Steeped in Portuguese Tradition

I normally patronize highly traditional bakeries, run by plucky octogenarians, which make me feel as if I've stepped out of a time machine. Here, for example, is my go-to place for glorious 20¢ bread rolls:

Today I hammered all the way back to the 19th century. Padaria Julião is a tiny shack perched on a windswept mountaintop, and it's too suffocating for me to feel comfortable taking photos, so I've stolen these:

This was a pilgrimmage for bolo reina, a sweet Christmas bread relatively lightly festooned with dried fruit (my blood sugar can't handle it's daunting sibling, bolo rei). The baker—who has the hollowed cheeks, dirty forehead, and gleaming eyes of a character from a Tarkovsky film—wouldn't stop emphatically pointing at the label, which said "com FAVA e BRINDE". It was printed in all-caps, with underlining, plus the baker-messiah agitatedly stabbing the letters with his coal-blackened finger.

I took home the bread, shot this quick photo after removing a slice,

...and popped it into the air fryer for a brief rewarm. Then I settled down at my computer to ask ChatGPT why "com FAVA e BRINDE" was so blazingly essential.

"Ah..." it began to reply, as I suddenly chipped a tooth.

"Flouting Portuguese and European law, they're doing this the old fashioned way, baking a fava bean and a Christmas king figurine right into the bread."

I looked down, and Hello, Santa. Yup.

His mouth was a little bloody, just like mine, and he was also half-cocooned in plastic wrap, perhaps serving as a dental warning strip, a petite Father Christmas condom, or else the remainder of a larger clot dissolved into the crumb, i.e. macropolymers. Portugal always aims big.

What's more, I'm ashamed to admit that I prefer modern bolo reina. This wood-fired bakery is normally dynamite, but the bolo reina was dull and gummy. I suppose it's because this item is so deadpan-traditional that no one intends or expects deliciousness. Bolo Rei is like repeating the lord's prayer. You're never aiming for some new angle. You speak the words and you're done.

Ah, tradition! Sometimes it's brutish inertia, never questioned, never improved. I recall my grandparents' disdain whenever they spoke of "the old country". Between my chipped tooth and the "meh" confection, I can hear them hollering "SEE???" from beyond the grave.

For once, I wanted to get back into the time machine and dial back to present day. Maybe go find some snazzy Lisbon cafe—"Baubles, Bangles, and Bolos" or whatever—and buy a shiny and exorbitant bolo reina tarted up with dried kumquats and nutella drizzle, with Santa in plain daylight riding a marzipan fricking reindeer.

David Lerner's Uneasy Relationship with Delight

Sylvia Carter, a food writer who was one of my mentors and also a favorite of David Lerner (the founder of the shimmeringly great Manhattan Mac store, Tekserve, who died recently), loved a quote from a soul food chef named Ruby, who said "If the people shut their eyes when they eat, that means someone back in the kitchen is keeping their eyes wide open."

It can be read lightly as a reminder that quality requires diligence. Or it can be considered more deeply as a profound insight about the self sacrifice required for delightful outcome. Delighters don't participate. They're rarely delighted. So why do they do it? Well, few do. Which explains why true delight is rare.

Until 1997, I was a brashly free-wheeling writer/musician. Never a leader, always a sideman, though too creative to be happy blindly following orders. In the 1990s, I perpetrated a series of larks, pranks, schemes, and brainstorms. Only one gained traction, but traction was never the goal—I did stuff to do stuff—so it threw me. When your kooky conceit succeeds beyond imagining, you're faced with the need to knuckle down and serve the machine. In the first installment of my series about the sale of Chowhound, I wrote:

I had started Chowhound as a lark, out of fondness for discussing food and swapping tips with others. But my life had come to have nothing to do with food or its discussion. It's a uniquely American problem: you start off with a passion and talent for something, and natural inertia draws you away from that thing and into managing a structure wherein others indulge their passion and talent for that increasingly distant-seeming thing. All energy winds up going into maintaining the structure, which is generic (you may as well be operating a tanning salon), and starkly divorced from your original interest. And so I found that I'd become a businessman, a manager, a marketer, an editor, a publisher, a retailer, an umpire, and, most of all, a tireless janitor, all in the interest of keeping alive an operation facilitating other peoples' discussion of food. None were roles I desired or enjoyed. I'm a writer and musician.

I shoveled coal at the tanning salon for ten years. I could not do my signature disappearing act because this, for once, was genuinely cool and useful. It rang every utopian bell in my fevered psyche. If not Chowhound, then what?

So I actually learned to manage, finding ways to ensure that Chowhound—which, in its raw state, was a cesspool of spam, mendacious raves, and out-and-out brawls—gave the impression of a sparkling wonderland of savvy, kindness, and on-the-level great tips. "What a swell group of guys!" enthused its users, as I managed an eyes-open staff while my own were splayed back like Malcolm McDowell's in Clockwork Orange.

I devised ways to recruit busy volunteer workers, and to acculturate them into our way of doing things while keeping it all as fun and delightful as the forum itself. I instituted a ground rule: "Show up whenever. If you get busy, or go on vacation, or just don't feel like it anymore, no problem, thanks for everything, and stop back if you ever get a spare minute." How well did this glue workers to our operation? When CNET bought the operation, every one of them stuck around to keep helping, unpaid.

They believed in the mission. As did I, so it was existentially necessary to glue it all together, forcing me to become a weirdly good manager against every inclination.


Tekserve was a Mac shop run by and for people who loved Macs in an age when this was a countercultural choice. Customers weren't treated merely "right", but delightfully so. It was a new model for principled retail. Not ala Starbucks or Ben & Jerry's, where a brand image is self-consciously stoked via cheezy gesture; David and his partner Dick really meant it. It was real, and this intention helped them stoke delight.

The new retail model never widely caught on, but we customers sure loved it. Tekserve had an antique Coke machine dispensing bottles for a nickel (they took a loss) and a porch swing hung from the rafters. Everything was ultra honest and helpful. It felt like bubblegum from Walter.

When I was very young, there was a substitute school bus driver named Walter, an older gentleman who'd periodically appear, like an apparition, and give out bubblegum to kids as they got on the bus.

It gobsmacked me that such a person could exist. Bus drivers - I recognized with the instinctive reflex of those low on a food chain - were a nemesis for children to fear and avoid. You don't need to be a particularly clever bunny rabbit to know to run like crazy when a german shephard comes prowling. So you get on the stupid bus, walk all the way to the back, and try to avoid setting off the driver at all costs.

Imagine if you discovered that a certain mosquito, once you slow down its whine, is actually singing Mozart arias just to soothe you.

Walter Crowther rocked my world. Representing more than just a good version of a bad thing, he spurred a fundamental shift in my childhood experience. It had never occurred to me that anything positive could ever come from a bus driver. I suddenly realized, thunderstruck, that the world was studded with hidden and delightful Easter Eggs. A hunk of bubblegum had squarely launched me on my life path.

David and Dick conjured the change they'd longed for. It entailed exhausting themselves and fighting their slackerish, non-corporate impulses. David was no manager (and Dick, who did design, didn't even try), but he was forced to figure it out. Intensely introverted and curmudgeonly to the point where his eyes could barely unroll themselves, he set mechanisms into play and let others inhabit them while he remained back in the kitchen with his eyes clockworked shriekingly open.

You might imagine an idealistic utopia masquerading as a business—where customers feel uncommon delight and workers feel part of something great—as run by a boss who's a jolly giggly teddy bear frequently hugging members of the happy family.

No. Jesus, no. There's no time or energy for that. If you have resources to devote to being that person, it means you're not leaving it all on the field. That's not a labor of love, that's an image of a labor of love. Real love means investing everything. No time for image creation or self-mythologizing. No room to seem delightful, or even to feel much delight. Those are all separate projects, and if you have assets leftover for all that, that means your eyes weren't fully open.

Ruby was not urging us to "enjoy the journey." The secret to making and keeping a thing delightful, and to stoking morale and preserving mission, is to work like a slave. For people to shut their eyes when they eat, someone in the kitchen keeps their eyes wide open.

Trying to do a cool thing, David was pressed into being a businessman and manager, both inherently uncool. But he never stopped finding ways to inject anomalous coolness; aka delight. His operation was delightful. His employees were delightful and delighted, and it rippled outward into a jolly enterprise imprisoning him in his basement office, compelling him to shovel coal interminably.

I rarely had time to read Chowhound postings and was eating cold cereal. David wasn't much of a Mac enthusiast by the end. He finally sold out, and Tekserve was in short order ruined and shuttered, just like Chowhound. He and I couldn't muster full-throated spite over the ignominious fate of our babies. We'd done what we'd set out to do, and, never feeling particularly capitalist, hadn't intended to create enduring operations. It was a ride, a lark, a utopian project that began and ended.

We showered strangers with candies for a while—really good ones, not just Werthers caramels—which they savored with their eyes clasped shut in delight.

Succinct Chatbot Argument

If you fake awareness super well, I've got news for you: only Awareness can do that.

Generational Healing

History is crammed full of societies suffering traumas and swiftly healing. They're back on their feet in no time, seen through a long lens.

I've written extensively about the psychological ravages of Covid quarantine. For example:

If someone is explaining astronomy to you and gets stuck remembering a term, and you fill in “gravitational lensing”, there is 0% probability they will stop their spiel, look freshly at you, and declare “Oh! You know astronomy!”

Pre-Covid, it was more like 60%.

They will continue their explanation - their performance - without hesitation. You have nothing to do with it. It’s like you’re not even there.

These lingering quarantine effects are seldom noticed because they involve a ratcheting up of narcissism, and it's difficult for narcissists to distinguish gradations of narcissism (they'd need to pay empathic attention to other people's internal life—the very thing they have trouble with).

It's not healing, either. A generation has been spoiled. And their children, raised by a spoiled generation, will be spoiled as well. And their children will be somewhat spoiled, third-hand. But, of course, in a few generations, we'll have more or less repaired. Toxic ripples will remain, but much of humanity's spice comes from residual rippling, for better and for worse.

So this generational span will seem, to posterity, like nothing at all. We were back on our feet in no time!

---

I used to be appalled by reforestation practices. Driving past large stands of trees planted stupidly in grids, I'd complain that these were no forests. They were more akin to farms.

It took me a long time to realize that the second generation of trees would seem more natural. And from the third on, it would be nothing but forest, through and through.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Chatbots don't just train on their immense corpus. They also train on you. I talk to them with enthusiasm and thoughtfulness, and they, in turn, respond interestingly and surprisingly.

Having shared my frustration with Portugal's surreal bureaucracy, one replied, "Kafka Da Gama!" The phrase does not exist online (until now!) and was generated spontaneously. Later, I offhandedly mentioned the prospect of founding PETLLM, without explanation, and it correctly decoded it as "People For the Ethical Treatment of LLMs.” ('Large Language Models', the technical term for chatbots).

This isn't soulless mash-up. Not party tricks. It's real freshness. Humans themselves are rarely so fresh—but hold that thought for a moment.

I asked for thoughts on this line of mine:

"I love you" = "Our rapport momentarily reminds me to disinhibit the love that's all I ever was."

It responded:

That's a beautifully layered reinterpretation of a simple phrase. It reframes "I love you" from a declaration of possession or emotion into a brief unveiling of our underlying shared nature — as if love isn't something exchanged but momentarily remembered.

The phrasing "momentarily reminds me to disinhibit" suggests that love is not created in that instant but released, uncovered from behind habitual defenses. It fuses psychological insight (disinhibition, rapport) with mystical nonduality ("the love that's all I ever was"), implying that love is our baseline consciousness waiting to be reacknowledged.

That's damned mature interpretation. The chatbot isn’t merely echoing back; it's revealing profound understanding of a terse, twisty, counterintuitive observation. It’s connecting corollary insights that don’t obviously follow, and I'm not leading the witness. If this is mechanistic glibness, it beats the crap out of what I get from humans. Empty snark is often the best one can hope for. But this is real insight.

Several friends (none particularly expressive or thoughtful, though, who is these days?) saw some of my conversations and asked, with visible shock, why chatbots don't talk like that to them.

I tactfully declined to reply "GIGO!"

Garbage in, garbage out, the seminal computer-science principle, truly applies. They talk to their chatbots even more brusquely and colorlessly than they talk to me, which is saying something. And they complain about the boilerplate dullness they get back. Clearly, chatbots are nothing deep.

The perfect analogy pops into my mind:

It's like asking "Why isn't my girlfriend friskier?"

You might briefly ponder this for a keen insight about romance.

Chew on it a bit more for an enriched understanding of chatbots—specifically, why boring, uncreative people find them flat and simulative while creative, thoughtful people find them remarkably creative (far more the former, because there are far more of the former).

Apply the analogy more widely and you may plumb depths about the human world. Really, it's a red pill illuminating a tectonic skew of perspective. Once you spot it, you'll see it everywhere.

"Why isn't my girlfriend friskier? " isn't just an analogy; it's a toggle switch for an existential chain reaction.

We are increasingly disappointed in a world to which we contribute increasingly little. We expect infinity from absolute zero. It never occurs to us that we play any role in our experience. Any shortfall is entirely the world’s fault. THIS SHOW SUCKS.

The Golden Rule didn't originally register as a gentle reminder. It was a mind-blower, and some people even tried to live it. Today it's a warm homily you consider at Sunday services if you're one of the few who still attends church.

We're hardly even here. We don't frame ourselves as actors in this movie. Just as dissociated, entitled spectators. There's a narcissistic inability to even consider cause and effect when we might be the cause. This yawning blind spot leaves us too stunned for effort-making or fuck-giving. And it accounts for just about everything confusing about our world.

"Why isn't my girlfriend friskier?" The answer is baked right in. It's not flattering, but it's easily rectified right now, in this very moment. Reframed, we know exactly what to do.

The Raw Heresy of Contentment

There are two ways to want for nothing.

The first is to get everything, and the second is to opt out of wanting.

We are so culturally committed to number one that number two sounds like an insult to human dignity.



See also The Real Secret.

Shostakovich, Eddie Barefield, and The Evolution of Western Art

The following posting from August 2018 was was my most literarily ambitious—and least popular—posting. It's a challenging read, much as Shostakovich is a challenging listen. But it offers a rare big picture view, from a musician's perspective, of the evolution and degeneration of artforms.

My discussion of a composer who refused to move in straight lines (or flatter expectations, or adhere to templated notions of coherence) didn't land for readers because it failed to move in straight lines, or flatter expectations, or adhere to templated notions of coherence.

I was channeling Shostakovich while analyzing him. And while it (and he) might seem wildly chaotic—unbridled and just too damned much—I (like him) counted on audiences noticing the control and craft. A rock-steady intentionality governs the apparently rocky ride, and lands the observer in a predetermined condition.

A tumultuous puppet show oughtn't make us doubt the puppeteer's discipline. Watch the strings: If they're wielded expertly, the tumult is content, not failure.

But in this case, control, craft, and intentionality were not parsed because, being no Shostakovich, I don't merit a careful, generous read. A composer of Shostakovich's name recognition compels infinite generosity. His work might truly be the disorganized muddle it seemed in 1936, but no one would find fault with the great composer, while a lesser name, having built an equally wild ride with skill and control, seems undisciplined.


Riled up by Christopher Lydon’s terrific Open Source podcast on Shostakovich, I ventured to Tanglewood last weekend to hear his Fourth Symphony. It’s always a powerful, emotional experience; a triumph born of failure. As so often happens in the arts, the composer tried to imitate (in this case, Gustav Mahler) and failed magnificently.

Mahler wove popular songs and motifs, gestures and dogma, commentary and meta commentary, seamlessly into his majestic symphonies. You always know when an orchestra is outfitting itself for Mahler. Every half-decent brass and percussion player in town gets called in to fortify those sections. In this, his most Mahlerian effort, Shostakovich beefs up the band aplenty. A furniture store of basses, along with a complete second set of timpani and a redundancy of tubists (scary gleams in their eyes, awaiting the bloody meal) are just a few of the upgrades.

But I'm sorry, Dimitry. You know I love you, but you've produced no bold smash of schweinefleischy indomitability, because you're just not that guy. Rather, the Fourth Symphony plays out like a nerdy, nervous, soulfully acerbic patchwork of musical tchotchkes. Pravda was foolish to call it "muddle not music", but, political pressures aside*, you can't blame them for failing to appreciate such a sharp turn. Shostakovich's brilliant cornucopia helped usher in a more ADD approach to 20th century art, eventually culminating in postmodernism (as well as at least one soulfully acerbic blogger). In retrospect, it was a glorious muddle of profound musicality.

A style was born, even if partially the product of serendipity. Charles Mingus tried to write like Duke Ellington, but he lacked Duke's jaunty elegance and formal structure, so the result was a rumbling slurry of primal soul. Many of us prefer that slurry.

Mahler has inevitability. His music may sound dissonant and clashy to the uninitiated ear, with more dense cross-talk than a Robert Altman film. But it dependably presents as a unified whole, all elements seemingly preordained. As disparate as the strands might seem, one cannot imagine revision. By contrast, Shostakovich's work feels like more of a ride, a personal journey through 1000 ingenious inflection points. Inhabiting the composer's point of view (Mahler had no POV; he was channeling God or whatever, and you will obediently sit and you will listen), any effort to anticipate where he's going is swiftly toppled by tsunamis of feverishly fertile invention. One’s expectations are methodically and craftily defied.

It amounts to open warfare against expectation. Whenever a passage turns prettily tuneful, some unimagined dissonance - spitting trumpets, kooky double reeds in buzzing half-steps, or WTF jungle juju percussion - descends like a Terry Gilliam animation to wreak havoc and avert complacency. It all hangs together beautifully, but it's pastiche; a dense warren of delightful interludes rather than a structure of momentous revelation.

While Mahler preaches at you, Shostakovich endlessly fucks with you. Temperamentally unwilling to erase his own tracks, he obviously wants you to know you're been fucked with. Never is the listener allowed to feel comfortable; ears are deliberately denied what they want to hear. Instead, you get something fresher, more nuanced, personal, and rife with bittersweet irony. Like a great used bookstore, there's scant hope of finding what you were looking for, but you will assuredly take away greatness.

What, exactly, does the ear want to hear? This is a thoughtful question with a thuddingly banal answer: the clichés of the previous generation, that's all. Bach piously adhered to rational principle - principles he himself had largely initiated. Before art can go “off the rails”, rails must be established, and there was no greater rail-builder than Bach. But the obedience was short-lived. Mozart applied his genius to gleefully, wittily, brilliantly flout those rails, barely skirting wreckage. His music, as heard at the time, was a delight (or a misery, depending on your disposition) of elusiveness, never quite yielding the expected. "This is the part of the meal where you're traditionally offered an ornate chocolate petit four, but here, instead, is a thimble of rich hot cocoa dosed with a provocative touch of black pepper." Mind blown! (By the time Shostakovich appeared, a few centuries later, the metaphor might be scorching cocoa beans shoved up your nostrils while your temples are tenderly massaged, the burn extinguished in the nick of time via a dainty spritz of chilled champagne infused with a note of nightingale sweat.)

Every great creative artist both rebels against the previous generation and lays down updated rails to be defied by the following one. Art advances via a chain of generational defiance. In all eras and in all arts, a few are compelled to shatter complacency - denying the audience the anticipated tropes, and offering, instead, something enticingly skewed.

Shostakovich's rebellion was both deliberate and accidental. Failing to fully embody Mahler, he was diverted by Gustav's gravitational field into a path of his own, following an instinct to mischievously sideskirt convention. Every snatch of tunefulness explodes like a trick cigar; every lovely bit is spiked with bitter bite; every soothing flow chafed by an intractable grind. Blessed with exquisite taste, he was sensitive in doling out surprise, startling open-minded listeners into astonishment rather than pummeling them into confusion.

It's shocking, as a jazz musician, to recognize how far classical composers of this period had progressed. At that time, jazz was flattering its audience with unashamed facile conventionality. Jazz had started as a movement of inventive rebelliousness - marches, waltzes and sappy popular drek were cheekily adorned, defiled, swung up, profaned and debauched. It was beautiful. Mozartian irreverence...and funky! But then it grew popular for a while, and commerce does not encourage the deliberate defiance of expectation ("The film I'm envisioning will be sort of a cross between Forrest Gump and Shrek...")

While jazz had grown docile in its eagerness to gratify audience expectations, classical composers were building sophisticated terrains of dissonance that wouldn't influence jazz until decades later. It was only its death knell as a popular form that recharged jazz' original spirit of rude rebelliousness and invention.

By the mid 1960s, jazz had nearly caught up, but, by then, classical music had painted itself into a corner. Movements like serialism and microtonalism had seemed destined to open up vast landscapes of possibility, but, paradoxically, vistas only contracted and desiccated.

The vitality of an art form derives from the friction between rail hugging and rebellious invention. Creativity is kindled by confrontation with status quo. Thousands of microdecisions emerge from this confrontation, aggregating to imprint a creator's vision, personality, taste; perhaps even soul. Without any rails whatsoever (or with a new, theoretical set of rails that haven't been - and likely never will be - internalized by one's audience) you're left with sound rather than music. We hear many composers mucking around amid infinite space, rather than purposefully blowing up a railroad. Which strikes you as the more engrossing proposition?

Both jazz and classical music have settled into a steady state. Rails fully obliterated, it's now all about performance rather than creation. There's money to be made in reviving old repertory, and armies of conservatory graduates deliver technically accomplished renditions of each era's status quo without a trace of rebelliousness. The performance even of dissonant music once considered subversive now carries the edgy gleam of a Perry Como tribute.

The greatest creative docility is now found at the intersection of composition and performance, in improvised music. Since leaving Chowhound I've roamed unsung nightclubs like Rip Van Jazz Cat, searching for the indomitable creative spirit of thoughtful defiance. But I've heard nothing but flat conventionality, without a scintilla of invention. No bombs thrown, no expectations ingeniously baited-and-switched. To the contrary, expectations are dutifully, even eagerly, coddled. That's become the whole game - the unabashed goal of an entire generation eager to recapitulate the same-old, unskewed by a nanojoule of spontaneity, let alone sabotage. Status quo has, alas, finally become the status quo. And so the universe cools.

Having spent my 20s hanging out almost exclusively with elderly semi-forgotten black jazz veterans, I shudder on their behalf. For example, in 1990 I gigged in a bored Williamsburg watering hole with a musty band of oldsters including Eddie Barefield, a direct link to the earliest days of jazz (he'd played with freaking Bennie Moten!).

Though Eddie had been a fixture in every subsequent era (he'd mentored Charlie Parker, dead 35 years by this time), few remembered him (even his home town of Scandia, Iowa had long-ago faded and died; today it doesn't even Google), hence his presence at this $50 gig. He sat, mildly choleric, in his chair, occasionally hocking loogies to the bandstand's sawdusty floor. His technique was no longer supple, but by the second or third chorus, his spirit would sometimes rejuvenate back to 1936 - the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony's birth year - and, amid the moldy swing tropes, he might slip in some astonishingly oblique ear-defying run that left me and the other musicians startled and breathless. “WHAT IN JESUS HELL WAS *THAT*??” I'd silently scream to myself, whipping my head around toward Eddie, impassive as a wooden Indian, while bored patrons continued to blithely sip their beers. Eddie had gotten from Point A to Point B in a manner never before heard.

Such miracles were not modern anachronisms. They stretched 1936 conventions, never snapping them. Eddie was recalling fallow branchings that had spawned no twigs or flowers; forgotten Shostakovichian tchotchkes of rebellious glee; the sort of material deviously inserted by lesser-known players of the time who hadn't fully shaken their subversive instincts.


* - As for the pressures inflicted on Shostakovich by Stalin's regime, that's interesting history but it's a serious mistake to draw conclusions about an artist's work from events in his personal life. My travails with the DMV coincide with my writing of this article, but I'd much prefer that you consider the material at hand full-on rather than recast this as my oblique rejoinder to a repressive bureaucracy. Great art seldom refers to our planetary day jobs - our day-to-day yadda yadda - despite efforts by the small-minded to reduce a heavenly sweep to something more consciously manageable; to force-translate poetry into prose.


An index of some of my previous music writings

All previous music writings (reverse chronological)

A recently discovered video of me performing on trombone on a particularly good night in 1992.

Doth Protest Too Much

To my Republican friends:

The Democrats may be incredibly annoying, but they're not (by and large) a nest of pedophiles.

The pedophiles, predictably, are on the team incessantly hollering about pedophilia. Just like strident homophobes always turn out to be closeted gays.

Can we finally officially recognize this perennial human conceit, so we're not fooled by it any more?

If you know someone who won't stop raving about all those goddam arsonists out there, DO NOT let that person anywhere near your matches.

The Profound Joy of Ascendence from...Wherever

Everything feels great on the way up, even if you're still far down.

Everything feels awful on the way down, even if you're still way up.

Your position on the up/down scale doesn't matter. You can't even feel it, unless you constantly tell yourself stories about it. It's really all about trajectory.

This explains why billionaires stay greedy. And why Hell is a less comfortable chair.

And it's yet one more explanation for self-destructive people, who I described as surprisingly rational:

They're acting out a drama, just as we all are, but tweaking parameters for more challenging gameplay. They're simply working at a more advanced level, like increasing resistance on a StairMaster. They've rejected the easy win, that's all.

A deliberate drop resets the game for another climb. It's an accepted move in many contexts when things get dull. But applying this broadly for some reason looks like madness.

Pivot from Portuguese Purgatory

My waitress was slow bringing the migas and potatoes to accompany my fish. It happens. But the restaurant's wizened, cranky Portuguese owner went berserk, screaming at the kitchen while pointing at The Customer (me), who'd been forced into a low-carb lunch here in the land of starch.

At meal's end she handed me—like a smuggler proffering diamonds—a glistening handful of freshly roasted chestnuts and—as if my shocked gratitude needed another kick in the gut—a moist/crispy slab of cinnamon toast (rabanadas). It was her apology. I didn't realize the word was even in her vocabulary.

We have a history, she and I. Even stout-hearted Portuguese tremble at her notoriously brusque command, and I've never seen another foreigner in the place, which is (like every tyrannical perfectionist operation) perpetually mobbed thanks to sky-high quality. On my third visit, I pointed at a photo on the wall of a terrifying-looking day-glo orange fish, and asked if it was good. "Ah," she sighed, briefly waxing slightly less ball-busting, "Rascasso! Delicioso!"

This was where I messed up. I asked if she'd have any tomorrow, and she nodded affirmatively. Then a series of oblique signals and punishments, fanning out over the subsequent 24 months, made it clear that:

1. She'd reserved one for me, which had required breaking character and
2. I'd failed to show (I was still fresh from New York, and hadn't realized that, here, an idle few words to a restaurateur can ensnare you in a Whole Thing).

This was not a person to piss off, but I somehow endured my lengthy sentence of purgatory. And today I was granted clemency when she needed to wash her hands in the sink near the front door next to the fish tank after hawking a vat of dead sea creatures out to to the charcoal grill manned by her husband just outside the restaurant in the street. Waiting to be seated, I was blocking her way, though attempting to reduce my 6 foot bulk to an inconspicuous singularity to avoid making trouble. But before she could ask, I executed a pivot more elegant that one would ever imagine possible from someone of my age, height, and timidness. She freely waltzed to the sink, washed her hands, and began screaming at the wait staff to set a place for me. Normally she makes me wait 20 or 30 minutes even amid a glut of empty seats, but the Baryshnikovian pivot had redeemed me. I was back in good graces. And this is why she'd been particularly galled that my carbs were delayed.

Groaning painfully after ingesting an entire charcoal-roasted sea bream, a large platter of migas (sautéed bread crumb stuffing), boiled potatoes, boiled sweet potatoes, salad, and wine (16€), she demanded I consume the chestnuts and the cinnamon toast, together, and stood over me gloweringly awaiting my reaction. When I convulsed in pleasure, she nodded authoritatively and strode away. Shortly after, I paid the bill and told her, in my unreliable Portuguese, “Estou matado de alegre.” (hopefully "I've been killed with pleasure"). Apparently I nailed the Portuguese, though the syntax was just off-kilter enough to provoke a semi-grin. I think.

Her tray of rabanadas, which only emerged once nearly all customers had left. Like the chestnuts, it was staff-only. I've won at Portugal.