baking

the tail end of baking

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I wrote the other day about how I no longer derive joy from baking. But I discovered that in the middle of a medium-sized bake. Later I posted pictures of the baking, and everyone exclaimed, “You’re baking! But I thought you said you weren’t going to!” Yeah… I won’t. But I didn’t realize I didn’t want to until I was too far down the road of baking this recent stuff to stop. I finished the bake, vowed only to do my planned Halloween bake next month, and then that’s it.

Meanwhile, if you want to try your hand at the things I made for my office this week, here are the recipes:

baked out

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For the first time since last year, I am baking. With my old industrial-style bakes, I seemed to hit a peak in 2013-15, and it’s been slowing down ever since, finally reaching complete nothingness as 2017 dawned. I remember baking only twice in the second half of 2016, and what little inspiration I had for it has disappeared. I don’t think I have ever gone nine months in my entire life without baking – until now.

And now, as I take it up again, thinking I might get into it once I start, I keep thinking, “I want to get this over with.” For the first time ever, I got no joy from the process.

I think I have questioned before how these shifts occur, imperceptibly. You don’t realize that the excitement and drive is leaving until it’s just gone. I am not sure I understand. I don’t think I need to.

I will finish this particular bake, and I will do one for Halloween. And that, oddly, may be the end.

But the last year or so has seen me (almost) wave goodbye to all kinds of things I thought I’d never tire of: writing letters, creating and sending my Halloween cards and CD mixes (the last-ever physical copies go out in mid-October) and now baking. Other things have begun to be more important, and for the first time in my whole life, I have begun to think more selfishly. Good or bad, I am simply tired and no longer want to make these efforts.

Photo by Jennifer Pallian on Unsplash

subtle change

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I may finally have emerged from a grey-food period. I was eating mostly the same mundane meal daily because it was easy, healthy and almost instant. But I’ve finally decided I should put in a bit of upfront effort and prepare some variation and make a few meals for a few days in advance.

My latest go-to, at the very least, is very colorful, although not necessarily pretty. With a base of a grain mix of quinoa, buckwheat, millet and amaranth, I throw in some beans (kidney or black usually), red and/or yellow peppers, red onions, asparagus, baby spinach, tomatoes and who knows what else? And then sometimes add a bit of salmon or a few prawns, if I am in that kind of mood (prefer mostly vegan eating but sometimes seem to need a change).

I think my laziest thing is that I don’t want to bother cooking, so if I do it all at once and make a bunch of well-measured out bowls and cook enough of this grain stuff to many such bowls, I don’t have to think about it every single day. I know people have been saying that to me forever – just take the one ‘hit’ in terms of time, prep, patience, and you will thank yourself. But even that, until recently, I could not force myself to do. But I suppose alongside all the rest of the changes this year, thinking ahead and preparing even for the most boring thing I can think of (eating) is something I can ken.

Now the question remains: will I ever bake again?

unhappy shirts

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A Tailor Called Sorrow
–Betti Alver
Yesterday in drizzling rain
on the road,
depression came
with its scissors open.

He put unhappy shirts
around the necks
of children,
and stitched black markings
on the lives of others.

Around the red faces
the tailor called sorrow
let a cloth with death silk
in it
hang,
and mingled white basting thread
in their hair.

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash

Farewell – ПРОЩАНИЕ

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Because, for some unknown reason, I didn’t include the English translation when I first shared this…

“daylong, nightlong, interminable grind”

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Reading Pornography in Old Age
–Howard Nemerov

Unbridled licentiousness with no holds barred,
Immediate and mutual lust, satisfiable
In the heat, upon demand, aroused again
And satisfied again, lechery unlimited.

Till space runs out at the bottom of the page
And another pair of lovers, forever young,
Prepotent, endlessly receptive, renews
The daylong, nightlong, interminable grind.

How decent it is, and how unlike our lives
Where “Fuck you” is a term of vengeful scorn
And the murmur of “sorry, partner” as often heard
As ever in mixed doubles or at bridge.

Though I suspect the stuff is written by
Elderly homosexuals manacled to their
Machines, it’s mildly touching all the same,
A reminiscence of the life that was in Eden

Before the Fall, when we were beautiful
And shameless, and untouched by memory:
Before we were driven out to the laboring world
Of the money and the garbage and the kids

In which we read this nonsense and are moved
At all that was always lost for good, in which
We think about sex obsessively except
During the act, when our minds tend to wander.

Photo by Dmitri Popov on Unsplash

“this unique distance from isolation”

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Talking in Bed
–Philip Larkin
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Photo by Quin Stevenson on Unsplash

it’s just a city

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The City
–Eddy van Vliet

The city is covered with places you
took from me. Full of joint
footsteps, full of joint laughs.
They were sheltered by dreams and if need be
love grabbed the gun to protect them.

Tell my legs how to evade
what belonged to them.

Tell them. They refuse to believe
that the theatres have burned, restaurants
were hit by plagues, terraces vanished
into thin air, hotels closed,
the courtyard was demolished.

I bow my head and think
the rain will not hit me. Thus
I shall forget what was taken from me.

“thighs cemented shut”

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Aphrodite
-Louise Glück
A woman exposed as rock
has this advantage:
she controls the harbor.
Ultimately, men appear,
weary of the open.
So terminates, they feel,
a story. In the beginning,
longing. At the end, joy.
In the middle, tedium.

In time, the young wife
naturally hardens. Drifting
from her side, in imagination,
the man returns not to a drudge
but to the goddess he projects.

On a hill, the armless figure
welcomes the delinquent boat,
her thighs cemented shut, barring
the fault in the rock.

Parting in stations/Craving comfort

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For the first time in my life, I have no butter in the house. I usually have a small stockpile because I’m always preparing to bake. But I haven’t baked since Christmas, which must be the longest bake-drought of my adult life. If I were to get into it, I am sure the drive would return, but now isn’t the time. Sometimes I wonder about shifts like this – are they phases, or are they permanent changes in our make-up? Are lemon cakes and Anzac biscuits a part of the past?

While in the now (or ‘the noo’ to be all Scot about it), the scent of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies does not waft through the air, I am surrounded by sunlight, poetry and music. All ache and exultation.

from Mean Free Path
by Ben Lerner
What if I made you hear this as music
But not how you mean that. The slow beam
Opened me up. Walls walked through me
Like resonant waves. I thought that maybe
If you aren’t too busy, we could spend our lives
Parting in stations, promising to write
War and Peace, this time with feeling
As bullets leave their luminous traces across
Wait, I wasn’t finished. I was going to say
Breakwaters echo long lines of cloud

Oh, what could be more beautiful than “I thought that maybe/If you aren’t too busy, we could spend our lives/Parting in stations, promising to write/War and Peace, this time with feeling”?

Maybe the soundtrack du jour: Ruby Haunt’s “Crave”. It sounds just like something I would have fallen in love with in high school but sounds immediate at the same time. It pulls my heartstrings.

“Listen to the girl, who waits by your side, in a simple world, no need to ask why, nothing’s gonna change, the people pass by, you feel no pain, as she starts to cry. Craving, craving some comfort. You can’t explain, the things on your mind, you’re on your way, you won’t rewind. It’s over with, no need to lie, you’re just a myth, but you know it’s fine. Craving, craving some comfort.”

If only life were like living in a bubble of poetry, literature, music, going to gigs, walking through the fields and forests, last-minute adventures, linguistic parades and endless conversations.

Oh, wait, it kind of is.