Writing

“Lord of Yourself I Crown and Mitre You”

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“It’s goddamned exhausting. I’m so tired all the time.”

I’m in one of my favorite coffeehouses in Southeast, having just had a light lunch after my workout. A woman sitting across from me is generously sharing her table and its electric plug ins until a friend of hers is meant to arrive. We’re not talking, but I gather she’s a teacher- she’s in a hoodie in a coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon, flipping through resumes, books on pedagogy, and Classroom Safety manuals. I can only imagine what’s going on in her world at this moment, but I recognize the beleaguered groan as she clicks through her laptop.

When school children learn about this moment in American history, I wonder what the textbooks will call it. I personally vote for The Great Exhaustion- a moment in history where the only things there were plenty of were arrogance and opinions.

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The Bookworms

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“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”

– Luc van Donkersgoed

Years ago, one of my relatives indicated the piles of books in his house and told me “Booksellers love Jews, because Jews buy books. Why? Because we’re always the ones that have to remember.” It could also be that we’re historically not that great at sports and needed something to do on the playground.

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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.

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The Cult of Pastry

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“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.

Long shot of a stone hallway in a medieval cathedral
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Home Brew

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It’s perfectly understandable to me how haunted houses can exist. We have the idea of “ghosts in the machine,” “Artistic DNA,” and omnipresent-but-unspecific “vibes”- why not “ghosts in the interior design?” Ghosts that can follow a person or people from place to place, creating the sense of where they’ve been before, and writing an intangible living atlas in the frontal lobes of Those Who Know.

The house where I was raised is a minimum hour drive away and five-plus years back in time from being swiftly and silently bulldozed. My parents now live in an ivory tower of an apartment, nineteen floors above center city Philadelphia. They brought some of their favorite decor from their old house was well as my Bubba’s similarly-leveled house, and have moved into an apartment roughly a twentieth the size of where we used to all live together.

Ghosts in the decor, then, is the only way I can explain spending a few days in the cluttered but cozy guest room and walking out the door in the morning expecting a staircase to the right. It’s the only way I feel like the living room of the Philadelphia high-rise has a piano and fireplace in it that I can feel but not see in their decor of wood, white, cream, gray, and Judaica.

Everything about our old house is there, tucked under the carpet or back in a closet, felt but not seen until you cross the threshold out to the hall. Then I am most certainly in Philadelphia.

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