get @baffled

It is possible to successfully eat Froot Loops with chopsticks.

There is a shed that I drive by most days. I have driven past it for years now. It is some sort of machine shop, I think. There is all sorts of flotsam and jetsam strewn around outside. The thing that most attracts my attention is what I am pretty certain is a 1956 Mercedes Gullwing. It's black. And falling to pieces. I don't understand why it just sits there. I would be more than happy to move it and fix it up....

On Sunday evening Jeremy had been sitting on his couch with his wife, watching a movie. He had rubbed her back and she had rubbed his hands, something she had never done before. It felt really, really good. During his lunch break on Monday, Jeremy called a day spa near his office, and without thinking said, "My wife gave me a hand job yesterday, and it felt pretty good. Can you guys do those?" The young lady who had answered the phone paused for a moment or two, and replied, "Only after eight o'clock and you have to pay in cash."

Borscht. It's a fantastic soup-like thing made from beets and potatoes and onions and a few other odds and ends. It is also almost impossible to pronounce correctly. It's tricky, too, because for our family's version the recipe has been passed down orally, rather than written down. Sometimes if we're having a foggy day, we can't remember exactly how it goes, resulting in a flurry of emails and phone calls to have the story told again. I don't really know why the recipe isn't written down. That would make too much sense. I suspect that somewhere along the way a great-great-grandmother put a curse on the whole thing so that if anyone does write it down their toilets will back up for a month or they'll get leprosy or accidentally vote Republican.

It's an "immigrant" thing, is borscht, hailing from the darkest reaches of Eastern Europe's attic. Like everything else, it made its way over here, packed in like rats in a grain silo with all the other traditions and customs that belong to the "immigrants". America has a great tradition of welcoming immigrants to its shores on the one hand, and with the other trying to crush unique cultures into a sort of homogenous goo. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson favored a utopian "smelting pot". Yet, America is full of hyhens: Chinese-American, African-American, Irish-American. I suspect the owners of those hypehns couldn't be prouder of them, either, dragging things further away from the utopian smelting pot. 

Borscht comes from a time and a place where people taught their children how to cook a dish and that dish then belonged to the family. It was a thing to be passed down through the generations, like Grandma's manicotti or Aunt Edna's deer sausage or Great-Grandpa's premature baldness. Things are different now, but I think it is nice to see that some dishes cling to life, like borscht. Even if it turns out a little different each time, you know it's yours.

Things have changed so much, in fact, that it is now considered a luxury to be able to take the time and effort to cook your family a dish like borscht. The ingredients are not exotic and are readily available even at your local Wal-Mart. Yet, here we are. Millions of people in this country have fallen, as they say, upon hard times. High unemployment, the residential foreclosure crisis, and depressed wages have put people, families, on the street, without the ability to make a soup-like thing from beets and potatoes and onions. Just as in the "good old days", people are hurting. Borscht is comfort food, but for many there is little comfort. 

If you have the luxury of time, consider this poem and see if it isn't close to the mark:

for want of the price

of some cheese and salami

he served ninety days

I am working on a book. But I'm stuck. Not exactly stuck, but having approachability issues. It's so easy to lose one's way, isn't it? That's true of writing, I know, but also true of life in general. To lose one's way assumes that we know what is our way in the first place. That's a big assumption, like assuming that your trip through the self-checkout at the grocery store will not include a scolding from the checkout machine to remove your items from the bagging area. In my experience, I get it wrong about ninety percent of the time. I will carefully scan my item and then place it in the bag, only to be told rather sharply that I need to remove it and start over, or worse, that a clerk has been summoned to assist me, all the while the growing queue of shoppers gets angrier and angrier at me and my ineptitude.

Losing one's way can be much bigger than that, can't it? Have you ever made a mistake so big, so grand that you're thrown off course in a profound way? Like a surgeon arriving at the operating room well and truly hung over, amputating the wrong limb. Something like that. Buddha advises us to not dwell in the past or dream of the future, but to concentrate the mind on the present moment. I am, but I'm not altogether sure what the present moment is about. So my project sits there, staring at me from the other monitor (I find having two monitors is tremendously helpful), while I tell you about it over on this monitor.

William Gibson hit the nail on the head when he said "You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work." That's where we are today, friends, revulsed by our own work. The cure, I think, is to go out and buy some new socks. Before I can do that, though, there is a question that needs answering: is there such a thing as a 'right' and 'left' sock? I will try to work that out and let you know... 

Going through all of my poems and writing them down again is turning out to be a rather cathartic experience. A long exercise, to be sure, but cathartic. It's like the debate over which is better, an e-book or a "proper" book. Writing it all down with a pen, in a notebook, just feels better, somehow...

I write things down, now. In a notebook. I never used to do that. Had a memory like a steel trap. Isn't that what they say? Not so much, now. Anyway, I went out and bought myself one of those Moleskine notebooks to write things down in. It's fantastic. This one is a vibrant red. It doesn't quite fit in my pocket, but it fits in a backpack nicely. When I was a student, I used to carry a backpack around all the time. I've had dozens of different backpacks over the years. One I particularly liked was one of those all-leather ones from Switzerland, you know, like you might see in a Riccola commercial or on a package of Swiss cheese, like Emmentaler. I never wore those short pants or long socks like alpine hikers from the 1950s, but I liked that backpack. I wrote all of this in my new notebook, and now I'm typing it here. I think that system works pretty well. Now, where is my pen...?