Cooking while broken

There was a time about 10 years ago when I got excited about cooking -- I read a Mark Bittman book about why it's good to cook at home, and I was briefly converted. (A similar surge of interested happened a few years earlier when I read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma.")

But it didn't take.

I try to practice my egalitarian preaching, though I probably fall short. My wife likes to cook -- or at least, she seems to, and she's very creative at it -- but I still try to cook a couple of nights a week. Usuallly it's something simple -- spaghetti, maybe, or chili. Maybe veggies thrown into a pan with a premade simmer sauce.

I sometimes miss doing more ambitious things, though. Today, while it's snowing outside, I tackled a recipe for slow-cooker cassoulet. Usually the slow-cooker works for my lazy man style of cooking -- just throw in stuff and turn the machine on. The cassoulet required a bit of prep, however: Chopping, browning, mixing.

You know, cooking stuff.

But I was reminded why I tend to shy away from this in the first place: My body remains broken from my surgeries (also about a decade ago at this point), and doing the physical job of cooking is ... exhausting. I solved the problem today by sitting for a lot of the prep. But my back still hurt quite a bit when it was all over.

I'm not asking for sympathy here. And I'm hesitant to use a word like "disabled." But ... I have less ability than I did. Some of that may be because I'm older, but a lot of it is is being broken. I can't -- and won't, ever again -- be able to do some things I used to do. And the things I do, physically, take a lot more out of me.

Like cooking.

Today, I found a solution. I need to keep looking for those kinds of solutions. I think I've let my brokeness keep me from living a full life over the years. But I only have this life. I don't want to spend it just staring at a screen.

Barry

I finished binging HBO’s Barry last night. I am utterly fascinated by Bill Hader. I think he’s magnificent. Just watching his face in the show, without any sound, would be entertainment all by itself. The way it goes flat when he’s trying to be a good guy, almost passive. The way his eyes get big and unblinking and his brow wrinkles when he becomes possessed by rage. Hader has fascinated me since I first saw him doing a Vincent Price impersonation on SNL, because who would do such a thing in the 21st century? He’s one of my favorite actors working today. 

Kansas Day

 

For Kansas Day, I share with you a family heirloom -- the seal of the State of Kansas, painted by a neighbor who lived across the street from us in the late 1970s. 

There are a couple of possessions that I have that are important to me for no other reason than nostalgia. One is this. Another is a little blue jar-slash-vase my mom kept a couple of pieces of jewelry in. And the last is a big, heavy manual typewriter that belonged to my grandfather.

When I die, those things won't have as much meaning to others as they do to me. And that makes me sad to think about, losing that meaning. But that's life, I guess. For now, they possess the meaning I give them.

The thing I learned in 2020...

 ...is that I'm never going to be an intellectual. But I'll work as hard as I can to be the very best middlebrow I can be.

It's weird...

 ...when I see my reflection while wearing a mask and see my dad's eyes looking back at me.

Writing after Trump

Donald Trump is leaving office tomorrow, and I'll admit to some personal nervousness. What's it going to be like to write opinion pieces in the post-Trump age? 

Over the last four years, there has been a certain clarity to writing left-of-center opinion. It's not that I wanted to reduce everything to "orange man bad" (as conservative commentators like to say) but the truth is that Trump wasn't just bad, but that he provided a prodigious supply of outrages. There was often fresh material, something new to illustrate his badness. 

But he is moving away from the very center of politics, and I fear that the muscles I use when NOT writing from a place of deserved moral outrage have grown atrophied over the last few years. I have criticized Trump for being a purveyor of "pure, refined grievance" but now I worry that I, too, am an addict. 

I'm sure that there will still be things to be mad about. Hunting for those things, seeking out the high of angry righteousness, would be a bad path to go down. 

Back in 2009, when Barack Obama took office, I feared I would run out of things to write about after George W. Bush's presidency so enraged me I made the jump from a straight-news newspaper career into opinion journalism. It turned out there was plenty to write about, even then. Probably, the same will be true now. 

We still have a pandemic to fight, an economy to write right, climate change to try to mitigate and other big issues. 

 And I will have to remind myself that some things are worth writing about even if they don't piss me off.

"Breaking Bread With The Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind" by Alan Jacobs

The writing of Alan Jacobs has proven useful to me over time. In 2011, when I was recovering from multiple surgeries -- and the brain fog that made sustained reading nearly impossible for me -- "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction" was both the kind of encouragement I needed, and the first book of any real substance that I was able to complete. A few years ago, when I'd just about abandoned any hope or motivations of bridging ideological divides, his more recent book "How to Think" caused me to reconsider. It's a book, in fact, that I need to revisit -- but his latest, "Breaking Bread With the Dead" is a fine companion to both those earlier books, a guide not on how to think but how to ground your thinking by careful consideration of words written in the far-ago past.

One of Jacobs' central beliefs here is that reading old books -- not just books, but old books -- can remove us from the constant flow of information that washes over us through our social media feeds, that they can take us out of the concerns of the moment so that we can take both a broader view but also a more nuanced view of the times before us. Those old books can also help us encounter diverse and strange ideas in -- to use modern parlance (mine, not Jacobs') a safe space.

"Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is not to make the other identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor," he writes, adding on the next page: "We do not have the same intensity of involvement in the past that we do in the present, and it's precisely that which makes the past most useful to us."

Jacobs worries about a modern tendency to dispose of old books because their authors -- or the times their authors lived in -- held different morals than our own, about race, about gender relations. He doesn't ask us to suspend our judgments, though. Instead, Jacobs suggests we bring our judgments with us in an informed way -- to find the nuggets of beauty and/or truth that might reside in a work -- and provides some examples of how this might be done. And he cautions against an opposite impulse, as well: "To say 'This text offends me, I will read no further' may be shortsighted; but to read a 'great book' from the past with such reverence that you can't see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better."

In "How to Think" Jacobs urges readers to be able to articulate views we disagree with in such a fashion that the persons holding those views would understand and express them, instead of how we might cariacature them. A similar thread flows through this book, a nudge to read stuff that doesn't share our precise viewpoints anyway. And to be generous toward the people who wrote those words. They built the world we inherited; some other people will inherit the world we build on top of that. We may hope they are generous to us, as well.

"When we own our kinship to those people," he writes of old books," they may come alive for us not just as exemplars of narrowness and wickedness that we have overcome, but as neighbors and even teachers. When we acknowledge that even when they go far astray they do so in ways that we surely would have, had we been formed as they were, we extend them not just attention but love, the very love that we hope our descendants will extend to us."

In offering us ideas about to read and wrestle with old and difficult books, then, Jacobs also points a way toward a way we can live and think morally in a world that often seems immoral, as well. He uses the word "love" -- I might offer the word "generous." Call it a literary Golden Rule: "Read unto others as you would have them read unto you."