Mousaka, mini meatloaf, and the weakerthans

The Mousaka saga is yet untold. It involves my culinary exploration, poor estimation of the carrying capacity of a baking dish, and the effect of smell on life in general.

And now I'm getting all crazy with mini meatloafs.

I should stay vegetarian.

Those of you wishing to subscribe to my musical tastes newsletter may. Just email me and I'll explain. Suffice to say, it involves Pandora, which isn't actually as good as you might think at bringing me new music.

Once again, the Weakerthans:



This song is pretty good as well.

As far as life in general goes: I am rapidly approaching the 'overload' portion of my stress carrying capacity. A nap this afternoon helped, but I'm not sure how long that energy can carry me.

I spent much of this week attending a 'range management' school. I attended to learn my plant identification (yes, I can now tell you the difference between fall witchgrass, little bluestem, windmill grass, and beadgrass; and I know why switchgrass is hilarious), but I learned more than that. Right now, I totally want to be a rancher. I'm interested in running the numbers, but I imagine grazing land ranching is the most environmentally sustainable agricultural practice out there.

I'm not even kidding.

Anymore the most productive ranchers are pouring a serious amount of ecological theory into their production methods. And when they are really cooking, they pretty much don't damage the native biotic community at all (assuming you can look past the widespread fencing and replacement of large mammalian grazers; bison and prairie dogs). The point is the birds and bugs and plants shouldn't be negatively affected.

Of course, I don't like or eat beef...

I guess the point is that I'm escaping from my job into a temporary imaginary world where I'm not exhausted by my job.

Saving the world one acre at a time is not easy.

Once again...

...I am sitting in a hotel room.  Quasi-drunk off of cognitive dissonance because, so far as I can tell, I have always made the right choices in life yet am never satisfied with the outcomes.  

I'm also a little weirded out because I'm reading "Discarded Science" by John Grant, which purports to discuss scientific theories that have been discarded, yet in actuality presents them with a borderline-serious delivery that is hard to distinguish from the tone used when describing actual reality.  

So yeah, the idea of Venus originating as a comet spewed forth from Jupiter's massive (and non-existant) supervolcanoes, only to bounce around the solar system and subsequently causing all of the otherwise inexplicable Biblical miracles (flood, parting of red sea, etc.) seems a lot more plausible when delivered in a calm and reassuring tone.

Chuck is dead.  Long live Chuck!

Today I stood on top of progress and economic development from 50 years ago.  Abandoned mine strip pits.  Sheer-sided sinkholes stuck betwixt slag-berms.  Fifty years of trees and honeysuckle working to reclaim it all for modern life, with ticks, birds, turtles, a dozen species of frogs, deer, and at least one very startled garter snake as the beneficiaries.  Yet all about to be undone so that we can dig a new pit and fill it in with broken concrete and metal.  

Yes, and I definitely feel the appropriate place to put our trash is in the holes we leave in the mountains from which we dragged the coal in the first place.  I'm just not sure why we're throwing away metal and concrete.  Which one of the three R's are we forgetting here?

It's all of them isn't it?  Why is this so hard?  Or, to put it more appropriately, why is this so easy to get wrong?

Because we give up.  You can't find a kid under 12 who will tell you he wants to kill the world when he grows up.  You can't find a person under 21 who thinks "I can't do it better!"  And I don't know anyone over the age of 30 who hasn't sold out at least some of what he/she believes and dreams.  The reality is that it is so easy to just put up the white picket fence that matches the neighbor's one.  And then, you know, not eating meat is such a hassle when you go visit your farming family...how many times do you want to explain why you're eating cheese ("It's like heroin, I can't stop") and not eating beef ("Environmentally stupid.").  

Giving up isn't hard to do, its easy, and once you do, you can really make some money.  Where am I supposed to put these ideals when I decide to cash in?  Will they fit in a shoebox at the back of the closet, hidden next to other forgotten items that no longer seem to serve as anything but a reminder of what isn't?  They certainly seem to have diminished in size and importance.  

Yadda yadda yadda.  I spent my evening meal sitting in a resturant called On the Route, the 'Route' being the Mother Road, Route 66.  There I consumed an entirely delicious and not as healthy as I'd hoped dinner that made me think of how surprisingly easy it is to make something fantastic:  Just stick it in oil.  Which is how I ended up eating fried potato salad.  If you think french fries and a 'mustard sauce' doesn't sound fantastic, well, join the club.  My story is that the waitress insisted on it since I asked "What do I have to try here?"  And I assure you, she was totally right.  But that meant I spent over an hour on the treadmill afterwards....in addition to the other hour I was going to spend on it anyway.

The reality is that today I got to observe a part of the world almost nobody has ever seen.  I got to watch a sunset unimpeded by monstrosities or trees.  I stopped at the side of the road, and was rewarded by seeing a wood chuck.  How lucky am I to get to discover new things all the time?  I stopped by the side of the road today to vent my frustration with being cooped up in a car, and saw through a cluster of trees two blue herons working their way upstream through a riffle catching fish.  

I'm exhausted a lot.  And more and more I just don't care.  

New Music Onslaught

Let's get this out there in the open, right now:

I'm burned out.  I'm not "burned out for a while" or "burned out right now" I'm burned out forever.  Imagine a fire that is no longer flaming.  Sure, there are coals there, with a lot of burn and a lot of heat still there, but this isn't a raging inferno anymore.  Ok, that's not entirely accurate, there's a lot of rage.  But there isn't a lot of fire...which is why I say I'm burned out.  

I'm much more likely to just say "Clearly we're not going to agree on this, so let's just stop here" than I am to say "Clearly you're not going to convince me to adopt your idiocy as my own belief, so why don't you just stop embarassing yourself."  Why is this?  Because I'm falling into the same damned pattern of every other human in western society "Give up the fight and just get by."  I can't tell you how infuriated it makes me to have all these choices and no idea which is correct and which is wrong and somehow I'm building myself a walled enclosure in middle america that superficially resembles the very same damned white-picket-fence, dream-world that I despise.  

Why am I turning into prototypical American Dream lifestyle?  Because it is so easy.  Look, that Wal-Mart over there?  That's the ONLY place within an hour that I can buy coconut milk or giram masala, or, for the love of judas, unseasoned pork loin.  And that's the only place with a pharmacy that doesn't mess it up and take 6 hours.  But it's Wal-Mart...bastion of all that is wrong with western society! I scream in my own head every time I go there, Why?

And go to the Dillons instead?  Are these better choices?  Are these really choices at all?  How did I end up here, in the middle of the country, working a dead-end job that is constantly documenting the destruction of another chunk of irreplaceable beauty, in a town 10 times too small, spending 2 hours a day talking and reading sports, and with no single decision along the way that appears wrong?  Who could look at my current lifestyle and think that I was ever anything but just another clone buying into the american ideal?  I'm just some guy with an over-inflated sense of his own individuality.  

 
But, you sat on the doorstep of your church youth director at 18 and read On the Road and discovered that you were a human...doesn't that count for anything?  You stayed up all night at a lock-in playing electric guitar!  You basically got a physics degree in two years!  You wrote and published your own poetry journal!  You have a Ph.D. from a fantastic university!  You can cook fantastic gyros!  How many people can say all that?

Probably not many, but as far as I can tell, that doesn't really mean anything.  

And so today I ended up calling my landscaping buddy and asking him what herbicides I need to use on my lawn to get rid of the non-grass and how to best get my yard looking good and having grass my kid can roll around on recklessly without fear of stickers.  Me...with a yard that's cleansed by herbicides and well-watered...That was the last log on the fire crumbling into coals.  My wife was incredulous, but this was pretty much the last bastion of my unusuality, and it hurts like hell to let it go.  

I don't know what this means...the straw and the camel's back isn't the right analogy.  This isn't a breaking, it's a change, and I think I'm going to have to figure out how to make it work in this new format.  Does that mean figuring out how to recycle all my grey water for watering the lawn?  I guess.

Yeah, this sounds all sad and depressing to me now that I re-read it, but it really isn't all that sad and depressing.  This isn't a padded cell, it's just a situation.  And I can't break out of the decisions I set up for myself...I just have to try to make something awesome out of it.  

Which leads, pretty much thought-for-thought, to me getting into gardening like crazy.  The wife and child and I planted 10 strawberry plants, 4 broccoli, 4 cabbage, and about 40 spinach plants.  Like everything we do outside and with the boy, that was some great fun.  

Anyway, long story short:  I have no interest in writing anymore.  Like a lot of my ridiculous dreams, I just can't sustain it right now.  I'll probably continue to post here, but my online life is dead everywhere else.  

But wasn't this supposed to be about cool music I was listening to?  Feast on the following:

So yeah

The new site template was driving me crazy because A) the font doesn't look right on all computers, B) the formatting was stupid, and C) it was just annoying. For now, I'm going back to the old template. We'll see if I can stand it.

Site News

Ok, so I got sick of the old template, and decided to be slightly less nihilistic about it. I also updated the links on the side there to reflect a more current collection of awesome.

The other thing: Apparently the last time I changed my profile info those of you who were subscribed to the blog got deluged by all the old posts since they got 'reposted' with the new name. So here's fair warning, I'm changing my profile name because it irritates me. Feel free to cancel your subscription and then re-subscribe. You've got a week, the switch will take place next Thursday.

Got it? UNSUBSCRIBE BY NEXT THURSDAY or risk over 300 awesome posts being re-sent (or you could just set it up in Google Reader).