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nebulat ergo cogito

The rain was coming down steadily when I walked to my car. By the time I got in and closed the door, I was cold and wet, water dripping off my hair, down my neck and into my eyes. I turned the key, and my headlights came on. Through the raindrops on my window, the reflected taillights of the car parked in front of me looked like stained glass. The trees, shrubs, and houses up the block looked like an impressionist painting.

I wiped as much water off my head and face as I could. It was running down my back, now, and I shivered. I still didn’t regret not bringing an umbrella. It never rains in Southern California, as they sang in 1972, so when we get a brief storm, I like to experience it to the fullest.

I started the car, and pushed a button on my steering column. The impressionist painting and stained glass were wiped away, revealing the stark realism of a residential street in the hills, a small, muddy river beginning to flow down the center of it.

I pulled away from the curb and began what would be a very slow drive home, through dark and winding streets that eventually put me up onto Mulholland, where I entered fog so thick, it could have been a cloudbank. The rain continued to fall, making the puddles on the road deeper than I expected. Winding across the spine of the hills that separate Hollywood from The Valley, the fog enveloped me, reflected my headlights back to me, turning the entirety of the world outside my car into a short stretch of pavement surrounded by a nearly uniform grey blob. I turned off the radio, my only tangible connection to the rest of humanity, and imagined that I was alone in a space between worlds.

I followed the slow turns, past the occasional suggestion of a hillside, a fence, or a turnout. The rain came down harder, mixing with the fog and my headlights to create a whiteout. I slowed my car, almost to a stop, and silently waited for reality to finish buffering.

 

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Three books that helped make me a better writer

I’m really tired, and don’t have a whole lot of motivation to do anything today, but I don’t want to break the chain of daily posts that I started over a month ago, so here’s some writing advice I gave on my Tumblr earlier today:

Do you have any recommendations for books on how to be a better writer and/or how to go about getting published? Or any advice in either. Thanks you’re the best!

Before you get into books, read and listen to Ira Glass talk about The Taste Gap. You’ll come back to this many times over the next few months and probably years.

Books:

  • Stephen King’s ON WRITING is incredibly valuable, and each time I read it, I learn something new because I’ve grown as a writer, and unlocked new perception abilities.
  • Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder, is very good, too. I don’t agree with all of it, and its primary focus is on screenwriting, but the fundamentals of pacing and working from a logline and basic story type are really useful.
  • The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby, is also very insightful and helpful. I love that it uses movies you’ve already seen and know to help explain the mechanics behind building them, so you can use the same mechanics in your original work.

As far as getting published goes, don’t worry about that until you feel confident and mature as a writer. Put your effort and XP into developing your voice, your discipline and commitment to doing the work, and rewriting the first draft. Once you’ve gotten all of that into your build, you can go ahead and start looking for publishing.

I hope this helps get you started. If there was one thing that I could make you listen to and internalize, though, just one single thing that you would be compelled to do, it is this: Write every day, and keep it simple.

I say to keep it simple because we all have this tendency to complicate things, in an effort to show everyone how clever we are. There’s certainly a place for that, but when we’re learning and developing, it’s going to be complicated enough on its own. Think of it like learning to play guitar: get your scales and basic chords down before you decide to tackle Metallica’s One or Stairway to Heaven.

A Recipe for Reasonably Good Beef Stew

Months ago, I got it into my head that I should make stew in the slow cooker. Before we go any further, I should tell you that I am, generally speaking, not a big fan of slow cooker recipes or things they make. So I went online, and looked at a bunch of recipes for beef stew, picked out one, and made it. It was pretty good, but not great.

Let’s skip ahead to a few days after Thanksgiving. I was with a couple of my friends, and we were talking about the joy and perfection of leftovers. My friend Riley told me that she likes to take pretty much all of the leftovers, from the turkey to the stuffing to the potatoes to the gravy, and dump it all into a slow cooker with some chicken stock to make a stew. Remember how I wasn’t all that into slow cooker things like 100 words ago? I changed my mind.

I thought about what she said, and then I thought about all the different recipes I’d looked at several weeks earlier. I realized that there were a few basic things that made stew … uh, stew, and that there’s no need to be precise when making it. You could just put all your Thanksgiving leftovers into a slow cooker, for instance, and turn them into a stew that’s perfect for eating with some crusty bread.

And that’s how I decided to take from my memory all the things I liked about the stew recipes I read back in like September, to make my own slow cooker stew a few nights ago. Here’s my basic recipe:

Reasonably Good Beef Stew

Before we get our ingredients together, let’s get something clear: this isn’t precise. This is a bunch of ideas and guidelines, because we’re going to imagine that we’re in the Long Long Ago, putting together all the stuff that we have on hand so that we can feed ourselves and the giant family we have because it’s the Long Long Ago and basically we make children for entertainment.

Walk outside and make sure that your summoning circle is clear of debris, especially pointy sticks. Double check to ensure that your hemp rope was braided beneath the light of a full moon, and has seven knots in it. Spit on the doorframe as you walk back into the house, and clap twice when the door closes and latches.

Then go to the store and get:

  • 2 pounds of steak that’s cut up into cubes. Your local store probably sells it as BEEF FOR STEW OR WHATEVER. Don’t waste super good steak on this, because that stuff is better on the grill.
  • 2 parsnips.
  • 3 carrots
  • 2 boring old regular potatoes or like four medium red potatoes. You may be tempted to use both kinds. That’s fine, but just know that it’s easy to overdo it with starchy vegetables.
  • About a half pound of crimini mushrooms. Don’t use stupid button mushrooms because they’re lame and boring and did I mention that they’re stupid? Crimini mushrooms are more complex in flavor, and give lots of opportunities for you to hike your pants up way too high and make dad jokes that use the word “Criminey!”
  • Three cloves of garlic.
  • One medium onion. You can use white or yellow. Don’t use red because they don’t soften up the right way and they’re kinda bossy in the cooker, overwhelming all the other flavors.
  • 2-3 tablespoons of tomato paste.
  • 1 cup of red wine. You can use cooking wine if you want, but I prefer to use drinking wine, even though I don’t drink it. But if you do, hey! Free wine to drink while you’re making dinner! If you wanted to substitute Guinness for the wine, you can do that, as well, and make this as more of a Guinness stew.
  • 1 tablespoon paprika.
  • 3 sprigs of fresh thyme
  • All the flour in the world (you’re only going to use like 1/3 cup and a little more to coat the beef, but you’ll be thankful you stocked up on flour after President Tiny Hands starts a nuclear war).
  • 3 stalks of celery. Some people call these things “Celery Ribs” which is so fucking pretentious I want to cut them into celery spears and stab them in their smarty pants faces.
  • At least 32 ounces of beef stock. You will probably want a little more, but it’s not necessary. Maybe you can barter with a neighbor, using some of your excess flour.

Welcome back from the store! Take a quick look at your summoning circle and light the candles. Wrap the rope around a stump and tie one end to piece of driftwood that was collected from the east shore of a lake during the solstice.

Okay! Let’s get ready to cook. You can add a little salt and pepper to these steps whenever you feel like it. I try not to use too much salt because I don’t like it and it doesn’t like me.

First, peel the onion, and chop it up into little onion hunks. Peel and mince the garlic. Then, wash all the other vegetables and cut them up however you want. Some folks like to slice their potatoes, others prefer to quarter them and then half the quarters. I realize I could have said “cut the potatoes into eighths”, but if I did that I would expect to be stabbed with a celery spear. You can keep the stems on the mushrooms if you want, but I prefer to take them off, mostly because it’s fun to pop the caps off the mushrooms and put them on the carrots like little hats. Try it! You can make the carrots do a play for you before you murder them and eat them. Just like mom did!

Put a little olive oil (like a tablespoon or so) into a nonstick skillet, and heat it up. When it’s warm, add about half the onion and all the garlic. Cook it, stirring frequently, until the onions are translucent and the garlic is fragrant. If you want to get all advanced, you can get an extra teaspoon of paprika and dump it in when you add the onions.

While the onions are doing their thing, put the beef into a bowl and dump just enough flour into it so that you can toss them around, and coat them with it. Sprinkle the tablespoon of paprika over them and keep tossing until they are pretty well coated with the flour and paprika. You may have to add a little flour, don’t worry about it.

Once the beef is all covered, and the onions are ready, add the beef to the pan, taking care not to dump any of the excess flour in with it. Stir it all around a little bit, and then forget about it for a couple of minutes while it cooks. Oh, I forgot to mention that you’re using like a medium-high heat. What you’re going for is to brown the meat without cooking it all the way through, so use whatever heat you think is appropriate for that.

After like four minutes, mix it all up again, and try to get the beef cubes to turn over. You can do this by saying, “Roll over, beef!” or you can use tongs to turn it, or a spatula, or a wooden spoon. Do not use a crazy straw because it will melt, and do not use telekinesis because you will splash oil all over the damn place.

After another four or so minutes, dump all of that stuff out of the pan and into your slow cooker. Put the lid on to keep it warm.

Now you’re going to warm up a little bit more olive oil in the pan. When it’s warm, take your tomato paste, starting with two tablespoons, and gently, carefully, put it into the pan. Don’t scoop it out of the tomato paste thingy with a spoon and just drop it in like I did, because it’ll splash the oil all over your Sex Pistols T-shirt and stain it which is not as punk rock now as you thought it was when you were a teenager. You can still be punk rock and have a clean shirt, for crying out loud.

I like to use a wooden spoon for this, but you don’t have to. Use something to stir it around and really spread it out until it goes from bright red to like a brick red color. Now pour in the wine, and like a half cup of beef broth. Stir this all together, and get ready for some magic to happen. Very slowly and gently start easing in a little bit of flour at a time, whisking it into the mixture. You’re making a gravy right now, and if you dump all the flour in at once, it’s going to make it all lumpy and they’re all gonna laugh at you. Careful that you don’t let the mixture burn.

After you’ve mixed it all together and whisked away the lumps, it should be smooth and look like gravy why not. When it does, turn off the heat and set it aside.

Take the potatoes and put them in a single layer over the meat that’s in your slow cooker. Then do the same thing with the carrots, and then dump all the other vegetables in. Now take the gravy and pour it over the top of everything.

Have a brief moment of panic because there isn’t nearly enough liquid in there to make it a stew, and then remember that you have that 32 ounces of beef stock that you used the flour to barter for. Pour it all into the slow cooker. If it covers or almost covers the stuff inside, you’re done. If it doesn’t, you can either add a little bit of water or more broth until it does.

How long this cooks is up to you. You can cook it on high heat for at least 4 hours, or you can cook it on a lower heat for up to 12 hours. The important thing is that the beef cooks and any evil bacteria who are living in there with plans to make you shit yourself to death are killed before they get a chance to do their sinful business.

I like to serve this with some hunks of fresh bread that I baked that day, and I like to garnish it with a little bit of chopped parsley. You can do whatever you want, though, including dropping some sour cream in there, maybe some plain yogurt, a little bit of Tabasco or Worcestershire sauce, or even more salt and pepper. The important thing is that you don’t worry too much about precision, and you don’t rush it. Think of it as making out for the first time but just a little more awkward and a lot less messy.

Enjoy your stew, and don’t forget to take a bowl out to your summoning circle to feed the demon. Make sure you feed it no less than five spoonfuls before the first rising of the new moon before you set it free. If you have any leftovers, they can be stored in the fridge for a couple of days, because this stuff reheats really well.

 

 

 

 

 

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So this funny thing happened last night

My friend, Chris, hosts (and I think helped create) a cool new gameshow on NBC called The Wall. It’s a combination quiz show and giant Plinko board, and it ends up having a whole lot of very real tension and meaningful drama. I really, really like it. Chris is very funny and relatable as the host, and I love watching how much fun he’s having.

So last night on the Tweeters, this happened:

Anne was on the other end of the couch when that happened, and I laughed so hard I startled our dogs who were between us.

 

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it’s a secret to everybody

I’ve never been someone who goes to sleep early, and I only wake up early when I have to, but I had a 7:30am call the next day, and I was in a lot of scenes, so I’d closed my bedroom door and turned off the lights at the relatively early hour of 10pm. I sighed, reached up to the shelf above my bed, and pressed play on my CD player. I put my head on on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. I listened to the disc spin up, and then the mournful guitar that opens the second disc of The Wall began to play.

Hey you… out there in the cold getting lonely getting old can you feel me?

Hey you… Standing in the aisles with itchy feet and fading smiles can you feel me?

Hey you… Don’t help them to bury the light. Don’t give in without a fight.

Before I realized what was happening, tears began to run out of the corners of my eyes. I was so lonely, so sad, so frustrated and so unhappy. I imagined myself like Pink, in The Wall; an artist who felt trapped by success he wasn’t ready for, and the expectations of everyone around him to maintain and expand it.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as the complete breakdown Pink has, of course, but I was a hormonal teenager. I was a dramatic artiste, and until a few hours earlier I had been staying at a beach house with my best friend and his family, in a house full of the girls from his mom’s drill team, including the girl I liked. Oh, she didn’t like me back, and was was never going to like me back — she was cool and confident, and I was so uncomfortable in my own skin, I was a total weirdo even when I was trying hard not to be — but I could dream that someday I would graduate from Duckie to Blaine.

I laid there in my bed, listening to Pink Floyd, and I cried. I cried because I was lonely. I cried because I was frustrated. I cried because I was in almost everything on the call sheet for the next day, but I didn’t so much more than say “Aye, sir,” and that was all I’d been doing for what felt like a long time. I cried because, though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, I felt like I was having my childhood taken away from me.

I let myself feel sad. I let myself miss my friends. I let myself wallow in the unrequited love that is so outsized when you’re a teenager. I stared at the ceiling until the CD was finished, and then I listened to it again, finally falling asleep during the second time through, sometime before Comfortably Numb.

So, obviously, I got better.

And I haven’t thought about that night, late in the summer of 1987, in over twenty-five years, but earlier this afternoon, it came back to me as clear and viscerally as if it had just happened. I’ve been playing classic NES games on my RetroPie, and 1987 was the summer that we were obsessed with The Legend of Zelda. We played a lot of Blades of Steel, Double Dribble, and Lifeforce, but we were obsessed with Zelda. In those days, we discovered secrets in the game by hearing them repeated from kids who knew a kid who knew a kid who went to camp with a kid. We pooled our money and bought big strategy guides that we couldn’t really afford, even though it felt like cheating, because that was the only way to get help when we were stuck. We made maps on graph paper, and kept notes about the different weapons, their damage against different enemies, and all the rumours we’d heard about secret levels and hidden dungeons. That was the summer we stayed up all night more than once, listening to Depeche Mode, Van Halen, New Order, and The Smiths while we ate enough junk food and drank enough Jolt cola to kill a muggle. That was the summer that I started to figure out who I was, and began figuring out who I wanted to be, and on this particular night that I’m remembering right now, I wanted to be with my friends.

Playing these old games has been like unwrapping memories, gifts I’d hidden for myself and forgotten about, and just accidentally knocked off a shelf. When I remembered how to beat King Hippo in Punch Out, though I hadn’t thought about that game in decades, and had completely forgotten that he ever existed, I felt like I’d punched a hole through time and watched myself, thirty years ago, doing it for the first time. The same thing happened when my hands took over and made me a spectator to a game of Super Mario Bros. that was played almost entirely by memory.

I have my system set up on the floor in my office right now, because I haven’t figured out where my RetroPie can live permanently, and my 44 year-old hips can’t handle sitting on the rug like their 14 year-old version could (though my 44 year-old self has a 100% better chance of actually kissing a girl before the end of the day than my 14 year-old self ever did) but I’ve spent hours there over the last few days, revisiting these games I loved when I was a kid, and letting the memories they reveal wash over me.

Building and updating and configuring and running this RetroPie (which is currently in a tiny, NES case that I made on my 3D printer) was a fun and rewarding experience, but the real joy that I get from Retrogaming isn’t from playing games from my youth, in some cases for the very first time. The real joy — in fact, the real magic — is when the animated goal celebration in Blades of Steel unlocks the memory of my best friend, Ryan, scoring against me in a two-player game to tie the score, standing up and mimicking the 8-bit characters while saying, “He who dances last, dances funkiest!” It’s when I instinctively remember how to get to the graveyard in Zelda, hearing the music it plays when I get there, and then getting knocked over by a sad memory like the one I wrote at the beginning of this post. These memories are priceless to me, and Retrogaming is not just the key that unlocks the chest where they’re stored, it’s the treasure map I use to find it. I feel like there is power in these memories, though I don’t know precisely what that power is, or how to use it.

I guess I’ll just have to keep playing until I figure it out.