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When Last We Left Off…

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Hello everyone!

My six-month hiatus did bear some fruit, as the book is at least two chapters closer to being done, but mostly it took some pressure off of me to write every week during a particularly nightmarish wedding season at the winery.

There’s been at least one wedding every single week since May, and it still hasn’t stopped, but the restaurant is winding down a bit with the end of summer and even though our fall offerings and harvest season vibes are on point (if I do say so myself,) autumn in Portland means the rainy season. That means losing a quarter of our dining space- and our diners.

Every weekend of the last six months, I’ve been hoarding every moment I didn’t need to work or think about working like they were the last roll of toilet paper in a bomb shelter, ready to go for the throat of anyone who suggested they might need a few squares because they’re running out of pages in the Twilight series. I made time to write for sure, but energy reserves was another story entirely.

A typewritten page with a poem by Charles Bukowski. It reads: “air and light and time and space "–you know, I’ve either had a family, a job, something has always been in the way but now I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this place, a large studio, you should see the space and the light. for the first time in my life I’m going to have a place and the time to create." no baby, if you’re going to create you’re going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children while you’re on welfare, you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you’re going to create blind crippled demented, you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood and fire. baby, air and light and time and space have nothing to do with it and don’t create anything except maybe a longer life to find new excuses for. - Charles Bukowski”
“Excuses, excuses…”
Yeah, I know.
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Breaking The Habit

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Old habits die hard. I wake up in the morning, and my gut instinct is to scroll.

America is back to being weird and scary as fuck and the urge to preserve my mental health is in constant tension with my wish to stay “informed.” I thought that getting rid of the social media apps on my phone would mitigate this- you can’t obsess over what isn’t there. The muscle memory remains, though. The habit. The “wake and bake” of the 21rst Century where our first instinct on resuming consciousness is “Shit, better fix that” and roasting our minds to a blackened husk on information before we go about our day.

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com
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Writer Unplugged, Part 2: Living in Micro

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“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.

A frame of Treebeard the Ent from the movie “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” with the caption “I am on nobody’s side, because nobody is on my side.”
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.
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Writer Unplugged

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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’m done with having social media be so important to me.

“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

Photo by Craig Adderley on Pexels.com

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“Vox Populi, Vox Dei”- Yelp and the Future of Food Writing

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Good evening, friends and neighbors.

I like going out to eat as much as the next guy. I make my decisions on a bunch of criteria-

  • What am I tasting?
  • Price point
  • Locality
  • Did I discover it and it looks interesting/ did a friend suggest it personally?

You will notice something missing on that list- I don’t really give a crap about internet reviews.

Broken iPhone

from pexels.com

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