things I'm over:

1. putting my time in things that don't impact what I care about

2. that entertainment in the city is mostly based on novelty and sexiness, or spectacle and luxuriousness; I am over distractions to sate a lack of meaning

things I still like:

1. music on Spotify, the small finds in my discovery playlist, but I don't agree with how artists are not adequately compensated

2. jazz

3. damien rice when the algorithm plays him 

4. playing piano 

5. the way the strings resonate on my vintage suzuki guitar

6. keeping the important things close

hobbies on rotation:

pottery, watercolor, piano, poetry. hiking.

things that are difficult:

writing, writing short stories, writing plays, writing characters, writing story arcs, writing a pitch. that my pieces are not finished nor polished enough when I let them go. trying new things when writing poems.

dishes that i have obsessed over and obsessively made multiple times in a row in the past calendar year as they come to mind:

1. chicken larb

2. punterelle alla romana

3. steamed fish (salmon/striped bass/sea bass) with ginger and scallions

4. potato kugel

5. baked mackerel

6. poulet roti

7. arroz con pollo

8. mushroom "chicken"

9. corn tortillas

10. chile verde

11. hatch chile chili

12. chicken tinga with roasted ripe red anaheims and roasted ripe red aji dulces and three kinds of tomatillos

13. green chickpea falafel

14. chicken tagine

15. roasted fennel

16. roasted cauliflower/broccoli 

17. miso cacio e pepe 

18. cacio e pepe

19. pan fried squid 

20. white beans and leeks

21. french onion pasta

22. mushroom rice

23. shitake chicken

24. rainbow cookies

25. amaretti cookies

dishes i've made when uninspired:

1. roasted chicken thighs with miscellaneous spices and herbs

2. pan-fried chicken with miscellaneous spices and herbs

3. chicken soup

4. roasted honeynut squash 

5. kasha

6. sardines and potato salad

7. salmon pokè bowls

8. blanched or sauteed water spinach/ sweet potato leaves / tatsois

9. miso roasted eggplants

10. roasted tomatoes

11. soba

12. vegetable barley risotto

13. sauteed garlic chives and tuna

dishes that I did not obsess over but made well:

1. miso corn

2. homemade chili crisp

3. summer peach gelato

4. hummus

5. tahini 

experimental dishes that I will not be repeating:

1. traditional pork bolognese - bland and greasy.

2. turkey dan dan noodles - turkey tastes weird and is not a satisfactory substitute for pork. the pork version is amazing.

3. gluten-free, dairy-free, seed-oil-free, I can't, but actually can believe it's not "Mac nor cheese" - got the flavor with spices and nutritional yeast but not the joy and dopamine that comes only from cheese

4. instagram recipe of mujadara - too acidic and sweet

5. roasted lean leg of lamb - no fat makes for a nasty, dry, spongy texture

6. gluten and egg free five-spice oven "fried" chicken - texture is meh, flavor is whatever

7. gluten and egg free southern oven "fried" chicken - texture is meh, flavor is whatever

8. vichyssoise - gross texture and bland

9. red borscht - high effort, gross texture and bland; easier to just buy

10. braised squid - bland and mediocre texture

11. lazy green curry mussels - canned curry paste and frozen precooked mussels are both mistakes; this needs to be wholly made from fresh ingredients 

dishes I attempted multiple times but failed at:

1. focaccia

easy snacks that I don't count as real cooking:

1. sundried tomatoes, italian mortadella, anchovies, ricotta, and honey toasted on top of bakery-sourced focaccia

2. pan-fried soup dumplings

other tasty things:

1. seasonal sauteed ramps from the farmers market

2. the seedy sourdough from lost bread

3. donkatsu from a hole in the wall in flushing

4. ripe bartlett pears

5. pizza bianca with mortadella from forno del ghetto

6. bonci's

7. chilean muscats

tl;Dr:

currently obsessed with piano but I have to finish a piece I'm writing before the end of this week.

distractions:

birthday

unresolved guilt

my sister; school

all those other people I could've been friends with but am not friends with, because they are lovely in their own ways but really just too much of something eh and bad.

good things:

pottery

piano

work from remote

parties, even though they are far away. (halloween)

eh:

foot cramps

cramps

meetings

Dreamt I got in a car with some sketchy strangers, but played along and found myself at a political gala. Ran into friends who were working and making the rounds; one of them said I could help by kicking off a song in 40 or so minutes, Bon Iver to drown the chatter, and I said yes. 

This was my last song I would do for them and this space; I was dying but did not tell them; I wanted to go out, business as usual, and had 40 minutes to myself to wander the karaoke bar booths and rooms while they worked. 

I would've said goodbye if I saw anyone I knew, but I didn't see anyone. Just more strangers, and I wasn't in a space to start something new. I never say it like a goodbye, but sometimes it is; just seems like a see you soon because they think I'm a given, someone they take for granted as fabric to a space.

somewhere between the overplayed loveliness of clair de lune and something more repetitive with a beat, a real hero, I haven't got much to say except it's just the aftermath, what remains after grief, and the drying of tears. one story closes and another opens, beginnings after endings.

this is not a clever story with a pithy morsel, just a Friday.

sometimes, before I have my coffee, I am a time traveler as I type away. I change my queries to extract the numbers I need as I sit in a classroom in 1994, listening to the radiator hiss by the open window, smelling whatever it is that makes the smell of old radiators, perhaps old silvery paint, or maybe just the age of its body and waters.

I am newly 6 and I wish for snow from the overcast white-grey skies as mind idles while my teacher reads from some book, and I am listening to the trucks go by outside. what is attention? I do not yet know the word "daydreamer", but I am daydreaming.

I wish I could make something as beautiful as fugazi's 13 songs.

dune

he called it one of the best novels ever, so naturally I have never read it and now, twenty years down the line, I still haven't; we haven't exchanged a word in nineteen.

I bought him some other pulp for his thirteenth birthday and we left it at that.

slippery

just 30 after midnight, a stray bullet came through the window and left the woman dead in a pool of blood and broken glass for her son to find.

this was my neighborhood, this could've been my window. it could've been my mother or someone else's aunt. people left flowers behind the fence, beneath her window, and they are all mostly dried up and withered now, only the plastic the same.

I walk by, think how her window was only steps from mine, and how any night, if I walk by my window to get a glass of water, that might be me.

disgusting

my knee is old in a way that makes me wish I could pop it open with a flathead screwdriver, clean the gunk, oil the joint, pop the cap back on, good as new except for that light discoloration, old bone beige

hope

she od'd. i didn't know her well.

sometimes when you pass, people turn you into symbolism if your story is interesting enough,

like a pr campaign for the dead, as if all the people who knew you were making up for all the things you would never get to do.

throw

up,

it all away,

the ball,

yourself at him, into the job, into your work.

teeth

you don't want a dry socket, so you drink water like the dentist prescribes, brush your teeth funny,

take the pain killers, watch tv, sleep,

go to school, gargle gently and don't spit too hard.

the hole heals, but from time to time, you dream about little cavities in your gums, right where the teeth used to be.

fancy

bow on your french chocolates,

breakfast radishes and milk buns from the farmers market,

japanese stone washed linen duvets,

a vacation to pristine americana where you can trek steep rocky ground for leisure,

drink store bought spring water from your 3 liter plastic pouches,

take pictures of places where people in your life could not afford to be.

rodent

drove 3x in d a u,

5 cups of coffee,

stayed up all night,

blah blah blah was very impressed with you,

on track for xyz,

if not too much trouble,

need this for an investor,

five stars,

really appreciate it.

blade

two cuts with his dull little knife because that's what edgy teenagers do,

so hardcore, a little scratch or two, something right out of tv but real like

cheap blunted swords that you could by from your local tourist market for thirty or less

so you could shine a bit of steel while you kicked all the drunk party guests out at 3am or so on new year's day in 2011

and sleep, and sleep, and sleep

and when an ex-chef wants you to touch his japanese sharpening block in his little knife shop when you are old and touring non-cities

you do it, because they mined it from deep under the ocean, but mostly because your ex lover thinks knives are cool and you are humoring him and the shopkeep.

radio

when we drive, we always start with the first channel,

scroll to the next,

and down,

until we've fallen into some obscure plane of dada notes,

cool jazz or lukewarm oldies as we try on warbly country on dirt roads, and motown even though we live too comfortably and carefully to really know what the man is singing about,

so I ask for permission to switch the radio off, and you assent.

radio off, I plug in my little glass and plastic phone, find an aria where the queen of the night demands murder. 

the soprano is a wisp. I find someone else, 

a less pretty chanteuse with heavy coloratura, 

start a tall road story, about sopranos who sing offkey, and other sopranos who relish it.

we would've never been friends in high school.

bulky

apples, a bag,

fuji, gala, a blondee, crispin gold. a new name for each rose.

a pink darling blossomed, high up on the tree,

and myself, too short to reach, so i plucked dying leaves,

and sent you autumn, instead of letters i wouldn't mean.

wisp

wisp

ink, hair, a child for you,

a house, a husband.

in the mirror, my locks have grown too long;

we are nearly twins again,

if you were the sky, and myself, the ocean at night.

fish

fish in october

no one was angry at dinner.

the moon shone. they laughed, unfamiliar with the lightness.

it did not take very long to cook dinner,

only five hours.

---

can't draw.

late night TV on your phone, infomercial after ad as you scroll your feeds,

martinis, with a twist, one, two, netherland vodka because it's so good and clean,

the undesirable waft of your neighbor's smoke, cigarettes, sometimes weed, but the evening breeze is so needed in november.

insomnia is a familiar thing, like sleeping in your ex's bed, or laying awake with all the things that clog your mind.

poetry is not a diary, but what if I don't have enough story for a film? what if all I want are distilled photos of people in solitude, in the night, or in some alleyway at least.

well, that's a lie. sometimes i want to see that intimacy, proof that love exists in the little moments, all imperfect, like lovers tangled in their sleep through a window.

i want to be in the room where those looks exchange. why watch movies when you can watch people talk? is this voyeurism? no, i don't want to see them fuck. i want to see their souls when they shed their skins, put these feels in a globe where i can shake the snow and relive these things that matter.

my boss once said that being a bartender was like being on a stage; you perform for your customers, and give them what they want, but I don't think that's entirely right. I think the bar is a room, and the room is the stage for everyone else; you're just nudging the party to where it really wants to be.