El Salvador Day 3: Quesadilla and the Death of Enlightenment

El Salvador Day 1: Strong Start with Grandma Rice Pupusas
El Salvador Day 2: Típicos


Pupusas weren’t the only long-time favorite foods I needed to try in the motherland. I'm also a huge fan of Salvadoran quesadilla, a coarse-grained rice flour poundcake with cheese pounded into the dough, ala rugelach. It seems a little like cornbread, but Salvadorans have been making rice seem like corn for centuries. It’s their big trick. Another genius touch: it’s sprinkled with sesame seeds. Guatemalans make vaguely similar cake, but with no sesame. Bah.

In New York, you can sometimes find quesadilla reasonably fresh, and it's terrific, but more often it’s stiff, cheaply shrink-wrapped blocks, sold in Latin delis and bakeries, nearly too dry to swallow. Back home in El Salvador, the quesadilla would surely be extraordinary!

---

A digression re: Latin and Hispanic food terms: Most Americans think of quesadilla as a Mexican dish. No.

There aren’t “dishes" in this part of the world, or in other parts - the major exceptions being France, Italy, and Canton, which is a major reason snobs take those cuisines much more seriously.

Quesadilla means "cheesy thing", and anyone who tells you what, exactly, that means, is lying to you. There are thousands of virtually unrelated cheesey items called "quesadilla" throughout Mexico alone, and Salvador has a whole other cheesy thing. If you melt Velveeta over a bagel, you can absolutely call it a quesadilla. No one can tell you otherwise.

Similarly, enchiladas means there’s chile in there, that’s all. Super vague! Tacos means meat conveniently pre-rolled so you don’t need to grab at meat with shreds of tortilla. So tacos aren’t a dish, any more than “sandwiches” are a dish.

I know you own cookbooks which say otherwise. They're wrong, written either by clueless gringos, or by natives who associate these loose terms with whatever style evolved in their families’ villages.

There are exceptions (e.g. chiles en nogada), but they are rare. In most places on this planet, when you've enjoyed some dazzling fish presentation, and painstakingly jotted down its name, you’ll later find out that you've written the local word for "fish". Or something like “Lenny’s fish” because that's the guy who cooked it for you. Few people realize any of this.

The confusion started when the French launched a new model (aka Classical French Cuisine) a century+ ago which caught on big in America and elsewhere. It’s obvious how entranced American gourmets were by the fact that we still call them gourmets. And we still falsely project this Frenchie model everywhere.

That wizened Guatemalan grandma is not producing some dish. Grandma, brilliant though her stuff may be, has been pounding corn all day. She is serving you corn, likely with beans, and, if she’s flush, some protein as well, in one of an array of cooking methods - not “dishes”, but cooking methods. "Broiled salmon” or “poached eggs” are not dishes, though similar terms in other languages - and describing less unfamiliar methods - strike our gourmet ears as Dishes.

So San Salvador doesn't make "a different version of quesadilla" any more than chicken noodle is "a different version of soup" from split pea. Both the latter are watery, hence soup. Both the former involve cheese, hence quesadilla. That's really about it! Just 'cuz you hear a familiar word doesn’t mean there’s any correlation. Or even any meaning at all (Mexicans have no idea what burritos or nachos even are, at least the ones who don’t work at tourist restaurants).

---

So I polled Facebook El Salvador groups, data-mined Google Maps reviews, and otherwise sank hours into pre-scouting the quesadilla place, and, fortunately, it’s unanimous. Every Salvadoran passes La Posada en route to the beach, stopping there for hot, fresh, steamy quesadilla from Neolithic stone ovens.

I pulled in, parking under the benevolent guidance of a half dozen workers - labor's comically cheap, so there are always swarms of worker bees around to help and to answer questions. Since it was a weekday, and no one hits the beach on Wednesdays, the place was deserted. But you could sense the lingering reverberations of stampeding quesadilla chaos. The place must seat 500 people, maybe more, in multi-levelled huts, treehouses, and patios, and the overwhelming majority never sit and eat (in extremely heavy, expensive, Chinese chairs), they just grab their slab of quesadilla and hightail it. So I bet they process a thousand customers per hour.

Tri-level quesadilla pagoda!

The manager - bored out of his skull on a weekday - took me on a tour of the sprawling facility. I told him I’d seen the same scenario all over the world: a good, honest, family place getting more and more and more popular, expanding and expanding and expanding, while somehow managing to keep it all together. La Posada hadn't lost its soul; hadn’t turned into a Big Box sterilized shadow of its former self. They’ve hustled diligently to handle massive scaling. And I can personally relate!

I approached one of the dozen stone ovens scattered around the landscape, and its smiling oven goddess raised a draping heap of colorful hand-weaved blankets to afford me a peek at slabs of shimmeringly beautiful, hot-to-the-touch quesadilla. This was the moment!

They urged me to order pupusas, and I should have done so, there being zero chance they’re not great in such a proud stickler of an operation. Also it was lunchtime and I hadn't had a bite to eat. But while I did grab an horchata, and it was the best Salvadoran - i.e. very cinnamony and sweet - horchata I've had, I took off, utterly fixated on my quesadilla. I hadn't consumed it there because I don’t like to be watched while I eat, especially when I might do so uncouthly. It's a rare phenomenon no one would want to witness.

Climbing the beach road back toward town, I figured I'd stop at the first turn-off, but was reminded that "pull off" is not a thing you do in the Third World. You either stop dead smack in the road (and likely get rear-ended and die) - which applies, also, to any road you might turn onto - or else you go the hell home and do whatever you need to do there. So it took a while, and I was trembling like a junkie.

Finally having spotted the nation’s only 25 feet of reasonable shoulder, I braked in a hail of gravel, and went on the attack, peeling away the outer paper wrapper, ripping apart the stabilizing cardboard quesadilla sleeve, and removing the plastic film, exultantly feeding morsel after silky tender morsel of quesadilla into my waiting gob, vanishing nearly an entire slab in a fugue state, remembering nothing.

Fortunately I had the foresight to document the unboxing. And the final, larger shot captures it all. If there’s a God, and He speaks to us, this is His medium of communication. He reveals Himself through quesadilla. Also Sprach Cheesy Thing.

Peak experience.

The next day, en route to yet another adventure, I noticed I’d left a small morsel. I didn’t expect it to be as great cold. Leff’s Law of Baked Goods, after all, states:

Anything tastes great right out of the oven. Pencils, styrofoam...anything. (So ignore any tips for baked goods that are "only good right out of the oven".)

I popped it in my mouth, and it tasted exactly like the shrink-wrapped stale quesadilla you find in Salvadoran delis around NY Tristate. Maybe a little worse.



Most of you will want to exit here. The following lengthy epilog is less about quesadilla and more about aesthetics and still loftier crap.

---

You can read this story in two ways: as the shaggy dog story it appears to be, or as something with broader implications.

Salvadorans would say “Duh, it’s better hot. So what?” Hell, they all know Leff’s Law of Baked Goods. They’re not ignorant.

But they’d also say, oven freshness aside: “It’s quesadilla. That’s what it is. The stuff you had in New York was proper quesadilla. This, too, is proper quesadilla. What were you expecting?"

Commoditization is defined as "the action or process of treating something as a mere commodity". A soybean farmer does not view every bean as a distinct individual. And the soybean market, as a whole, doesn't distinguish between farms, or regions, or anything else. Soybeans are soybeans, period. Indistinguishable economic units. One doesn't hunt for good ones.

Commoditization is a creepily alien concept for 21st century food lovers, thanks to a movement, which I was part of, at the end of the 20th century pushing a fervent faith that a knish is not just a knish, and that there are muffins worth driving an hour out of your way for.

It’s hard to believe that these were ever radical notions, but the shift has been so powerful that (much as middle-aged progressives sincerely falsely remember being pro gay marriage in the 80s and 90s) we've completely forgotten how different it all was not so long ago. And, boy oh boy, were things ever different.

I could write a book about this (and probably should): we've experienced a deep shift in our aesthetics that no one appears to have noticed. And this shift reflects a broader tectonic movement, also unnoticed, toward neo-Romanticism.

Quick glossary/cheat sheet:

Romanticism is all about inspiration, subjectivity, idealism, and other loosey-gooseyness that can't be accounted for via meters or spreadsheets. Think of poets in meadows, weeping lightly 'cuz they feel so much.

Enlightenment (a materialist view) is about crisp, pompous, Vulcan logic and SCIENCE, damn it! Think of uptight Victorian professors with pocket watches and private weird porn obsessions. It's the yang to Romantic yin.

The Age of Enlightenment brought an end to the Middle/Dark Ages, which we commonly consider a big improvement because we're still kinda/sorta in it. But The Romantic Era had its fleeting moment a couple centuries later, and continues to pop up, ala George Foreman, long after it's been counted out (we've always visualized the future as more brainy than artsy, which also reveals an Enlightenment bias).

In my view, Romanticism was a sophisticated, highbrow version of the Dark Ages mindset, when everything was faith and God's loving hand in a world of mystery, miracles, and the supernatural. Poet and priest both swoon over (different sorts of) intangibiles, while materialists sneer at both, sternly demanding we cut the crap and ignore any Easter eggs we might glimpse in our peripheral version, which are, it goes without saying, pure and utter nonsense.

One can make no logical case for Romanticism. The perspective is too slippery and nonlinear, and involves too many paradoxes. In fact, Romantics cherish paradox (materialists view them as opiates for weak minds). And a fresh new paradox has recently arisen and been widely accepted, without anyone realizing how deeply it challenges the foundations of Enlightenment.

The materialists still think they've won, having expunged Romantic nonsense from the serious consideration of smart, educated thinkers centuries ago to bring us all, halleluj...well, definitely not “hallelujah”, but maybe “eureka!” into the Age of Enlightenment. They still haven't recognized the significance of the new paradox crashing like a tidal wave.

So here's the fresh new paradox heralding a tectonic shift. The fun part is that you, reader, are likely not just familiar with it, but smack in the middle of its vanguard:

You, like me, probably take it as a given that a thing can be, and even should be, better than "perfect". The idea hardly disturbs you. It goes almost without saying that the pretty girl with the “boringly perfect,” “overly pretty” features can never be as deeply attractive as one with some character; blessed with a lattice of serendipitous flaws aggregating into je ne sais quoi.

To a staunchly rational intellect, this does not compute. It’s utter claptrap and magical thinking. It is patently impossible to improve upon flawlessness. To imagine otherwise is to deny logic and wave away the splendid triumphs achieved through disciplined rationality since educated people stopped seeing witches and fairies everywhere.

For me, the apex of humanity is our ability, when we're at our best, to create wholes greater than the sum of their parts. That's what real magic is. It’s why we drive hours for certain muffins that are not just correct but deep. I surely don't need to persuade you, because this is a fundamentally new era, where even those who don’t hunt superb muffins for sport at least blurrily recognize they’re out there.

And I think you'd agree that perfect beauty isn’t the most beautiful beauty. Along the same line of thinking, you'll acknowledge that there are wholes greater than the sum of their parts...and the merely "correct" lies well below transcendence in the scheme of things. Until a few decades ago, "better than correct" would have been a head-scratcher. Same for "merely perfect". Flawless beauty was more than enough, and, logically, can't be exceeded. It was a commoditized world where muffins were muffins.

That world is gone. I’ve watched, in my lifetime, educated people come to believe in magic. Wholes-exceeding-parts. The banal inadequacy of perfection. Special soybeans and exemplary muffins. Transcendence pursued. We are Romantics. It's come back, and it's mainstream.

Consider that "cheap eats", until recently, were an unserious topic of discussion. A Dominican banana milkshake is hardly served in quality crystal, does not use exquisite bananas or fresh farm milk from special cows. So why go on about one? Such a thing has patent flaws, so it's not truly great. Call it beautiful or soulful or moving if you’d like, you kookie little gnome, but we’ll take our sustenance in serious parlors of rigorous cuisine like Lutece, where they’ll make an off-menu frappe from Madagascar bananas frozen to absolute zero and served with sophisticated panache. Now THAT'S quality, if quality is your thing!

And perhaps so. But there are strata beyond mere perfection. Strata of greater beauty; of transcendence. This is an entirely Romantic (and strictly illogical) proposition. It’d have enraged a Victorian professor. The proposition of some indeterminate and intangible "something more" quality (transcendence isn’t always fireworks; it lies waiting just an inch beyond the brink) was precisely what the Enlightenment had arisen to squash. It is, yeegads, religious!

But it's won. There are still small pockets of resistance, who'd still insist that crêpes Suzette are commoditized, so the dish is either correct (in which case any two are functionally identical) or it isn’t. Go to any fine dining restaurant and upspend to have them made "properly", and that's your apex. A talented-but-untrained Brazilian chef with half the required ingredients and a frying pan might present a charming and inexpensive eating experience for those of a bohemian bent, and perhaps even offer some serendipitous quality, but, please, don't make an ass of yourself by proposing that her crêpes Suzette would actually stand up.

If you tried to chowhound your way around Manhattan or San Francisco in, say, 1955, asking experts to recommend particularly great clams casino, they’d direct you to the expensive famous place where the fewest errors are made. Where everything is just so. And there you'd enjoy not transcendent but proper clams casino. That’s as good as it gets. The correct thing is the correct thing (remember Platonic forms?), and "transcendence" is the crazy-talk of wild-eyed maniacs.

If you liked clams casino, it’s because you liked the form of clams casino, not because you like some standout (aka transcendent) particular one, because transcendence is silly superstitious nonsense. Everything seemed commoditized - either an adequate unflawed soybean or not one. So when I walk into a restaurant and ask which wine is delicious and the waiter asks which grape I prefer, and I reply that I prefer the most delicious wine more than I prefer any certain grape, that is the two opposing mindsets on full display and at complete loggerheads.

One more example from a 1955 (or 1655) view. That great Italian grandmother cook is easily explained: she doesn’t mess up much. Sure, she "cooks with love", but that’s just a cutesy conceit. She is cooking properly and skillfully, and anyone can be trained to do the same if they simply apply themselves and don't make mistakes. Lesser grandmas cut corners. Their potatoes aren’t QUITE as fresh. If you use totally fresh potatoes, and don't screw up anything, your output will be of the very highest possible level. Commoditized!

This is how it was for all previous history, though it sounds like another world. And it is impossible to make a logical case for the notion that correctness could be surpassed, i.e. for transcendence (though it’s been one of my goals, in this Slog since 2008, to at least explain how transcendence is conjured up, even if I can't possibly make it crisply comprehensible to staunch materialists).

The old view didn't, as I once imagined, stem from ignorance or snobbery. It stemmed from logic. You can't beat "correct", so try to eat in places with well-trained, meticulous chefs. You'll eat best where flaws are fewest. There is no greater good to aspire to. Perfection is the absence of flaws, and, again, nothing beats perfection.

But, as I child, I heard the famous classical pianist Van Cliburn play live. He'd won the Tchaikovsky Competition, and one wins piano competitions by not making mistakes, which struck me as vulgar. Competitors also needed to be "correct" in their tempo, their dynamics, and their "interpretation" and “musicality” (just two more parameters on the check list!). If there are no mistakes in execution or interpretation, you've played the concerto flawlessly. What could be better than that? A proper performance of Rachmaninoff was commoditized, ala soybeans!

“This is proper quesadilla. What were you expecting?”

What could be better than that? Music! Music could be better than that! Van Cliburn didn't move me; didn't inspire me. He missed no notes, and betrayed no flaws one could point to. But he didn't do anything very right, either. And I did not understand what a radical and logically untenable position "very right" was. I just knew I'd spotted a sort of shortfall not everyone could recognize.

Years later, I noticed the Arepa Lady squirting crappy generic margarine on her ambrosial corn cakes (which I never saw anyone ingest without shutting eyes tightly, balling hands into fists, and displaying a nearly painful ecstasy), and materialism caved in for me completely. Flaws and correctness are red herrings. There's something else going on with deliciousness; with real beauty; with art and aesthetics, generally. It has very little to do with the freshness of the potatoes.

Everything I stand for and love and seek in this world (including whatever the hell I was looking for from that quesadilla) stems from an irrational throw-back Romantic mindset, shared suddenly by a majority, heralding the end of Enlightenment.


Note to snarky trolls: I certainly don’t claim to have started it. I’m just an early adopter who’s been riding the wave with particular vehemence.


Go forward to El Salvador Day 4: (Part1) Izalco Bound

Minimal Daily Sludge

While I stall finishing my remaining El Salvador trip reports...


A chef friend addresses an old worry of mine:

El Salvador Day 2: Típicos

Go back to Day 1


Day 2 is brought to you by Perpetually Dancing Fishnet Grandma, who does not exist in even the same universe as Day 1 Rice Pupusa Grandma.


An ill-advised stop at El Peche Cosme, the Applebees of San Salvador, was followed by a more salubrious ingestion of fried goods at Chilateria Mama Nema (tagline: Sus Orígenes, i.e. “Your Roots”). The local I was hanging with, photographer Alvaro Mayorga (and his artist partner, Erin Nicholls) had been coming here for típicos (“the usual suspects" but not in a Keyser Söze way) for most of his life, and even he didn't know the place's name, which we finally spied on a banner inside the COVID-bunkered interior.

It's a mystery why immigrant restaurateurs transport certain dishes but not others. In all my Salvadoran ramblings through Queens, Jersey, and other hotspots, I’ve never spotted nuégados, which are ubiquitous...well, típicos. Rectification achieved!



Let's start on the left with the nuégados de masa (made of corn, but not  called maíz because corn meal, or masa, is distinguished from corn itself, ala fine-sliced Eskimo distinctions re: snow). These are hush puppies. They're even served with molasses, like hush puppies. Only diff is these are fried crunchy straight through, with no inner chewy/cakey core. See cross section below:

And they're made by people steeped in pre-Colombian corn familiarity, as opposed to your average Alabama housewife picking up a package of cornmeal from the Piggly Wiggly on her way home from pilates.

Nuégados de yuca are more risen (in the yeasty sense as well as the godly sense), and the nuégados de huevo (egg) are, appropriately, large enough to have mothered the others. And they have a remarkable layered, moist texture which contrasts movingly with the crusty exterior. It reminds me of like three different things, but they’re so out-of-context here that I can’t recall. One day I’ll be eating okonomayaki or whatever and it’ll flash.  

Alongside, I tried two corny atoles (I'll translate as “hot porridge drinks"): atol de maiz tostado, which is bland (to counterpart the molasses-dripping intensity of the nuégados), and atol chilate, which is herbed with something vaguely like eucalyptus. The classic flavoring is ginger/allspice, but idunno. Even though I’m an inveterate atolista, I couldn't get into it.  

The Chilateria guys kindly offered me a tourist taste of pickled and sweetened green mango. It makes no sense if you’ll think about it (if you want sweet, why choose green?), but it was highly addictive. Maybe that’s why the first dose is free.

Next door is Panes Coyo, specializing in turkey sandwiches, another dish Salvadoran immigrants don't bring with them. And they're a thing. 

They come with a sidecar of sauce used only for turkey sandwiches. Turkey sandwich sauce. I poured an absurd quantity in and over my sandwich, but was chided for not using all of it. 

In America, a turkey sandwich is a tight, dry unit. In El Salvador, it is a hot wet sprawling mess. Sort of like the back quarter panel of this car parked just outside (did you notice the bullet holes?):

The turkey sandwich guys also had stacks of shimmering golden fried yuca I couldn't resist. I’d have been fine with them as-is, but was talked into getting them “with everything" - which, here, is taken literally, to mean “every material substance on the planet”. Sauce, baby fish, pork debris, yarn, antifreeze, who the hell knows what else.

Hot wet mess turkey sandwich with hot mess fried yuca, all eaten with hands coated with residual molasses while flies eagerly circled. I have definitely landed.

Lagniappe: more messy still: mango spiral. Long noodly strips of green mango befouled with pumpkin seed powder, chili, and a thousand other slurpy things. No fork, just extrude from the plastic bag and attempt to ingest. Godspeed.

Continue to Day 3

El Salvador Day 1: Strong Start with Grandma Rice Pupusas

Olocuilta is what Brazilians would call a "favela"; a rickety hovel of sheet-metal housing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of small-time entrepreneurs. 5% sell cans of soda (hey, it's a living), and the rest make pupusas, the local corn thing - thick, stuffed, and griddled - or, if you're very lucky, cooked on an old-fashioned ceramic comal atop a roaring fire.

Here's some online info about this zone, and here are the words of one Nathan Wise, an American expat who offered local eating advice on Facebook:

When you land you're gonna get transport to San Salvador. About half way there's a town on the highway called Olocuilta. Half of the town is pupusa restaurants. It's where they invented rice pupusas. The story goes when they were building the highway people there fed the construction workers, one day they ran out of corn and some enterprising individual turned rice into a mass for pupusas. People loved em and come from all over El Salvador to eat them there. I usually bribe the cabby with a couple extra bucks and promise of a couple extra pupusas. You can establish a baseline there before you ever get to the city. And it's more likely to have shortcut-free traditional food than the capital.

As you drive into Olocuilta (or even merely veer in that general direction), throngs of proprietors near the highway entrance frantically beckon you. As always, the thing to do is to resist and probe further in. My destination was Pupusaria El Chayito, which I'd scouted out from this video:

They’re situated on a lonely block far from the hustlers. The place is sort of an anti-hustle. There is no sign. No street number. No confirmation that you are where you think you are. You might very well be intruding on a family dinner. In fact, I'm not entirely sure I wasn't.











I took photos of the general setup and, of course, the food. I did not shoot the ancient proprietor/chef de cuisine, who was already terrified of the gringo who'd shown up a half hour before opening to watch her eagle-eyed as she stoked her oven and set up the huge jars of curtido (pickled cabbage). I tried communicating, but she was viscerally convinced of who I was, and a friendly Spanish-speaker wasn't any part of that.

At the end of the meal when I told her, in comfortable though imperfect Spanish, "Madam, that was the experience of a lifetime. I'm so grateful for the experience. I would pay anything for these pupusas, but how much do you want?" She held up three fingers. Three dollars. It was impossible for me to have been saying these things to her, so I simply wasn't. The power of faith! And I couldn't possibly understand her answer, so up went the fingers.

What I really wanted to communicate was that I'd eaten hundreds of pupusas in the past 40 years, some of them good, but this was my very first in El Salvador (and, it goes without saying, by very far the best). And when I inquired about varieties, and she piped up "¡REVUELTA!", a mixture of chicharrones (pork - not just the skin, by the way, that's elsewhere in Latin America) and cheese that is her sole offering, I wanted to tell her that for all those years “revuelta” has always been my go-to pupusa. I am a revuelta man. And I have come home.

But none of that could be communicated. Too much; too crazy; just no. But it’s not like I’m complaining.

These were, indeed, the famous rice pupusas. She doesn't even bother with corn. And if I were to turn around, go back to the airport and get on a plane home, it would have been totally worth it. No question.

While this wasn't the sort of peak eating experience where food gets scary and different, it was absolutely a ten (per my surprisingly useful system for rating foods from 1 to 10). Eyes rolled. Moaning happened. Abuela noticed. I think if I went back three times we'd be best friends.


Move on to Day 2

Documenting Travel

People don't fully recognize the immense and versatile documentary power of a smart phone camera while on the go, especially while traveling.

Just pulled up to a restaurant, bar, shop, museum, park? Found a great coconut juice vendor on some beach? First thing, shoot a photo of your foot.

Or whatever. Doesn't matter. Just to record GPS data and date/time, so you know where you were and when. It will be a cinch to locate the address and venue name later. If you do this whenever you stop, you'll have a perfect, thorough, reliable record of your movements, without using up any data allowance (if you're abroad and not on a foreign data plan). Never again wonder where that cool thing you found was. Also take a reminder (not necessarily artistic) shot of the cool thing, for linkage. 

Say you're checking out a place you previously read about on the internet, and want to tie that info in with your photos without stopping to take notes. Call up the web page in your browser and take a screenshot. You'll thus capture the URL (and with the latest iphone OS, you can always select and copy the URL's text directly from the photo).

Found an informative brochure for where you are? Or a sign showing operating hours? Or a menu? Swiftly shoot every page. Bang bang bang bang. Then throw away the paper. Return home without business cards, brochures, etc. It's all on your phone. One Camera Roll to rule them all.

Need to match a photo to some note you've taken? "Chauncy recommended this caviar"? Open the note on your phone. Screenshot. Then shoot the caviar (or menu or venue name). Done. All together nicely.

If you have some live comment you need to tie in (“must return on a Thursday for half-priced wine”), don't open your phone's notebook app to write a note that will be tough to associate back to this time/place. Instead, scrawl your note on a paper napkin and shoot the napkin (and then throw it away). Or else go ahead and open your notebook app, take a note, then screenshot the note and delete the note itself. Just pack the bejesus out of your camera roll!

Finally, shoot the receipt. Go paperless. This shot is also tied to GPS data and time/date.

When you're back home, you'll know every stop, every venue, and every expense. Twenty years later, you'll know exactly where you bought that great coconut juice on the beach, and even what you paid for it!

75% of my camera shots while traveling are purely reference (it's more like 50% for normal life at home). Stuff like recording of GPS data, taking of screenshots, elimination of paper (e.g. I don't record checks, I photograph them after I write them). Those support materials make my artistic photography much much easily to account for and share later. It's the best possible use of packrat instincts!

Then, when you do shoot real photos, shoot freely. No need to establish context, account for where you were when, or to associate your photos with supplementary data, notes, info, etc. It's all laid out, in beautiful chronological order, in your camera roll.

Two More Movie Recommendations

Coming soon after my rave for "Compartment No 6", currently in theaters, which noted that "sitting in a movie theater watching a not-super-popular movie not-on-a-Friday/Saturday-night is the greatest degree of social isolation you can experience outside your living room", here is one film in theatrical release, and another streaming on Amazon Prime.


"A Hero" is now streaming free on Amazon Prime. It's by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who is one of the most consistent directors on my favorites list. And he's done it again.

I don't like to discuss plot, or even the setting or genre, of my movie/TV recommendations. I made my argument here, concluding

If you're still making your viewing choices based on genre ("I like shows about plucky millennials but dislike science fiction"), you are a reactionary force, pulling things back to 1978. If you really value art that transcends, why embrace the damned launching pad?

I don't care about the yadda yadda; I care about what they DO with it. If Nazi film maker Leni Riefenstahl (who was GREAT, by the way) were alive to make, in her old age, a film humanizing an Auschwitz guard, showing his sensitive side via charming vignettes in his off-work home life acting like a doting husband and father, I'd be just as offended as you by the proposition, but would watch the hell out of the film. I'm all in on artistic expression of every stripe and from every perspective, bar none. Art uber alles, baby.

Sorry for side-tracking. Neither of these films is controversial. I'm just explaining why it doesn't matter to me what happens, where it happens, or which previous films had previous things happening in similar places. It's the 21st century; get with the program!

---

"A Hero" is an efficiently-packed, tightly-written very serious Greek comedy, described by the NY Times' A.O. Scott as having the "density and observational acuity of a 19th-century three-decker." A great comparison, but I'd add that an acute and observant 19th-century three-decker is just what's needed in these fuzzy indulgent times. A tall glass of ice water in hell.

In this film, everyone gets screwed, though everyone does their best. Every single character, without exception, acts reasonably, defensively, even sympathetically if viewers can wedge minds open enough to fully consider the perspectives. Yet, again, everyone gets screwed. It's like an impossible Escher painting, where the roads lead to impossible, yet ultimately inevitable, places. The ending is the only one possible, though phenomenally undeserved from every angle. What a fantastic movie.

Moviegoers love/need to choose sides. A favorite they can identify with. If you indulge in this way, everyone else in the movie will seem like a jerk, a shyster, a monster. Petty bits of bad judgement and minor transgressions - and stoic unwillingness to easily toss aside self interest to empower your favorite character (as happens in movies) - makes this a most uncinematic film.

But "A Hero" bucks the eternal rule of cinema: the audience's point-of-view character must serve as fulcrum. Here, just once, it's not like that. These are all full-fledged humans with full-fledged lives and interests, none existing simply to thwart or enable the protagonist. This is, then, a movie about actual reality, which explains why it's been poorly understood. We're all well-versed in simplistic movie logic. Reality, though, is poorly understood.

Don't miss Farhadi's previous two oscar winning films: “A Separation” (rentable everywhere) and “The Salesman” (streaming free on Amazon Prime).

---

Nobody's ever made a good movie about meditation. Watching some dude, however charismatically bearded, zone out on a cushion doesn't show you anything. What he's doing is not "for show" (unless he's bad at it, in which case his tortured twitchiness will be hilarious). So, instead, spiritually ambitious filmmakers fall into cliché with winsome broad-stroke shots, held for a poignantly long while, to, like, foster the viewer's soft-heartedness. Really look at this waterfall, man! Really LOOK AT IT!

"Velvet Queen", currently in theaters (probably, alas, like twelve of them) isn't for everyone, but it's an admirable inroad. It's nominally a nature documentary set in the Tibetan wilderness, with beautiful filmmaking that's more than just winsome shots held for "calm-the-fuck-down" lengths, centering on legendary French nature photographer Marie Amiguet and his inquiring Watson-ish companion, writer Sylvain Tesson.

At one level, these seem like the usual intellectually pretentious French aesthetes. But if you can get past that (not everyone will), you'll soon realize they're not full of crap. Amiguet's got some illumination going on (and a lifetime of superb achievement to back him up). And Tesson isn't as boorish as you'd first expect, despite his voiceover confession of impatient weariness he'd never confess to the infinitely patient, infinitely stoic Amiguet, who never found a frozen tundra he didn't hanker to to lie upon silently all day awaiting a fox or raven to appear before his lens....or, just as good, maybe not.

The film has real poetry, even with the inevitable Fraaaaaaaaaaaanch weightiness, and its laughable shape-giving "lucky stroke" of finding precisely what it's looking for just as the two prepare to pack it all up and fly back to Paris. 

Amiguet's singular perspective, teased out and articulated in Tesson's voice-over, combined with co-director Marie Amiguet's sumptuous, heartfelt camera work, and the beautiful but diligently non-grabby score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - plus some distinctive shots of animals and landscape quite unlike anything you've seen before - make this not only a terrific film, but one that actually offers a taste of meditative silence.


I hate to say that. You can't get to nothingness - to silence - through somethingness. Immersing in objects won't prompt you to flip perspective and identify with pure subjectivity, which is what meditation is ideally about. But one must let go before one can flip, and this is one of the best letting-go films ever created (most hold on tightly to their flamboyant letting-go message).

Tick Paranoia, Covid Paranoia

I haven't seriously worried about getting COVID since my second vaccine shot last March.

Meanwhile, scads of my friends spent that year hunkered down, fully vaccinated but barely going out because they'd instilled the simplistic message that "COVID's bad, mmkay?"

I also have unvaccinated friends, but let's deal with one variety of anti-science ignorance at a time.

Meanwhile, there's an enormous scourge in the entire northeastern quadrant of the country with no vaccine or reliable cure: Lyme disease. It can fry your brain or leave you with chronic perpetual pain. Everyone here has heard the horror stories, but they all absent-mindedly traipse through grass. Hey, it's just grass, right? It's nothing terrifying, like air!

My vaccination counters all COVID threat, but lyme-infected ticks are poised to make me horrendously and chronically ill. So while I freely go to movies and restaurants and travel, and walk outdoors unmasked, I don't spend a minute on grass or dirt until I:

Put on clothes I previously treated with Permethrin

Spread a 30% DEET repellent on my hands, arms, neck, shoulders, and ears.

Pull my Permethrin-treated socks up and over my pants bottoms.

Spray my shoes, socks, neck, and hat with lemon oil.

Then, when I'm ready to come back in, I strip down to my underwear just outside the door, carefully place all my clothing in a laundry bag, and pull tight the drawstring.

I leave the bag leaning against the front door while I take a long hot shower, using a loofah over my entire body to remove any hangers-on.

Then I throw clothes and laundry bag in the dryer for 30 minutes (dry heat kills ticks). My Permethrin-treated shoes always remain outside.

My preventative routine (recommended by experts) strikes people as nutty paranoia. But I don't get Lyme Disease.

I'm also apparently nuts with COVID. My right-wing friends think I was a fool to vaccinate, while my left-wing friends think I'm suicidal to go within a block of another human being without wearing a HAZMAT suit, or touch my mail without first soaking it in isopropyl (see this short send-up of the Great COVID Divide)

I have often felt like a sane man in an insane society. But never more than right now. And, the unexpected thing is, I can't find any reason to feel proud of some sort of superiority, when all I'm doing is dumbly, obediently following advice from scientists and health authorities. The people who don't follow that advice, who deem their visceral impulses super solid and competent, those are the geniuses!

I never want to be a genius. Teach your kids to deny their fabtastic birthrights. Teach them to trust themselves and love themselves a bit less. Two generations of cultivating self-love and self-trust in the aristocratic First World has brought us a society terrified by non-threats and oblivious to actual ones, and swaggeringly certain we have nothing to learn because our ignorant assumptions are nothing short of divine.

Shmuckiness and Christianity

In my recent posting "Sunk Cost Prolongs Idiocy", I noted that adults don't learn (because it requires conceding ignorance), or change (because it requires conceding wrongness), or improve (because it requires conceding inadequacy). We must feel stupid to become smart. But we'd much rather be idiots than feel like idiots. This explains the vast preponderance of idiots…and also the epidemic of zany self-overestimation. 

But there's an exception. One proposition poked through and persuaded people - loads and loads of people! - to eagerly acknowledge shortfall and seek closure.

Christianity became the greatest success of the past millenium by marketing the proposal that you are a sinner, but (the "Good News"!) you can be saved, if you merely let go and let God (that specific credo is a late arrival, but it's a goodie, as even a crusty old Indian swami I knew had to admit).

Christianity played a certain angle, targeting a specific sense of shortfall people were willing to cop to - especially once the movement reached critical mass. And, just like me baiting delicious yummy cupcakes, it came with its own easy solution - one far less daunting than learning, changing, or improving. Surrender’s literally a no-brainer (and it really does work).

The Church somehow persuaded millions of humans, who normally cling to lofty self-images, to concede their shmuckiness (aka sinfulness). An incredible feat, akin to making dogs dance on hind legs. No wonder it was a smash hit!

Of course, it no longer works. Hasn't for a while. While Christianity remains a potent tribal identity (like rooting for a football team), the meat of the thing - "I'm a sinner submitting to salvation" - has been largely erased from the picture and replaced with things like prosperity gospel, i.e. "I DESERVE THE VERY BEST!"


As rich, comfortable, narcissistic moderns, we've sealed all gaps, glimpsing no self-shortcomings. "I am neither miserable nor a sinner. I am not, in any way/shape/form, a shmuck." That level of self-delusion, ignoring mounds of evidence, is what modern society deems healthy. Now that we’re all immaculate, we project the palpable sense of shortfall back onto the World itself, which, it goes without saying, TOTALLY SUCKS.

Survival Kit: Coping with Paranoid Schizophrenics

A friend is having problems with a paranoid schizophrenic in his life. I've had a couple of those, plus I've dealt with a broad swathe of mental illness while managing a million people online for a grueling decade (one of Chowhound's moderators was a doctor who'd spent years treating indigent addicts in the South Bronx, who, a few weeks in, was shocked to have observed more twisted and demented behavior than she ever had in her day job. She described it as a "a post-graduate seminar in aberrational psychology.")

I was going to send him a note, but perhaps this will be useful to others. So here you go. I don't know a lot, but I do know some things.

1. It Feels Like Knowing

The kookie untrue beliefs don't feel like beliefs, nor do they feel kookie. They don't feel like propositions that have been considered, accepted, and incorporated into their world view. They're not workshopping new lines of thought. Nothing like that.

Rather, it feels like knowing. Solid, fundamental, unswayable knowing. The way you know you live in a country called America, and have two feet, and that chocolate tastes good. You know these things, and they are not up for argument. That's how their kookie untrue beliefs feel - even if a new set arises every few days/hours/minutes.

And it's not a matter of over-tenacity, any more than you're overly tenacious in knowing the things you know. It's perfectly healthy to remain steadfast in one's fundamental understanding of the world. The infirmity lies not in the tenacity but in the filtering and error-checking.

So don't expect to "talk them out of it". How receptive would you be to being "talked out of" the fact that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, or that people eat turkey on Thanksgiving? How closely would you listen to someone's arguments to the contrary?

This problem is not confined to schizophrenics. We all "know" plenty of wrong stuff, and it all feels solidly known. Recognize this and let it feed your empathy!

While creating my smart phone app, Eat Everywhere, which I fact-checked to death, terrified of looking like a gringo dilettante, I discovered to my horror that a half dozen or so of my favorite foreign dishes don't exist.

I'd remembered wrong, or made assumptions, or had repeatedly eaten the dish in one single immigrant restaurant which concocted it to pander to clueless American customers. I've evangelized some of these dishes - in print! - for years. They were bedrock to my view of world cuisine. Yet they were ghosts.

That was an eye-opener. Man, I knew they were real! 

So was I "hallucinating" them? Not exactly, no. Just applying good faculties to bad data. The depth of my belief was not the real problem. 

Calm Contradiction May(?) Be Useful

If someone substantial in your life tells you that you do not, in fact, have two feet, the statement will not persuade. Yet it will be tabulated and stored, minutely influencing the greater Well of Conviction. It goes into the pot. If, one day, you look down and see only one foot, you'll remember.

You cannot argue paranoid schizophrenics out of believing the CIA implanted radio transmitters in their dental fillings. But you can register a quiet, mild "no" vote on the proposition. Be confident, be calm, be kind (but not condescending) and accept that you will not change minds. Even without acceptance, you've spoken truth. There is truth in the pot.

This is counterproductive if you can’t manage it calmly, quietly, and without condescension. Parenthetical voice, not confrontational voice. And if, despite best effort, you rile them up, nix it for a while. Stress is counterproductive.

However, along the same lines (and I suggest this part with greater confidence): resist the urge to patronize. Don't lampoon their beliefs to underscore the absurdity. Don't "show them how crazy they look." That might register as a "yes" vote! Schizophrenics, like Twitter users, parse sarcasm poorly.


Permission to Be Generally Dumb and Unpleasant

Paranoid schizophrenics can be very unpleasant. If you love one enough to stick around, it's reasonable to insist that they not burden you with unessential unpleasantness. Don't be problematic in ways you can actually control! Do the dishes! Don't drink milk straight out of the container! Don't use the hot water while I'm in the shower!

But that's not reasonable at all. Humans - even healthy ones - have bad moods, harsh words, behavioral lapses, and poor judgement. It is not fair (though completely understandable) to expect them to be immaculate above/beyond their uncontrollable dysfunction. Factor accordingly (more here).

And, as you do take this into account, note that this is you becoming saner. The situation can leave you saner or it can leave you nuttier. Why not choose sanity?


Autonomy 

People get to be wrong. They're allowed to make horrible decisions and do harmful things, even life-threatening things. This is a lesson learned by everyone who's cared for aging parents (at least those who haven't driven themselves and their parents batshit crazy).

Sure, we draw a sharp distinction for the infirm. They're not in proper control of themselves! But we're all infirm and lack healthy control in some respects at certain moments....and rightfully expect not to be strapped to gurneys until the bad impulses go away. And we mostly don’t strap schizophrenics to gurneys. So we don’t get to control them, even if we decide, with good intentions, that they really need it. 

All human beings get to be stupid and self-destructive. That’s part of the package of basic rights. So unless you're prepared to strap someone to a gurney, you're going to have to respect their autonomy. There's no choice. Short of criminality or mortal self-harm, they get to make their own calls. Even wrong ones. So long as they’re classified as human beings. 

In the end, you'll discover it's largely an issue of your own missplaced sense of control and authority. Your rock-solid certainty of what's best isn't always so solid. You're not THAT sane, either. Releasing your false notion of control can be your own mental health therapy.

Loving and Caring Without Getting Personally Spun

The item above requires developing some detachment. That's a tough call with loved ones, given that love is nothing but attachment.

You need to say "This person is currently in another universe, behaving very poorly, and I'm not coming with them...or bringing them back. They will continue to reject love and effort, and it's not my (or their) fault. It's simply how it is, and I don't need to hold the horror in my corpuscles. I will accept the unacceptable, while unconditionally loving this person, regardless of her current galactic address."

Note: I myself can't do this.

I know how to hold on tenaciously. And I know how to let go completely, dissolving all sense of caring and attachment. But I’m unable to detach selectively.

When I let go, I really let go. I'm terrific with infinity, but pitiful with gradations. It's a terrible shortcoming.

So I have little to offer on the subject of partial detachment - detaching enough to respect the person's autonomy (and preserve one's own mental health) while simultaneously remaining engaged, present, and caring. Find yourself another jnani for that part.

I'll say this, though: It's the same issue I once confronted atop a ladder while trying to quell a rising sense of panic via a holistic (not selective) "letting go". That was, duh, a really bad move, and I've been trying to come to grips with it ever since.


More "Survival Kit" postings

Sunk Cost Prolongs Idiocy

Repeating some themes previously discussed, but tying them together a bit more neatly.

Sunk-Cost Fallacy(noun)
The phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.

"Important" Means Never Letting Go
An acquaintance of mine has spent a full decade anguished over a single finite loss. She'd insist that it was a finite IMPORTANT thing. Fair enough. I get it!

But the universe won't bring it back just because she insists and fixates. Tagging phenomena "important" garners no special dispensation in this immersive cosmic swirl of unending creation and destruction we've opted into. We knew the rules going in.

Her friends try to soothe her. None would ever utter the obvious thing they're all thinking: "Let go! Move on!" Contemporary civilization is built upon an immutable law that the whiny must be consoled, and never have their assumptions challenged. While consolation only reinforces the false premise, sinking the person deeper into a mental tarpit, we want to seem helpful much more than we want to actually help. So we reinforce frozen perspectives rather than risk the friction of inducing a shift of perspective (aka "reframing").

Etch-A-Sketch People
Every torturous passing year adds greater incentive to tighten her clasp rather than let go, simply because of sunk cost. If she were to lightly shrug and simply move on with a hopeful spark in her eye - if it were that easy - then what was all that Sturm und Drang for? Opening up and reframing and letting go and moving on would reveal that the closing-down, holding-on, and paralysis was willfully unnecessary. And that is the last thing she wants to reveal to herself. She wants to avoid feeling silly far more than she wants happiness.

So she just keeps doubling down, planting herself so deeply in mental mud that she's become what I call an Etch-A-Sketch Person: so unflinchingly committed to a counterproductive dramatic trope that she'll drop it only upon the ultimate reset (i.e. Etch-A-Sketch shake) of death. She is tightly strapped in for this ride she’s decided to characterize herself as taking.

Improvement Requires Owning Your Shmuckiness
Please don't be an Etch-A-Sketch person. You needn't commit to a preposterously grim pretense of immobility. I've previously explained how we freeze perspective and how effortlessly we can self-liberate via reframing, but the insidious component is sunk cost. If my shackles could be effortlessly cast off, why have I been lavishly lamenting my plight? What was I, a shmuck?"

"What was I, a shmuck?" is the biggest problem.

Why can't adults learn effectively? Because that would mean acknowledging previous ignorance. What was I, a shmuck?

Why can't people change? Because that would mean acknowledging previous stuckedness. What was I, a shmuck?

Why can't people let go? Because that would mean acknowledging previous grasping. What was I, a shmuck?

That asshole Dylan Thomas really messed us all up with "Do not go gentle into that good night...burn and rave...Rage, rage against the dying of the light." NO! Opposing the inevitable is not admirably staunch and feisty. It's just poor mental health. Heed, instead, the incomparably wiser Anthony de Mello!

Why do people double down when caught, deny indisputable facts, and stick with hopeless causes? Commitment! It's a choice: Strap in tenaciously, rather than humbly concede your shmuckiness. Don't worry, your impulses are solid gold, baby. Remain fully inflated at all costs!

A Shmuck Never Has Far to Fall
I've come at this world ass-backwards, always presenting shmuckily. My underlying assumption is that I know nothing, am horribly skewed, deluded, error-prone, and sadly, pathetically clueless. In today's America, I sound like I require medication, if not institutionalization. I suffer from a POOR SELF-IMAGE, an unthinkable proposition for this society. One must fervidly hypnotize oneself back into delusion:

I am powerful and competent and people love me! I am powerful and competent and people love me! I am powerful and competent and people love me!

Stand tall! Straighten your spine! Accept without doubt that you are indisputably above-average in every respect! Be a WINNER, for chrissakes!

Nah. I never did any of that. I did recognize when I was right - because when you're right, you're right - but I never identified as "Mr. Right". I was always a zaggy hairball of wrongness who occasionally spat up an errant gem or twelve. I still feel that way! Have a look at this Slog's subtitle!

I've held onto this framing because it's worked out great. We all must choose between being right or feeling right; being smart or feeling smart; being wise, creative, insightful, or feeling those things. You can’t have it both ways, and I've blithely sacrificed the latter for the former. It was a rough ride, but, finally, teetering on dotage, I enjoy some perqs. I sit at the keyboard and some level of insight somewhat reliably flows. I once dreamt of that (of that HAPPENING, not of being The Guy Who Does That. I want to sing way more than I want to be a singer).

I stick with this framing, registering rightness and good results as they arise, but without trying to act the part. It doesn’t need to get all over you. One is not, it turns out, compelled to savor one’s own farts through haughtily dilated nostrils. It can feel like play, and be performed like a child, with unbridled enthusiasm and no grippy grown-up dramatic hooey.

And so I have nowhere to fall. Whenever new information, insight, or perspective reveals that I've been wrong all along, I swoon with delight. Being shown I've been wrong all along fills me with hope that one day I'll feel genuinely right! Who knows, maybe I'll turn this thing around!

The normal cure for feeling shmucky is to fix the feeling. I've always figured it made more sense to strive to become less shmucky. This approach is widely rejected, though, because it leaves people feeling starkly under-elevated. So it's a non-starter.

One advantage I enjoy is laziness. It takes vast energy to create and maintain a lofty self-image. You must strenuously reject fact, truth, change, improvement, and The Universe At Large. But with no self-image to maintain, I'm breezily unattached. I can drop any assumption or self-notion without existential crisis. Without sunk cost. Without looking back and saying "What was I, a shmuck?" The answer is eager affirmation. "Shmuck, yep!" This leaves me freshly, lithely responsive.

Better Cupcakes
Haughty food experts used to newly arrive at Chowhound, pronouncing this or that cupcake "The Best." Period. Truth has been revealed. Thor has spoken!

Inevitably, chowhound B would pipe up, "Nah. Try this other cupcake. It's better!" And chowhound A would grow huffily combative. Because if his cupcake isn't the greatest fucking cupcake, that means he's a shmuck. And, as he will assure you, he is certainly no shmuck. Whence flamewars.

I'd enter the conversation.

"Hey, buddy! :) You really like cupcakes, no?"

"And how!"

"Then wouldn't you want to know about even better ones? Wouldn't that be a welcome outcome? Me, I'm a recognized food expert, but nothing on gawd's green earth would make me happier than for someone to inform me that all my favorite places suck, and lead me to greater deliciousness, amen. That's my dream! I want it! Don't you want it? Don't you want even better cupcakes?"

"I don't know that his cupcakes are better!"

"Sure, but isn't it worth finding out? Isn't it enticing? Why would you fight so tenaciously against the hope of possibly-more-delicious cupcakes?"

It often worked. Maybe, just maybe, his momentary cupcake love could entice him out of the sunk cost of his shmuckiness denial.

Persuasion
I'm abnormally successful at changing people's minds. My success rate, when I'm not being ignored, misunderstood, argued with, patronized to, spat upon, or face-punched, can be as high as 5-10%.

My trick is to deal directly with perspective (framing!). I don't traffic in the usual clichéd talking points. I don't shame people or make them feel stupid. I don't ram them from the opposite direction. Heck, I don't even offer crisply logical argument, which is persuasive only to computers.

Rather, I try to coax a shift of perspective. You know the old canard of "Make them think they thought of the idea?" This is how that's done. Coax them into a fresh perspective, and let them draw their own conclusions. One can't force a conclusion, but one can certainly induce a shift of perspective (that’s what art is, and coaxing shifts of perspective is also the only viable route for a would-be Messiah).

The Cupcake Dialog was successful more than 5-10% of the time. Maybe a whopping 25%. Though it was often hard to tell, as they'd never come back and admit it. It was never really about cupcakes. It was about phenomenally misguided notions of who they are and what this life is.


I try hard not to manipulate. So, as I write this, I realize the Cupcake Dialog maybe was too much. First, their sunk cost is enormous, so I'm coaxing quite a violent drop back into sanity. Plus, many people need to feel absolutely fantastic to so much as get out of bed in the morning. Shake them into questioning their splendor and you might leave them with absolutely nothing, because splendor's all they’ve got.

This is why I've started viewing the conceited, the bullies, and the control freaks (have you ever noticed the latter are always the people least deserving to be in control?) as the desperate unfortunates they truly are. I frame them as adorable toddlers posing in cheap superhero Halloween costumes. Best to hug them, offer some candy, shut the door, and hope they go knock elsewhere. Nothing else to be done, nothing to change, because, in most cases, if you stripped off their preposterous cheap garb, you’d behold only trembling gelatin.

Trembling gelatin. My God. No wonder they're terrified.

So even the practice of inducing reframing - aka art - might be yet another hapless Messiah misfire. There really is no good reason to ever, ever raise the house lights. Just talk to the mask. Always talk to the mask. Never stop talking to the mask.

Problem is that I feel compelled to help them transcend that. I look behind the mask, and speak, sotto voce, directly to the mask-wearer, and have developed clever means to help people break free of facade. I had to go through a lot (a LOT a lot) to possess this ability. But it’s as useful as mastering Neptunian. Because it is in no way beneficial to expose trembling gelatin. Masks are often shields, and people sink vast cost into armoring, and beneath all this lies trembling helpless gelatin that's never seen the light of day.