New Things of the Week

1. I’ve started learning how to make stuff out of polymer clay. I’ve never been a really crafty person, but this polymer clay material is calling me. It’s like modeling clay, in that it never dries out. But unlike modeling clay, you can cure this stuff by baking it for at while in your oven. Then it turns hard and permanent. I have some in the oven right now– I’m imagining that it will turn into a hard plastic sort of stuff. Like anything, you can make art with it, or you can make crap with it. Among other items, I want to make weird, freaky little characters and such, and give them to my friends. Also, make stuff for my house. If I can build some skillz, perhaps it could free that noisy little visual art demon I have in my head. The one who convinced me to take that drawing class a while ago.

2. For the next four years, every automobile commercial I watch, or ad I look at is wasted time. I wonder what that adds up to. Surely somebody knows how much time the average person spends looking at car commercials. Anyway, it’ll be wasted time because I leased a Volvo yesterday. It wasn’t the most considered decision I’ve ever made, although I’ve been thinking about getting a new car for several months. But a Volvo, well, that idea just happened on Friday. So I went to Car Dealer Heaven out there on Peachtree Industrial Blvd. intending to drive a bunch of cars and maybe think about considering a purchase/lease possibly sometime soon maybe. And the first place I stopped was the Volvo place, and I drove a car and it was just OK, but the dude met my price and the car does look pretty swell, so now I have a Volvo. I am a Volvo driver. A Volvist. Volvoid. It’s brand new, and does indeed have that smell. Having only driven either a used car or a rental car for the last seven years, and having not sat in many if any new cars during that time, I can tell you definitively that fake new-car-smell spray does absolutely not smell like an actual new car. This is what it looks like, except mine is black. Perhaps I’ll make a model of it out of polymer clay.

3. The Weekly Rob this week is an audio file, and it’s really good. I was thinking about writing to NPR on his behalf, ’cause if he can do a “podcast” sort of thing like that on a regular basis, and it’s that good every time, he might have a new career.

4. I watched some video demos of Google’s “SketchUp” application, and am feeling sort of inspired to create a 3D model of my house. I have these ideas for adding/subtracting/modifying my abode, but I’m nervous about tackling them without being really sure they’re going to turn out awesome. For example, I want to paint my bedroom. But what colors? I don’t have the visualization powers necessary to just know what’s going to look good. If I made a 3D model of my bedroom, I could paint the walls with a click of a button. It would be a pretty time consuming task to make the model, but once I had it I could do the paint thing, I could model additions like the new wall I want to put up in my basement, and a porch I want to build, and the deck I want to put out back, plus other eventual goals like moving my air-conditioner unit to the other side of the house so it’s not right at the bottom of the steps to my side porch, leaking condensation down my driveway like it does now.

5. Work is pretty good right now. I have a lot to do, and almost all of it is interesting. So, yay to that.

6. My mortgage-holder sent me spam about this service called “Homefree” which promises to schedule out your home maintenance chores, and give advice and how-tos for the things you need to do around the house. I haven’t signed up yet, but I’m going to, because they have this “demo” on their site, which is hilarious and I love it. It’s kind of a slideshow, with this British guy narrating. His lines are funny, the fact that he’s British is funny, the slides cracked me up, and that’s really reason enough for me sometimes. I like to encourage ads and marketing that are appealing to me. This of course is the point of all advertising, but you know’m sayin’. Also, the service might just be useful and my mortgage company has a 60-days-free promotional code for it right now.

7. I think that, where women are concerned, at least the ones that I am inevitably attracted to, I am as interesting and sexy as the lump of polymer clay in my oven. That is, sort of interesting, but definitely not in a jump-his-bones-right-now kind of way. (Does that ever really happen?) I’m not sure what the deal is, but fuck it, I have a new car. It looks cool, and that makes me cool, and girls will flock to me and my sexy, hot, safe, only slightly boxy Mar-hicle. As opposed to a Ve-hicle. Get it? Ha. Haha. Mar-hicle!

8. Eight, I forget what eight was for.

9. Now that he’s out of the oven, I can show you what my first li’l polymer clay dude looks like:

The Navy Memorial Is Boring

Ok so last week I skipped brunch, which meant I totally forgot about posting something to this blog. I profusely apologize. Insert bloggishy irony-laden reference to disappointed masses of readership here.

For the past week, since last Saturday, I’ve been up Nawth in Pennsylvania being a Good Son. Or so I’m told. But really, it’s only a week out of my life and I spent most of it on my keister watching TV and working on my computer and petting really really tiny dogs.

It’s been at least a decade since I spent any great length of time in the company of my parents, and the details of their life stood out for me in great relief, compared to what I’ve been used to having sort of evolved my own patterns of living. So for the last week I’ve been an interested observer of Things I Never Noticed While Growing Up In Your House. I’m still familiar with the rituals and rhythms of the house, but the little things like just exactly how many boxes of cookies are in the house, and what they eat for dinner every night, and how narrow the range of their food choices… how STABLE it all is, 37 years into a marriage. Cookies and stew and 2% milk and baked macaroni and cheese and and *gasp* I think I probably gained five pounds; I haven’t checked, because I’m afraid.

Now I have to lose weight. Not entirely because of this last week, but man it’s getting oppressive in this flabby tub o’ grease I’m walking around in. I just generally gotta get in shape y’now? I have been so totally slacking for the last, oh, two years. I really really mean it this time. I’m not a completely fat slob or anything, yet, but God forbid I should be chased through the streets by an angry mob; I’d be run down and clubbed to death in scant seconds.

I made a good start at it yesterday. Well, if you don’t count the huge Red Lobster dinner. But all day yesterday I walked and walked and walked around Washington DC. You see, my flight to and from Atlanta was booked through Hotwire, and the way they make Hotwire flights so cheap is that one leg or the other is at god-fucking-thirty in the morning. In this case, my return flight.

Rather than get up at 3:00 a.m. to drive from Harrisburg, PA to Dulles Airport (a 2.5 hour drive) I decided to spend the day at the Smithsonian, sleep at a hotel, and have a nice easy commute to the airport in the morning.

Getting to Washington is pretty easy. I stuck “Harrisburg -> Washington Monument” into Google Maps and it worked OK although it was telling me to get on some weird variety of a highway that turned out to basically run parallel to the real highway but was totally pisspoor signage-wise. That’s the thing about DC. The signage, or lack thereof is an issue. A sticking point, sharp as a kitten’s tooth. But I got there. Eventually. I had to stick around and say goodbye and eat some oatmeal and just generally fart around until 1:00. And print some maps.

My goal for the day was kind of nebulous, no agenda other than the Hirshhorn art museum. The Hirshhorn and maybe one or two others to be named later. It was waaaaay too cold for seeing any of the monuments, although even in 33-feels-like-10 degree weather there were plenty of tourists walking around without enough clothing on. Chumps.

Getting my slack ass into town at 3:00 p.m. kind of forced my hand a bit, since most of the Smithsonian museums close at 5:30, and parking is a total cluster. I wound up parking in some garage on the Hirshhorn side of the Mall (where the Smithsonian “castle” is). You can only park in the pink spaces. The garage was under this kind of large shopping center where every store was closed at 3:00 on a Saturday. Welcome to DC.

I was kind of nervous, because I don’t have the greatest sense of direction and it felt like I had parked somewhere off the beaten path. But I only wandered around for fifteen (f-ing COLD) minutes or so before I found the Hirshhorn. The Washington Monument is pretty handy when you don’t know where you’re going. The city’s height-restriction ordinances mean that the big white phallus is basically viewable wherever you are in town.

So I made it to the Hirshhorn, which only had a couple of floors open but also had some great art. There were a couple of Calder mobiles that were actually pretty cool. Smaller ones, but neatly balanced and kind of intricate. I usually think his mobiles are a waste of space. I’m not sure why this is the first thing I chose to describe.

There was also a piece that looked like somebody had dug up a ten-foot-square patch of muddy dirt, plopped it on a table, stuck it in the middle of an art gallery, and put motion-sensitive alarms all around it. A table full of dirt. Or “earth” if you feel like being that way. On the “earth” were all these fake mushrooms. But they looked really real. Really really real. The card said something about urethane and such, so the artist (Roxy Paine) must have made all those mushrooms and the fake dirt and the fake little pools of water.

But cool as it was, I’m not really a fan of art where it’s really the artist’s ingenuity on display rather than his artistic statement. So, like, it’s cool and all that you made a bunch of really awesome-looking fake mushrooms, but I’ll be over here looking at the f-ing AWESOME Max Ernst. Which is in the same room as the first Okeeffe I saw that day. “Goat Horn with Red.” I liked the Ernst better, but still, I adore Georgia Okeeffe so I spent a good fifteen minutes staring at a painting of a red goat horn.

Oh, that reminds me, I have a bone to pick with you, Hirshhorn curator. Next to the Okeeffe was this platform where they had a couple sculptures. One of which was this fantastic shape carved out of “plane wood” or something, with some painted sections. It was really great, but since it was on a platform and the platform was up against the wall, I couldn’t see the other side! And there was definitely another side. So, if you visit the Hirshhorn and see the wood sculpture next to “Goat Horn with Red” and are blown away like I was but also aggravated because you can’t see the surely-awesome other side of the work, make sure you lodge a complaint.

Speaking of ingenuity vs. artistic value, there was this video, a very POPULAR video, which seemed to be a filmed rube-goldbergian sequence. I couldn’t get too close, because there were always dozens of people in the room watching the video. So I gather it was pretty cool. But I was there for ART, not a film clip of an intricate series of mechanical interactions, ’cause I saw that on the Mythbusters Christmas special.

Eventually I was Hirshhorned-out. Needed to rest my eyes a bit. But before I got Hirshhorned-out I saw a Magritte, some more Ernst, a Miro, a Jasper Johns, this funky “video flag” by Nam June Paik made of neon and video monitors displaying stuff and junk, and I saw this great sculpture of a woman reclining on a lounge. It looked like it was made of plastic, but was way better than that description probably makes you think. Oh, and a couple Picasso sculptures.

So my day was, once I got to DC, off to a great start. My next stop was the National Gallery, sucked in by this tantalizing sign:

“Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych”

Lemme tell you, kids were DRAGGING their parents in to see that. I mean, how could they not? Unfortunately, the gallery was about to close when I got there (FYI, it closes at 5:00) so the Netherlandish Diptych remains mostly un-unfolded in the great linen closet of my mind. But I did see some great Chinese porcelain, so thin and pretty and perfect and old and yet pristine. And I did take the opportunity to get annoyed by the pretty girl with the stupid boyfriend making stupid comments, and then more annoyed when she started making stupid comments too. Not trying to be clever, just… just… ugh. Dumb. Well, at least it wasn’t a pretty girl making really smart comments. I might have just seppuku’d right then and there, ’cause that’s just torture. Pretty, smart girl with stupid guy. *seppuku*

Like I was saying, the porcelain was pretty great. And the guard with the hiccups was amusing. It was a really bad case, man. He could hardly get a word out for hiccupping. Hiccoughing. “The gall-hic-ery is hic-losing. P-hic-lease g-hic-et ou-hic-t.” Heh, poor guy. Stupid gallery, stupid five o’clock.

But there is a museum open past 5:30, and it’s freaking AWESOME. If you’ve been to the Air & Space Museum, skip it and visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum, at the Reynolds Center. The same building also houses the National Portrait Gallery. Which is nearly as great as the American Art Museum.

Right now, for example, the Portrait Gallery has this extensive collection about Josephine Baker, and a whole bunch of sculptures by Jo Davidson which are great of people like FDR and Gertrude Stein. Just heads, but even though the busts are of bronze or terra cotta or whatnot, it’s like you’re staring Lincoln Steffens in the face. Lincoln Steffens!

But it was the American Art Museum that I really went there to see, mostly because I had a hunch there were more Okeeffes lurking somewhere. I was not disappointed. On the ground floor exhibition, you can sit on a bench and stare at “Manhattan” for as long as you want. It’s an abstract depiction of Manhattan, with some roses around it. And it turns my head inside out. I can stare at that painting for a long time. in fact I did.

And what do you know, not thirty seconds after I finished text-messaging Rob that I had seen two Okeeffes that day, when a third was just hanging there. On the wall. A lesser work, an abstract with beautiful colors, that I don’t remember seeing before. So, three Georgia Okeeffe paintings, in the flesh, in one day.

Also on that first floor was an exhibition of folk art. Some of it was really interesting. There’s this enormous tin-foil monstrosity that some guy spent basically his whole life constructing. There are some paintings of dubious value. And there’s an Elvis-head jug.

And a robot lady.

There are three floors to the Reynolds Center, basically split between the American Art and the Portrait Gallery. Stuffed to the freaking GILLS, and the third floor is this beaaaautiful renovated space that a sign on the wall says used to be the largest room in the country. Up there on the third floor is the modern art, which is pretty close to the Hirshorn’s collection. They share a couple artists even, there’s another work by the guy who did the “video flag.” The video flag was pretty big, but at the Reynolds Center there’s a HUGE wall of monitors, broken up by neon into the 50 states, with different video playing for each state. I think Georgia’s monitors were playing the Olympics. Hawaii’s monitors were playing “South Pacific.”

The curators of the Smithsonian’s art museums like conceptual art. They like video art. They’re probably very hoity toity. There were a bunch of dark rooms you could go in and watch boring videos. But then there were at least four works by Nam June Paik: the video flag, this other giant piece with like a hundred video monitors playing kind of wild variations on Japanese stuff, all mixed up and buzzing and loud and freaky, the one with the states, and this piece which was just an old-fashioned TV with one single line of light going across it.

There was a card there that explained how this work was reducing television to displaying the most simple thing when it is usually displaying a lot. I hate those freaking cards.

I like conceptual art, as long as I find it visually appealing. If it’s ugly (to me) then I can’t be arsed to stand there and ponder it. Who considers the cow turd? But if it looks cool it can, on a good day, move me to consider something I probably wouldn’t have thought about. If I’m looking at a big red canvas, I might stand there thinking about communism, or blood, or bloody communism, or commie bloodunism. Or if I looked at the TV with just a line on it maybe I’d reminisce about the Outer Limits or think about the limits of technology and the fragility of our reliance upon same. Who knows! It’s a field day for the imagination!

But once They start explaining conceptual art, telling me definitively what some scholar has decided is the Meaning, what is Being Said, all the fun goes out of it and I stand there looking at the piece, reading the card, then deciding if it’s bullshit or not. It reduces the art to a thumbs-up/thumbs-down reaction for me.

Stick the little cards on old portraits or pictures of action scenes, or explain how Picasso did his cubist paintings and what all you can find in them if you look. Point out the symbolism, discuss the technique, tell me what’s going on contextually in the time period of the work. But let me decide for my OWN self what the flowers thumbtacked to the wall mean in relation to my life and times.

But despite the best efforts of those pedantic little cards, it was a good day. As I was walking back to my car (via a circuitous route that makes sense only to my subconscious) I passed near four girls walking down the street, arm in arm, singing what I think was the theme to “The Facts of Life.” They seemed to be having a grand old time on their field trip.

They made me smile. Before I got too near I turned down another road so as not to make them nervous. I’m very conscious of that sort of thing. If I’m walking behind someone on the sidewalk at night, I’ll whistle like, “Ode to Joy” or something, so my sidewalky companion will know that I’m a person of culture and breeding and not an assailant. This particular day, I was wearing an army-green jacket and shitkicker Sketchers. That army-green jacket could easily be mistaken for a tatterred old actual Army jacket worn by some insane homeless veteran. Because of course all veterans are insane and homeless. That is what I’m saying. And also my film-student black-rimmed glasses just shout “rapist.” This bit of altruism probably only cost me another ten minutes wandering around in the cold before I found the garage.

But I did, eventually, wander back to where I parked, underneath the strangely empty shopping center in the building that also houses the National Transportation Safety Board, and that apparently used to house a movie theater for which they never bothered to take down the arrows directing you to it throughout the mall. So don’t get your hopes up. There is no movie theater at The Promenade. Just get in your car, parked in one of the emasculating pink spaces (pink = public I guess, like public bathroom soap), and get the hell outta Dodge City.

Only good freaking LUCK getting out of D.C. man. The convicts of the District must love to fuck with tourists, ’cause there seems to be only ONE SIGN for any particular highway, when you really need like four to find your way to the onramp. Seriously, you’ll see “I-66 W –>” nailed to a hotdog shack 100 yards off the road, behind an elderberry bush, and you’ll go “oh crap” and make the turn just barely in time, but then there won’t be any other signs and the damned highway is nowhere to be found. You know how often you can just sort of look around and go “oh, it’s over there” and kind of make your way to the road you’re looking for? Not in our nation’s capitol. I drove around for half an hour looking for that motherfucking road. And make a wrong turn in D.C. and you wind up, literally, in Virginia.

Oh, and don’t trust Google either. The directions to my hotel failed to mention that the one vital turnoff was closed for construction and you couldn’t get there that way. Why don’t mapping services include alternate routes as a matter of course?

So I had trouble finding the highway, then I had trouble finding my hotel. Oh, and Google Maps also failed to mention the two toll stops on the road to my hotel. Kind of getting lost looking for my hotel was how I wound up at Red Lobster, stuffing my gullet with an Ultimate Feast. It could be worse actually, the Ultimate Feast involves broiled scallops, crab legs, a Maine lobster tail, four or five fried shrimp, and a baked potato.

It’s the cheese biscuits that do you in. Basket of four. Gotta be 400 calories each. But so. Damned. Good.

Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head and drove to the airport. Have you ever been to Dulles International Airport? It’s a bit on the weird side. The main terminal is this huge cavernous thing with a sort of billowy top, if you can think of concrete being billowy. When you’re inside, it feels like the ceiling is made of canvas and there’s too much snow on it and it’s about to cave in. Except it’s not. It’s a vast expanse of concrete.

Although the signage at the airport is pretty good, the ticketing area kind of looks like the architect didn’t anticipate all the roping-off that airlines have to do to manage their line flows. So you have this big empty space, and these ticketing counters plopped in the middle of it with hundreds of those spring-wound rope pole things. If the terminal is supposed to have any kind of effect, it’s lost. I must say though, that United is pretty efficient in getting people through their line. And even at the gate, I was struck by how together the United crew was. Lots of announcements, clearly spoken, useful. Good job, folks. Even you, dude with the lisp.

Oh, also, Dulles is kind of a facade. There’s this big architecty terminal, but once you’re through security you go down this hall and walk through this non-descript door and suddenly you’re on a giant shuttle bus to your gate, which is this drab lump on the tarmac.

The shuttles look like something they would have used to transport Space Marines in Aliens. All huge and industrial machine punk, grimy and purpose-built. You literally walk through a door into what appears to be just a room. Little do you know, the first time you get on one, that you’re in a magical carriage on top of four humongous wheels, and you’re twenty feet off the ground and that your gate (or the terminal, if you’ve just arrived) is a five-minute drive away. Those things have to get like no miles to the gallon.

Flight home was fine, except for a rather abrupt landing. The flight attendants didn’t do much of a check before landing. I didn’t even have to unrecline my seat. I think they were taken a little offguard, perhaps not enough communication from the pilots. The landing man, dude *slammed* on those brakes, hard enough that it was difficult staying in my seat.

Made it though. Got my bag with no trouble. Got the shuttle to long-term parking with no trouble. Found my car, paid the lady ($76!!! Never again), and drove home. A nice enough trip. Read three books. Saw three movies, “Children of Men” (C), “The Hitcher” (D), and “Pan’s Labyrinth” (B+). Saw three Okeeffe paintings. Hung out with my parents for six days straight.

Good enough.

Something Happened

Scariest book ever. On the back, if Heller had asked me for a blurb, I’d have said “Utterly demolishing” although the PR flack would have asked me to change that to “devastating” because that’s the word you’re supposed to use. Demolishing is more apt though. Heller is probably my favorite author, but I’m not about to read that book again. It has, by the way, very little to do with this post.

Except that I might be demolished soon. There’s an event happening, right now as I type, that might be my wrecking ball. I’m on the edge of a wall, to one side a resumption of normality with oblique references to “the scare” every once in a while, and on the other side… an abyss.

Which side is the wrecking ball on? It’s swinging to and fro, slowly advancing down the wall, and when it reaches me will it throw me to the ground or into blackness?

Over this course of events I am powerless. Completely impotent to affect their resolution. Perhaps I could pray? But what would I be praying for, my own selfish need for things to go back to the way they were, or just what some God wants? This was all his idea, after all, so it’s not clear to me what good that would do.

Whatever angle I take when I think of a rational God, things do make sense, stuff happens for some kind of reason whether it makes me happy or not. If there turns out to be a God, I don’t think he cares much about me being happy. He’s not against it, mind. But if I go and pray that Thy Will Be Done, that Will might be a giant finger flicking me onto the wrong side of the wall, the bottomless pit side, and yay for God’s Plan if that happens but I’m well and fucked for a good long while.

In any case, as an agnostic I can’t say one way or the other and as, well, me I just would rather not hear it. It does my family good, and for that I’m glad, I’d just rather the rhetoric were carried on out of my earshot. Alas, no chance of that.

I’m sitting in the dark, typing this post, listening to Kid A and feeling all spooky and creepy and slightly nauseated, waiting for the phone call that tells me everything went fine and there’s nothing to worry about and I’ll see you in a few days and I love you goodbye.

And willfully ignoring almost every thought that drifts in the direction of what’s happening. What’s actually happening, you know, like physically with knives and sutures and ether or whatever the kids use these days. Because as soon as I start thinking in that direction my little island of control starts to wobble; it’s really just a patch of seaweed with pretensions. Or maybe I’m standing on the bubble of a giant Portugese Man-O-War, in imminent danger of sinking through its carapace into the nest of stinging polyps.

Ok, phone call received, status tentatively good. It’s not all over yet, there’s one last f-ing scary hurdle before I can go back to obssessing about minutiae. Vague, yes, and I apologize for that, but the point of this isn’t a news update is it? It’s catharsis. It’s distraction. I hope you’ve never had a need, but if you have or expect to have well then brother lemme tell you I understand. People are weird and they react strangely at times and you never know quite what’s going through their heads. A lack of response indicates what, disinterest? Or just an awkward not-knowing-the-right-fucking-thing-to-say?

Of course, sometimes they do say the wrong thing in which case you have to figure out whether to cut them some slack. Might be you chewing that shoe leather next time. Or maybe they’re all “oh get over it.” I fuckin’ hate that. Then you’re all “what the HELL” and they deserve those dagger-eyes you’re giving them, because they need to stop being such assholes and remember what it’s like to suffer through one of these life crises. Parents, build some empathy into your children, lest they grow up to be callous jackasses.

Granted such ignorance doesn’t happen often in this particular circumstance. That’s more what you get when you’re heartbroken than when you’re in danger of demolishment. I think it’s a racial defensive measure– when you’re not heartbroken, you have trouble remembering what it’s like to be heartbroken, and can’t relate to the poor sobbing sap on the curb. Selective empathy as a survival trait.

I’m going to go eat a couple slices of pizza and read a book about screenwriting. I’m pretty sure I can keep it down now. The pizza, that is. Pepto-Bismol-willing.

Food

No resolutions, no year-end-wrapups, same blog same self-absorbed blog posts. But, like seemingly everyone else in the world, I am obssessing about food. Not so much how to make myself eat less of it, since thoughts like that are so prevalent I’ve recalibrated the instruments to treat them as ground-level noise. No, rather than fixating on how much I eat, I’m absolutely fascinated by what there is to eat, even though I myself am too chickenshit to try a lot of it for reasons I’ll delve into further down. It’s true, I am actually afraid to taste new things if they aren’t obviously going to taste good. Which means they taste like a combination or a variation on someting I already like. Food fear. Culinary cowardice. Call it what you like.

I also have a problem with food literature. I can’t get enough of it! Weird huh? I have “Yang Can Cook”, and only ever tried to make the sticky rice. I burned the bottom. I have “How To Cook Everything.” I have “The Joy of Cooking.” I have three Ruth Reichl memoirs. I have Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” memoir. I have this book where this guy quit his job to slave in a kitchen to learn how to be a professional cook. That one isn’t so good actually, but it’s sitting there waiting for me to read it anyway. I have all of these food memoirs, cookbooks, and whatnot. And with the books I’m also all geared up, or want to be. I buy pots and pans I don’t need, like a 12-quart stockpot, and dream of spending $200 for an AllClad dutch oven that I’ll probably never use. I paid $300 extra to have a combination convection-oven/microwave in my kitchen.

This food-literature problem is in no way an indication of how much I love food. As a result of my foodfear I can usually take or leave it. I’ll ooh and ahhh when something’s especially good, just like the next guy. But to me it’s such a hit-or-miss prospect that the occasional orgasm isn’t compelling enough to warrant all the bad sex I have to go through to get a money shot.

So-to-speak. Maybe that’s a poor analogy, since I’ll take all the bad sex I can get, orgasm or not. I mean, come on. It’s sex.

Still and all, I can’t seem to read enough books about food. The descriptions tantalize me, no matter how gross or disturbing the item being consumed. When Ruth Reichl writes about weird sushi she had in a tiny place in New York, I’m rapt. It’s like Gremlins, and Ruth has gone into the old Chinese man’s store to buy herself the most unique Christmas present ever.

Barnes and Noble is an enabler for my food-lit problem. You know how you’re not supposed to grocery shop when you’re hungry? I should never enter a Barnes and Noble with anything less than a full-on turkey dinner stuffing (heh) the crevices of my torso, because instead of a delicious lemon Entenmann’s danish, I’ll inevitably waste $20 on “How to Break an Egg.” Or worse, some jumbo-sized “classic” you can’t walk out with for less than half a c-note.

I just can’t help myself! There’s always something new in food writing. Something I’ve never heard of, or some story, some adventure. Colorful characters, lots of middle-class white guys suffering to learn their craft so they can open a restaurant staffed by romanticized Ecuadoran journeyman cooks.

And they swear a lot. I like that. Ok, maybe they don’t swear a lot in general in food memoirs, but there’s always that element of… earthiness is a terrible word, but I’m going with it. I’m a sucker for anything that feels like “yeah this is just how people are, let’s all just stop pretending we’re not.” And part of it’s the old country-bumpkins-are-smarter-than-you-think appeal, except transferred to haute cuisine in the city. Rough-and-tumble guys and gals with hands that can reaching into boiling water and pluck a noodle out to test for doneness, hands full of scars from their carefully chosen knives which they wield deftly winding up with cuts regardless because everything needs to be done at once and no matter how early they start it’s always just barely done on time. Which is required, because you can’t let food sit when it’s done, right? At least you’re not supposed to… I don’t remember the words “heat lamp” appearing anywhere in Kitchen Confidential.

Then there’s the science. Things TURN INTO OTHER THINGS, just because they get hot. And then you mix stuff with other stuff and it turns into YET ANOTHER THING. It’s frikkin’ AMAZING. While amazing, it also unfortunately reminds me of a standup routine that was never funny, where the comic went on for about five minutes about how the airlines’ safety spiel always has your seat cushion becoming a floatation device. Magically transforming itself from an item of delicious luxury into a lifesaving artifact of buoyancy. What’s the deal with that? That might have actually been a Seinfeld routine, now that I think about it.

I find the science of it all fascinating, intellectually, and I ache to experience it emotionally. But it’s not quite there. I have trouble with the transformative wonder of cooking. It conflicts with the guiding aesthetic of my life, which is simplicity. Now, this isn’t to say that my house is bare, that I ride a bike to work, or anything like that. I don’t have the discipline for that sort of thing. But I do like the pure item, the unadorned-but-well-executed whatever. I grew up on noodles and butter. Pizza. Coke with ice. Chicken and rice, made from Uncle Ben’s and Campbell’s cream of mushroom. Experimental edibles were never dinner at our house; it was pretty fast and facile growing up, with whatever Mom or Dad threw together.

Amazingly, we never made a habit of TV dinners. I can’t explain it. With all the Ragu I ate between the ages of five and 18, you’d think Swanson would have made an appearance. But that lumberjack never seemed to take up residence in our freezer. Maybe he would have gotten in the way of the half-gallons of ice cream. Oh man, I love ice cream.

Any kind of dessert, pretty much, except rice pudding. What the hell is up with rice pudding? Ick. It’s like on Iron Chef when somebody makes squid ice cream and the judges are all “um, ok, well, let’s see here.” And don’t talk to me about how I’ve never had really good rice pudding and if I had I’d change my tune. How much bad rice pudding must one suffer before one is allowed to try the “good stuff?” Do I need to trot out the orgasm analogy again? No thanks, pass the tapioca.

Perhaps it’s not some highfalutin’ “simplicity” that’s the mark of my culinary preference but rather safety, comfort. I will admit to loving comfort food– everything my mother ever made, except Spanish rice. My Mom makes the worst Spanish rice ever. I asked my Dad once why he ate it, and he shrugged and was all “it’s there.” That was typical of the attitude at my house, although Dad does like a good steak, and his mother was all Pennsylvania dutchy with her soups and such.

My aunt inherited that skill; it was always lovely to go to her house during the holidays, ’cause she always had a vast amount of homemade chicken corn chowder simmering on the stove and a half-gallon plastic jar for me to take a bunch home. As we left, she would press the container into my hands with a couple of bullion cubes and instructions not to let it sit too long or it would go “sour.” Chemistry again.

I guess I was being a little silly up there, after all, since obviously food is important to me in a way. Food serves to bring back memories, of family and familiarity and comfort. But not adventure. I’ve never felt compelled to try new things, where food is concerned. And let me just explain briefly what I mean by “new.” I’m probably about to shock you.

I don’t like tomatoes. I like tomato products, like ketchup, and even salsa. And heck, some pico de gallo on my taco is no big deal. But big chunks, or whole tomatoes, or even the sun-drief tomatoes you get in some cream sauces with fettucine? Nuh uh.

Mushrooms, ha. I’ve tried a mushroom or two, and it didn’t make me gag, but I have some reservations about their very nature. I mean, come on. It’s a mushroom.

But even though they’re, you know, mushrooms, I want to like them because there are so many kinds and I’m an Iron Chef fan and they use them all the time on Iron Chef and the cute little Japanese actresses who will eat just anything up to and including the beating heart of a sacrificed Mayan peasant all go absolutely crazy for “shiitake.” I want to like something that much. I do share their fondness for rice, however mushrooms would make me less fat. Exercise would too, but I like that only a little more than mushrooms.

Squash. It’s dead to me. I have no squash. For unlike the occasional tasteless rubbery mushroom, the tiniest medalion of summer squash will make me gag. For a while when I was growing up, my mother tried this experiment where she’d dole out a “no thank you” helping of whatever mushy crap she’d cooked up that I didn’t like the looks of. I vividly remember the “no thank you” portion of squash that gave me the almost-heaves right at the dinner table. I don’t like squash, no sir. Its poor cousin zucchini I can take or leave– I find it basically tasteless, but in a kind of slimy way.

Sauces. Am I the only one who remembers that saturday-morning PSA cartoon where the dancing… creature… begs the viewing audience “don’t drown your food”? It was the same series as “exercise your choppers” and the one I can’t seem to find on YouTube that did some spiel about healthy snacking and then the old “can you make me a banana/ok you’re a banana” joke at the end. That wasn’t even funny when i was ten. Those PSAs were torture.

Asparagus and I have nothing to say to each other either, because it tastes like crunchy nothing and makes my pee smell. I don’t like tofu unless it’s floating innocently in miso soup, which I do like, can you believe that? It’s hard for me to believe. I like miso soup. I like miso soup. It just seems so… un-me… to like miso soup. That green stuff is seaweed.

Foodstuffs should be fully-blended. This obsession with chunkiness that’s going around leaves me cold. Blend it, I say. Even iPods. Especially iPods. Yes I eat iPods. Wouldn’t that be a great name for a breakfast cereal right now? “Crunchy Rainbow iPods with MP3 Marshmallows!” But I digress.

I don’t want to have to try to identify chunks, and one of those chunks is invariably a mushroom or a tomato and then I have to pick shit out of the mess in the bowl or on my plate and then I have to figure out what to do with the picked-out bits and I wind up with a little graveyard of tomato chunks around my place-setting, which is just a mess and childish. Don’t make me regress, set the blender on puree won’t you please?

But really, if it’s all the same to you I’d rather you didn’t have to mix anything in the first place. I like my steak without crap on top. I don’t want pineapple salsa on my salmon. I’ve recently managed to learn to eat pineapple, but it’s still Just Not Right in the context of fish. Any kind of fruit that’s not in one of the accepted forms or suspensions for that matter. Which is essentially in fruit salad, arranged in a pleasant arc on a catered plate, scarfed whole right after I get it home from the store, or if it’s a strawberry, ice cream.

I do like fruit though, and fully intend to someday try a kiwi.

Oh man, this post is already longer than my arm and I’ve barely touched the subject I started out to write about. Books. Books on food. And this specific one I’m reading right now, written by a girl I’m sure in an alternate universe would have been my soul mate. Alas, I’m left bereft in this sad pocket with nowt but a thin tome to console me. It’s a good tome though. It’s called “Julie and Julia” and it’s by the girl who had this blog called The Julie/Julia Project where she challenged herself to make every single recipe in Julia Child’s cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” over the course of a year.

It’s not a compendium of blog posts, actually, which is really cool. It’s a true memoir of the period in which she kept her blog and made all the recipes. So not only is there the book to read, but all these blog posts to go through if I want to. Which I probably don’t. As much as I like books about food, I can’t bring myself to care about blogs about food. They leave me cold. And not in a good ice cream kind of way, but more like day-old eggs in aspic.

But the book man, it kicks all kinds of ass. Her writing is kind of like how I wish mine was. Straightforward. Funny. I’ve laughed out loud at least four times, and I’m not halfway through. She’s great at description, using words like “mooshed.” The passage I was reading when I was compelled to leave the bathtub and start this blog post involved mooshing some sugar cubes to make a Belgian cream for her brother. I like words like mooshing. She had to moosh the sugar cubes with a fork, and they were giving her a little trouble.

Plus she swears a lot. Which I like.

And she’s left handed. Which is kind of cool, since I’m left handed. I’ve never cared one way or the other whether people were left or right handed, probably because growing up I was swamped with books about all the famous left handed people like Ben Franklin. I’m not sure why I was given these books. To make me feel special? To make me not feel freakish? I never felt freakish. I never cared. Being left handed was aight, except that it meant I couldn’t play any god damned position in baseball except pitcher, outfield, or first base. Fucking left handed. Ok, maybe I’m a little bitter about that. I would have been a great second baseman.

Anyway, this girl Julie is left handed too, and in a bunch of other ways just kind of all-around great. She’s funny and not too serious and a little flaky and, as self-deprecating self-described in her memoir, my kind of girl. Before she started her project, she says, Julia Child meant as much to her as Dan Aykroyd. Ha.

See, that’s funny. I’ve deliberately unfunnied it here though, so you’ll feel compelled to pick up the book. I’d let you borrow my copy, but it’s got stains on it from the chicken-in-KC-Masterpiece I had for dinner with some steamed green beans covered in butter and salt. Followed by a batch of delicate heart-shaped sugar cookies that I made from scratch… from a recipe I found on the Internet. Oh the irony of it all!

But I used an egg and flour and everything! Made the dough, then let it sit in the fridge for an hour. An HOUR. For me that’s the equivalent of the ten-ingredient grits Bobby Flay made last night on Iron Chef America. So I waited an hour, during which I cooked my chicken and green beans while I watched the aforementioned episode of Iron Chef. It was “Duck Battle.”

Flay lost to Ming Tsai. Then I retrieved the dough from the fridge, rolled it out, stamped out the cookies. I need to get a crucifix cookie cutter, like Swoosie Kurtz had in “Bubble Boy.” Cooked the cookies. Ate the cookies. Unadorned. No icing– royal, cream cheese, or beef-marrow. The cute Japanese actresses would have been unimpressed, their overdubbed critiques disappointed as they politely covered tiny yawns with perfectly-manicured fingertips.