little valley and the creek and I don’t think it really had any time to change colors too much before it was time to put our jackets back on and head back down the hill.
3. buffalo blue cheese wraps
that’s right - more soy curls! that’s right - i needed to use up some leftovers from my fridge!
one thing about living alone and making some kind of new food every week is i end up with a lot of leftovers in various stages of completion because usually the recipes i am looking at for inspiration do not make one-person-sized batches. i guess i could do some math but i hate doing anything with fractions and i’m also not trying to figure out what 1/4 of “3 Tablespoons” is. that is not my life.
so as a result i end up with a lot of completed leftovers but also a lot of semi-used components of dishes in my fridge that just kind of sit there for a while. i’ve started labeling everything with blue painter’s tape and sharpie so i know exactly when i put it in the fridge because otherwise i guarantee i would end up accidentally eating some kind of sauce from last november that has since mutated into some kind of biological agent that’s banned by the geneva convention. i feel like i probably push it a little bit on recommended expiration dates even so.
this week i took a look at what i needed to get rid of and the most pressing items were some lettuce, an onion, some tortillas, and some already-baked soy curls. and while i was in sunriver last week i had eaten a buffalo chicken wrap with blue cheese because the restaurant didn’t really have anything vegan or even vegetarian so i detoured a little bit and had the real thing. and it was very good.
i mentioned most of this stuff already. the soy curls were already baked, from a previous meal, and very lightly sort of flavored but not really. the two things i had to go out and track down were vegan blue cheese dressing and avocado. buying an avocado day-of almost never works, at least for me, but i did get very lucky this time and found a pretty much perfect one. and the vegan blue cheese dressing ended up being pretty tasty even though Daiya’s stuff is generally uhhhh not great. they have a nickname for it in some circles but it’s too rude to print here.
i sloshed some Frank’s Red Hot on these curls and threw them in a 375 oven for about 10 minutes, mostly just to warm them up a little.
then i assembled it into a wrap. very straightforward although it’s incredible how bad i still am at wrapping burritos or wraps or anything like that despite being 32 years of age. i wonder if that’s one of those things i’m just never going to get better at. we like to think of life as some kind of progression towards some kind of ideal or higher level or something but the truth is there are some things you’re just never going to get better at and that’s how it’s going to be. wrapping burritos could be one of those.
and i put all the pics into a gif and it’s hard to take a good picture of a wrap when you finish making it after sunset. so there ya go. very short section.
4. good opinions
usually what’s more important than having a good or correct opinion is to have an opinion at all on the good or correct things to have opinions on. reasonable people can disagree on what your opinion actually is, as long as your opinion is pertaining to one of the subjects on which it is crucial, in this day and age and in these times, to have an opinion.
i know a lot of people reading this are in different places in their lives in terms of age, demographics, whatever, so please keep in mind that this list isn’t exhaustive and it’s geared towards people who are roughly within my “sphere” of age social position class etc. say, within one or two standard deviations.
here’s a short list of some of the good subjects to have opinions on. this will set you up for success at bars parties social functions etc.
paint color of a house
yards / lawns / landscaping
historic evolution of car bumper height
which streaming platforms are better than others from a purely moral / ethical standpoint
if they are making the right amount of TV shows
if they are making the right amount of movies in a certain cost bracket
kinds of cheese to put in a sandwich that will end up being toasted or heated
the democrats
the likely trajectory of renewable energy (be as specific as you like)
how important it is to know about or pay attention to celebrities
book covers
how to prepare grilled meat (better hurry on this one though the window is closing. it’s pretty close to being played out.)
all that new construction in whatever area
what can be done to fix up the city
well i think that will about do it for this week. feels like a short one but maybe that’s just because i did more of it ahead of time like i’m allegedly “supposed” to be doing and it was less of a scramble to put it all together. again, a life lesson of some kind i’m sure. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.