Ramblings

Over the last few weeks, the local landscape has been fairly inescapable, or unignorable (thanks, ting tings!).  Fires, thunderstorms, hail, winds - the weather has been fairly apocalyptic as of late. Added to that is the fact that I've been  dealing with a pair of architects for the last few weeks, and most of our discussion has centered around green design, organic architecture, and landscape integration.  The end result, I guess, is that I've been feeling very western.

What I'd love to do is - well, it's not the "east meets west" thing, I know that.  I don't want to blend hinduism with SoCal organics, or smoke pot out of a hookah.  But there are images I love: a landscape that is incredibly familiar but somehow eternally alien, where you transition here between storm and sun and wind and rain and snow and fire like you wouldn't believe; it was 62 degrees and raining here this morning, and this afternoon it was 87 and hot hot sun.  You can't really get used to that; Colorado keeps you guessing, and the earth here is harsh: cactus, scrub, dirt, rock, pine - interspersed with marsh, riparian wetland, mountain streams, the Rockies...I'm up in the Park a lot, and I'm always strucked by how majestically [I]fucked[/I] you would feel if you were out there as a pioneer.  Likewise, standing out on the plains in the middle of a thunderstorm is a terrifying experience.  You can see lightning over the foothills, and everywhere you look it's either the exposed sandstone of the flatirons or the carved-out, eroded mesas of the cretaceous sea floor.  Seriously, it's pretty cool - visitors never expect to find trilobites at the ranch trailhead.

I would love to find something that taps into that sense of exploration.  I think that Damir, InAisce, and to an extent, M.A.+ all are searching for that - or, at least, they are all searching. Nicholas K also presented a beautifully "cowboyish" show  for F/W 2011 (in my mind, at least), down to the hats.  I like the idea that it's still [I]worth [/I]searching for serenity - there are places out here where you can really go to be [I]alone[/I], in the mountains, on the plains, even on the side of the road on the bank of stream on a rainy day, when there are no cars.  I don't know about you guys, but I get sick of having phone, internet, email, everything in my palm all the time.  What I want to to do is sit.  Sit and listen.  I'm so tired, all the time.  Two days ago, when it was pouring rain outside and all the creeks were flooding, I went outside and just sat in my car and listened to the rain.

Tension.  Always tension.  I want something that fits in between suburban technorasta-urbania, backwards cattle ranches, and the glaciers and moraines of the mountains.  I have been thinking of too many things, too many directions, too many futures.  Here are some pictures I took in my bedroom this afternoon.  I want to be all of them.

I still haven't read it.

I remember visiting the temple of Dionysus, and taking a picture of an eroded marble column that had been swallowed by grass and neglect.  That is an image I find eternally relevant.  There is a feeling I have, sometimes, when I am reading a book or standing on a ledge, of watching all the old gods die.  I love pillars.  I love decay.  Rather, I love permanence, but impermanence is beautiful and necessary.  Immediacy is...unavoidable, and pleasurable in its own right. I have a kitschy golden skull candle, but I think it looks good on this pillar:

That pocketknife was my grandfather's.  His parents were immigrants, and he ended up having to run the grocery store his father started to support his family.  He ended up in the merchant marines in World War II, and he probably purchased this knife in the 1940's.  The bird foot is a "lifecast" - the mold was taken from a catbird that no longer needed its foot.

Beauty exists with and without background data.  Again, tension - meaning is inextricably linked to and eternally removed from context. Do I believe in singularity? Unequivocally.  Do I believe in analogy? Wholeheartedly.  I want to wear Demeulemeester fringe shirts with TOJ leathers and bargain-bin pants; I want to wear capes and shawls annd urban cowboy boots while watering the tomato plant on my porch. I want to be self consciously romantic; I want to make believe in flight pants and aviator jackets on the plains of the West.  I want life to inspire - and I want to look like I give a shit, because I do.  I care about beauty.  I care about art. I care about life.

More food

preheat oven to 375
Boil a kettle of water

In a blender, mix:
1 can coconut milk
1 can evaporated milk
1 can sweetened condensed milk
6 eggs
1 generous tbsp dark rum
dash of vanilla
dash sea salt
at least a cup of toasted coconut flakes (buy some shredded coconut, toast it in the oven for a bit)

Liquefy that shit

In a pan, make your caramel:

Melt a cup of sugar on med-low/medium heat until it's dark brown and syrupy (don't add water).  If the heat is too high it'll burn.  resist the urge to stir.

Pour liquid sugar into your baking dish, coat the bottom, and roll the liquid sugar around the edges to coat it.  Be really careful, and wear oven mitts.

Pour the liquefied flan mixture over the hot sugar into the baking dish.

Place the baking dish on top of a deep tray or other, shallower baking dish.  The shallower dish it sits in be about half the height of the dish with the mixture in it.

Put the two dishes in the oven.

Pour the boiled water into the shallower dish so that the baking dish is sitting in a water bath that reaches about half way up its sides.

Bake for 45 minutes.

Remove, allow to cool in the water bath until the water is room temp.

Refrigerate 8 hours, or overnight.  Or as long as you can possibly wait.

Invert and devour.

Mad science!

A Dinner

How to make a really good summer drink

I'm not going to say that this is the best dark n' stormy you've ever had, because I'd sound like an idiot.  I'll just say that this tastes delicious, and you should try it out.

What you'll need:

Fresh ginger
Lime
Ginger beer
Rum

First of all, everyone has their favorites.  I'm not listing any amounts, because they don't matter.  You can tweak everything to your taste.  I'm using Gosling ginger beer, which is a standby, but I also love Ginger People brand ginger beer.  Just stay away from the light "ginger ale" stuff - that's for other drinks.

Peel and mince your fresh ginger, and quarter the lime.



Throw it in a highball glass, or any other tall glass you have lying around, and muddle the lime and ginger together as vigorously as you can without looking deviant.  You should probably use a muddler for the sake of hygiene, but I use the handle of a whisk.



Add your rum (Pour for a few seconds, or measure it out if you like).  I keep mixing at this point, and let everything soak together for a bit.



(I don't know a thing about rum.  I do know that Myers works fine, and I'm sure anything else that tastes good works fine as well.  Except Bacardi, which is disgusting.)

Add ice.  I fill the glass with it.  If you're awesome, you can use crushed ice, which is always fun, but I am too lazy to do that.

Top off with ginger beer.  Yum, ginger beer.



I chucked some fresh cherries in this one.  I imagine that trying to eat them would infuriate some people, but I think cherries are delicious.  They also go really well with ginger.



Uggghh, so good.

I'm thinking, here, of David Attenborough.

Any time I try to feel something - emotion - I just end up tired, or angry.  It's as if I've been replaced by an empty sink on the inside.  Anything that feels difficult to parse; any emotion beyond the instinctual expression of laughter, anger, or the immediacy of infatuation drains out of me and leaves me feeling exhausted.

It's difficult to express anything except by analogy.  Take this: What use is a a bombed-out building, charred from the insides out but still standing? It takes time to regrow life in a crater. What could be more beautiful, more terrifying, than new life?  How can you take comfort in something that you know is transient?  Beauty is devastation waiting to happen.

I'm making this sound overly depressing, and I don't mean to. I am not depressed.  I'm a cynic.  I am...having difficulty with proactivity.  With forethought.  With interpretation.

Nobody really understands it when you tell them that you "can't deal with things."  They assume you're exaggerating, or making excuses.  Sometimes it feels as though you are.  But it's not as if you can help it.

Saying you have difficulties with feelings is a statement that gets brushed off, ignored at the worst; listened-to - but not really understood (and who could possibly understand?) - at best.  I can act sympathetic, empathetic even, but those words don't necessarily mean anything, don't necessarily link up with recognizable emotions.  When you turn inside, all you see is the sink.  Fighting monsters is dangerous work, even if you didn't pick the fight.

Perhaps, after loss, poetry is the only thing that matters.

A reflection on pants

I was feeling a bit nostalgic today, and took some photos of what remains of my collection of raw jeans - something that I've never done before.  It's fun to look back and try to remember what I was thinking about four years ago, when I was at the peak of my obsession with denim.  I've since been through all kinds of stuff, but my first pair of APC jeans were new standards, which I think I had read about in Esquire or something.

I bought this pair of petit standards in April, 2009, at the APC store in the Marais.  I'd been wearing the same pair of jeans (also APC) for the previous two years, and raw denim was still exciting enough that I wanted more.  New standards weren't skinny enough, I was listening to indie music and drinking cheap beer with Parisian hipsters, and petit standards fit the slouchy grunge look I was into.  Since then, they've been all over the world with me.  Ten countries are listed on the inside of the pocket bag, and they've been used and abused so consistently that the only thing holding them together anymore is darning thread. I wear a lot of high-brow clothing now; everything from Patrik Ervell to Rick Owens and Damir Doma, but I still smile when I put these on - even if they've shrunk so much and had so much patching that the crotch barely fits anymore.

The first time the back pocket ripped open was when I slid down a concrete banister in the metro.  My friends and I had gone out the wrong exit, and instead of going through the station and finding our way back to the platform, we slid down the middle of the escalator we'd just come up.  It earned me several strange looks, and a hole in my pocket.  Over the last three years, they've been soaked through in rainstorms, had the crotch ripped open numerous times, they've fallen in the mud, been repaired, ripped, and repaired again, spilled on, and puked on by me and others.  They've been washed countless times, and they were even bleached at some point in early 2010.  They're basically retired, now, having been replaced by a pair of jeans that stays on my ass - these ones don't even stay up anymore.

These were also purchased in Paris at some point in 2009; from a small consignment store in the Marais that's fairly close to the birthplace of my petit standards.  They're by Helmut Lang "Elastic Classic Slim Cut Denim," and I have no idea what year they're from.  They started out as a uniform black with a white weft, and they've now faded to an interesting dusky black/grey.  The weave is really loose, and they're great summer jeans, despite the color.  The pockets are an interesting detail, but are actually really annoying to use, and I always wonder if I could have a tailor change them into normal pockets somehow.  When I bought these, I had been searching for a pair of black  jeans forever, and hadn't found anything for months. I randomly wandered into this store and tried these on.  They were perfect, and I walked away a happy man after paying 40 euros for them.  For the longest time I had no shoes to wear them with except for a pair of grey high tops that are hidden in a box somewhere and a pair of brown desert boots that looked terrible with them, and have since been ruined and thrown out.  I haven't kept track of them like I did with my APC's, but they've seen almost as much travel, if not quite as much wear.  I go through phases with them; half the time I think they look horrible, and the other half of the time they're my favorite pants.  The reality is, I assume, somewhere in the middle.

My girlfriend got me these for my birthday last year after she got sick of hearing me lament the condition of my ragged old pair.  They're petit standards as well, and after not having purchased raw denim since 2009, it was pretty strange to put them on for the first time.  I didn't really like it; couldn't remember why the discomfort had been so much fun three years before, wasn't really looking forward to breaking in a new pair of jeans.  I don't have the patience or the interest to wear them every day, and my wardrobe is really different from the uniform of white t-shirt, jeans, and desert boots I was wearing in college.  Even though they're only seven months old, and haven't been worn nearly as much as my last pair, they've gotten more enjoyable to wear.  They'e already been showered in a few times and had a trip through the washing machine, and I like the way they fit much better now than I did when they were new.  They're finally starting to stack well, and feel more like jeans than a chore.  I made the mistake of trying to sandpaper them, which I hadn't done on any of my other jeans, and don't particularly like the results - only because I now have more creases than I ought, and some of them aren't really in the right place. I've never cared much about the "authenticity" of the jeans, but they definitely don't look as natural as I hoped they would.  Hopefully as they fade the creases will blend in a little more.  They're fun to wear, though; they look good, fit well, and they still make me feel like a cool dude, just like my first pair did when I bought them in Paris three years ago.

I don't know when I got into the habit of drawing on my pants, but it's something I do now.  It's fun, for some reason, and I think it looks cool too.  Makes them even more my own.

The rest of my raw jeans have disappeared over the years. I went through new standards, petit standards, NDG's, PRPS jeans, UNIQLO's, 7FAMs, and who knows what else.  Now I wear boring old levi's to work half the time, and probably won't buy a new pair of raw jeans for another three years. It's a little sad to look back on who you used to be, what you used to think you'd become, and where you are now. Bittersweet, maybe, to realize that you've had to grow up, even if it's against your will, and in ways you weren't expecting. And funny to think how a pair of jeans can be a window into the past, and into your head.

If you don't have a dog

You're probably fucked.

It's only May, and already I'm too hot.  82 degrees outside, bright sun, light breeze.  On my small porch, I have an overturned footstool that has been filled with dirt and requisitioned for use as a planter.  I don't know a thing about gardening, but the chives that were so happy to have been moved out of the shade of the deck in the backyard are starting to wilt in the heat.

I've made myself an omelette this morning, using the chives from my footstool, tarragon, and parsley.  It doesn't come out quite the way I want it - overdone on the outside, too underdone on the inside.  It tastes fine, though - fresh and eggy, like real food.  Most people seem to want to drown their omelettes in shredded cheddar cheese.

Sometimes I feel like the chives.  It's hard to stay upright, hard not to wilt in the sun.  At various points in my life I have been accused of being distant, detached.  Uninterested. Uncaring. Selfish, sometimes.  The truth is that caring is dangerous.  Caring gets you hurt.  Hurts others.  Stops progress.  I've heard people say that it's easier not to care, easier to cut yourself off from the world.  Smile and nod. I don't think that's true. Sometimes I consider forgiving alcoholics, wastrels, people who have succumbed to the sun.  It never gets easier.  Really, it only gets harder. Harder to forgive mediocrity, ugliness, inefficiency.

It has been so long since I've seen something beautiful.

Hard, on occasion, not to feel like a child.  Not to want to be a child. Hard not to curl up into a ball, or run away, or do your best to fade away.

It's hard to plate the omelette, invert it just so, and present it so that the smooth underbelly stares up at you, naked and pure and inviting and washed-out daisy-yellow.  Hard to keep it from splitting, hard to keep the underdone custard on the inside from running out of the first knife wound, leaking out the ends, soiling everything with rampant, runny yolk.

Sometimes you just need to grab your dog and hold on for dear life.

People sometimes ask me how long I spend editing these things.  Not much.  A cursory glance, a few changed words, and then it's done.  I tend to call my drafts "finished," which isn't really accurate, because I'll find myself going back over them days later, changing little things here and there, even if no one will ever read the edited version.  So, I guess the answer is that I write it out and then I'm done with it, but I don't ever stop thinking about it, and I don't ever stop trying to improve it.  Whatever it is.

“I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.”

Today marks the second anniversary of my brother’s death.  There is a vocal part of me that does not want to recognize this, wants to ignore it, wants to get past it and move on.

This is the first time I have ever written about Hart since he died. I do not like it.  It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, or that I’m struggling for words.  No, I have too many words, too many disparate thoughts that I don’t want to acknowledge.  It feels strange to even type out his name.  This is the worst I have ever felt while writing.

I think that it’s probably important.  To speak, I mean.  Or write, in this case.  Even if I don't ever do it, even if I'm not good at it. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve made it to speaking yet.  I talk about Hart, about what he was like, about the things he did; I even occasionally talk about our relationship.  I don’t talk about his death.  I’ll give facts, snippets of useless information to anyone who asks – and no one asks - but I don’t talk about it the way you’d talk about something important.  I give suitably morose “too bad” statements, lay it out as if it were nothing more than a macabre timeline of unfortunate events, and then end my story with a joke and a chuckle.  It is a self-defense mechanism that I am not sure I understand. 

When I was in high school, I wrote an essay about my brother’s struggles with depression.  I’m not sure what I did with it; it’s probably long gone by now, victim of numerous hard drive wipes and catastrophic computational failures, but I may have even included it in my undergraduate applications.  I’ve rarely thought about that essay, and I don’t remember what was in it, other than that I titled it “Blankets.”  I think it made my parents very sad.

February ninth is the date that I remember.  Not the fifth, which is today.  I’m not sure what significance the ninth actually has, other than that which I’ve ascribed to it – I don’t know if that was when I learned he was dead, if that was when he died, if that was the day I flew to San Francisco, or if it has some other, even more disconnected relevance.  I don’t think it matters.

The ninth is next Thursday.  I know this because the gourmet foodstuffs my father and I ordered will be arriving on Tuesday, the seventh: Four quail, fifteen quail eggs, a pre-made container of duck-and-veal demi-glace, two large sections of duck foie gras, and some sort of caviar selection that my father has designed.  It feels strange to me to be celebrating.  Last year, I think I spent most of the day in my car, driving up and down the canyon roads near our house in Boulder.  This year, I am in Summit County, skiing at Copper Mountain and Arapahoe basin. 

My father told me yesterday that he thought Hart would approve of our plan of stuffing ourselves with expensive, decadent food.  I don’t know what Hart would have thought.  Hart is dead.  I don’t usually like ascribing emotions or opinions to him.  Josh is probably right, though.  There are things that Hart liked, and pigging out was one of them. 

At some point in the last several weeks I reminded myself that it was February, which meant that it had already been two years.  I must have blocked it out again, because yesterday, when my father reminded me, I realized I had forgotten.  I think it would have come back to me as we got closer to the ninth.  February fifth holds no meaning for me, although it apparently does for my parents.  That’s up to them.  Mostly, I find that reality is what you make it.

The second year has been worse than the first.  When I came back from school, I felt as though I had some sort of purpose.  I was not pleased to be back in Colorado, but I could tell myself that I was doing my part to keep our family together, and that, at least, had some sort of meaning, some sort of importance.  Working at my father’s company was just a temporary thing; it helped him get back to work and it kept me from losing my mind.  Now, it has been two years since I graduated, and the only progress I have made is, finally, completing a set graduate school applications.  I haven’t even decided if I want to go back to graduate school in English.  Some days I think that I should go to culinary school.  Or get more serious about cobbling, sewing, tailoring, even biology.  Even law school.  Once again, I’m working at Stratus, feeling more out of place than I ever did during my first stint, feeling as though I ought to be doing something else, feeling as though I’m somehow gaming the system and stifling my own growth, but also feeling relieved at having a job. 

People ask me, “How are you doing?” Or, “How are your parents?” I always tell them, “OK.” Usually, I don’t want to talk to them.  I don't know what they're asking.  Do they mean, "How are you doing?" Or do they mean, "How are you coping with the death of your brother?" Most people don’t ask, though; they’ll ask me what I’ve been up to, what I’ll be doing next year, if I’m planning on staying in Colorado.  I’ve been here for two years.  Two years is a long time.  Have you seen Finding Nemo? You know how the Ellen Degeneres-fish repeats “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming,” to herself, over and over again?  When I got back from school, that’s what I would tell myself to do. “Just keep swimming; Stop, and you’ll sink.  You’ll drown.  You’ll die.  You’ll wallow, you’ll be stuck, stuck somehow somewhere someway.

I knew that the first year after Hart died would be a bad year.  I didn’t think that the second year would be worse. The first year was survival. The second year is uncertain, vague, gelatinous, lacking in gravity.  What do you do when you realize that you are alive?  That you are alive, but that nothing will ever be the same again, ever?  It felt like someone had accidentally hit “pause,” that Hart had just stepped out for a minute, and that soon enough he’d step right back in.  I spent a year keeping my head above water.  I don’t know what to do now. 

I have nightmares about Hart.  Not that he’s dead, but that he’s alive.  He’s alive, and he’s just been pretending, or hiding, or there’s been some terrible misunderstanding.  I’m always angry when he reappears: “How could you do this?! Why did you have to die?  Why can’t you stay dead?”  My dream-identity can never cope with the double-shock of learning that he died, acclimating, and then learning that he’s alive; and so I wish that he were dead still, that I didn’t have to (once again) re-map the world in my throbbing head.  I feel very guilty about these dreams.

I have a few things of Hart’s.  They’re mostly unrecognizable now.  I have a pair of black, coated jeans that I bought with him while we were in Gothenburg.  I tailored them with my sewing machine, and now they’re like leggings.  I have a pair of APC jeans that I gave to him after I purchased a better-fitting pair.  Those were bleached, and worn, and now they’ve been dyed black.  I also have his Gameboy.  This summer, when my parents and I went to the family cabin on Lake Sunapee, I brought the newest Pokémon game with me.  Hart loved Pokémon, and whenever we went on family trips he’d bring it with him.  It was often infuriating at the time, but it felt right to bring it with me and slog my way through the game.  

I do not have enough time to have any time to waste.  I do not have time for bland foods, bland movies, or bland days. I do not have the patience for bland people.  I do not like to kill time, waste time, or pass time.  I don’t like it when I catch myself doing it.  It’s difficult to quantify that, to know how things fit into such a heavy-duty hierarchy.  I think, though, that it is most important to not stop having fun.  Surviving is not living. 

a glass

I've been trying, for a while, to come up with a variation on the "last word," which is my favorite cocktail. Attempts have included such disparate - and ultimately discarded - ingredients as rum, brandy, bourbon (this showed promise), and even Malibu's sultry coconut delight. Tonight, however, I feel as though I've finally hit on the winner:

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Synthese:

2 tequila (silver)
1 green chartreuse
1 maraschino (luxardo)
.8 st. germain
~.7 lime juice

Shake until very cold, strain into cocktail glass

Garnish with lime wheel.

Now, I was doing my measuring with a fruit juicer, meaning that only a rough 2 Oz. measurement was available to me. So, this could be slightly off. However, I think it's quite a successful drink, especially considering it all came about as a response to my current lack of gin.

The tequila and lime is a very obvious combination, but both the St. Germain and Maraschino work surprisingly nicely with a base that I really hadn't considered before tonight (I'm not much of a tequila drinker). It's much smoother than the Last Word, which is both a good and bad thing. The tequila gives the drink a sort of velvety smokiness, and although I enjoy the rough edges on the gin, this ends up being a drink that is familiar without tasting like a margarita. There's a definite kick to the combination, and I was pleased to discover that it really wasn't "too summery," which is really all that comes to mind when I think of tequila and lime.

So, I encourage you all to try your own spins on your favorite cocktails, as you never really know when you'll come up with a gem. Do try this one out as well, although you may have to do a bit of experimenting with proportion to nail the taste you're looking for.

City of Mirth

I tried to climb one of the towers, once. One of the big ones, I mean. The little ones are easy to climb, you can just shimmy up those until you get lost in the fog and can’t see the ground and it starts to get dark. Then you go down, if you don’t want to die. But you can’t get your hands around the big ones, and so you can’t climb them. They’re smooth, smooth as polished gold. There are no ledges, no handholds, no nothing. So, when I say that I tried to climb one of the big towers, what I really did was hurl myself into the side of a tower a few times and then give up.

There are no doors in the towers of Mirth – none that I’ve found, at least. There are windows, though, high up; windows behind which lights must be turning on and off, because something is up there, blinking randomly in the fog. I’ve never seen a person behind one of those windows. I’ve never seen anyone walk out of or into a tower either. But there are Mirthians. Oh yes, they’re there in their gilded spires, playing with light-switches while all around them the ones who come to Mirth scream and disappear.

On the subject of pants

I've never really cared for cuffed pants. Granted, I don't wear trousers often, but when I do, I don't really want to look like some asshole who hangs out at Pitti and spends the rest of the year blogging about yachts and tassel loafers.

Thickening

Driving a 996TT around Boulder is a lot like driving a WRX around Boulder:

1) Both have four wheels
2) Both have four wheel drive
3) Both are manual
4) Both have boxer engines

Well, I guess that those are about the only similarities, really - at least on paper. One is a 480 HP pocket supercar, the other is a friendly little four-wheeled ski-lift. But they're both sort of burbly and comfortable, and, well, car-like, and the Porsche isn't nearly as intimidating as you'd think.

It has surprisingly excellent visibility, with the one caveat being that you're pretty much staring at everyone else's bumpers when you drive around, which is actually a bit unnerving when you're surrounding by 3-ton SUVs carrying distracted mothers too busy using their cell phones to pull over for you.

In the shop's lot, I found myself laughing like a maniac as the starter ticked over and the throaty woofle of the flat-six filled the bubble cabin. It sounds like a tyrannosaurus trying to clear its throat, in the absolute best of ways.

The gearshift is very light, as is the clutch. It's certainly not a workout to drive the turbo, and after the initial trepidation that comes with pulling out into traffic, working through the gears really is as easy as in my Subaru. There's no reason to turn on the radio, because once you're moving, the heavy, throbbing bass of the engine is fairly all-encompassing, and does a great - and probably necessary - job of reminding you what your'e driving.

It's lurking malevolently in my garage at the moment, hunched and brooding like some horrific beast-machine from a mechanized, dystopian future. I'm looking forward to the next few weeks.