(Full Disclosure: I wrote this post last week, but then… well, last week happened and I was exhausted, and this week is Christmas weekend so my brain is pretty much an electrified potato right now. Thank you for your patience!)
If you follow my Instagram, you’ve noticed I’ve been posting a lot of stories about beer in Portland lately. Not unusual in general maybe (#drinkerwithawritingproblem,) but just especially lately.
I found out casually while getting a post-shift beer at Von Ebert Brewing that they and several of my favorite local breweries decided to do a holiday “ale trail” called “The 12 Days of Gristmas”- “grist” being the term for the milled grain and mash bill used to make beer.
12 breweries. 12 holiday beers. Get a stamp for each one, turn them in at the end for up to 12 raffle tickets to win swag.
It’s silly. I probably don’t need swag. No one needs beer enough to strategize how to hit as many breweries on the list as possible in one day on foot. I certainly don’t.
I love beer though. I love supporting my local businesses that make good things. I love walking around through Portland. and I didn’t mind questing for something where the only thing at stake is my liver… but that’s what the walking is for.
Whatever breaks the despair and gets you out and moving is worth it.
My name is Matt. I am a Jewish-American baker, writer, and raconteur. I love food, beer, whiskey, mead and meadmaking, the taste and smell of good pipe tobacco, talking to strangers, and telling stories.
If you are in Beaverton today, you might see a guy in an Irish sweater with a copper-shod walking stick, a tweed hat, and a long tan cloak sitting at a bar with a pint of dark beer, typing on an iPad disguised as a very beaten-up composition notebook.
There is a lot of darkness and sorrow in the world right now. I’m keenly aware of it- too keenly, maybe, according to my therapist who’s been reminding me to keep off of social media. I’ll probably write something later summing up my personal attitudes about it all, but I’ll just as likely keep that to myself. The world is not short of opinions right now.
It’s also not short of doomsaying, chest-beating, and heartstring-wringing. There’s plenty of people who will take it upon themselves to remind us of all the horror in the world, and that’s a good thing. We can’t go about with our heads in the sand, pretending the problems of others aren’t our concern and then getting indignant when “no one did anything” when they become our concern.
What goes too far is when these good-intentioned messengers take it upon themselves to berate others or themselves for finding joy where they can.“With so much suffering and pain in this world, how dare anyone be happy?! Don’t you care?!”
There are plenty of who don’t or are ignorant of the plight of others, to be sure- but so many of us do. Here’s the truth though: Denying yourself joy and happiness does nothing to help others, and it weakensYOUR resolve to endure.
I was sitting in the break room at the winery, having just finished my lunch. It was a chilly, sunny day, and the break room has a really nice window that looks out on the terrace, the waterfall feature on the grounds, and beyond that over the valley.
I was debating how to best pull off the rest of the week, crank out a new bread recipe for my chef’s latest special, and what kind of desserts I should do for the seasonal menu change. I was grateful for the distraction. The toxicity of social media around the Israel-Hamas War was still trickling through despite me pulling back. When that many lives and that much culture is on the line and the generational trauma of two entire peoples is simultaneously triggered, there’s too much at stake for it to be managed through TikTok videos, memes, and idiotic flame wars- but here we are.
It made my heart hurt, and my mental health required me backing off, so I’d resolved to do what I’d always done when feeling pained and powerless- feed people, and put good things into the world that weren’t there before.
Then my phone rang. It was my wife, nearly in tears. Life was about to provide an object lesson in Pain, Powerlessness, what we do in the face of it, and the things that mean more than posting “the right things” on social media.
We all want to belong. To something greater than ourselves, to have a community, a tribe, even just to have a family, biological or chosen.
The last few weeks have been a serious trial of my personal sense of belonging. Getting (mostly) off of social media has helped stem the tide of belabored bullshit. “You are either with us or against us,” whatever the “us” is, is a big red flag for whether you actually belong to a certain group or whether your belonging is conditional on saying and doing the “right” things.
Work in the kitchen has provided a sense of place and community. Kitchens ave historically been my “safe spaces” and sanctuaries. Everything has a place, a purpose, and my belonging in them is undeniable and absolute- by my experience and skills if not myself.
“Matt the Baker” is only part of me though, and leaning into that solely for my sense of belonging is dangerous. I am also an American, a Jewish man, more a leftist than anything else politically, and fundamentally a human being.
“Belonging” to any of those things has been intensely difficult lately, but I still feel the need to have a tribe and not be a “man without a country” when things get tough.
We have to learn to belong, first and foremost, to ourselves.
a person who is an adept conversationalist at table
– Dictionary.com
Whenever I get asked why I got into music and writing young, my pat answer has always been “because pens and clarinets don’t stammer.”
Most of the people I call friends today who didn’t know me as a kid find it hard to believe I had a speech impediment. It’s taken me quite a long time to get some control over the how and why my tongue would tie itself up, and I still stammer when I get excited or upset.
“Stammer” isn’t quite accurate, though. I think it’s actually called a hesitancy, but everyone knows what a Stammer or Stutter sounds like. Hesitancy in speech is when your brain gives orders to say words faster than you physically can manage them, so you buffer with a lot of “Uhs” and “Ums.”
Why yes, this does like both a symptom and cause of Anxiety- as does my tendency to hate recordings of myself speaking where I’m not reading off a script. Coping mechanisms for a hesitancy include the tendency to mentally “rehearse” statements and deliberately speaking slowly with pauses between sentences, both of which increase the likelihood of being spoken over or interrupted.
Neither is great for ones self-confidence, especially in a Jewish household in New Jersey where conversation is more like a demolition derby than an exchange of information.
Here I am though, describing myself as an amateur storyteller, a deipnosophist and a raconteur– all of which are very fancy words for “chatty bitch.” I’m an introvert who frequently “runs out of people minutes” but who extols the Life-Changing Magic of Talking to Strangers.
Clearly there was a grand struggle, a great effort made to conquer my disability and emerge from my Bullied Child Cocoon as a Magnificently Eccentric Social Butterfly.
Nope. Nothing nearly so interesting as that. I just became really really good at telling stories. I don’t stammer when I’m reciting from a script- so I learned to treat telling stories as recitations.
“Confidence is what we call the equanimity we see in others.” The ability to look social anxiety and fear in the eye and say “Whatever, I’m not going to let you affect me.” Some liquid courage may or may not be involved in shaking off social inhibition, but when it comes to Talking To Strangers or being a raconteur, I don’t really have “tricks” or “hacks” for being a good conversationalist. At least, I don’t have any that aren’t covered in greater detail by others.
There was no “a-ha” moment of conquest over my anxiety and stammer. The only “trick” I can point to was literally just building that confidenceequanimity for speaking to strangers… and that developed over time.
It’s psychological, and it won’t be shaken off overnight- or ever completely really- but the first step for me was finding opportunities to be brave and practice pushing the anxiety aside for a few minutes, an hour, the length of an evening.
I won’t lie to you, it’ll feel really weird. As a relatively tall, bearded, hairy dude, I was terrified of coming off as a creep. That’s where deciding to let equanimity rule will come in clutch, and the best feeling in the world will really just come from finding kind people.
The best way to find kind people? Start off with something kind. Even if it doesn’t turn into a stirring conversation, you will have made someone feel good. It can- and probably should– be something casual and surface-level. “Dude, love the suit.” “That’s a super cute outfit!” To this day, I sometimes worry that that’ll sound creepy, but truth be told? Most folks are just happy to be noticed kindly.
After that, for me, came something harder. The fact is people are really good at picking up on sham or fakeness. Any place you have to act fake to “fit in” isn’t somewhere you belong OR will enjoy being. Being told to “be yourself” is trite bullshit and too easy- you have to learn to be okay with being yourself. To quote Dr. Brene Brown, “We belong anywhere we show up as our authentic selves. Everywhere, and nowhere at all.”
That is a tall order… and having friends, loved ones, and the company of kind people make it easier. My friends don’t care if I stutter when I’m excited- they know I have something worthwhile to say. Enough kind people have responded well that, despite the anxiety, I know that I can be my chatty, eccentric, Anthony Bourdain/ Jimmy Buffett/ Bilbo Baggins mashed-together self.
That’s one thing I should mention, though- it probably is my single biggest “trick” to being a storyteller. Any storyteller, writer, artist, or creative of any type will likely tell you something similar, but here’s my version.
To have space made for you, make space for others. If you want to tell great stories, you have to listen to the stories of others.
That’s the biggest perk of talking to others- you don’t always talk. You listen, you learn, you absorb, and you connect.
At least until you run out of people minutes… then you get to hide out, recharge, and think of more brave ways to tell and hear new stories. Not a bad way to spend a night out in any case, right?
The Black Hat Baker 