Since I’m not drinking this year, I haven’t been making beer. But I still like to make food things, so I’ve been teaching myself how to bake bread and roast coffee beans.

So the thing about making beer is that it really isn’t that difficult. Brooklyn Brew Shop says If you can make oatmeal, you can make beer, and it is entirely true. If you can just follow a recipe, you can turn malted barley, water, hops, and yeast into beer.

The thing about baking bread is that there’s a little more intuition to it than making beer, but not much. It’s incredibly satisfying to mix up flour, water, salt, and yeast by hand, fold the dough, let it rise, shape it into loaves, and bake it. There are all sorts of different types of bread to make, but that basic combination is pretty easy to understand. Like brewing, if you can follow directions, you can turn those things into bread.

Roasting coffee, though, is much more difficult to perfect. I’m using a smart roaster (the Behmor 1600+) that controls the delicate parts of the process, including the heat curve, the speed of the turning drum that holds the beans, and the cooling process. But roasting coffee isn’t something where you put the beans in, push some buttons, and wait until PRESTO you have roasted coffee beans. There’s a steep and complex learning curve (at least there was for me) and a very small margin of error. In my experience, when I’m roasting 1/4 pound to 1/2 pound of beans, there’s anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds of intense terror that I have to watch very closely, because in that tiny window of time, I’ll either end up with something decent or a complete a pile of fail. Unlike beer, which can sometimes end up not as hoppy or malty as I wanted, but still be drinkable, or bread, which may not rise as much as I wanted but still makes a nice tartine, if the coffee beans are off, they pretty much have to go into the trash. I mean, unless you’re really into wet cardboard.

So it was kind of a big deal for me recently when I had acquired enough data to feel like I knew what I was doing, and could reasonably expect the raw beans I put into the roaster to come out tasting like something I wanted to drink and share with others. (I didn’t mention that roasting coffee beans provides an opportunity for lots of notes, just like brewing and baking does, and it’s essential to do that if you want to get anywhere close to mastering it).

Anyway, I decided to offer some beans in the secret store, and the first batch came out yesterday. It’s pretty much exactly how I wanted it to come out, and I’m proud of myself, so I put some pictures from the roast on the other side of the jump, along with some notes on the process.

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Near the beginning of June, someone asked me if I was planning to do any travel during the summer.

“No, I’m staying home to write a book,” I said.

“Oh? What’s it about?”

“It’s a collection of short stories that I’ve been wanting to tell for a long time, but haven’t had time to tell, because I’ve been doing other people’s work for the last couple of years.”

“That sounds like a cool project. And the year is only halfway done!”

“There’s another way of saying that,” I said. “The year is already halfway done.”

And so here we are, past the halfway point of the year. A long way past it, actually. Today is the 244th day of the year. There are 122 days left in 2016. Better start your holiday shopping.

I never thought I would have a midlife crisis, because the way they are depicted in media and pop culture are anathema to me: the sports car, the clothes that look ridiculous on someone my age, fucking someone young enough to be my kid. These are all things I would never do (things that are pretty gross to me, actually) so I just figured that it wouldn’t happen to me.

But I read Henry Rollins’ column in the current issue of LA Weekly, and he mentioned something about having more days behind him than in front of him, and I realized that, yes, I’m having a midlife crisis. It’s not that I want or need to do any of those gross things I just listed; it’s the feeling that there are more days behind me than ahead of me. It’s the feeling that I’m running out of time to do the things I want to do, and the fear that comes with that. It’s feeling the world around me change and leave me behind. It’s seeing young people who have no idea just how fast they’re going to be me. I guess it’s the feeling that motivated me to do this reboot in the first place. I may have fewer days behind me than in front of me (or maybe not; my generation is probably going to live for a really long time, maybe even to a point when we can upload ourselves into computers … unless we’ve already uploaded ourselves into computers and all of this is an illusion) but I’m going to make the most of them, to the best of my ability.

So let’s check in and see how things are going.

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