This particular Thursday...

This was one of the most intense Thursdays of my life.

An Apology.

I realized, as drizzle speckled my windscreen, that I was lost. My headlights shone into the vacant space in front of the vehicle and were reflected back by an intense fog. Lost. Figures. I’m new to this. I’ll always be new to this, I think. I’ll never do it quite like they can. The others on the road can tell. I think they can smell my fear through the steel.

I had begun to lose confidence in my map-reading abilities, to say the least. Actually I had been ambivalent about them before this night, but sometimes you have to throw yourself headlong into a situation without looking back—how else will you ever get anywhere? It gets tiring, alone at home with the reruns. You grow restless, want to feel some sunlight on your skin.

I knew I was in a familiar neighborhood. I recognized the warped street signs, the shadowed landmarks. But I didn’t know how to get from point A to point B, from panic to refuge. Frustrating, not being about to get someplace when you’re around crap you recognize, stuff you see everyday shoved in your face plain as day, like a joke with a rimshot.

You mentioned that I could call you. You hoped that I would call you. You were never subtle. I never thought I’d pick up the phone, until I found myself squinting in the dimly lit car cabin, thumbing through my contacts for your number as the heat in the resting car began to dissipate. I had assumed before that even being new at this, I would get along just fine on my own, reading my own map, but this night was different. Because it just was. And that is all.

You picked up, not quite believing it was me, and not quite believing I would ask you to help me find my way. To be perfectly honest, I called, not quite believing it was you, and not quite believing I was asking you to help me out with the map. Maybe it was the drizzle or the fog that pushed me. Maybe it was the darkness.

Together we talked our way through it, stumbling through awkward verbal moments and your recurring incredulity, a few heavy exhalations billowing into our receivers. I don’t think I really believed you knew the best route. I think I had just grown tired of going at it alone. I think I just really needed to hear someone else’s voice in that moment.

For a while after that, you would accompany me on drives and be my navigator. I have to say, you made it a point to help ensure that I obtained some kind of confidence, not just behind the wheel, but in all my endeavors. That is invaluable, and I appreciate it, probably more than you know. But this couldn’t last forever, and I knew it from the get-go. For that, I apologize. I regret wasting your time.

It is quiet now, in the cabin, as I drive down the road to all my familiar haunts. I’m not as intimidated by the warped signs and waning sunlight anymore. I’d rather be home before dark, but I accept that, of course, I will occasionally be stuck out in the dark. My only hope is that next time I get lost, I call someone as helpful as you were.

Fiction Update: Slowing Down to Read

Whoops, bit of a delay there in the updating. Anyway, here to discuss the latest in my novel attempt.

I've slowed down a bit, which is unlikely to surprise anyone that really knows me. I know myself, and I'm not surprised by it either. However, I'm not discouraged. My reasons for slowing down are actually related to my endeavor--I stopped to do some reading.

It's interesting that around the same time I began to have difficulty writing with confidence, that I also stopped reading as regularly as I once had. It's probably not a coincidence, either. This isn't to say that I haven't read a book in years, it just means I'm not always in the process of reading one book or another, and starting a new one once I've finished the previous one. This is tragic. If there's ever a way to gain confidence in your writing capabilities, it's by stopping to read literature and learning via osmosis. When reading books you begin to develop a feel for the language, the pacing, the way themes weave in and out. Reading is invaluable. I began to feel like I'd wasted valuable studying time, with my final exam date looming ominously in the distance.

Ode to Pancakes

I like pancakes.

No really, I do. I really enjoy pancakes. Breakfast ‘o’ champions, in my book.

Now that I make my own pancakes from scratch, I love pancakes. Strong, healthy, hearty pancakes are warm and filling to begin with. Krusteaz and Bisquick ain’t got nothin’ on good old fashioned whole grain flour (whether the grain you’re using is wheat or anything else). Add to that the triumphant feeling one obtains from mixing her/his own flour and baking powder and other pancakey whatnots into a giant metal bowl and you’ve got a breakfast to be proud of.

I like waffles too. We even have a waffle maker floating around somewhere in the garage. There was a point in time, maybe eight to ten years ago, when my family would make pancakes at least every weekend, because dad gone it, we had a waffle maker, and we could. That waffle maker taught me an interesting thing about the vital differences between waffles and pancakes.

While the convenience of having a machine do the cooking for you is, honestly, incredible, that doesn’t mean that your waffles will turn out perfectly. Waffles are a finicky bunch with unpredictable personalities. You have to measure your batter perfectly or you’ll end up with thin, brittle, waffle-like biscuits that will make your breakfast plate cry tears of condensation. God forbid those crispy misfits actually have holes in them. It’s one thing to have a waffle that fails to be crisp on the outside while soft on the inside—the waffle ideal, for sure. It adds insult to injury when your waffle is cardboard and won’t even hold your syrup in its admittedly clever square-shaped basins. Oh, the pain of watching perfectly good syrup dribble straight through your food, pooling beneath your waffle’s steamy underbelly.

No, it’s in those ways that waffles fall short of their syrup-coated cousin, the pancake. True, waffles have an ingenious syrup-reserving design. The late comedian Mitch Hedberg once said it perfectly: “I like waffles better than pancakes. Because waffles are like pancakes with syrup traps. They say to syrup, ‘You ain't going anywhere, don't even be trying to creep down the sides. Just rest in these squares, if one square is full, move on. When you hit butter, split up.’"

Syrup traps. Touché.

But how can one resist the subtle, seductive curves of a perfectly round, perfectly brown pancake? How does one refrain from salivating at the sight of an amber-colored drizzle sliding gently… gently down its smooth exterior?

This isn’t to say I always make the perfect pancake. I’d say I have a 40/60 percent chance of burning one of my pancakes, usually the second one since the pan’s already so hot at that point. Since I only make two, I pour them thick, and since it’s hard to check if a huge pancake is done on one side, I tend to overcook that side. It’s a bad habit, I know. If I worked in the kitchen at an IHOP my behind would be on the curb by now.

These days I like my pancakes best with agave nectar, Earth Balance, and a tofu scramble on top. Oh wow. Yeah, that’s a treat. That’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner right there. I only recently learned how to make a tofu scramble worth the effort. It’s not the seasoning that makes the tofu, like in other tofu dishes. It’s not even the tofu that makes the tofu scramble suitably scrambley. It’s the other stuff inside the pan. I used to think that well seasoned tofu was enough. Lightly seasoned eggs were enough, back when I ate eggs. Simple seasoning might fine be for other tofu dishes, but no. No, no, that is where I was misled. Tofu scrambles need glorious heaps of vegetables in order to be worthwhile. They make for a good opportunity to clean out the crisper. A sausage substitute or pan-fried soyrizo goodness will also serve you well. Add that, plus good seasoning, plus a carefully planned approach to what goes in the pan and when, and then tofu scramble sings.

I mention all this breakfast stuff because I bought agave nectar for the first time a few months ago. And wow. Wow. That stuff is delicious. It pours better than honey and maple syrup, works as a sweetener in lots of different ways, and it tastes milder (and in my opinion better) than honey. The only drawback is that it’s kind of controversial—some say that because it’s supposedly insanely high in fructose, it shouldn’t be consumed at all and to call it a healthy substitute for anything is completely wrong. Hm. Disturbing. There doesn’t seem to be a perfect sweetener out there. Until I manage to buy some brown rice syrup or some other alternative, it’ll still be better than so-called “maple syrup”, which is mostly high fructose corn syrup anyway unless you’re buying the super-pricey fancy-schmancy stuff that I really can’t afford right now. The happy medium, of course, was comparably inexpensive agave nectar, which you can now find in two-packs at Costco!

The bottom line was that I really needed something to put on my pancakes. The last time I made pancakes, I failed to realize that I’d run. Out. Of. Syrup.

Tragic.

That’s one of the drawbacks of both pancakes and waffles, at least your typical breakfast ones. They must be eaten with something. Trying to eat a couple of pancakes alone. It’s like the whole “seven saltines in a minute” scenario. After a while you just can’t stuff any more into your mouth. There gets to be a point of Peak Pancake. This is why I only make two moderately big pancakes at once, rather than a stack of them. I never have to feed that many people anyway. There’s another Mitch Hedberg joke about pancakes that I must admit is completely true: “As a comedian, you have to start the show strong and end the show strong. …You can’t be like pancakes. You’re all happy at first, but by the end, you’re sick of ‘em.”

Fiction Update: Catalyst

Progress report time!

Tremendous progress, I'm proud to say! I've finally, finally, finally been making headway with SJL! Yes, that's the novel project, yesyesyes!

There was something about the way I was feeling during the last update that made me feel particularly frustrated with myself. I realized that for years I have been over-thinking things. Aiming high and so hung up on the potential for failure that I get nowhere. On Monday, I sat down for hours in front of the computer and simply wrote, without thinking.

And man, it felt good.

So over the course of the week, I'm just making it a point to sit down every day and do a little bit on SJL, something, anything.  I remind myself that right now my focus is just to get it all out. I can refine it all later, that's what editing's for. It may all be a bit discombobulated right now, but it won't always be that way. If I don't sit and write something, then I'll never have anything to edit.

So having said that, I'm off to get in my required time spent with the project.