The Day My Life Changed

I was anonymously part of an online discussion where someone asked for tips for launching an online community. He received dozens of replies, many of them highly-rated, but all of them primitive from my expert vantage point.

I wrote up 500 words - 500 golden words - with the weight of authority and hard-won knowledge. It was insightful and smart. You didn't need to know my history to recognize that 1. I knew my stuff, and 2. I was right. I'd offered, perhaps for the first and only time on the Internet, a terse but complete guide to online community design and management. A gem. Sorry, it just was.

My reply was completely ignored, aside from a couple of users who took snarky potshots at it.

---

I was long accustomed to being ignored and to receiving potshots. I've lived a bifurcated life in which I feel both eccentric/crazy/annoying and correct. I have tolerated this paradox, self-identifying both ways: batshit eccentric and also quietly correct. Crazy and sane. Right and wrong.

"Rightness might not be everything, but it's got to count for something." That was the plaintive maxim I held onto for decades. It sustained me, and I needed the support. You'd need to be a supreme egotist to walk around with straight spine and haughty superiority in a world that unanimously insists you're out of your mind. Your internal mental tickertape would need to sound like this:

I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-right-I'm-so-frickin'-right.

What a horror that would be! Fortunately, I'm capable of only one mousy, hesitant refrain.

I'm....right?
For one thing, I couldn't be sure. I didn't love everything that came out of my brain. I'd failed at stuff, I have blocks and shortcomings and slowness and fog. I once noted that

I read slowly, I memorize poorly, I have trouble following instructions and following novel and movie plot points. I don't digest data points quickly or easily. I was a B+ student, and am shockingly poorly-read. My cognitive horsepower is, at best, mildly above average.

Also, I recognize that all sorts of people are better at all sorts of things than me. Recognizing my own spottiness (and having been raised around people with a strange ironclad faith in their phenomenally ignorant convictions), I always accepted the possibility that I might be far less reliable than I believed.

But then this online situation happened, and I could only see one side. In this one instance, for the first time in my life, I felt 100% assurance. When I'm 90% assured, or 99%, or even 99.999%, I can comfortably continue my bifurcation, and live my life as daffy-overheated-weezil-but-also-probably-onto-something. But not this time. And that's when it all began to unravel. Worldly reaction had jumped the shark.

As I've come to recognize my general rightness (my patches of wrongness feel wonderful and refreshing when I discover them; I bathe in them with considerable relief), the one thing I haven't done is to flip the switch launching an inane narrative about how being right makes me awesome. It just doesn't connect. My mechanic can rebuild a transmission - something I couldn't learn to do with a century of instruction - yet he doesn't feel particularly awesome. And assurance, it turns out, feels way better than arrogance, anyway.

But the gaslighting's over. That's the main thing.

The Opportunity of Endless Iteration

If I took a cooking class - even a great one that lasted for a thousand years - it wouldn't help me cook anything great. I'd make fewer mistakes, but I wouldn't advance one nanometer toward deliciousness (see my thoughts on culinary school).

But for 15 years I've channeled meal time hunger into culinary improvement. Simple. Mild. Gradual. Torturous. And while I'm not completely there yet, I'm starting to become the sort of cook I myself might (lightly) praise.

The writer Nassim Taleb, who coined the term "Black Swan" (and who is an arrogant shlub whose thoughts should never be taken at face value - useful intellectuals are self-doubtful, assuring that their insights get pre-passed through a belligerent filter, whereas self-worship makes for spotty thinking), talks about "skin in the game" as being the key to success and creativity.

He's right, it's true. Humans do their best work when it's tightly keyed in to their deepest needs and desires. If you cook and work and love and breathe in a rote get-from-point-A-to-point-B fashion, you're missing the opportunity; you're squandering the rocket fuel.

And dryly resorting to books or videos or classes to improve yourself won't help you cook up anything truly great - in any realm - no matter how hard you work at it. You must have skin in the game (this is why black athletes do better).

Be more ant-like, and let your preset needs and desires drive you, through the endless iterations of daily life, to transcendent result.

From here:

Life consists of a series of revisitations to tired cliches, certain with each new pass that we now really understand them. And so it is with Edison's "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration." That quotation used to conjure up images of wild-eyed fanatics banging hammers in garages in the middle of the night. But it's just a matter of normal people blithely but indefatigably putting out. The Colorado River, etcher of the Grand Canyon, is just some shitty little river. The best among us are shitty little rivers. To me, that's what Edison was saying.

From here:

Billions of people yearn for greatness.
Millions of people do things they hope will make them great.
Thousands of people do great things with nary a thought about where it will leave them.

Poultry Victory

I've finally figured out chicken (sometimes I'm very, very slow, but one of my secret tricks is to keep plying away, ant-like, even in - especially in! - realms where I'm hopeless. That's why I'm a writer even though I'm aphasic).

The trick: low heat and long cooking time. Also, I added a bit more olive oil to the pan than usual. I need to eat low-fat (and enjoy the creative challenge of devising delicious workarounds), but some things can be a little less low fat than others. So for twice this quantity of chicken, I used a tablespoon rather than my usual teaspoon. Not exactly a deep fry.

Here's how I produced this weird-looking plate:

Chicken
Crush a few garlic cloves and very briefly sauté them at medium low temperature (mostly to flavor the oil).
Lay unfurled boneless/skinless chicken thighs atop crushed garlic cloves, rough side down.
Sprinkle with ground coriander, Smoked Spanish Paprika, Aleppo Pepper, and salt and pepper.
Cook on medium, just barely sizzling. Don't touch anything.
Flip when brown and shrunken (and pull out and set aside garlic cloves).
Note: I never needed to scrape chicken thighs to flip them before. A good development!
Requires only minor cooking time on other side (just as well; you don't want the smoother surface to get tough/dry/browned).
Remove thighs, add chicken broth or wine to pan, reduce while stirring, pour over final result at the end.

Baby Bok Choy
Cooked American style, not Asian! This 'Merica, dude!
Cut bulbous bottom off each baby bok choy
Cut roughly in 1" thick slices, vertically
Lots of water baths to remove dirt
Shake dry then blot dry with paper towel
Season with Aleppo Pepper and salt
Sautee with olive oil in post-chicken pan until well-shrunken and tired looking.

HMart's Five Grain Rice (pre-cooked)
Heat cast iron pan or griddle to high.
Add rice mixture to pan (no oil necessary if pan is properly seasoned), crushing it down with heel of hand
When it starts sputtering like popcorn, remove and serve.
Note: any leftover rice or rice dish would work.

YA TV Update

Yesterday I recommended my favorite news show, but I haven't updated my entertainment TV reccos in a while (here is a reverse-chronological view of all prior postings). I'll be terse and maddeningly non-descriptive.

---

I think Chernobyl, on HBO, was "The Wire"-level quality (must listen to the episode-by-episode accompanying podcast, and check out the episode-by-episode run-downs by a guy who lived in Russia at the time). Chernobyl is the highest-rated television program ever on IMDB, and I think that's proper. It's grueling to watch in the watching, but the takeaway (as with all great art) is warmth, not trauma.

---

Killing Eve's second season had the misfortune of being merely excellent after a debut season that was oh-my-god great. If Mamma Grimaldi's lasagna taught us nothing else, there are light years between "good" and "great" (more on that here). So don't listen to people suggesting that you ignore the second season which is, again, excellent.

---

Fleabag, written by and starring the creative dynamo behind Killing Eve's first season (she wasn't part of season two, which surely accounts for the fall-off), was excellent in its first season, and even better in its second. Don't miss.

---

I was leery about What we Do in the Shadows, the vampire comedy on FX, being an American TV series transplant of an New Zealand film (with the same name) that I love dearly(stream it from Amazon for four bucks). But it's really good.

---

The Other Two, on Comedy Central, didn't get much attention amid this frenzied golden age of television, but I loved it. It was about the family disruption when the youngest son suddenly gets Internet famous. Super dark, ala You're the Worst, on FX, which I loved even more (despite its disappointing final season).

---

You probably saw the VEEP series finale. I'd suggest re-watching the final scene - where all the characters are aged 24 years. Keep your eyes on Tony Hale, who plays Gary. Here's that part, below (though I'd suggest watching the whole scene on HBO):



I write a lot about lavishing excessive love, care, and effort to create a magical result, and this is an example. For just a few seconds of screen time, it is clear that Hale spent way, way, way, way, way, way more time than necessary preparing; accounting for every minute of those 24 character years. This over-diligence creates a magnetism, a gravity, that shocks the viewer. He's not doing dress-up shtick like the other actors. This really is that guy after that time jump. It's magic (and necessary for the scene to have real dramatic weight beyond the gag). It's Mamma Grimaldi level work.

The Best TV News Show

I've previously noted that the path to sanity in these politically trying times is the witty/smart Twitter feed (and Periscope live videos, also in the Twitter feed) of Rick Wilson.

If you're looking for a news show, centering on Trump, with a rational, smart perspective and a sense of humor - offering genuine insight rather than the standard shallow venting - you've got to check out "Deadline: White House" with Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC. It's on at a weird time, 4pm Eastern, but I'd strongly suggest you record it. If you watch just one news show, let it be this.

The program has always been good, but lately it's been unbelievable. Everyone I know in or around politics has been attracted; its influence increases geometrically. It's truly must-see TV.

I find MSNBC, generally, to be too lefty doctrinaire, CNN too shallowly surface-skating, and FOX to be cynically pursuing a strategy of profiting on - while abetting - the dismantling of the Republic (see clip below for, among other things, a dandy dissection of this). But Nicolle Wallace, a moderate Republican, is Goldilocks, and that's why she attracts the best guests (though not all are winners; one senses MSNBC policy foisting some substandard talking heads on her)

Here's Friday's show, which was particularly good (I loathe Al Sharpton, but I'll be damned if his political analysis - when he manages to get past his imperious, self-serving inclinations - isn't pretty sharp):

Mistaking Fogginess for Deafness

When I was in my 20s, most of my friends were 80 and 90 year old semi-forgotten jazz luminaries. And I noticed a correlation: old people who stayed sharp didn't say "huh?' a lot. Old people who were slowing down, mentally, did. This made me suspect that hearing wasn't the problem.

If you simply slow down your speech, old people's hearing often works much better...even if you haven't raised you voice. The problem is often cognitive bandwidth rather than hearing. As your mind slows down, there are fewer available resources to process conversation in real time. The result is a buffer overload. Hence "huh?"

Much - perhaps most - old-age deafness should be attributed to deficient mental processing.

Of course, some old people really are deaf. But most of them are at least somewhat deaf, and that's the confounding factor. Their hearing being marginal, it's easy for them (as well as their doctors) to blame aural deficit. If someone with crappy hearing says "huh?" a lot, it's a perfectly reasonable conclusion, and there's no machine that can intercept brain signals and measure how much of the problem is in the hearing versus the processing.

So we buy into the myth that old people who say "huh?" are having problems hearing. Try slowing down, and see if it mysteriously improves. Or, even better, speak in canned clichés. When unsurprising things are said, that poses less of a challenge for sluggish brains (this is why we instinctively speak in predictable ways with babies and very young children).

More Observations On Aging
My Quora answer to "What does it feel like to be old?"


I have the opposite problem, myself. I have more than 50% hearing loss, but nobody ever believes I didn't hear them. So whenever I ask people to repeat themselves, they always, always rephrase with 1. simpler words and/or 2. greater politeness. I've considered pinning a button to my lapel with the words "Seriously Fucking Deaf".

Chicken Cutlet Country

Years ago, a big reason for traveling was to try regional foods (here's a very partial list). You wouldn't miss goulash in Toledo, or green chilis in New Mexico, or spoon bread in the Deep South, or barbecue in Texas.

Regional dishes weren't always unique to the region. For example, Manhattan was all about oysters - at least until New York Harbor's oyster beds died due to pollution. Oysters were served in many other places, but Manhattanites made a celebration of them. You could depend on high quality and freshness. To this day, Manhattan oyster houses usually adopt an old-timey, turn-of-the-20th-century look. Whether they realize it or not, they're linking to a long tradition.

I may be the last surviving person to realize this, but the regional specialty in the lower Hudson Valley is chicken cutlets.

No, really. If you read food guides from the 1950s and 1960s, you'll see mention of this very old tradition, which was fading even back then. Chicken cutlets have always been found everywhere, but folks there made a celebration of them.

I enjoy spotting echoes of dying cultures and watching people act without awareness of the ghostly traditions forcing their hands. The delis in towns just north of White Plains to this day feature their chicken cutlets, without quite understanding why. I haven't seen hard stats, but I'd bet they move more cutlets, day after day, than similar delis in Stamford or Yonkers. Chicken cutlets still have some residual juju!

The other day I lined up to order at Rocky’s Millwood Deli. The place has a lot of pride despite modest ambitions, and the glue holding it all together is Rocky's chicken cutlets. Nine of their twenty "named" sandwiches are chicken cutlet-based, and cutlets are prepared throughout the day, so they're often hot and fresh (unless you go super late - Rocky's is open 24 hours). Like Montreal bagels or Vermont cider doughnuts, "always-hot-and-fresh" is is a sure-fire sign of a regional food....even long after the region itself has forgotten.

Like a particularly high bank of shoveled snow persisting well into Spring, Rocky is the final holdout, not completely melted. They're unaware of their link to a wider tradition, but I feel privileged to know.

The Reed

The reed,

unendingly assaulted by violent wind,

never suffers.


It never occurred to the reed

that the wind was a separate, external thing.


Insofar as the reed thinks at all,

it thinks it's dancing.

Photograph by Paola Casali

Killer Cereals

Guests often remark at my unusually large number of cereal boxes, and ask what's up with that. I reply, with glee, that as a grown-up I can have as much cereal as I want to. I can also get in my car and drive anywhere anytime without permission. I take great zest in the perqs of adulthood.


I'm a mixer. I used to consider this an eccentricity, but I've discovered that many other people mix cereals, too. I've settled on a repertoire of boxes selected for mixability, taste, and healthfulness:

Joe's O's (Trader Joe's) - better than Cheerios, though not as much better as they used to be. A great mixer, adding malty grit without occupying much bowl space.

Special K Red Berries - this is my equivalent of Peanutbutter Smurfs or whatever. Its sugar content is above my threshold (though still not all that high), and its fiber relatively low, but I mix it with homelier, healthier cereals to add a bit of sweet fruitiness, only eating it undiluted when I crave dessert (it's infinitely healthier than a brownie or slice of cheesecake).

Note that the best freeze-dried fruit cereal I've ever found (perhaps my favorite current cereal, period) is Jordan's Country Crisp with Strawberries, available only in UK and Canada (though it's sold on Amazon for a ridiculous sum). When I get my hands on a box, I pay the ultimate honor. I eat it with whole milk.

Ohmygodohmygod someone came up with a do-it-yourself recipe for Jordan's Country Crisp with Strawberries! Note that Trader Joe's sells good freeze-dried strawberries and good coconut oil.

Corn Chex. Rice Chex were never exactly zingy, but they've gotten blander and blander over time. At this point, they're effectively flavorless. Corn Chex are super corny, and the texture's great, to boot. Not much fiber, but not much sugar either. Combines well with Joe's Os. Contrasts provocatively with blueberries.

Quaker once made a divisive cereal called Crunchy Corn Bran that I really liked. It's been replaced with Corn Crunch, and the Crunchy Corn Bran fans are outraged by the new formula.

Nature's Path Organic Heritage Flakes "Ancient Grain". Cheap at Trader Joe's. Remember the old SNL commercial for "Colon Bow" cereal? This is heavy and crunchy, with more fiber than particle board. Good flavor, however. I sometimes eat it straight, but more normally add it, like medicine, to mix ins. It comes in a "Crunch" version which isn't half as fun as the manufacturer seems to think it is. It tastes like something eaten by angry nuns. Stick to the flakes.

Autumn Wheat is the only cereal that could be described as beautiful. It's made by the good Kashi product manager (in my head, there's a good one and a bad one. While there are atrocities in their line-up, akin to rabbit feed pellets, I always try new products in case it might stem from Kashi Dr. Jeckyll). There are versions of Autumn Wheat flavored with cinnamon, vanilla, berries, even chocolate, but I get horribly tired of them after a single box. Cereals must be subtle and enigmatic. If they commit to a really distinctive flavor, you'll easily tire of them (that's why I space out my Corn Chex). There's a reason cereals like Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes have been dominant for over a century. They're ultimately enigmatic; the David Bowie of breakfast cereals.

I have mixed history with Corn Flakes.

I once cooked up a theory that Corn Flakes causes amnesia. The moment you start eating them, you enter a deep bliss state which is utterly forgotten after the final bite, as you snap back to your previous opinion: Meh. Corn Flakes. Whatever. If aliens visited and tasted Corn Flakes, I maintained, and they were told they were available anywhere on the planet for mere pennies, they'd consider us a demented species for our failure to celebrate this blessing and to live our lives around it.

The problem is that as corn has become a tasteless, soulless food thanks to selective cultivation in the US (when was the last time you had an ear of corn that tasted like anything but pure cloying sugar?), Corn Flakes have lost their appeal. Although....hmmm. Maybe they haven't. It's quite possible they're as great as ever, but I'm cloaked in amnesia.

Years ago I did a massive granola tasting. Here's an update on the top picks: Love Grown Foods scaled massively and lost the love. Early Bird is still obscenely rich, obscenely good, and obscenely expensive, and Udi's has become ubiquitous (I haven't tried them in a while but have them mentally filed as "downhill"). Made to Crave went out of business years ago, and Ola is still out there, and has remained small, but I haven't mail ordered any since the tasting.

What about my beloved Quisp? Quaker brought it back - a dream come true - but it wasn't the same recipe. Not as much brown sugar flavor. What do you expect from a company named not "Quisper" but "Quaker"?

No highly-commercialized boxed cereals with nuts ever. They're always rancid.


My hot porridge recipe

Breaking the Rhythm

It was the first night of a six night gig in a nightclub in a fancy hotel in Berne, Switzerland (The Schweizerhof, which we, naturally, referred to as The Scheissekopf). We slept in the hotel and ate our meals there.

On the first day, I was nice to our waiters. Though starchy and formal, they tried feebly to return the friendliness. On the second day, they didn't try at all. On the third day, they radiated contempt, and on the fourth they were subtly rude. By fifth day, I worried they might spit in my soup.

Nothing had changed on my end. In fact, I kept trying harder to be nice, figuring I must have been doing something wrong. It didn't help. Quite the contrary.

Finally I asked a Swiss friend for his opinion, and he said "You're being overly nice. They don't respect you. And they suspect your motives."

The sixth night I ignored them completely. I was aloof. They behaved properly, and the meal went much more smoothly, their normal rhythms unbroken.


A friend who'd worked in a movie box office one summer once told me that his pet peeve was customers trying to be friendly and personal with him. He had a job to do, and it required a certain rhythm, and if you really wanted to be kind you wouldn't break the rhythm. You'd behave predictably, so he could efficiently do his thing without needing to indulgently redirect attention toward chatty yadda yadda.

Further Reading:
Surprising Behavior Breaks Things
Driving Tip