Reframing Alcoholism

I spend a lot of time explaining about framing, but not enough time giving real world examples. This isn't navel-gazing Eastern MYSTICISM. This is the key to happiness, to change and growth and learning. It's the key to everything.

Want to be The Messiah? Framing is the only way. Want to escape depression? Depression's when your perpsective (same as "framing") gets stuck. Want to see your family and friends stroll out of a funeral 3000% happier without even noticing what happened, like by magic? Framing! Want to talk meaningfully to someone on the opposite side of the political divide? Framing!

You can't persuade or help anyone by pushing opinions or facts at them, or by arguing with them. But you can kindle reframing. that you can do. It's within your power. It requires effort and polish and deep empathy, and you must bake fresh to ensure a custom-tailored result, but it can help powerfully.

I recently sent the following to an alcoholic friend:

I'm not a temperance guy. If you want to fuck yourself up, I don't judge (though at a certain point I'd imagine it would get boring for you). But here's the thing: putting yourself in that condition is how you say "No!" to the universe. "No, I don't want to perceive you clearly and soberly", and "No, I don't want to contribute helpfully or coherently". That's what drunks and addicts do. That's the mindset. It's a denial of what's going on (and the problem from out here is that we're the universe, so you're saying "No" to all of us, even as you eagerly try to connect and contribute). It doesn’t feel like a party to us out here when you’re slobbering. I'm not sure you get this.

But you don't actually have this “No" mindset. There’s stuff in the world that bugs you, and makes you anxious, but, more deeply, you're someone who lives to express, comprehend, and connect. And those are all sober functions. That's not drunk stuff, it's the opposite of that. Those things are about saying "Yes" to the universe, and they all require mental clarity. So you are, by nature, one of the most sober motherfuckers I ever met.

You don’t need to grow or learn or meditate or “change” to do those things. You don’t need to add stuff, just subtract. Just subtract boring stuff.

Hey, it’s an option.

Chowhounding Évora (Portugal), Part 2

Continuing from Part 1...



Vinho e Noz
Vinho e Noz (click title, above, for link), despite being hidden way out of the town center on a scary residential street, was so stuffed with American tourists that the waiter couldn't speak to me in Portuguese—he was 100% in English language mode. But the food is real, traditional, non-pandering. Is it touristic? I'm confused!

Nice shroomy throwaway.

We need to talk about the cilantro. Portugal loves cilantro, but Alentejo worships it. They use more of it, and in mysterious ways. An Alentejan chef does things with cilantro that Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican chefs could scarcely imagine. I tried to capture it in a photo. Behold cilantro as biomass:

I'm digging into a holy grail. I remember açorda from my music tours of Portugal in the early 90s when you'd get a thin soup full of garlic and strewn with some bread cubes, much like Castilian garlic soup. These days, when you ask for açorda you get wet migas—a thick gruel of bready stuffing. I've been trying to score old-style açorda, and a few elderly folks have pointed me to Alentejo. And here I am, doin' it!

This is not a great açorda. It tasted like faded glory. A dish from a past generation. I need to get out into the countryside and find a staunchly traditional village where I might find a more vibrant version, and perhaps even one with fish eggs—the apotheosis of classical açorda.

But I'm awfully glad to have emerged from the gaslighting, having confirmed that my memory of açorda wasn't manufactured by my fevered imagination!


Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira
Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira ("Typical Wednesday Tavern") is the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. They tout their high-concept service: a lengthy tasting menu with many daily-rotating dishes—just show up and eat, no decisions required. They bring course after course of basically traditional Portuguese food, with just enough quirks to sustain the “tasting menu” conceit.

It’s all really good, and a few things are awesome, and far more food than anyone can eat, like fattening hogs. Then they charge 57.50€/person, a king’s ransom in Portugal, even in a presumptuous restaurant town like Évora.

There’s no question that you receive value, both in quality and in sheer quantity. But I felt like someone sold me twelve printer cartridges. I don’t need twelve printer cartridges. Nobody does. And while it might be a fair price for twelve printer cartridges, it’s still a lot of damned money when, again, no one needs twelve printer cartridges.

But it was delicious, everyone left happy, and the staff is lovely. They speak perfect English, as they must—it’s nearly all Americans, because no Portuguese person would spend 57.50€ on lunch. In the end, they won me over with the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. And great food.

Folhada de queijo. About as good as it gets.

Beautiful "black pig" presunto.

Tongue sliders with a relish of chopped pig ear and rabbit. Edgy! But by no means a false note. It's both innovative yet organically Alentejan. No pandering here.

Exquisite calamari, decent bacon-wrapped dates (ala Better Homes & Gardens canapés circa 1965).

Thin sliced slow cooked pumpkin (HOW DID IT NOT DISSOLVE? THIS IS MAGIC!) with onions, oxtail rice, and actually good Belgian-style fries. Still a million miles from pandersville. They're not betraying Portugal by making Belgian-style fries. Fries are everywhere, and they're just doing them right.

Ultra slow-cooked pork neck. The best thing. With spinach migas.

Dessert for four. yeah, as if!

Those shot glasses are "frozen mojito". Again, forgivable. It's not like a Sriracha jello boilermaker. They've managed to be clever without pandering. Évora restaurants have mastered the impossible, none more than these guys. They walk the line with grace and aplomb. It's real. And it's good.

Note: the waiter told me "I don't taste coriander, really." He meant it in the same way that a Thai doesn't taste chili heat. This statement was the essence of Alentejo, and I was honored to receive it. I wear the insight like a medal.

Yikes!


Dom Joaquim

Dom Joaquim is a historical, weighty, dignified old-school place, as you can see from the dining room. Though even here they offer (in addition to a weighty leather bound tome of a la carte offerings no one looks at) revolving plates-of-the-day specials at lunch (catch up on that culture via my explanation).

I went for ovos rotos ("broken eggs") with mushrooms (self-explanatory from the photos, below):

...and deer and wild boar stew with chestnuts, with migas featuring delicate wild asparagus, a local craze that only appears for a brief few weeks per year.

Staunchly traditional cooking with no shortcuts. Nice.

For dessert, I often fall into the "which of these things is unlike the others", and I'd never had sericá before, which they describe as milk/sugar/flour/cinnamon pudding accompanied by conserved plum. But it turns out I know it under a different spelling, Srikaya, which always intrigued me due to its random and unintentional Thai correspondence. Wikipedia has it as sericaia. Not sure what's up with all these spellings. In any case, you can't get the full vibe from a single portion, so check out this photo from Wikipedia:

Oof!
Padaria Arte Antiga

Quick random bakery stop at Padaria Arte Antiga, which is nothing special but centrally located and had some interesting local stuff.

At 6 o'clock, that's doce de grão, a fried patty stuffed with sweet chickpea filling. If sugar + chickpea strikes you as strange, just remember how in East Asia all beans are prepared sweet for dessert. It works.

At 11 o'clock, a big discovery for me. Argolas de azeite are crunchy baked bread rings, with plenty of olive oil baked in, very much like a number of Genoese and Tuscan bread-stick adjacent items. This really got under my skin.

The bratwursty pastry at 4 o'clock was stuffed with sweetened sweet potato (they also make them with jam or with pumpkin/walnut marmelada). It would be too doughy/heavy anywhere else, but the local bread is so tasty that you could polish off five pounds of these lickety-split. They're called popias (aka alcôncoras, aka poa de espécie). I never saw anything like them, but found this explanation online (translated into English):

At first glance it looks like a dry cake, but then the filling is surprising and delicious, based on honey, sugar and olive oil cooked in the light until it forms a dough. This dough is then wrapped in a thin, sugar-free dough and goes into the oven to bake for about 15 minutes. It's a typical cake from the Odemira area.

I'm lucky; turns out there's a food fair in Odemira in three weeks where selected ancient grandmas converge to bake these. I'm giddy. I'll report back.


Snack Bar Portugal
The ultimate honor is a return visit, and so I lunched again at my proudest obscure find (I actually stumbled into it a year ago), where I admire everything so much. This meal couldn't match the supernal watercress soup and majestic feijoada de choclo, but the caldo verde and cação com amêijoas—dogfish shark with clams and mashed potatoes—was homey wonderment. The caldo verde did not contain the traditional slice of choriço, and the owner declared "meat in soup is disgusting!" Well, all right then!

That was a new dessert for me, farófias. I normally steer clear of the bright orange heritage Portuguese desserts devised to use up egg yolks left over by the hordes of nuns using egg whites to wash their habits. Farófias comes from the other side of the coin, an example of Portugal's meringue-fluffy egg white desserts, this one with crème anglaise at the bottom and a psychoactive quantity of cinnamon atop.


Ginja Gouge

I asked for quality ginja (sour cherry liquor) at a hotel bar. They poured me this 2011 reserva, and it wasn't until they'd rung my card up that I realized it cost an obscene 29€. I later found it online at €44 for a whole bottle. So, yeah, I finally hit the tourism wall full-force. But even so, it was real good ginja, so I couldn’t bear too deep a grudge.

Ruínas Fingidas
These ruins are part of the sprawling public garden (Jardim Público) in the city center. The town describes it as a "folly", having repurposed an old convent and its grounds into quirky civic parkland. In this photo uppity pea hens peer down on their lessers—specifically, peacocks courting from below.

Redux
Even though I hit mostly lesser-known sidestreety places (Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira a big exception), the food was, obviously, expensive. Plus they're filled with American tourists. Yet I ate great, and detected no pandering whatsoever. I was mugged only once, though I'd have made out worse if I'd patronized the main-drag joints with colorful umbrellas (colorful umbrellas places are the sign of death in South Europe) serving as traps for spring breaking kids and groovy middle-aged American couples feeling "adventurous".

Well, here's all I've got: Évora, unlike Setúbal, is "on the map". They have Unesco World Heritage status, which inexorably lures the groovy. It's also not far from the obscenity of "Melides" (don't speak it out loud), the Alenetejan beach community where George Clooney and his shiny pals bask in local culture by turning everything into the French Riviera. But while all world regions are proud of their cuisine, Alentejo is pugnaciously, religiously so, which might make pandering viscerally impossible. The food's got to be real, even as the economic wheels spin.

That's my theory, anyway.

Chowhounding Évora (Portugal), Part 1

There is an evil genie aspect to life in Setúbal. I'm a huge booster of soulful grandma cooking. But when that's all there is, months of unremitting peasant fare will leave a hound yearning for precision, refinement, and even mild pretension. One needs some goddam yang to counterbalance the smothering yin.

My desperation has driven me as far as London (which is like Pittsburgh from here - $75 round trip flights), but it turns out that I just needed to drive an hour south to the neighboring state of Alentejo—which I could practically spit at from my balcony—and to its capital, Évora.

The Évora food scene is like night and day. The menus are similar (Alentejo has a distinct cuisine, but, like Punjabi food in India, it's worked into the national consciousness). The difference is the profusion of restaurants that are actually restaurants, not grim lunch pots run by cigarette-dangling wizardly grandmas who can't be bothered to skin the fava beans or core the apples. There are captivating winkles and touches. There is care and subtlety. It's The Answer to My Prayers.

It's also expensive. In Setúbal you can't eat well above 15€ (pricier places exist, but they're clip joints). But if you want a special occasion meal, there's no need to fly to London (aka Pittsburgh). Just head south to Évora. I've never been so happy to fork over €30 or €40 for a meal. You get solid value...at least if you choose good places.

But it's not easy! The most anonymous lunch joint in Setúbal is damned good, but in Evora, you must choose wisely. Let's start with a high note.


Sal Grosso
My top find: Sal Grosso (click the titles, e.g. above, for links) was like manna to my tears. Lemonade for a sleeping bee. It's every mixed metaphor rolled into a giant soufflé.

Sal Grosso is a restaurant restaurant. This may sound like nonsense for those who haven't spent months eating grandma pot lunches, but Sal Grosso has pace, bustle and excitement. The staff knows it's bad-ass, and the customers feel lucky to be there, and the chalkboard menu (largest I've ever seen) is packed with enough choices to stoke anxiety—the good kind. I'd almost forgotten what that's like (normally, I trudge through a dank doorway grunting boa tarde, and a sea of limping pensioners moans back indistinctly while harried Grandma hip checks me out of the way to rush stew to someone's table).

I'm eating meat here, obviously. Pork cheeks, to be specific. And those are migas alongside. No one translates it as "stuffing", but it's moistened seasoned bread crumb, so...yep. This one's tomato flavored and colored, and the acidic sharpness cuts like a knife, perfect counterbalance to the unctuous cheeks.

Big takeaway: Setúbal is for fish—Évora natives envy the quality our grilled fish—but Évora's about meat, further heightening the yin/yang aspect. If you ever visit Portugal, hit Setúbal for fish, Evora for meat...and let Lisbon be your souvenir shop.

Bread's great everywhere in Portugal, but better in Alentejo, and better still here. Yeah, the yellow one is broa de milho, the Portuguese cornbread that is, alas, mostly found in the north.

This was the first salad I've had in two years that didn't come with greasy bottles of oil and vinegar for self-dressing. Fancy!

Pudim de água. "Water pudding" might not sound exciting, but just look at that! Those almond flakes are not throwaway. They're super fresh and careful.

Dangerously high prices compared to my €8 complete lunches back home. But entirely worth it.


A Choupana
Right next door to buzzy Sal Grosso, give or take a century, is A Choupana.

You figure this is the quintessential cozy Portuguese lunch room, right? Straight out of our collective unconscious! Ah, Portugal!

No. None of that's true. Nothing like this exists, aside from this one unicorn. Counter seating is unknown here. The hobbit hole coziness is aberrant. This is not, at all, what Portugal is like.

I desperately want to come back and eat here. My eye is very much on the ensopado de galinha do campo, country hen stew. Not a normal offering, but totally Alentejan (for more on all things hen, see my trip notes from El Salvador). I love counter seating. Table seating makes me feel like I'm on display. For many people, that's a feature, not a bug. But, me, I'm in it for the food. I am not a decor element.

Menu shots:

Recanto
I actually started the trip at Recanto, which I did not fully trust despite its sterling reputation. Online photos had sent up warning flares. But I figured they'd know what they're doing, having earned senior status in a solid restaurant town.

Nyuh-uh.

Welcome to fricking Instagram.

Behold overcooked duck with unrendered rubbery fat strewn with molar-busting pretzel salt, plus a multilayered vaguely Frenchy potato slab reheated to the puckered point, served with a zippy raspberry sauce with strong shampoo vibes. Ugh.

You can fail here. This isn't Montreal (where even crap restaurants are like blessings from some benevolent god).


Snack Bar Portugal

I was here on my one previous visit, and Snack Bar Portugal remains my proudest Évora discovery. No one here knows about it outside its small die-hard clientele, all Portuguese. By contrast, literally every other restaurant was full of Americans, which we'll ponder in an upcoming installment.

This is one of Évora's humblest restaurants, but it's a great restaurant. Cheery, clean, the owner and his family are full of positivity and kindness, and the food has both the grandma soul you'd expect in a humble lunch room, but also some magic.

This watercress soup tasted like saffron. Which makes no sense, because it's not often used here, and certainly never in a cheap canteen. I asked the waitress, and the older Portuguese wife sitting two feet from my right elbow, who'd just eaten an entire meal without saying a single word to her husband, broke in to explain the culinary alchemy that yielded the saffron flavor via a 2000 word soliloquy I 40% understood. None of this would happen in Setúbal, where I don't think anyone even knows what saffron is, and where the wives stay home.

In any case, this was one of the great soups of my life.

Then feijoada do choco. Beans and cuttlefish. Kicked the ass of the versions I've had back home. This was downright magisterial.

Finally, bobo de caramelo, caramel custard. Nothing deep or refined, but all balances nailed. What a meal. I left glowing.


To be continued...

The Underpants

One floor below me lives my neighbor José and his unnamed wife ("never mind her name"). They are not a fun couple. This apartment of mine, which cost like a rat-infested fourth-floor walk-up in a bad nabe of Queens, is top-drawer for here, which means I live among the local aristocracy. And I always need to be reminded that aristocrats rarely brim with good humor and joie de vivre.

Horror of horrors. Recently, a pair of underpants fell from my line, splatting directly atop Nameless Wife's undergarments. I slid this note under their door (here's an English translation):

Good evening, José and family!

I hope you enjoyed my generous gift on your laundry line! I assure you, it’s perfectly clean!

I was planning to buy new underwear next week anyway, so it’s fine to throw it away if you don’t want it!

I hope you are enjoying the beautiful weather!

The next morning, I opened my door to find my underpants in a shopping bag. A thick one, carefully chosen to steer clear of full snideness yet clearly alluding to the potentially noxious condition of said underpants, though they were, as I pledged, 100% copacetic. No note. The bag had been hung from my door knob. Silently. Neutrally. "Here's your underpants."

I imagined the up-to-the-elbows rubber cleaning gloves she'd used to deposit them into the thick-but-not-too-thick bag. And the many additional wash cycles she'd given not only her adjacent undergarments, but every last item hanging on her line.

Flash forward two days.

I leave my apartment and find yet another thick bag dangling from my doorknob. It contains a pillow case I hadn't even known had dropped. I went directly to the supermarket, bought a spool of shopping bags, and left them dangling from José's doorknob. The unspoken point, of course, was "Expect more drops!"

I imagined José's pinched grin, wryly amused by the gesture, while she-who-must-not-be-named ran through nasty scenarios. "Does he think we can't afford shopping bags?" "Is he giving us gifts in order to obligate us in some way?". If José won, there would be no response, and no returned bags, and the arc would be smooth. If Wife won, I'd find the bags back on my doorknob. And I get the vibe she normally prevails.

One thing was for sure: she'd find it unthinkable that her neighbor was expressing irony as a whimsical gesture to stoke joy. Because life ≠ joy. The notion of burning a single calorie for shits and giggles would be mind-boggling and paradigm-shaking. I had to be up to something malevolent or taunting or ugly and the bags would be sent back. Note-lessly. In an even thicker bag.

A player of long games, I plotted my next step: If the bags came back, I'd heighten the absurdity by buying a fishing pole, attaching an oversized gleaming metal hook, and lowering the line with underpants hanging from the hook right to her eye level.

The escalation proved unnecessary. The bags were not returned. My joke appears to have landed. I have bullied—with wit and consummate politeness—the encounter onto my terms, even in their building in their country, and even being the shmuck who keeps dropping underpants and whatnot into their midst like space debris.

But it just occurred to me that I'd never have left them a bunch of bags if this were Brooklyn or Chicago. I opted for it here because it's keyed in to Portuguese sense of humor. Among my puny superpowers is the ability to play to the humor sensibilities of different people and cultures (it's a framing thing), and I realize that's exactly what I did here, unconsciously. It was a joke custom-designed for Portugal.

The Value of Rapport

There's a guy I met online years ago who is a brilliant programmer and a joy to work with. The harder the problem, the more he likes it. If he wasn't so busy with his day job, I'd make up projects just to prod him into action and watch him overcome adversity.

Over the years, he's quietly helped me with a number of endeavors, always refusing compensation. Most recently, he worked on my smart phone app, "Eat Everywhere", and, per usual, he saved the day with some clever, elegant tech that did the equivalent of building a stable bridge between a mountain peak in Peru and one on Alpha Centauri. He handled the sprawling, deal-killing technical nightmare like folding a napkin.

I told him I had a cool apartment in a great town in Portugal, and invited him and his family to take over the place for a week or two, since I hardly need an excuse to travel (I moved here in part for €50 round trip flights to Milan, Budapest, Berlin, etc.). I left him, naturally, copious food tips, and overlapped for a couple days to show him my haunts and secret treasures. I also left him my bank card, because foreign credit cards often don't work here. I told him he could Paypal me when the bill comes in.

To my surprise, he was flabbergasted by my "generosity", since we'd never actually met. And I've been struggling to make sense of this. Was I missing something here?

If someone clearly demonstrates kindness, brilliance, and solid dependability, is that mere trivia compared to the vivid in-person evidence of personal style and presentation? If he'd had a pimple on his nose, would that have lowered his stock?

I get that rapport matters. But when competent, kind people recognize each other, that's a deeper rapport. Working eagerly and selflessly to build cool stuff without ego or acrimony. How does that compare with the shallow rapport of being fun to hang out with? I don't hand my apartment and ATM card over to lively conversationalists. It's a fine trait, but it doesn't stoke trust.

Social rapport—as every con man knows—can easily be faked. Tell someone they're awesome, and they'll open their hearts and their lives. This planet is a psychopath's delight; fakery gets bought, hook, line, and sinker.

Someone who contributes meaningfully to your life, is never unkind, and asks nothing in return? That's the good guy! Such qualities are not fakeable (at least not over the long run), so that's who you trust, no?

Well, it makes sense to me. While I enjoy a lively hang—and admire dermatological savoir faire—such factors strike me as a very poor basis for establishing trust or extending generosity. But I'm apparently in an extreme minority. And as I mull it over, lots of mysterious weirdness here on planet Earth suddenly makes sense.

Apartment Feedback by Status Level

I've lived in every status level (currently an aristocratic pad in a Portuguese town which cost less than a 4th floor rat-infested studio in a bad nabe in Queens). So I've experienced friends' reactions to every level of dwelling. Heres how it pans out:

Hellish: "It's nice!"

Dull: "You can fix it up nice!"

Normal: "So how's Shirley's gall bladder?"

Nice: "It's nice!"

Very nice: "So how's Shirley's gall bladder?" (with surreptitiously darting eyes and barely concealed sneer)

If no one ever says a kind word about your home, it means it's either 1. completely normal, or 2. impressive. Either way, don't be alarmed. You're doing just fine.

This also applies to everything, of course.


See also:
"Jealousy"
and "Jealousy Redux"

Non-Aspirational Lunches

I've been running weekly photo essays on Facebook sharing non-aspirational lunches in anonymous Setúbal restaurants. I'm keeping a running index, updated weekly, here, if you want to bookmark. Don't miss the captions.

October 18, 2024
October 25, 2024
November 3, 2024
November 12, 2024
December 1, 2024
December 6, 2024
December 14, 2024
December 22, 2024
December 28, 2024
January 5, 2025
January 10, 2025
January 18, 2025 (bad week)
January 24, 2025
January 31, 2025
February 8, 2025
February 13, 2025
February 20, 2025
February 28, 2025
March 8, 2025
March 15, 2025
March 20, 2025
March 27, 2025
April 4, 2025

And here is a downloadable 23mb PDF showing all the outstanding Bengali food I ate last year at Setúbal's Leiteria Montalvo in chronological order (the olives in the second shot are hilarious. She's trying hard to fit in in Portugal!).

Why is This Stupid Hotel Breakfast So Good?

That was a neat bit of chowhound detection work.

I reluctantly poked my head into the hotel free breakfast, because hope springs eternal. And my first bewilderment came from the scrambled eggs, which were real scrambled eggs, though in a trafing dish, not fresh. Also, the ham looked good. I loaded my plate with uncommon enthusiasm and carted it back to the table, and every bite was wonderful.

This should have brought me nothing but pleasure, but I can't resist a mystery. So as I worked through eggs, ham, stewed tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms, pasty beans, small pastries, a slice of whole grain toast, a roll, some peach jam, and a glass of mixed fruit juice, I pieced it together.

At dinner, this is a legit great 5 star restaurant, more expensive than I can afford. Of course, this is not that. The staff's not here and no one's aiming to dazzle. Their Michelin star is not hanging on the tenderness of my scrambled eggs.

I realized that the breakfast is terrific due purely to muscle memory. The good chef is still home in bed, sleeping off the substances he did after service, and the fancy stuff is all put away, but everyone in front and in back serves some minor role or association to the big show, so they know something, and they have been trained to have standards, so this is the shittiest they can possibly do. They'd like to do worse, but can't.

They'd like to make rubbery scrambled eggs, but it's actually hard for someone with a shred of diligence to produce execrable hotel buffet scrambled eggs. And the olive oil used in those tomatoes is the good stuff (they're not going to haul in cheaper oil just for breakfast service). And the stupid mini croissants are from one of the hotel's snooty suppliers, not a big white truck from an industrial park. The restaurant doesn't have business relationships with drek suppliers.

So, when the second and third string staff of a great restaurant try to serve you shitty breakfast, the result won't completely delight, but it will be 100,000 times better than the shitty breakfast they're trying to cook, and you'd expected to eat. It will be food.

Nonlinear Exertion and Myth

Maximal exertion, in the case of extremely capable individuals, requires nonlinear effort. Duly challenged, exertion becomes a runaway chain reaction.

The legend of the Red Shoes was never about an inability to stop dancing. It was about the peril of confronting the geometric curve where great capability and maximal effort converge to meet daunting challenge.

The legend of Samson was never about a haircut. It was about the plight of extremely capable individuals jarred from the precariously narrow conditions wherein they're able to exert at full capacity.


As a kid I thought a lot about a lonely waterproof heater lost overboard in the Atlantic, trying to heat the whole ocean.

This *IS* Democracy

This is democracy.

Every time I try to clearly frame the situation, that's what I come up with. While I hate every bit of it, this is democracy.

Everyone's treating these political shenanigans like some fresh hell, but it's all stuff we knew about. The extreme right has wanted to dismantle the federal system (and gut medicare and social security) for decades. It was a queasy background rallying cry even for moderate conservatives, who didn't really mean it. Reagan and the Bushes couldn't ever pull that trigger, though President Pat Buchanan would have done so in a hot minute. But this was queued up since forever.

As was reported as early as 1964, a pervasive slab of conspiracism, malice, and gut ignorance—even among highly educated people (MAGAS are mostly boomers, our best educated generation) has always been out there, and never as sparse as we've hoped. It's a ton of people.

So this is democracy. Democracy means everyone gets their shot. Democracy doesn't mean you win every time so it's just how you like.

And, anyway, the cancer is not exclusive to one side. The urge to stifle dissent while hollering about free speech is as unconstrained on the left as on the right. Same for the favoring of certain groups and the disfavoring of others. Truly, it's all fucked, but we're reacting by doubling down. It's a simple process: the left moves extra left and the right moves extra right because no one can stand a whiff of Those Assholes, so we all recoil into the opposing extremism rather than the sane center. And it's a vicious circle because extremists smell worst of all, ensuring the most extreme revulsion both ways.

Democracy doesn't mean you love and support the country only when your side governs. The MAGAs don't own "entitled hypocrisy". Democracy means sharing power and, again, we knew these people and these ideas were out there. We knew we were living in a democracy, yet now we're shocked—shocked!— that they came to power and are making it happen. The shock is because we assumed that the beauty of democracy was our perpetual control, and that's inherently anti-democratic! We're certainly not being pro-democratic by hating the people with whom we share the country and its governance! Think about it!

So now, yeah, the vicious cycle is such that those guys are, in fact, legit killing democracy (for them, it's merely their side controlling things). From my perspective, it's a terrible tragedy. But from the higher perspective, it's a huge slab of the country getting to do what it always wanted to do. It's like traveling by minivan and some want to stop for dinner at Burger King. Sometimes you have to tolerate stopping at Burger King. Even if you're a vegan. Tough sell, alas, for a society of entitled aristocrats far too entitled to happily share power. If you don't want the assholes to ever run things, don't do democracy!

Our notion that half the country must never be allowed to get their ugly, terrible, no-good way is not democracy. If we can ever re-acquire a clean view of what democracy actually is—and what tolerance really is (other people's tolerances are different and if you can't tolerate that, you're the intolerant one)—maybe this won't go all Jew/Palestinian. I'm stating the one and only hope. I know you blame the other guys. And I've been doing the same! I write this not as a sanctimonious preacher, but as a repentant sinner.


We can retain some sanity by reframing like this. But it compels the question: how to proceed? Easy! Play the democracy game! Fight and resist! I don't mean screeching on social media or keying your neighbor's Tesla. We might start with voting. 24-37% of voters in key battleground states did not vote in 2024. Way more than the margin of difference. So could we invest some slim fraction of our bounteous shaming energy on people who don't? Maybe allow an occasional "nigger" for "kike" to slip by unremarked upon while we concentrate our cleansing focus on not letting husbands/sons/daughters/friends/coworkers get away with not voting? Can we use some of our hounding/screeching prowess to bully every like-minded voter in our perimeter to vote every damned time, and to consider pulling only Democrat levers?

I am evidently no pure Democrat, so if I suggest that last part, you've got idealogical coverage. No decent Republicans remain, and in my opinion they must be voted out en masse. But this can't happen if we don't vote. We need to find new channels of resistance beyond keying Teslas and preening in our Resistance drag. Like voting, for starters.

It comes down to whether we're enjoying this—suffering and all—too much to look away from the shouty pizazz and turn up the glaring houselights for a few seconds? To stop dramatizing and actually do a thing? To flip a voting lever?

I had problems with absentee ballots last time, to my enormous shame and regret. But I'm on it for midterms.

Smashing

Thumbs up for smashed windows in Tesla stores! Yay, smashing!

The psychology is not complicated. 1. Adopt a two-dimensional cartoon view of the world, removing humanity, consistency, and morality from consideration. Then... 2. Smash, with relish.

I don't like Elon Musk. I pray for his stock price to keep crashing so his loans get called in so he no longer has infinite money to perpetrate evil. I'll do anything legal and principled to try to stop him.

But Tesla dealerships are not run by Luftwaffe colonels. They're run by actual people, inconvenient as that might be to the two-dimensional cartoon view. I can't believe this needs stating, but a vandalized Tesla or Tesla dealership might be (and probably is!) run by a progressive who was trying to reduce carbon emissions. They're likely trying to get out from under their investment (tricky given the market). They might even be LGBTQ or trans or some other victim group you deem worth loads of extra consideration.

This is just one reason smashing is a bad tactic. The problem with summary judgement is that we're incredibly shitty/sloppy judges.

Smashing stuff smashes the vaunted "rule of law" you're suddenly super in love with this year. If you celebrate illegal smashing, you deserve a Daily Show-style clip contrasting that with your weighty pronouncements about Institutions and The Rule of Law, because—surprise!—now you're the flag-waving fake patriot hypocrite goon.

If you don't want to live in a cartoon world where the rule of law means nothing whenever anyone decides that Baddies need smashing, consider adding the magical third dimension of thoughtfulness and morality. At least don't *egg on* the smashers. Could you manage the milquetoast credo of "No 'Thumbs Up' for Smashing!"? That's not a heavy lift, is it? You don't necessarily need to scold them amid their smashy good fun. Just maybe don't offer your full-throated support.

Because the face-eating hyenas always eat your face in the end. Guaranteed. Not just the MAGAs. All extremists. All smashers. And your admiration fuels them.

Fuck.

Lobster Boil Update

Three years ago, I wrote about the sticky wicket of knowing when to jump out of the pot when you sense an impending lobster boil. I proposed a way to prepare for such eventuality without obligating yourself or going to undue expense or trouble (How to Plan an Alternative Timeline While Remaining Momentarily Complacent (Part 1) and How to Plan an Alternative Timeline While Remaining Momentarily Complacent (Part 2)).

The boil is now explicitly revealing its heat. You're not in immediate personal danger, but it's getting too late for a dilative, comfortably thoughtful appraoch. What is happening is not cyclical. Things are broken that will stay broken, and we are only getting started breaking things. And it's difficult but essential to register that the burn-it-down thirst is broad, and not confined to the Right. That, to me, is the tectonic problem, not Elon Musk's scampering atrocities (I may be wrong, but I imagine he'll be gone sooner or later).

I've repeated this thought twice in the last month not because I'm getting old and forgetful, but because it's super important: Bernie Sanders in 2015 was giving speeches proposing, with populist fire, sweeping, tectonic changes to institutions, while crowds roared appreciatively. There was serious MAGA energy (same vibe, different credo) at the time among the progressive Left, and it hasn't dissipated any.

A fundamental credo of this Slog is that "Recognizing stupidity doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you're observant". Same for spotting delusion, or bad behavior of most sorts. Simply noticing how deranged the Right is does not make you sane.

I'm not taking shots at the Left because I have a political credo to push. My point is that we don't just have a problem on the Right, we have a national problem transcending partisanship. As we learned from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it's possible to have extremely legitimate beefs with an opposing group without earning moral high ground for yours. Both of you might be awful. You must add that possibility to your calculus...or else consider moving to the lonely Center.

The Right seems a trillion times worse right now, but that's only because they actually got their shot at it. So I don't see a cyclical problem (which might get better) but a systemic one (which will get worse).

I'm looking ahead here, which is an unusual move amid tumult. But it's not my thing to stand frozen in a stupor repeating "This can't be happening!" I perpetually scan for the next shoe-drop. My life has been more difficult than most, so protracted struggles to accept the here-and-now are indulgences I could never have afforded. I've taught myself to reframe on a dime—to immediately accept the immediate and pay all attention forward.

To conclude: a piece of good news, and a piece of bad (or, ok, "even worse") news:

GOOD NEWS (doesn't start off sounding good, though): America is fast losing its position in the world (destruction is much swifter than construction). How much does this matter to an individual life? By chance, I asked the same question before moving to Portugal: "What do I give up going from the strongest country to a smaller, weaker one?" The full answer would require a separate posting, but the upshot is "not much".

Pundits and columnists are ruing the potential end of the American Century, but that big picture view is what they're paid to consider. For you and me, unless we have a severe case of scorekeeping and a rabid desire to be "NUMBER ONE!!!", it doesn't matter much. Individual lives are small, and living deeper down in the pack offers a helpful reminder of this. I don't need Portugal to be an awesome force in the world, I am completely ok with it merely feeling like home.

It might even make living in America more pleasant in the long run. The vibe is considerably kinder and chiller when you're not living amongst world-ruling titans, who can get a little tramply. So don't get too caught up in the pundit/columnist big picture framing. Tectonic changes are interesting for historians, but none of us are historic figures. So shave that lofty part off of your personal stress load and motivation.

BAD NEWS: Five Eyes, an Anglosphere intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, has either stopped, slowed, or plans to stop (depending on news reports) sharing some or all intelligence with the United States. Frankly, I wouldn't pass the crown jewels of my country's safe-keeping past Tulsi Gabbard, either, even if the ultimate destination weren't Donald Trump.

Five Eyes is the most important thing you never heard of. Five Eyes is what keeps us safe, particularly when it comes to terrorism (I read up on intelligence stuff as a hobby). So if you live in a major city center, you might want to move somewhere less targetty. The insecurity urbanites felt in Fall 2001—which thankfully didn't amount to anything but spurred many of your neighbors to leave town, along with the second migration post-COVID—may have quietly passed a tipping point, creating a reasonable imperative, if not immediate panic. Sorry.

A Rarely-Considered Angle on Food-Borne Illness

As a food critic who's eaten in tens of thousands of eateries in dozens of countries, I've felt pretty expert about foodborne illness, both experientially and scientifically. But four months with a seemingly unpurgeable Campylobacter infection—so severe that I lost 35 pounds and filled my kidneys with tiny stones from dehydration—proved educational.

Scientists know a lot, and eaters know a lot, but it takes an ordeal like that to bridge the two. I've pieced it all together, and it's useful knowledge for all chowhounds.

There's a widespread notion that greasy little ethnic joints can make you sick because they're careless and sloppy. And while you can get sick anywhere, odds do seem empirically worse in certain venues. It feels xenophobic to ascribe sloppy carelessness to certain groups. Also, it's wrong. Any human grouping cooking dangerously wouldn't last long. Humans are super good at reproducing, defecating, eating, and cooking. Those things are bedrock for us. Every group cooks healthy for their group (or at least did until modernity shifted diet).

So are the perceived perils entirely xenophobic? No. There's a reasonable explanation: the third world doesn't sweat cross contamination. Not because its standards are lower, but because it's usually unecessary...for two reasons. We'll get to those reasons in a moment.

This is a terrible time to be writing this, with a big chunk of America increasingly vocal about third world immigrants as filthy spreaders of pestilence. I'm doing the opposite. I'm explaining what's actually happening, which is perfectly innocent.

Cross contamination, for the few who don't know, is when hands, implements, or surfaces touch raw meat and then come into contact with cooked meat, contaminating the cooked meat. Absurdly extreme diligence is required to prevent this. I'm hyper-aware of the issue, and even I find it difficult to be 100% conscientious in my food handling.

Cross contamination is a fairly recent peril in the First World which, in the 20th century, industrialized its meat handling (densely packed farms and slaughterhouses, multiple processings, etc.). At some point, it became so laborious—i.e. expensive—to keep meat safe through that production line that we gave up trying. As a result, our meat must be handed like medical waste.

Yes. We are the sloppy, careless, dirty ones. And the Third World is unprepared for our slovenliness. In less developed parts of the world, much of the meat is butchered from known animals within a few miles of home, and reasonable butchering/cooking/storing practices keep things safe for people with healthy digestive systems. And people do have healthy digestive systems. Kids play in streets with dodgy sanitation, stoking the super fortified guts and immune systems we all enjoyed before First Worlders began raising kids in sterile bubbles, leaving them asthmatic, colicky, and eternally sensitive.

The Third World has no concept of meat as medical waste, so immigrants may not treat meat like medical waste. They cope in their home cooking because their guts and immune systems are hardy. And when they take jobs as cooks, they learn the strange practices of avoiding cross contamination. We enjoy their food without problems, as their cohorts, licensers, and inspectors ensure they're up to speed (though restaurants in more insular Indian communities may be more prone to old-fashioned cooking methods for the old-fashioned Indian guts of their clientele).

In Portugal, off-the-boat Indians cook largely Indian-style with no sub-community of native-friendly Indian restaurateurs to spread word about the colicky, sensitive stomachs of locals, or about the medical waste nature of industrialized meat. And their largely Indian clientele experience no problems, so they work with no sense of peril.

The good news is that even in worst case scenarios, most of us can endure food-borne illness without medical treatment. 24 hour turnaround is normal. But not me. For various reasons, I'm unusually susceptible, which has forced me to puzzle this all out.

Even for me, there's a solution. A brief (seconds, not minutes) reheating to a modest 165F/74C (internal) kills relevant cooties.

Disclaimer: This reheating advice covers typical cross-contamination scenarios from conscientious kitchens. Truly hazardous pathogens arising from severe neglect require prolonged boiling or sustained high heat, but such outbreaks would make news and you're generally no more vulnerable than anyone else.

A risk scenario between the two extremes occurs when cross-contaminated food sits at room temperature long enough for bacteria to multiply significantly. While brief reheating will still kill the organisms, their abundant microscopic remnants may still pose risks. Such cases, fortunately, are less common. Reasonably diligent chefs from everywhere know to take pains to refrigerate.

Two notes:

1. Use a thermometer to ensure that interiors hit that temperature (position meats at the bottom of the rewarming pan, close to heat source).

2. Be careful of your own cross contamination. Until heated, handle everything like raw meat.

Since I can't possibly train every immigrant in the knotty practice of avoiding cross-contamination (to them it seems like hysterical paranoia—which, in a way, it is), when I want Indian food, I take it home and briefly reheat. No problem. And any thriving business with non-Indian customers is safe, too. Again, kitchens that sicken customers don't last.

I eat tons of Indian food (my Bengali food is cooked by an Ayurvedic practitioner who is extra-healthy in ways even I can't fathom), and I haven't had a recurrence in quite some time. That said, I haven't figured out how I can safely travel to the Third World. My wanderings may be done.


More general advice on gastric issues

Maslow's Sledgehammer

Once the radicals have thoroughly demolished the economy and the federal government's ability to function, and their supporters are forced to acknowledge how bad it is, most won’t cop to their part in it. They’ll say it’s just more proof that all politicians are liars who let you down, so we need even more deranged outsiders to come in and do things hyperbolically differently.

For most of history, crowds reverted to the mean. Fervor eventually drained, and they moved toward the center. That, I think is gone. Our nation of aristocrats will just keep huffily demanding relief from their imagined oppressors (and from the real ills created by previous relief efforts).

Contemplation in 2025

I sometimes hear from readers who figure that there's something wrong, either with me or them, because they can't easily pick up my gist, and must reread posts.

Either the problem's on my side—because I'm convoluting otherwise simple ideas (I'm not), or I'm just too "brainy" (that might be true if these ideas came easily to me, but I'm a normal guy who thinks long and hard)—or the problem's their's, for being foggily unable to connect as easily as they do with magazine articles and typical blog posts.

Neither is true.

Writers these days aim for easy digestibility above all. Like mama birds, they pre-chew everything to vomit down readers' gullets, terrified by their knowledge of how finicky folks are about unprocessed chunks. For years, I was one of the most easily digestible of writers. I don't regret it, it was fun, and I'm proud of my output (read some here).

But notions and insights percolate that do not lend themselves to glib premastication. Readers must chew a bit on writing which requires—and hopefully rewards—multiple re-readings. In 2025, that's a shocking ask. But while mental exercise isn't for everyone/anyone (super smart people get particularly frustrated when their powerful minds can't effortlessly Hoover everything up on the first pass), a few holdouts like me still demand it. Substance has no economic or aesthetic value in 2025, but it pings my Golden Rule. As a reader, I'd love this stuff.

I'm constantly bombarded by gooey glibness—the same ideas, the same buzzwords, the same framings with just a slight tilt to make it the writer's own. I can go weeks or months without seeing a single fresh idea. The Slog is mostly fresh ideas, and fresh ideas don't swallow easily. Re-reading is necessary.

I've re-read all the postings in the left sidebar multiple times, because I write to firm up nebulous intuition into more solid ideas and to try to connect them. Each time I reread, it firms up and connects better, propelling me toward new epiphanies and connections. I've been doing exactly what you've hopefully been doing - chewing on these ideas. The necessity of doing so is not a bug, it's a feature. It's not that I'm smart, or that you're dumb. It's that contemplation, while a sorely underused faculty, remains an option (for both of us!).

I addressed this seven years ago in a posting called "Cognitive Lozenges", noting that "these postings are cognitive lozenges which, by design, impede speedy absorption (by, for example, forcing you to unpack phrases like "cognitive lozenges"). The ideas that absorb me are counterintuitive and nuanced, and while I always leave a breadcrumb trail, I choose not to spoon-feed (having worked as a professional spoon-feeder for years). I want you to work it all through, as I have, and maybe go further than I could."

Jim's Rubric

Aiming deep leaves you shallow.

Depth sneaks up while you flail.

Substantiality Inoculates Against Scammability

I recently wrote about the scam operations sweeping the globe using the business methods of international mega-corporations. Now with this, too:

....I've been thinking a lot about cons.

The perennial truth about cons is that only the greedy can be conned. Rubio isn't innocent. He put ambition above principle and above even the country he thirsts to lead. Trump merely exploited his original sin. Really, they deserve each other.

There's an alternative, which makes you immune to scams and cons:

Don't do any of that.

Principles first!


Here's why that's hard for people: Most don't have principles; they have placeholders, unthinkingly adopting the slogans and inclinations of their tribe, their class, their family, their workplace, their friends, their role models, some TV show or film. It's extraordinarily thin and propositional, and thus can be replaced by other principles with frightful ease whenever some actually deep drive (ego thirst, greed, fear, etc) supersedes, or merely when tides shift.

This explains, for instance, why conservatism meant one thing in 2015 and a nearly opposite thing in 2016 to tens of millions of people who felt solidly conservative through it all. Hypocrisy? Not really. Just empty tribalism. When a flock turns, the flock turns. They hardly notice.

Building principles deeply and carefully is like cooking deeply and carefully. Results will be meaningful, and that feedback loop solidifies the process. Haphazard cooking and thoughtful cooking are utterly different, and the cooks even more so. The latter stand for something. I haven't heard the word "substantial" used lately, and when I do, it usually refers someone with a great big house. We've lost the very concept! And insubstantial people are easily conned.

A big factor in my scam immunity is that I don't crave cheap shortcuts. Some people get emails from Nigerian princes and at least momentarily dream of $100 million windfalls. That wouldn't fulfill life fantasies for me. A bizarre fluke, nothing more. My satisfaction stems from writing something fresh and compelling, or playing or cooking something beautiful, or helping a stranger (and scramming before it turns kooky). Processing my confusion into insight. Finding a great hidden restaurant. Treasure hunting and treasure creation let me cling closely to treasure! Perhaps I'm the most deeply greedy of all, but I channel my greed differently.

And I don't stoically endure my process of seeking satisfaction—my work. As a karma yogi, I've found that the work itself is the juicy sweet spot. The crafting is infinitely more rewarding than the result. If you scheme to jump to the result—to haphazardly cook one up, or take a cheap shortcut—you're a nowhere man. Just more insubstantiality, our national curse.

"Fame is a by-product of doing something else. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal just because you want to take a shit!" -- Banksy

If Kim Kardashian locked eyes with me in a bar and told me I seem fascinating, I'd tell her "No, I don't. I actually might be, but you have no way of knowing that. G'bye." Not just to avoid the inevitable con, but because I get no kicks from cheap shortcuts. The shortcut itself is like a scam, and I'm reality-based.

These disinclinations of mine - I don't want a hundred million dollars wired from Nigeria, and I don't want "a shot at" Kim Kardashian, and I don't want to be president, etc ad infinitum - have always made me seem like a loser. A grubby rat scurrying about, fretting over iPad charging cords, painstakingly editing each word like polishing rocks, fraughtly choosing between non-aspirational lunch places, and staying up till 4am to de-commercialize online food discussion. These are not the activities of studly, successful, admirable people. Such people make A HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. They SCREW KIM KARDASHIAN. They become PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. And so they can be led around like slaves while seemingly ambition-less rats like me are free and impervious.