Cucurbits and Tubercles

(...or Squashes and Root Veggies, for those of you who don't garden, speak Latin, or make love to words like an OCD logophile)

I love eating food in season, not just for its superior quality, but also for its perfect fit with the turning year's mood swings. In the segue between autumn and winter, just around the first frost of the hermetic season, root vegetables (tubercles and the like) attain a sweetness and a depth unmatched at any other time of year. They are perfect for roasting, for steaming and blanching and sauteeing and frying, for mashing and smashing and bathing in butter. Burrowing roots and tubers are the winter kitchen's blank canvas.

The other great autumnal rock stars are the brilliantly armored winter cucurbits---the humble squashes. O Kabocha! O Calabaza! All you earthly-hued cousins of sweet meaty flesh! You cry out, insistent, for heated sacrifice. You are tragically resplendent hollowed and roasted, your shiny skins filled with your own dressed innards. I love you sweet and savory, creamy and rough, smeared on face and speared on tongue. If root vegetables are the canvas, winter squashes are the ochred foundation painting. These two are the basis for comfort & joy in hearthside hibernation.

Scattered and smashed and artfully married with these are the brightly colored palettes full of winter fruits, window-grown herbs, late-harvested grains and cold-tapped sugars; apples and quinces, sage and thyme and rosemary, hard wheats and rich, earthy molasses and maple syrup.

These are the foundations of our burgeoning cuisine. These are the meals of preparation and promise. The pumpkin colored carpet leading to the dirt-velvet burrow. These are the offerings of hunt and forage, of stiff-fingered plucking and digging. This is plunder hard-won from the cold & sleeping earth.

Dine well this winter, sweet gastronomes, and be grateful for each mouthful, for every morsel pushed backward on the tongue.

...Are Those Feathers I Smell Burning?

I have been so full, during these last many months of growth and opportunity. This nonstop balancing act of homage and betrayal and calm, calm, calm has left me largely unable to write with any kind of regularity. I'm too close to see the thing, too close to make out details... "The Thing," of course, is the trajectory of my life-pattern segue, the path from There to Here to There. The overgrown machete-cut trail of murder and love and bewilderment and beauty. The Artery of Understanding....

And I still don't get it.

I reckon that's what I'm doing here: trying to figure stuff out. Writing down what knowledge Experience has given me. Trying not just to remember, but to live what my Mama taught (and continues to teach) me. Trying to acknowledge with my Absolute Everything the rhetorical query of George Eliot, "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"

Of course, I am only now realizing that sometimes "making life less difficult" entails adamantly demanding others Piss Off and leave me the hell alone so I can think. I used to be so good at that when I was still a belligerent teenaged drunk....

These days, in lieu of shouting, I am moving 2725 crow-miles away (to a subtropical island, no less) before I leave the US entirely for a while. I'm afraid Seattle's oyster-broth winters have been in my hair a bit too long. I've got too much rain in my eyes to see, too much blood on my skin to be able to feel anything but vicious extremes. And christ almighty, the whole Terrified-to-Idiocy climate of oppression gaining momentum in this country is making my goddamned skin crawl. People are getting dumber and meaner, and I've been exposed---to my last howling nerve---to too much cruel and violent bullshit this year to be willing to put up with any more. Period. I'm not saying I'm the only one stripped to the marrow. Not by a long stretch. I'm just done keeping my bones in the petrol-fire. I'm done seeing it, smelling it, being reminded of it every day. I'm tired of coughing up loathing every morning with my coffee...

So, I'm getting out.

Giving myself a metaphysical electroshock. Letting the sun burn the bile from my skin. Engineering my own recrudescence. Planning my own bonfire, my own smoldering ashpile, my own PhoenixNest from which to rise.

Lo, I am already on fire.

Bullfighter

(Seattle)
There's an oil painting of a bullfighter, mesmerizing a wild-eyed bull, hanging in our dining room. It used to hang above the fireplace in the Palindrome House. The painting is old and crackly, beginning to lose flakes of color and layers of vividity. Its kitsch value keeps it around, as well as the inexplicable draw it seems to have on every person who spends any time with it. Yesterday I noticed something new: the painting is pocked with dozens of tiny holes. Like from dozens of tiny moth mouths.
Or from the edges of a shotgun spray.

Now I can't stop staring at it.

They're probably not shot-holes, though, right? I mean, every other shotgun blast I've ever seen (like the one through my bedroom wall) leaves holes a bit bigger than the ones in the bullfighter's bony hip, in the bull's meaty flank, peppered through the mustard-and-gangrene sky that seems to sicken them both. And the painting was still hanging when I went through the old house, so I have no idea whether or not those holes continued through the wall behind. Still...

It's everywhere. I can't go anywhere in this town without feeling the tap-tap of tragedy on my right shoulder, waiting for me to turn around so I can see its wide, bloody grin.

I get it, already. Jeezus.
Leave me alone.

...Of course, it won't leave. Can't leave. Is maybe bound up here forever, caught in the silken nets of fog that extend over the valleys, tripped up in the pointed tops of needled trees and in the teeth of mountains. My shoulders are not big enough, despite my Atlas-training, to shake this grinning, gnawing beast free. I have to get outside the pit, outside the fight, to see what I'm dealing with. It may only be a tiny thing with big teeth and bigger bark...but it may be a monster. Either way, I am ill-equipped to continue fighting. I need to recharge, to shift my perspective. I cannot in good conscience keep ruminating our little Tragedy when we live largely untouched by the Great Tragedy of the world. I need to go and meet people wiser than I, people who live beside the Great one all life long and grin in spite of it. Or because of it. People with wider views of suffering and joy.

UnAmerican.
Unspoiled.
Uninterred.