Limitation

A reader writes:

"I went back and read your entries from the ChowTour 2006 – and I still remember your Kugel Catharsis article – and your review of the International Food Store in Lodi --  and my eyes tear. Being an Orthodox Jew – Ill never get to partake in 99% of what you had reviewed. Now – back to our memories of NewfoundLAND...."

I talk to lots of eaters, and everyone has limitations of one sort of another. Some have allergies, some are vegetarians, some have health problems, others are obese and trying valiantly not to be. Some simply live in areas with monotonous food choices, while others can't afford anything beyond rice and beans. And lots of people are just naturally picky (I was the pickiest child on Earth; my father sneeringly referred to me as "Charley Gourmet").

But the most mournful of all seem to be those who keep kosher. Deprivation of bacon and scallops (and, for some, anything lacking the stamp of just the right rabbi) makes them rue the vast swathes of deliciousness they're missing. I'll resist the impulse to make a crack about praying for a miraculous alleviation of piety, and tackle the issue directly:

I must be one of the freest eaters ever. I'm familiar with lots of cuisines, and feel comfortable striding into restaurants filled with people who don't look like me. I can't afford to eat high end every day, or even every week, but I can try such places once in a while, plus all-I-can-eat pizza slices and tacos. I can travel pretty easily; being a New York jazz musician is a little bit like being a Japanese karate pro - I can quickly find work anywhere in the world to help defray costs. I'm extremely omnivorous; I'll eat anything (except blu cheese, liver, stinky tofu, olives, and hot dogs). And I can go explore at the drop of a hat, thanks to being single and having a flexible freelancer schedule. Best of all, I like to drive!

But even I am extremely limited. Crushingly limited. Downright hog-tied! I can't eat before the gym or twice-daily meditation, which creates huge logistical burdens. I can't eat at night or I get heartburn. I can't eat a lot, or I get fat. I can't eat sugar or I get addicted. I can't eat salt or I bloat (I do all these things sometimes, of course, but must choose my battles). And I can't eat what's not here. The supernal roasted chicken from La Llar De L'all I Oli just outside Barcelona is not available to me right now. And it's worse for me than for you, because while you can only dream of shrimp chow fun, I have unlawful carnal knowledge of this poultry. It haunts me so.

There's unavoidable limitation in any human pursuit. And even sterner limitations apply, paradoxically, to those who've scratched out some extra freedom. Like any candy store worker, I've been taught tough lessons. I don't spend every waking moment darting to places like Worcester, even though I nearly could. The last time I did that for a sustained period of time, I wound up exhausted, sickened, bloated and jaded. Have a look at the slideshow documenting all food eaten during that two month Chow Tour assignment. As one eye-buggingly succulent dish after another zooms by, you'll go through Elisabeth Kübler-Chowhound's five stages of food grief: wonder, hunger, nausea, pity, and death (my boss at CNET simply couldn't understand why I insisted on scoring it to such sorrowful music). The next time you regret food limitations, just replay that slideshow. See freedom and retch.

Creativity thrives under limitation. If you can only eat snickerdoodles, well, just work your ass off to find (or to bake) ridiculously great ones! I once met a guy who suffers from Homocystinuria, a rare condition where you can't tolerate gluten or protein. He eats sublimely, with the infinite care not of a sufferer but of an aesthete. Under such conditions, you can either mourn (a calamari kaddish?) or else do what every human being is challenged to do in every realm and in every moment, anyway: play the cards you're dealt, hoping to make the best of it by investing all creativity, drive, and passion into coughing up something stupendous in spite of it all!

In other words: go find some ridiculously great glatted-up snickerdoodles, and make me jealous!

Ids and Dust

Every generation thinks something essential has been lost from the previous. And, indeed, it always has been. Progress is destructive. Even shifting status quo is destructive. Time itself, really, is destructive.

What's destroyed is usually cultural, though. Languages die, bits of knowledge are lost, nobody appreciates a swinging rhythm section anymore ever since those four British kids with the funny haircuts started selling all them records. Styles change, but the essential qualities of human nature never vary.

Or do they? I've been watching Ken Burns' The Dustbowl (currently on PBS, and great), which included this quote from an Oklahoma resident at the height of the catastrophe:

"We are trying to hope that the worst is over, Yet today, after we thought the drought had been effectively broken, we had another terrible day of violent wind, drifting clouds of dust, and russian thistles racing like mad across the plains and piling up in head-high impassible banks. We feel as if the administration is really making a sincere effort to improve general conditions, but they have a tremendous task."

That strikes me as a communication received from another galaxy. I recall widespread bitter outrage at the government's failure to foresee and prevent a few guys from hijacking airplanes with box cutters. I see Hurricane Sandy victims who ignored evacuation orders venting righteous fury at the government for its lagging efforts to rescue them. I see a nation of pure, raging, childish id.

Iddy Americans demand omniscient omnipresence from their government, while demanding lower taxes. We didn't pass Obama's jobs bill - composed almost entirely of Republican proposals - and while unemployment has improved nonetheless, we scream bloody hell about how he - personally! - hasn't improved the situation fast enough. It comes down to this: where's my damned job?

We want, and we want right now, and extenuating circumstances are just not our problem. Romney was right about "takers", but he was wrong about that 47% figure. It's closer to 100%. And the fact that he himself apparently paid no tax at all for years, yet muttered about freeloaders who pay no taxes, is just the perfect icing on my argument.

Hypocrisy is the effect, not the cause. What's happening is the extreme endgame of unbridled, imperious, screaming/grabbing id. And it wasn't always thus. The more I think about it, the more it stupefies me: Starving Oklahoma farmers, walking around with heads wrapped in wet cloths, their babies dying, the dust up to their barn roofs, their crops and livestock dead, acknowledging that the government's doing its best, but, hey, this is a really tough problem. Can you imagine such a reasonable statement being made - even in situations far less dire - in this century?

Postcards From My Childhood Part 4: Backsplash

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget. As my fiftieth birthday approaches, I'm revisiting them.


As a child, my technique for relaxing and falling asleep was to visualize a stressful moment I'd experienced during the day, and to imagine myself, in that moment, falling down into a cozy bed.

It worked well, but, after a while, I discovered to my horror that whenever anything stressful happened, I'd find myself growing sleepy and wanting to fall down into a cozy bed.

I felt it was important to remember this backlash effect...hence the postcard.


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The Cosmonaut Can't Be Sam Kinison

The reader replies to my last posting:

"I was a few degrees from the warlord fantasy, however I think the problem was actually getting myself to believe the simple fantasy I came up with, so a more fantastic fantasy might not have helped.  I really think I would have been fine if I could have convinced myself it was my old buddy or a kind relative in the next room watching TV. I just couldn't sell it to myself, which is what I need to work on, I believe."

I see my mistake. I've appeared to be selling this as some sort of self-help "solution". But it's not that. I've left out an essential step: first, you need to recognize, at some level, that the key to life is learning to want what you get rather than learning to get what you want. It's only useful for those who've already developed (or been born with) a bit of equanimity; who've already sanely realized that (as I wrote here): "Amid all the childish Sturm und Drang in a world where petty, arbitrary predilections are grasped for with utter tenacity - and little lasting satisfaction - it seems impossible to escape the conclusion that, really, it hardly matters, one way or the other."

You have to really feel that. Otherwise, you'll imagine this is about tricking yourself into believing that "bad" things are really "good" things. If you see those labels as absolutely ironclad, none of this is for you. In fact, the labeling is the problem! Equanimity is the capacity for loosening up on that labeling.

There are two paths to equanimity: via meditation, or via lots of abrasive time spent in a state of agitated frustration with the obvious ineffectiveness of one's toy steering wheel. Either route eventually alleviates the compulsion to viscerally need this or that result. It releases the delusion of control; it's not a shiny new means for imposing control.

The problem is that a bit of perspective and equanimity won't completely settle everything on a dime. Hormones and emotions and memories and the oceans of unconscious urges and fears remain in play. Also, we tend to forget and flip back, because old habits die hard. It's at times like this that the Cosmonaut/Warlord move helps. It's a dab of emotional salve allowing our bodies, emotions, and unconsciousness to catch up with our wisdom.

It's a way to sooth errant wafts of anxiety, just as we lull children - innate sweet-sleepers who can nonetheless get worked into tizzies from their comparatively mild little anxieties - via bedtime stories and teddy bears. Most grown-ups are too encrusted with aggregated urges and aversions to benefit much from mere lulling.

If the cosmonaut were, like, Sam Kinison, this move wouldn't have helped in the least. The cosmonaut didn't say "I'd better figure out what to do so I don't go berserk from that GODDAM BEEPING! I know....maybe I'll pretend it's friggin' angels or something so I won't be bothered by that GODDAM BEEPING anymore!" It's not a move to exert control by pretending to want what you get! It's not reprogramming. It's just a playful gambit to shift perspective. But if you can't for the life of you see that beeping is, on one level, just beeping - if you make your annoyance paramount, and decide that beeping just inescapably sucks - then you're stuck. No mere trickery can help you flip. You'll die in the space capsule with your face twisted into a tortured grimace.

"I definitely need to put more effort into it.  I think I will start meditating and see if that helps me control where my thoughts go."

Let me save you time. You can't. We don't think our thoughts. They just appear, wafting up from deep unconsciousness; from deep in the crud. The answer isn't to try to better control it all, but to flip to the extreme opposite tack - letting things be. And meditation brings a letting go - the very opposite of control. So beware (but don't worry; you won't fall, you'll float)!

"I can see how it will be a handicap if I can't tame my brain to allow me to sleep with a little TV in the background."

You can relieve your bondage to your chattering brain via meditation. But nothing short of a lobotomy can "tame" your brain. Remember, it's all crud, down to the very core. Don't polish the turd, just escape self-delusion by recognizing the futility of straining for a given result. Recognize that it's about calmly playing the hand you're dealt. Do as my GPS does whenever circumstances don't match with preference: recalculate!

"Yeah, next time I'll tell them to knock it off.  That's part of the problem, they are a constant nuisance so the moment I hear that TV (music, partying etc.) I go straight to super pissed because there is a history with them.

Going inward to avoid the friction and pain of external interaction is a very bad idea. It will just atrophy your real-world skills - your ability to calmly play the hand you're dealt. And telling yourself fantastic stories to empower inward escapism is worse still. That's a route to madness. The cosmonaut wasn't looking for an easy escape from a challenging problem. He was just beautifully accepting what he truly couldn't change.

The Frustrated Cosmonaut

A reader writes (in response to that video I keep flogging over and over again, wherein a cosmonaut transforms hellish noise into heavenly rapture via a shift of perspective):

" I tried really hard late last night to turn the sound of my downstairs neighbor's television into 1) the sound of people I care about chatting and 2) the sound of people I care about watching TV.  I knew I wouldn't get far trying to turn it into music a la the cosmonaut since it was only audible at random moments.  I failed, but eventually got to sleep anyway.  I guess it takes some practice."

You didn't put enough effort into that!

You are from Uganda, and your young children were taken from you by warlords. You passed an agonizing decade not knowing whether they were dead or alive and assuming you'd never see them again. Then, while traveling to another city, you were serendipitously reunited. They'd escaped the warlord but couldn't figure out how to get home. Overjoyed beyond words, you packed them into your car and drove them back home, where you all enjoyed a celebratory feast, and, after many hugs and tears, you finally went to bed. Your kids, happy and relieved to be back in the family living room, stay up watching television. As you turn out your light and pull up your blankets, you notice the noise, and your immediate instinct is to ask them to turn down the volume. But, no; you decide the sound of your beloved long-lost children right there in the next room, safe and cozy, enjoying the TV, is so dear to your heart that you wouldn't change a thing. After a decade of starkly silent nights, you drift off to the first deep slumber you've experienced in a very long time.

Seems like a long way to go? Is it a bit bit loopy and deranged to invest so much mental energy in sheer fantasy? As I wrote here:

"Human beings spend their lives in conflict with imaginary people: mentally rearguing old arguments, worrying about faceless attackers and detractors, reliving bygone humiliations, and generally using our imaginations to make our lives a living hell. That's considered "normal", but using the same faculty in positive ways to help us cope seems, for some reason, childish and loopy."

On the other hand, while it's critical to cope well with what can't be changed, that imperative oughtn't be used to avoid dealing with what can be changed. So your best solution might be to tell those idiots to turn down their damned TV!

Rage and Love

I was driving out of a store's parking lot, while an old geezer, who was driving poorly, did likewise. He became confused, reaching the (incorrect) conclusion that I'd cut him off so I could exit first.

The guy absolutely flipped. Started honking his horn and screaming out his window at me. It was so over the top that I grew alarmed - worried he might be having some sort of medical problem. So I backed up until my car was parallel to his and opened my window.

No medical problem. He was howling and screaming and cursing at me, his face twisted and red. I waited patiently, then asked, mildly, "Do you always scream at strangers?" His response "No! Only at @#$*s like you, you mother@#$@#ing @#$@ $#@$@#!"

I completely understood how he'd misconstrued things, so there was no call for me to get my own dander up; I just waited for him to finish so I could explain the misunderstanding. But my calm patience only goaded him further, his fury finally reaching a point so over-the-top, so urgently personal, so operatic, that the encounter had come to feel, in the strangest way, incredibly intimate.

It dawned on me that I've never in my life had anyone share quite so much with me. He was hemhoraging his vital energy, shooting stress toxins into his bloodstream, showering his presence and locking his attention, all for a total stranger. It struck me as a staggering display of generosity. I recalled the phrase "I'll give him a piece of my mind!". But it's really heart, I think, not mind. When we get angry at someone, we give them a piece of our heart. It's bewilderingly tender.

When witnessing rage - in yourself or in others - if you can dispassionately disregard the facial expressions and the semantic meaning of the words being uttered, it's clear that rage is love filtered through a colored gel.

Postcards From My Childhood Part 3: The Iron

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget. As my fiftieth birthday approaches, I'm revisiting them.


When I was shipped off to college, I was given a strange and foreign object: an iron. And since they don't come with instruction manuals, I had no choice but to teach myself to use it. It wasn't long before I discovered the first rule of ironing: you can't iron away a crease. You can reduce it some, but the fabric will always have an inclination to bend there, and there's no changing that, even with the brutest force.

This for some reason fascinated me. I spent time rolling it around my mind. And, eventually, I had an insight, realizing that there is, after all, one - and only one - way to eliminate a crease: flip the garment and then iron to create an opposite crease.

I realized I'd hit upon an essential truth, and have applied it all my life. For example, if you're plagued by nightmares full of scary monsters, the trick is to love the monsters (this was surely the original intent behind giving children teddy bears).

The cure for ennui: make life exciting for others. If you feel you're not getting your due, work to give others their's. If you feel helpless, help others. If no one understands you, show people you understand them. If you're lonely, ease others' loneliness. If you're sad, cheer people up.

Gandhi's entreaty to be the change you seek in the world, Kennedy's appeal to ask what you can do for your country, and Roosevelt's fear of fear all involve the same mental jujitsu.

I learned to never expect payback. That just creates a new crease. You've got to put all attention on the flip itself, keeping the fabric crisp and well-ironed.

One of the easiest, quickest examples: if you're scared, reassure someone. If there's no one around, an imaginary someone will do. (Human beings spend their lives in conflict with imaginary people: mentally rearguing old arguments, worrying about faceless attackers and detractors, reliving bygone humiliations, and generally using our imaginations to make our lives a living hell. That's considered "normal", but using the same faculty in positive ways to help us cope seems, for some reason, childish and loopy. Noticing this, by the way, entailed yet another flip.)

The biggest/greatest flip of all is well-illustrated by the story of the Russian cosmonaut, re: this movie clip I keep linking to:




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Rare Upstate Oaxacan Outpost

La Amistad Bakery in Newburgh, NY (at 74 Mill St.) sells that rarity of rarities, Oaxacan black mole paste. And also tlayudas, the big rounds of bread traditionally topped, pizza-like, with meats, vegetables, and Oaxacan string cheese (which they also sell).

Naturally, there's also a food concession in the back - which I've never caught at the right time for actual food service - and tamales early on weekends.

There's more Oaxacan stuff further north in Poughkeepsie, I understand.

My Thoughts on Petraeus

I can't for the life of me understand why anyone ought to care who a capable government official is fucking.

What are we, high school students?

Postcards From My Childhood Part 2: The Piano

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget. As my fiftieth birthday approaches, I'm revisiting them.


I started taking piano lessons when I was a mere six years old, and it wasn't long before I did what every child is irresistibly compelled to do: I used my forearms to mush down all the keys. And I listened very keenly to the result, which I recognized as more than mere cacophony.

I found, to my delight, that within this jumble of notes was every song. I could, if I concentrated, pick out Row Row Row Your Boat...in any key! TV commercial jingles. Concertos. Every song ever written, and every song that ever might be written was there to be selectively tuned in to. Nothing was "played", yet everything could be "heard".

I had learned a new faculty; focusing attention to create the perception of change, as opposed to the more normal passive perception of change. The sound entering my ears was unvarying - "out there" was an unchanging jumble. But "in here" played exquisite symphonies. It wasn't imagination; the notes had actually been struck. It was just a matter of internally moving one's attention around static notes, rather than having notes externally moved around one's static attention.

On a gut level (I wouldn't have been able to articulate any of this at the time), I came to suspect that this was how it all works. We live surrounded by a static Everything, and apparent movement and change are created by movements of your attention. All notes are struck; we spend our lives arbitrarily tuning in to this or that.

For one thing, where's Heaven, assuming there is one? We've mapped much of the galaxy, but have yet to find an immense cloud populated with happy reclining people. Yet lots of wise people assure us heaven exists. Indeed, I've experienced it, for fleeting moments, and so have you, but we didn't transport up into the sky - nor have we descended for fleeting moments in Hell. Both were experienced (and are always available for re-experiencing) right here.

And what isn't experienced right here? Even when we travel, isn't it always with the same eery, unshakeable sense of right-hereness? Who can fail to suspect that this pervasive Presence isn't the bedrock of it all?

All notes are struck. That's the postcard.


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