mard

One time earlier this year I found myself in the possession of an immersion blender. I had heard, from the internet, that they are especially good for making homemade mayonnaise, and that homemade mayonnaise is the real deal. So I got together some oil, an egg, a squeeze of mustard, and some lemon juice, and I blended hard. The result was some pretty darn good mayo! Still, I felt like it needed an application. You don’t just eat mayo with a spoon. I saw in the cabinet that I had some Trader Joe’s canned trout with smoke flavor, which I had recently bought thinking “I should do more fish”. Combining the mayo and the trout, I beheld a mass of oily white fishy goop. It looked like the kind of substance you’d see in the back corner of Zabar’s, requested once per day, every day since the 70s by the same hunched octogenarian rando in a leather jacket. It looked like what Bernie Sanders coughs up when he goes too hard in an argument. This stuff was pre-war. So anyway, I ate it with some bread and it was so good I really almost cried. It was so good that, a couple months later when I was living in a new place and no longer had the immersion blender, I decided to buy an immersion blender on a whim. I had a bad day at work, and I got the idea that the only possible thing that could cheer me up is if I went to Target and bought an immersion blender and made the goop. I dropped one hundred dollars on this grandpa food and it was worth every damn cent. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the grandpa aesthetic. Not so much like I want to look like a grandpa, but there’s something about being in the world like a grandpa that I like a lot. I want to be able to look at someone while they’re talking to me and just start smacking my lips. I want to stare at someone, smack my lips, and feel perfectly confident. Grandpas can just aggregate with other grandpas, play games no young person has ever heard of, and make funny faces. Grandpas just kind of do what they feel like they want to do, which begs me to make the distinction between grandpa and elderly new yorker curmudgeon. Fran Lebowitz is probably not a grandpa: she is too in control of herself and of her schtick. I don’t mean to say that Fran Lebowitz is calculating her persona, it’s just that she certainly has free will at the least. Liza Minelli, as a counter example, totally seems like a grandpa. She’s just out there doing show tunes and getting into trouble. There’s no agency there, she just goes and does it. I think about being a grandpa when I’m really busy with work, or when I’m having to think hard about something, having to feel like I need to be important, or fast, or critical. And when I think about being a grandpa I’m not even thinking about my kids or my grandkids (though children are not a requirement for being a grandpa), I’m just thinking about what mild hijinks I could find myself in without noticing. I had a version of this “I want to be a grandpa” thought during my sophomore year of college, though I didn’t phrase it like that at the time. I had an intense finals week I was prepping for, and I had this fantasy that I could just get up from my desk, leave the library, walk over to Panera bread and order a bread bowl. When telling other people about this fantasy I would do it like some kind of long-form bit where I’m telling the story of a guy named “Mlark” who has a bunch of finals to study for and instead goes to Panera bread and eats bread bowls. The day arrives that he must take his final and he’s nowhere to be found, he’s just at Panera eating bread bowls and asking for new bread bowls when he’s finished. Day in and day out he eats his bread bowls without a care in the world. He stops showing up to school entirely, is completely missing from any relevant location except the Panera, his funds run out, he starts working at a Panera, they pay him in bread bowls, etc. The punchline of this bit was that there’s an epilogue to the story: Mlark ends up super happy and successful. No other details. Today I walked out of work and passed this old grandpa-ass diner in the upper east side called the Ritz diner. They had a red neon sign that said “hot soup”. I considered it!

Who is John Mayer? I know he plays guitar. Is he good? Do we like him? Is he controversial? What does he look like!? I don’t know what to do.

Been having some dreams lately - I don’t always have dreams but when I do it’s usually because my sleep is bad, or sometimes when it’s exceptionally good. Rn I’m sleeping on an air mattress (bad) so we’re in dream city. I had one last night where I was in “LOST” except I’ve never seen that show and barely know the premise. I was with this girl who was also on the island (like I knew we were on the Lost island but this was actually my house) and she has this strange condition where she has constant hallucinations of gunshots firing her way coming from the hands of whoever she’s looking at. She also had a gun that I could see for real. So we go to my house and put the gun in the silverware drawer and then my mom walks in and she’s walking with a white mobility cane and sunglasses, and I’m like “oh no mom are you blind now?” (my grandma’s and mom’s eventually my deteriorating eyesight is a big anxiety point) and she’s like “no I’m just prepping for when I WILL BE” and the girl I’m with is like “wow that’s heavy, I like being able to see” and I’m a bit perplexed on this girl’s relationship to vision. This dream was bad = sleep bad. I had a really good dream a couple weekends ago visiting home. I was sleeping on a futon that’s usually bad but I guess I found a good groove in it that night. In the dream I’m part of an EMT team called in to care for a group of kittens whose cat mom is missing. The kittens are found in the sewer and it’s a pretty miserable scene, they’re all crying and scared and I’m there with them and I’m only able to think about all the real life anxiety I have, especially about all the stuff outside of me (looming fascism, etc.) that I can’t control and a lot of bad emotions . The thought in this moment is “things are always bad” and the whole situation with the sad kittens confirms this. Trust me this dream will get better. So I grab all the kittens and climb up a ladder through a manhole cover and to my surprise at the top of the ladder is a big raggedy cat who I recognize as the cat mom. This is great and all the kittens rush to her and the situation is relieved. Cat mom is kinda weird looking and looks like a worn toy, but makes really really deep eye contact with me and telepathically tells me “maaarrk sometimes things are good tooooo” and this absolutely *sends* me and I start WEEPING and I weep so hard in this dream i must have looked like 😖 irl. And then I wake up and I feel very refreshed! This dream was good = sleep good. This felt like the kind of relief people get after having a really intense trip and finding some profundity in a weird vision. I still haven’t really had too much of a psychedelic experience but maybe I can buy a bunch of chocolates from Etsy and see where it takes me. Or I could buy a mattress

I just wanted to let everyone know about the greatest YouTuber of all time. His name is Chef John and he runs a video blog called Food Wishes where every week he films himself prepare a new dish requested by his viewers. Just his hands are visible, no face, which is a shame because he looks bizarre and has a big bushy Super Mario mustache. The man has been doing this since around 2007, so he’s been at the top of the YouTube food game longer than practically anyone. I love his recipes, which range from sensible to brilliant to truly bonkers. The samosadilla: a cross between a quesadilla and a samosa. Genius!! Mini meatloaf ghosts: a bunch of little meatloaves shaped like ghosts draped in a white sheet of  provolone cheese. He used a knife to poke out little :o faces in them. bonkers!! the man is off his rocker!! Recently he made a lasagna with polenta instead of pasta. I think that’s pretty neat. He also once made a large meatloaf shaped like a face. He has HUNDREDS OF RECIPES and they’re all great. I love chef John. I’ve been trying to watch more Chef John videos even as I’ve been trying to curb my YouTube intake. I think “I’m finally quitting YouTube” is the phrase I’ve said the most and it must be pretty annoying to hear at this point. I’ve been successful a few times, partially or fully abstaining from any videos for months at a time, but then there’s always a relapse, followed by a much longer period of daily consumption of YouTube videos for hours at a time. I’d rather not think about how much of my life I’ve spent watching YouTube. It’s too depressing. Instead I think about those periods of abstinence, when I really did feel like my days were longer and more satisfying. I had more focus and less desire for distraction. I did creative stuff and was generally less of a sad sack. YouTube is a weird kind of hell for me sometimes because it makes me upset to spend any time on, yet because the YouTube algorithm is so enmeshed with my gullible monkey brain, I’m always convinced that the thing that will actually give me relief or make the time more worthwhile is *more* YouTube. Like if I were just to find the perfect video that would satisfy me to the point of not needing to watch another. Then the cycle deepens and I feel worse. …unless that video is a Chef John video The most distinctive thing about Chef John is his way of speaking: he starts every video the same: “helLOO this is CHEF John from FOOODwishes dot comm wwIiithh… <recipe title>!!!!!!! that’s right!”. Sometimes my old roommate would get annoyed and tell me to stop watching his videos because his vocal inflections were too annoyingly repetitive. He’s always like “dadadadaDADA⬆️, daDAdadadaDUDU⬇️“ if that makes any sense. It makes sense if you watch. I think it’s good. Chef John has a vibe somewhere between t.v. newscaster and fun aunt who used to smoke weed. He also always says some variant on “you are the boss of your sauce” that sometimes makes sense but by the fact that he has to say it hundreds of times, usually doesn’t make sense. It’s like, “you are the Sylvester Stallone of your Provolone” or “you are the Louis Vuitton of your blue cheese croutons” or “you are the Ringo Starr of your tuna tartare” or “you are the Patrick Swayze of your bologne-ze” or “you are El Capitan of your scallop gratin”. Those are real and I like them. I think I’ll probably never entirely stop watching YouTube, or at least I can’t picture that for myself right now, but as long as I watch some Chef John I won’t falafel.

i've always wanted to do something cool like ascii art let's try and make ascii art, no practice just go: |\/\/\/\/| | | | | | O O | > | < "cowabunga" C /____\ | | / \ ok sweet i did it, i made ascii bart tune in next time when i'll be mastering more art forms such as glass blowing for example