Yo! Local peeps!

On November 14th I will be enjoying the honor of providing nibbles for my adorable farmer-visionary pals Ken and Doug’s Hudson Valley Seed Library annual Art Pack gallery show. Come on down! All details are here. I will be bringing truffles made with local ingredients (the pumpkin seed oil dudes and the beet-coriander grrls!) as well as tasty little savories made with local treasures of the squash variety. See you there!

Oh, and even if you aren’t fortunate enough to live in the H-to-the-V, you can buy Ken & Doug’s open-pollinated HV-specific seeds, packed in their gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous seed packs designed by the same lovely Sarah Snow who designed my gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous bonbon boxes and featuring the work of local artists. Browse the loveliness here.

I’m already mourning the passing of the Season of Wearing Cute Dresses in a pretty hardcore way. Yuck. Forgive that I already posted a picture of this outfit (which I have christened “You’d Never Guess She’s a Man-Hating Anarcho-Feminist,”), but I did a lot of tailoring to it to make it fit (there was a LOT more lace) and I’m pretty much in love with it. Those tights have little twee hearts on them!

Lots happening out there in the world, plus I am over my horrid mood of last week! Let us celebrate with links:

My BFFF (extra F for how Fucking much I love him) Than Luu is doing some ridiculous food blogging on his travels around the world with his band Black Gold (Oh look! Another opportunity to mention the music video I was in, how handy!). Check it out!

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Speaking of bands, while I was engaged in a horrible Halloween depression spiral, my sweetheart was in Louisville mixing THIS. Wow.
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Profanity-laced hilarity courtesy of McSweeney’s.

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The new Bloodroot calendar is out! In the two years since Bloodroot published the gorgeous cookbook set that I was honored to have had a hand in creating, they have been publishing a calendar with new recipes. The calendar is super gorgeous and filled with 99% vegan recipes straight out of my mentor Selma’s head–snap it up!

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I’m happy one of the Brooklyn Jonathans (Safran Foer, Ames, and Letham) wrote a book about why you should be vegan or whatevs, and I’m happy that famous blonde actresses are writing vegan cookbooks, all of that is well and good. But these books are written for non-vegans—why people have to keep pointing them out to me I have no idea.

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Speaking of another of the Bklyn Jonathans, Ames wrote that new show Bored to Death and though I haven’t seen it I completely loved & agreed with Nancy Franklin’s recent New Yorker review (I basically agree with everything Nancy Franklin has ever said though.). Particularly this part:

Chick lit—the range of fiction by women about contemporary city life, friendships, sex, jobs, climbing out of the wreckage of youthful dreams—gets a lot less respect than the male equivalent, which people tend to approach as if it were automatically more artful, more written. Women write “thinly veiled accounts”; men write “romans à clef.” Women writers may have a room of their own, but men who thrash around in front of the mirror and record their every failure, humiliation, moue, and excretion for an audience’s consumption still own the house, even if all they do in it is lie on the couch—and then write about it.
The work of Jonathan Ames, who created the new HBO series “Bored to Death,” lies in this vein of self-fascination and self-conscious inertia.

My god, YES. I suffered through a Jonathan Ames audiobook (which I refuse to Google to figure out the title, as I am unwilling to spend one more second of my life on Jonathan Ames) once, and every second was pure torture.

On the other hand, everyone says this new series is good. Oh, the pain.

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And a few work-related miscellanies:

Heya Baltimorites (?)! Check out Brunie’s Bakery, a cute small-batch vegan bakery in your fair city. Recently their head baker emailed me to say that she was making the wedding cake for the woman who ordered the aforementioned wedding truffles from last week and she just sampled and adored a few truffles. How nice is that? I love it when things like that happen. Vegans can be a crazy bunch, but overall we are such decent, sweet, friendly people, no?

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(All that follows is NSFW!)

So, this erotic chocolate shop in Belgium wants to sell ye olde vulvaz, and I hope we can make it happen. How hilarious does it look? My favorite product so far is the “Candy Gay String.” And while I find these deeply, deeply horrifying….I must say they are pretty well done! And they remind me all over again to be annoyed that no one (Beloved TCHO! Are you listening?) makes high-quality vegan (coco milk!!!) milk chocolate and white chocolate. Oh, and I have this mold! I once made it for my sweetheart filled with peppermint patty filling and presented it to him right before he left on a tour. It was too much sugar (a solid inch or so of peppermint patty filling, I’m not sure quite what I was thinking) and he couldn’t eat it in front of anyone and I fear a lot of it went to waste. But it was adorable!

Holidays, like sports and most of pop culture, are to me readymade traditions that the unthinking masses engage in because they haven’t thought of anything better to do. Thus, an unending delightful consequence of being an adult is the ability to decide for myself what holidays I celebrate.

In true anarchist/atheist/selfish fashion, I celebrate no holidays except birthdays. The joys of doing my taxes on Thanksgiving or spending all of Christmas reading a novel are ceaseless wonders to me. Without mandated family gatherings or oppressive religious traditions (a luxuriously empty womb also means I don’t have to go through the motions of enjoying holidays in order not to deprive a kid), the lack of holidays has come to signify something truly worth celebrating: escaping from a chaotic, sad childhood into a hand-crafted, well-examined adult life.

I usually feel gleeful when my sweetheart and I are escaping the banality of what the rest of the country pretends are celebratory occasions, but for some reason Halloween always trips me up.

It seems innocuous enough: I like candy, I like outfits. It’s not a religious holiday, in fact it’s an explicitly irreligious one. But every year Halloween just about breaks my heart, so maybe it’s time to get to the bottom of why.

Maybe it’s because I can’t stand horror movies or anything gory. I can’t tolerate being scared by imaginary demons when the world terrifies the fuck out of me on a daily basis. If I let myself, I could have nightmares about the soap aisle in the supermarket. Staring too hard at a strip mall brings tears to my eyes if I don’t catch myself. I am just not cut out for this harsh American world. The idea of a holiday designed to scare people when everyday life is rife with serious terror is inexplicable to me. I know I have a horrid gift for finding the downside to everything Americans seem to enjoy—maybe people not possessed of this knack actually need to go searching for things to be scared of?

Maybe it’s all the feminist ridiculousness surrounding the holiday we’re all aware of—how it’s all about being a “sexy” whatever. Any excuse to parade our indoctrination into the patriarchy, right?

There is also the small matter of “costumes.” As someone who has the terrible habit of dying her hair unusual colors—these days demure, almost imperceptible blue streaks—a holiday where people give themselves “permission” to wear “crazy” hair styles and clothes is just patently ludicrous. I “dress up” every day (well, OK, I dress up 3-4 days of the week, depending on if I’m working a regular 8-hour day and might see another human, or a 15-hour day when wearing a true outfit and a bra is just stupid). People who wear Uggs and leggings every day of their unimaginably horrific lives then go crazy on Halloween seem breathtakingly sad. (On the other hand, people who wear amazing outfits every day and use Halloween as an excuse to wear extra amazing outfits are breathtakingly rad. I’m not one of those people, but I at least understand and like them.)

And then maybe it all comes down to that thing I have with festivals and fairs, again. And that fall is just a depressing season for a sun worshipper like me.

Or maybe it’s just that my sweetheart has been out of town forever and all I ever do is work and work and think about work and come home and read The New Yorker and drink wine with my cats and decline offers to hang out with good friends because being around anyone just reminds me how he’s not around and maybe if my bestest partner in crime was here we could go out on Halloween and enjoy the ridiculousness and I wouldn’t be here stewing in my own pickled juices and overthinking everything and could just let people go and have their fun without hating on everything, all the time, always, forever.

Ugh. I want this day to be over.

My farmer pal Jessica grew these teeny little carrots, an heirloom variety called Thumbelina. They are a serious pain to  cook with, because you need to peel them to get all the dirt off (you could just scrub them, but I like to peel instead of scrub) and tiny round objects aren’t the easiest to peel, but look what happens when you cut them in half!

Technically you’re not supposed to eat the tops of carrots, but I couldn’t resist giving them to my clients like this. They were part of a tzimmes recipe, which is a Jewish New Year dish of sliced carrots cooked with something sweet. We’re a ways past Rosh Hashanah, but tzimmes is a nice dish anytime. My favorite recipe for it uses lemons sliced micro thin, which cuts the sweetness of the dish.  Give it a whirl:

Tzimmes with Lemon

6-8 servings

• Gil Marks, in The World of Jewish Cooking, from which this recipe was adapted, says: “Since carrots grow even in poor soil, they became a staple of eastern Europe. Carrots are an important part of the Rosh Hashanah tradition:…the carrot’s sweetness fits in with the theme of the holiday [a sweet New Year], and when sliced they resemble gold coins.*”
• Most tzimmes recipes use ginger, cinnamon, raisins, prunes, or dates, but I like these plain.

grape seed, coconut, or canola oil

2# carrots, peeled (unless very fresh) and sliced

1 c vegetable or mushroom stock or water (orange juice is nice but sometimes too desserty)

½ lemon, sliced as thinly as possible

½ c maple syrup or natural brown sugar

1 ts. sea salt

chopped fresh parsley for garnish

1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat until hot but not smoking. Add the carrots (only as many as will fit in one layer) and sauté until lightly browned, about 5 minutes.
2. Add the lemon, broth, sugar, and sea salt. Cook over medium-high heat until liquid is reduced to a glaze. When no more liquid is left in pan, stir constantly until carrots are deeply colored. Be careful to avoid burning.
3. Remove from heat and stir in parsley. Serve.

Adapted from The World of Jewish Cooking (a great book!) by Gil Marks

*Oh Jews, we’re so great at combating stereotypes about us…

When people order large quantities of truffles, they get to pick from a long list of flavors not usually offered. Recently a sweet woman ordered 2-truffle boxes as wedding favors, and I’m so blown away the combination she created that I have to share: one fennel-apple truffle and one pumpkin seed oil truffle, snuggled up next to each other in a tiny box.

(My sweetheart took his fancy camera on tour, so I am stranded in a sea of photogenic fall scenes with only my camera phone,* thus the dreamy blurry quality of these. Maybe I should add a decent camera to my wishlist!)

How perfect for a fall wedding, right? Even a wedding-hater like me has to admit that. The apple ones are dipped in pulverized pink lady apple bits and dusted with fennel pollen,** and the pumpkin seed ones are made with deep green beautiful roasted Styrian pumpkin seed oil and garnished with slow-roasted caramelized pumpkin seeds.

Oh, the beauty.

(lest you question my packing chops [horrors], please know that these boxes were packed inside a heavily fortified bigger box.)

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*Speaking of: Dustin, though I have so far been too lazy to really use the others, I really really adore that Genius camera app you recommended–I use the timer function pretty much every day for outfit photos! Man, what would I do without such lovely blog reader friends?

*Hey local farmers–you could make a mint selling local fennel pollen to insane chefs like me! Yes, I know, it’s ridiculous to harvest, but the kind I buy is $30 for one ounce!

Dudes (sorry sorry sorry, I try not to say dudes, because it means…um, dudes, but sometimes it just works, you know?). I have this giant file of shit I want to buy, because I am a huge hypocrite who loves owning things while bragging about what a non-consumer I am.

Or/and: we all need to buy some things, no matter how much we pride ourselves on our DIY chops/Earth First!esque nonconsumption/distain for sweatshop shit/refusal to own ugly mass-produced cheap crap. Making the choice to mindfully save up for incidentals as well as larger treats that are well made instead of brainlessly buying loads of Wal*Mart hideosities can be a way to fill our lives with meaning and beauty. (I can spin anything, I should work at the White House!)

Anyway, putting this all online means I can rid myself of a messy file of clippings and notes, so here we go. I’ve got other posts half done with lists of books, music, and a huge huge huge list of food-related shite, so if consumerism thrills you, prepare to be thrilled (and/or to question my sketchy taste) in the next few weeks. Thus:

MY MASTER WISH LIST!

Totebag lovers! I’m a totebag grrrl through and through, and I think this Muji pouch organizer is just what I need to prevent my totes from becoming the giant Bermuda Triangles of crap that they currently are. Plus, as a MOMA member I get a discount on it! On the other hand, I bet I could sew it myself in about 1/2 hour….

I wonder how this washi paper tape would do to label food containers? Right now I use painters tape for my meal delivery service, and it works OK. This looks prettier though. And maybe if clients put it in the dishwasher (as I have asked them repeatedly not to do, as it necessitates using goo-gone to remove the stuck-on tape glueiness) it would just magically dissolve?

There is another tape I have a note to look into, too: this 33-pack of masking tape in 11 colors!

Loomstate organic cotton jeans: I’d like two of each, please! (OK, I already own three pairs…)

Someday I’d like to make a Lagusta’s Luscious belt buckle!

Once when my sweetheart and I were going to have a cheesey commitment ceremony I wanted to get these rings, then we both realized that a commitment ceremony wasn’t for us…and neither is wearing rings. Still, they are rad.

A laptop case I’m interested in, most likely made in China, sigh.

And other laptop bags…

As long as we’re looking at things we’re not ever going to buy, how about a $360 mailbox? Yes, that’s it there above.

I’m dying for this tape dispenser!!!

Amazing handmade bike baskets.

Cuter gladrags than the plain-jane ones I have…also these!  (Why yes, I do wear washable menstrual pads that I then wash in my bike-powered washing machine, T*M*I, I know! And yes, I’m basically a 13-year-old girl with my terror of tampons, but whatever works!)

Cute lamp!

Good for photo albums!

Godless necklace, Y*E*S!

I already own this hanger necklace, but periodically it gets bent and I need to buy a new one. My pal Aaron has been making me ones for the past few years with little bits of copper he finds here and there (those are good because they develop a nice patina), but this is a good back up.

Do you know Resurgence magazine? I do, but would like to get to know it more, on more of a bimonthly basis…

Strangely alluring matches made from a single block of wood.

Solar-powered phone charger!

I’ve never grown phlox, as a matter of fact I don’t really grow anything much at all, but this “Peppermint Twist” phlox is so freaking adorable that it’s almost enough to make me into a flower grower.

Ah, remember that one time when we made everyone in town hate Brittany, aka the “Ralph Nader of New Paltz”? Funsies! Kiddos, don’t do what we did and dare to believe that you have a right to run for Village Board without the approval of one of the two major parties or the third party to which you belong—running without the express approval of any of these groups and instead merely as a person who would be kickass for the job will, with absolute certainty, cause people to scream at you for all eternity because you “spoiled” “their” election. But weren’t the signs ridiculously cute? And the boys sharpening promotional pencils? (Click that link above for the cuteness)

On our little New Paltz Green Party email list, we’ve been having a little discussion about why we didn’t take a more active role in co-sponsoring and participating in a recent anti-war rally.

Rallies are a bit of a touchy subject for me. To put it plainly: I hate them and think they are stupid.

Well, to be fair and a little bit more nuanced, I should say that it seems to be that not only are they largely ineffectual, they have also become festivals of ridiculousness for well-meaning but largely idiotic lefties looking more for a playground than a revolution (I should here perhaps remind people that I generally dislike any sort of festive public gathering, political or not). I’m the last person to say that artistic expression isn’t a part of the revolution, but the lack of focus at most rallies is disturbing.

Unless they are supremely giant (Sandor Katz, Jacob and I went to the 2003 NYC anti-war rally together and that was the last time in recent memory that I felt even a vague a sense of purpose in a group of lefties….On the other hand, Sandor spent that night in jail, if I remember correctly.) they accomplish less than nothing, because they make us look stupid. And a supremely giant rally is nearly impossible to create.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote to the group, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Oh! First of all, I should state that my bestest frenemy made some points I completely and totally agree with:

I think that it’s a waste of the organization’s time to make any attempt to end the war in afghanistan directly. The purpose of the Green Party is to implement our vision of the world through first electing Greens to positions in government, then electing enough Greens to hold majorities and govern, then to have those Green majorities implement public policy that is going to quickly bring us implementation of the Green Party vision. The New Paltz Green Party’s reason for being is supposedly to build an organization (and support for that organization) large enough to hold majorities on the Town Council, Village Board and send five or six Greens to the Ulster County Legislature.

That requires an organization geared towards raising money, recruiting members, articulating what Green means in the context of New Paltz policy and training our members to run for and hold office.

Since the Green Party seems only rarely able to make any efforts in that direction I, as a party member would have grave concerns about our leadership spending energy on quixotic protest movements as well. There are many, many other organizations focused on national and global political issues and if wanted to work to stop the Afghanistan war, Id join and work with them.

I would even argue that the New Paltz Greens should not run anyone for Congress on a stop-the-war platform unless and until we have a local political party doing local political work again, rather than what we seem to have now — just another vaguely leftist protest group which uses the Green Party name to help get Democrats elected.

Yeah, well, the end is crap, but there are some good points in there. Here’s what I wrote:

Thanks for raising this question. I was the one you mentioned, I believe, who tossed off a remark about how I don’t think rallies of the sort that took place last weekend do any good, and thanks for the opportunity to expand on that, which might have seemed callous at the meeting.

Actually, Jason said pretty much exactly what I was going on say on this issue (except for the part where he insults the NPGP, which might be true in some ways [not the part about getting Democrats elected, Jesus Christ, you endorse one awesome Democrat [Kitty Brown! Vote for her!] and….breathing breathing breathing, moving on] but certainly isn’t productive).

Here’s my take on it:

It’s not that I don’t think protests and rallies and demos can never do any good, it’s just that in terms of time spent versus results achieved, I don’t see a strong enough connection to put in the time.

In 2003 pretty much the entire world rallied around not invading Iraq, and I don’t see that it did one iota. (Yes, we had a different President. But still.) That was very disparaging, especially when I had seen how rallies could make a difference—when I was a kid in Arizona my mom and I went on dozens of MLK Day rallies, and eventually Arizona recognized MLK Day. It felt like we accomplished something. (On the other hand, I also remember going to rallies against that idiotic Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and he is still as crazy as ever. And many pro-choice rallies, which you could say, I suppose, have worked. And countless demos against meat…which people are still eating.).

While I’m inclined to completely agree with Jason and take the position that the NPGP should focus on issues closer to home and become a stronger group before we tackle larger problems, I also think it’s wonderful that there are people in the group who are concerned about those larger international issues and want to fight against war, for example, in the name of the New Paltz Green Party. That warms my heart.

On a personal level, however, here’s how I see it: I have a very limited amount of time on this earth. I need to pick my battles. Though I very much want to end war, I have serious doubts that going to a rally in Kingston will do anything at all to accomplish that. I could listen to speakers saying what I already believe in the company of others who completely agree with me, but what else will I accomplish?

Instead, I work most of the time and try to use my job as an example of what a small business run with principles other than capitalism at its heart can be. In my spare time, I try to do what little tiny bits I can to ensure that in my little tiny town good people are elected so that New Paltz continues to be (or, um, begins to be) a well-functioning, progressive town.

I don’t do nearly as much of that work as I should, but it is my belief that in focusing my life on those two issues (as well as a few other little tangential pursuits) I can have a greater impact on those specific goals than I could have if I spread myself so thin trying to do so much that I never accomplished anything.

This is why I do not personally go to rallies, though I would very much like to see our country end its violent overseas policies. I am worried that this makes me seem heartless and like I don’t care about anything outside of New Paltz and my life, but I’m just not convinced that even if I tried I could have any impact on how whether or not my country decides to uselessly kill people on the other side of the globe with my money.

I understand that a huge principle of progressive democracy is that if we all do a little bit—voting, calling our elected leaders, working on campaigns, and yes, going to rallies—we can see big changes (for the record, I do all of those things except go to rallies). If everyone in New York went to that rally, it most certainly would make a difference, I do believe that. And by saying that I won’t go because I know everyone won’t go, I understand that I am part of the problem, not the solution, as the saying goes. I am happy people are organizing antiwar rallies, even if I can’t quite put my heart into attending. I wish there were more politically active Greens so we weren’t always spread out so thin and that we could carry a banner at the rally. I don’t see why, if we were a bigger party, we shouldn’t.

But again: I feel most sane and like I am making the biggest impact when I am focusing my life like a laser beam on what I feel I can reasonably accomplish. It’s not perfect, it’s just where I’m at right now.

The cuteness is really just ridiculous:

I got my package, thanks! Also: if you’ve never been to Horizons in Philadelphia (horizonsphiladelphia.com) you should check it out. I went there this weekend and in terms of vegan fine dining of no specific ethnic origin, I have never been to a better restaurant anywhere! Just be sure to make reservations, they fill up. bonus: its right around the corner from a nice little vintage clothing shop. Don’t miss the portabella carpaccio or the salted beet appetizer. Thanks again for the chocolate, and the good timing- i only have to stare at it and not eat it for a couple of days :) [it was a gift]

Actually, I have been there, and loved it! I’ve also been to that vintage shop!!!

Strataspore: “A platform for collective knowledge about mushrooms.”

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Spend an adorable and seriously heartwarming 20 minutes with this Brooklyny hipstery awesomey shortie, all about abortion!

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FUCK YEAH: Barbara Ehrenreich on how “positive thinking has undermined America.” Yep. Totes!! My god, I loves me some Barbara Ehrenreich.

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This entire blog will terrify and fascinate you, I promise. Veronica turned me onto it because in this post this seriously mentally insane person explains how many of the little globule-y things I had at Alinea were made. Wowzers.

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This Calvin Trillin gem that so perfectly sums up the Roman Polanski mishegoss has been passed around a bit, but in case you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a peek and an “EXACTLY.”

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An anarchist’s take on Michael Moore’s new anti-capitalist movie.

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Little bit o’ Bonbons press (the blog is also my personal scrapbook, OK?)….

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Oh, and here is the cutest, (and also most bizarrely inaccurate) piece o’ Bonbons press ever.(I wouldn’t exactly say that I “made the chocolates in part as a response to friends who voiced their opinion that no one else but Obama could have won the Nobel Peace Prize” though yep, I did have a conversation with someone who said that and yep, I did point out that Vandana should have received it instead, but man, that would have been quick to whip up an entire choco line! But whatevs, that’s a minor quibble in a sweet article.)

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Brittany pointed me to these cute vintagey threads. Oh Etsy, je t’adore.

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Our local distillery, Tuthilltown Spirits, is now incredibly famous, and deservedly so. Their Baby Bourbon and Manhattan Rye Whiskey are RIDIC. Hooray for local hooch!

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I found out about this sweet teeny jam company from Edible Brooklyn–how adorable: Anarchy in a Jar jams. How amazing to be alive when anarchists are practicing their politics by making jam.

It warms my heart, yo.

Have you noticed this? That people who are really deeply good at what they do and are doing it to the Nth degree are so often serious assholes?

If you’ve been to, oh, I don’t know, let’s just say….Brooklyn, then you know of what I here speak. Awesomeness overshadowed by self-awareness of awesomeness, which then tips said awesomeness into the realm of insufferability. We’ve come to accept it with writers, painters, movie directors, but in my life I see it a lot with small business owners. The ones who are doing the most awesome shit are so often also the most stuck-up and annoying.

My work is to be at once awesome and not assholey, and it’s harder than you can possibly imagine.

Seriously. The struggle not to be an asshole takes up roughly half of my mindspace on any given day. I come from a family comprised almost solely of giant assholes, and I live in today’s giantly assholely world. I am both made of and swim around in assholely molecules every minute of every day.*

Despite that, I think it’s fair to say that I am not, on balance, an asshole. I think about this all the time, and here’s what I’ve figured out: I think (I hope) I have struck this weirdly awesome balance in my life: I am at once the most intense and angry person I know as well as one of the most sweet. Can this be? Can I continue like this? I really want to, I really like this balance. Not letting the anger overtake the sweetness, not letting the sweetness trickle into treacle.

I am deeply hard, I have harsh political views, I am sometimes overly brash in my resistance to compromise, and being forced to bear witness to most people’s lives, beliefs, and activities engenders in me feelings ranging from disinterest to literal revulsion to screaming rage.

On the other hand: I work hard at cultivating loving relationships with those I love; at deeply enjoying the pleasure of being alive; and at opening my heart to the many breathtaking wonderfulnesses my life provides.

I like talking about it, and trusting good friends who will tell me when the balance is a little off. I like that I can sometimes sort of put my sanity into other people’s hands, letting them feel the heavy weight of it and asking them plainly: “OK? Sane?” And they can nod and smile and reassure me that my anger is healthy,** or take my hand and ignore me when I blow up and take a walk and tell me I’m being, quite literally, insane.

A lot of this is related to work. Let me tell you a story.

There is a bakery in the town in which my commercial kitchen is located. I have heard many, many stories about the baker who owns this bakery. For example, a few months ago I linked to a police report about him wandering around a street festival without trousers, with his junk all on display. (That really doesn’t bother me, I’m just painting a picture for you. I like people’s junk being on display, actually. It sort of adds value to my day to know that weirdo bakers are getting drunk at small-town street festivals and possibly scarring children for life with their wrinkly junk.***)

In every story I’ve ever heard about this baker, the phrase “what an asshole!” is invariably used. The story about the time my sweetheart tried to get a vegan hot chocolate. The many many stories from my sous chef, who continues going there seemingly only to collect bizarre stories (I should state that she is too sweet to actually call him an asshole, but that’s her sentiment, I can tell). The friends of mine who ordered a wedding cake from him and somehow things got so angry that they asked another friend to pick up the cake because they knew they would get into a fist fight if they saw him. Etc. Ad infinitum.

I had never been to this bakery. I bake my own bread and work around the corner, where there is always good, free food waiting for me. But on a recent weekend I was poking around town with a friend and he wanted to get a coffee**** and a sandwich on good bread, so we ventured in.

Within two minutes I was so incredibly angry that my friend and I spent the next few hours analyzing the interaction second-by-second, with me tracing each strain of anger back to a specific ill-placed word, dark look, snobbish turn of phrase, infuriating sentence.

My friend wasn’t particularly bothered. He was happy that some sort of eggy sandwich he got was appropriately-sized (“Only one egg!” and I should state that he charged him .25 more for an egg that wasn’t born in hell, which is, I suppose, good on balance.)  and he also ate the second half of my sandwich, which was incredibly tasty (I’m a half-sandwich eater, OK?*****).

That’s the thing: everything was good. The food was just lovely. Made with care, if not exactly love. When ordering my sandwich, I misunderstood the vegan options on the menu and apparently ordered wrong. I was sternly told that my off-the-menu sandwich creation was “not recommended” and looked upon like a speck of dust who couldn’t put together a good sandwich if my life depended on it. The baker went on and on about why that sandwich wouldn’t be good and why I should order the sandwich on the menu—which is what I was trying to do.

In the end I got all icy and sternly said: “Just give me the best. vegan. sandwich. you. can. make.” and he respected that, both the iciness and the request for quality, as I had a feeling he would.

I won’t go into the many more details of insultingness and irksomeness. It was a feeling that permeated the place.

“He’s a good baker, he’s just not good with customers,” said my friend. He didn’t get why I was annoyed.

“Well he shouldn’t FUCKING DEAL WITH CUSTOMERS if he’s going to insult them all day long.” I replied.

This is, of course, why I do not have a shop that is open to the public: I am not good at dealing with customers. I would critique people’s orders, talk down to them, get visibly annoyed by their food stupidity. I know this about myself, and I sequester myself appropriately. I am largely cloistered. I rarely answer the telephone. This is good for me. I have found a way to navigate through my annoying snobbishness and holier-than-thouity to a decent career doing what I love. (The internet is my medium, I bow to its barriers.)

The thing is: the baker was toeing a line I very much like: he runs his business with principles other than money making at its heart. Clearly he cares more for quality than kindness, and I completely respect that. The place reminds me a lot of my beloved Bloodroot: resolutely individual. Going to Bloodroot for the first time can be frustrating because there are no waitresses and the ordering system is quirky, but the owners are aware of this and walk everyone through the process. Unlike almost every restaurant in the world, they treat you like a person, not a “customer.” I love this. It is the world I want to live in.

You’re not treated like a customer at the bakery, either. You’re treated like a potential enemy who must be conquered. This I do not love.

The baker is an artisan: I’m sure he works with razor-thin margins, I know he bakes everything from scratch, I’m sure he puts in the effort to make everything he does worth doing. People do not like this. They like and want cheap shit, and when you give them something other than cheap shit they are confused and quickly become annoyed, as do you after you explain for the six hundredth time why you cook the way you do, why things take a little longer because you make them from scratch, why your bread won’t last for weeks and weeks.

This work of quality artisanship is very, very annoying. You’re taking one little string and trying to pull the entire world over to you with it. Sometimes it breaks, and that makes you angry.

We make our choices. I understand mine, I understood Bloodroot’s, and I understand the baker’s. I don’t understand McDonalds, I don’t understand Starbucks. I like mine, I like Bloodroot’s, and the baker’s make me angry.

Balance is the thing, I suppose. Balancing our love of artisanship and all that it entails with a love of life that prevents us from succumbing to assholery. I guess I’ll keep on keepin’ on, trying to balance my beloved anger with sweetness, keeping my head down, working hard, trying to have compassion for those also on my path.

Meh.******

*I just had a long conversation with myself (in my head, thankfully) about whether or not calling people assholes is sort of anti-gay, just as I try not to call people pussies unless they are, you know, doing something awesome (I went through a phase of calling people “fucking cunts” when they did awesome things, but somehow it didn’t take, I have no idea why.). For some reason I have absolutely no compunction about calling people dicks since I very much enjoy insulting men, but calling people assholes seems a teeny bit insulting specifically to my beloved fags. After I went around and around this in my head, I finally came to the conclusion that it’s OK to call people assholes because let’s face it: shit comes out of an asshole, that fact cannot change.

(And here my partner is reading my blog in his bunk on his bus on his phone right before bed, and is dying a little bit inside because of my bathroom humor. I can hear his sigh these many states away. Alas! We can’t all be Mr. Integrity!)

**Which brings me to my Best Facebook Status Update of the Week. Are you ready to be blown away? Here goes: “My anger is a guava kombucha: sometimes healthy, sometimes explosive, always pink, always on the verge.” yesssssssssss.

***I think we can all agree that calling people’s bits “junk” is sort of rad for reasons no one can really explain, no?

****I’ve started saying “a coffee” instead of “a cup of coffee” or “some coffee.” I like it and feel it somehow sounds more European. Don’t you think? (I don’t actually drink coffee myself, but jump in on people’s conversations about which of the 40 coffeehouses in my town has the best coffee all the time. You didn’t need to know any of this.)

*****This is the post full of things no one cares about or needs to know!

******If you are wont to compare my writing style to that of the dearly departed David Foster Wallace because of all my parenthetical asides and footnotes, PLEASE DO.