“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”
– A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V Scene I
At the end of his own weird and raunchy comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare lets us in on his own thoughts regarding passion and madness. Passion, Creativity, and Insanity are the coin of the realm in culinary arts. The work of food writers, celebrity cooks, and media like The Bear parade our damage for the public and make us heroes, horror stories, characters, and even martyrs when we die.
I don’t think for a second it’s somehow undeserved. That’s the part of our lives that kitchen veterans miss and swap stories about. What some people think needs to be done about- or with- that passion, however, has me wondering. How to do you temper, train, guide, and coordinate that kind of raw passion and madness? History would tell us we need to be like the military. Owners and executives who spend more time owning and eating in restaurants than actually making them work tell us we need to lead and manage like a business or a factory- possibly one that turns Dirt into Diabetes.
Personally, I think that the answer to leading and managing cooks is to stop seeking “employees” as much as finding acolytes.
I’ve gotten back into watching the classic “Twilight Zone” episodes lately. They are the right mixture of length and creep factor that I like to unwind with after work. I’ll usually crash out in my rocking chair, pour a little whiskey, put on an episode, and try to make Cleo share my legs with a knitting project.
Yes, I’ve got a thing for being cozy.
My favorite episodes are the ones that feature Ed Wynn (“One for the Angels”) or Jack Klugman (“A Passage for Trumpet” and “A Game of Pool,”) in addition to “The Changing of the Guard.” It’s pretty easy to see why, beyond Rod Serling’s work being patently incredible. I’m still thinking about legacies and impacts, and those episodes are about people coming to grips with theirs.
Everything we do impacts those around us in some way, so even when we act to create a legacy, we don’t (and can’t) always know what shape that legacy may take.
One of the banquet cooks at my winery has been learning to be a tattoo artist and not long ago got the go-ahead to find some clients to train on. After working with pen and paper and then fake skin, he’s got to do 50 pieces on other people under the supervision of his teachers. Offering yourself to be trained on can seem jarring, but it’s a wonderful way to get new work done for cheap- and if you know the artist (and where they work), it makes it more comfortable.
The reference picture and Tyler’s treatment for the tattoo
As I leaned back in the chair and Tyler put the stencil on me, his teacher walked up and said “Aw fer… you’re killing me, Tyler.” That’s kinda like hearing your surgeon go “Oops” just before you go under… but he followed it up by looking at me and saying “Friggin’ overachiever, this guy… made progress faster than anyone else, leans hard into everything, and now this. Tyler, how many does this make for you?”
Tyler chuckles and grins slightly under his beard at the praise and says “Well, uh… this is actually my first on someone else.”
Tyler and I are work acquaintances. We get along fine in the kitchen but don’t chat much. My head is always down in my pastry work and he buzzes about prepping for banquets. We both share in the community that kitchens everywhere create. This was the first time I saw him come alive, leaning into what he was passionate about and fully engaged.
Throughout the session, his teachers came over with praise and sent other students to watch him work. It was clearly his calling. I leaned back and couldn’t help but remember my squadmates eating my first pastries from home and saying “Why are you on an ambulance, Matt? You should be doing this!” I remember my therapist warning me not to walk away from the culinary life so lightly- “Matt, this is your calling. You come alive when you talk about it. Your eyes light up.”
The tattoo came out perfectly, and I get to be part of Tyler’s story about finding his calling, just like his work gets to be a part of me.
A Simple Dice Game
I think it’s got to be the feeling that makes dice games so enjoyable. I’ve always been a bit of a fidgeter, and the feel, look, and sound of rolling dice signals a particularly fun kind of gameplay. It “feels” more aggressively random and chancey watching dice skitter across a surface before coming to rest than pulling cards out of a deck or watching a marble whirl around a roulette wheel.
After my tattoo, I wandered into Montavilla Brew Works for a pint and they had a few of my favorites on tap. Montavilla Brew Works and its neighbor Threshold Brewing are where I got a make a small mark on the Portland beer scene. Montavilla in particular has several beers inspired by The Lord of the Rings, such as their “Palantir” Dark Ale, “Old Fellowship” Barleywine, “Peregrin” Palo Santo Wood-Aged Porter, and “Extra Special Baggins” Bitter.
Some time ago, I reached out to them with a suggestion- either an imperial stout as dark, strong, and evil as Morgoth, or a beer as bright, light, and cheery as Tom Bombadil. A few weeks later, they released their “Bombadil” Bright IPA. I might have liked the stout better, but I was thrilled to have played a part however small.
Today, as I walked in, Morgan the bartender came straight up to me with a grin and said “YOU sir, have caused an UPROAR.” She then turned around and shouted to the room “Hey all! It’s him, DICE GAME GUY!” and at least five people yelled in response “DICE GAME GUY!”
The “dice game” in question is part game, part logic/deduction puzzle called “Petals Around the Rose” when I learned it in college. It’s a simple but frustrating little challenge where one person who already knows the game rolls dice repeatedly and another person guesses the “answer” for a given roll. The object of the game is to figure out what rule is being followed to get each answer. When I first played it, my friend Jessica drove me nuts for three days trying to figure it out.
Some weeks ago, after Morgan and another patron were playing Yahtzee during a slow point in the day, I borrowed the dice and showed them the game just for a bit of fun. Apparently, Morgan then took the game and played it with other staff, who played it with other customers, and so on- each seeing how long it took the others to figure out the rule. When asked where it came from, Morgan just said “There’s this pastry chef named Matt who comes in and is a HUGE nerd, he showed it to me.”
So on a cloudy cold Sunday, I walked in to get a beer, and was greeted by a room of people all telling me how long it took them to figure out Petals Around the Rose (the fastest was & minutes, apparently) and Morgan gently scolded me saying “See, now you need to be more of a regular here. Everyone knows you.”
We can never tell just what it is about us that people will remember, and that’s a good thing. If we had to extrapolate every action of ours out Butterfly Effect-style, we’d go mad and paralyze ourselves into stagnation. We can’t walk around all day debating what every little thing we do will mean in a hundred years. All the same, to a lawyer in California, I’m the guy he used to drink with in Portland who came up with his favorite toast. To a cook, I was his first tattoo commission. To a brewery in Portland, I helped name one of their beers and introduced them to a new bar game. To an extent, our legacies and memories are in the hands of other people.
When you realize you never know what you’ll be remembered for, it makes you choose your activities wisely, treat others kindly, and live a more engaged and joyous life.
When it comes to human nature and the various manifestations of it, I have the same opinion that I do about aliens- namely, “It’s a big world/universe and anything’s possible.” My cordial introductions to abnormal psychology, through my own experience and in my college years, bear this out well. The idea that anyone could enjoy being sick makes a lot more sense once it’s dressed up in words like “Munchausen syndrome,””factitious disorder,” or “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off.”
Yes, some people can enjoy being sick- but I am avowedly not one of them.
I’m at my desk with some jazz playing, a candle burning, my slippers on, and I’m feeling just about human again at (hopefully) the tail end of the worst flu I’ve had in my life. This is the first time in five days that I’ve felt the capacity to work on or do anything besides sleep, cough up green gunk, hobble around and chug liquids. The coaster on my right which would normally have a nice beer or a little whiskey on it is currently occupied by a large, sea-foam green bottle of Gatorade. Hydrating has been the priority for the last few days, and when I’m finally well enough to rejoin the world, I think I’ll be ready to throw every sports drink bottle I see into the sun.
What is it about being sick I hate so much? More than just the actual symptoms- hacking up gunk, every hole in my body leaking assorted fluids, and the various aches and pains aren’t something I think even the most ardent sympathy seeker really enjoys. It’s the loss of focus, the loss of energy, and arguably the loss of agency for methat makes being sick so miserable. The inescapable feeling of being locked in your own body, and that body being out of order.
What do you want to do? What do you feel like doing? Doesn’t matter- you aren’t calling the shots. “Sorry boss, body’s out.”
“The harvest is passed, the summer is finished, yet we are not saved.” – Jeremiah 8:20
“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right/ here I am Stuck in the Middle with You.” – Stealer’s Wheel
Surprising no one, when you make the call to leave extraneous noise behind, you are left with a lot of time alone with your thoughts. You get to piece together how and what you feel in the absence of others. You redefine who you are and who you want to be.
That redefinition happens in my rocking chair over some whiskey and a bit of knitting and a horror movie, in the car to or from work, or in my gym during cardio. More than meditation, those become my time for me. Without every randos bathroom thoughts on human rights and global macroeconomics corkscrewing their way into my brain, I come back to “What’s important to me,” “How do I feel about it,” and “What are my limits and boundaries of support for such things.”
I am, after all, a leftist Jew. If it isn’t folks in red hats hopped up on Great Replacement Theory that think making trouble for me and Emily will “make America great again,” it’s some mouthy white kids in keffiyehs who think pushing in my face will help “free Palestine.”
In about a week, though, 99% of the United States will wind up doing whatever comes next on Extra Hard Mode. Meditations and ruminations won’t be worth much. What’ll be worth more is actions on the micro-scale.
I invite you to ask questions of me personally before giving lectures and screeds in messages or the comments section. This is my neck of the woods, and I have a zero-tolerance policy for assholery.
Several things can be true at once. In my case, all of the following are 100% accurate: 1. I “chose” to be a writer. 2. I gained some weight in the last few years that I’m working on losing. 3. I practice meditation daily. and 4. I always have to be doing something.
Besides my baking and wannabe-writing careers, I’m a guy with a lot of little crafts and hobbies on the side. It’s always good to be multifaceted, and the majority of my hobbies veer toward the cozier parts of life. I homebrew, I knit, I play guitar and harmonica (not in any bands, and not especially well- just good enough to please myself and some friends,) I read and enjoy good whiskey.
Over the last year and change, however, you would be forgiven for thinking one of them was “Losing My Shit on the Internet for Hours of the Day.” In my end-of-the-year post, I talked about how 2024 was about “coming back to myself” and relearning who I am. Part of that process is also deciding who I am not, and what I don’t want to be. When you love something enough to make it an important part of your life, you need to treat it like it’s important– and get rid of the stuff you don’t want to be important.
“I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair. I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see. For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in every wood in every spring there is a different green. I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago and people who will see a world that I shall never know. But all the while I sit and think of times there were before, I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.“ – Bilbo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Black Hat Baker 