Inputs
The Dwight Garner Grub Street Diet: Never have I wanted to be someone else so intensely.
Tonight, the first course is our favorite thing: fresh mozzarella layered with slices of the season’s last good tomatoes. We fleck the platter with olive oil, salt, and basil. When we’re alone, we fall on this like vampires onto an ingenue’s neck. I’m astonished, constantly, at how many people are out there — some of them serious eaters — who think they’ve had fresh mozzarella when they haven’t. This stuff must be bought, fellow earthlings, while it is still warm (we usually get ours at the Fairway on West 74th Street), and it can never have been chilled. You need to buy two orange-size balls: one to eat in big hunks while standing over the sink, while they drip all over you as if they were ripe peaches; the second to slice and serve with your tomatoes. You know this, right? If not, you can thank me later.
Company by Shannon Sanders: Proceed to the middle of the enviability spectrum, where the members of a Black extended family in the DC area depicted in this book of short stories reside. If you are Eh on short stories, these feel interconnected enough to pull you along.
The Autobiography of Gucci Mane by Gucci Mane and Neil Martinez-Belkin: Then we have GM, through whose 270 page autobiography one proceeds as if in a demented funhouse where there are plenty of obvious hazards but even the happier looking corners can’t be trusted, as every triumph just seems to trigger another violent altercation or cough-medicine induced debacle. I got the book on Kindle but I’m going to try to get a peek at a hard copy at some point because I am really hoping for photos of some of the six-figure pieces of jewelry he mentions in the book.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff: And more miserable yet than GM going through opioid withdrawal on a prison toilet is the heroine of TVG, a teenaged girl who chooses possible death by escaping into the wintery wilderness over certain death in the starving Jamestown colony. If a metric of a book’s quality is how many pressing things it compelled me to neglect because I couldn’t stop reading it, this one is way up there (plus having to immediately start something fluffy as a palate cleanser when it was done).
The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.
Outputs
Recent events that I thought might turn into something but didn’t quite achieve critical mass:
A racoon spent an afternoon sleeping on the neighbor’s second floor balcony. At one point the creature woke up, looked over the side, decided “That’s a ‘later me’ problem”, then went back to sleep. The neighbor called Animal Control, and I was hopeful that their involvement would precipitate dramatic and/or comic events. Sadly, they told the neighbor they would only come if the racoon hadn’t left by morning, which it disobligingly did. My only consolation was that this did not happen during the pandemic, when the disappointment at being deprived of a spectacle would have been crushing.
T was away so I had to take N to hockey and get him into the inscrutable padding that has to protect his precious body from the other kids or the boards or the ice when he decides he’s ready for a break and drops languidly in a heap. A dad from the team who lived in Tamil Nadu until adulthood and has never been ice skating himself had to lace Ned’s skates while I, who never shuts up about my Nordic blood, looked on ineptly. Our babysitter was with us because she wanted to see N skate, and when I said “You know, if you meet someone and fall in love and end up living here and having kids, this could be what your life is like one day!” she made such an interesting face!
I had coffee with the wife of a senior professor in T’s department, where I learned that hearing that your future is going to unfold exactly how you think it will barring some dramatic action by you can be both horrifying and activating. For context, after her husband got tenure she bought half a dozen sheep that live in their backyard, and swam across a Scottish lake.
We took B to the ER for reasons that I decided were not appropriate for public sharing. I’ll just say that he’d eaten like seven apples earlier that day.
Condiment Corner
Always a banner day here at Ropography HQ when I can justify opening a new mustard. Do you ever come across pantry items and reflect on all the other cabinets in all the other apartments you’ve put it in and think wow I’ve had this since Durham it is definitely time to chuck it? That’s a little bit how I feel about this mustard, which was brought at my request by a Finnish au pair who finished her time with us quite a while ago. It is a little bit sweet and very mild. It is very golden, almost orange, which is what I prefer in a mustard possibly because this exact product imprinted on me. I thought I remembered it having a bit more kick but perhaps I am thinking of the spicy version, which she also brought and is floating around here somewhere. Hopefully it turns up before we move again.
At some point I started using song lyrics for all the subject lines. All songs sourced are here.