The Innkeeper

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Tonight I made grilled salmon with lime butter, and orzo with garlic and kalamata olives. A bottle of some Australian Sauvignon Blanc to go with. The old lady's in the kitchen doing the washing up.

I'm sick with the pleasure of it all.

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Plus, I might have ate too much.

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I have been doing art and doing art and doing art. I have been doing a lot of wandering in the wilderness. Not much in the way of intentionality or vision, just putzing around until the emotional wire starts to hum. 

Sometimes it goes, sometimes it don't.

If it don't, I won't keep it.

It it does, then I don't much care what it looks like. 

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It must speak with its own voice.

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I am enjoying learning how to cook. I love prepping the ingredients, chopping and cutting and squeezing and mashing and warming and browning and crisping and boiling and steaming and wilting and charing and smoking and grilling and frying and baking and broiling and skewering and patting dry and crusting with salt or pepper and gathering herbs from the garden and pounding garlic in the pilon and tasting and mixing and plating and then and then and then

EATING THE MOTHERFUCKER!

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Also, the wine is good.

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Also, the company is good.

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For a guy who grew up on McDonalds and fried baloney sandwiches, the discovery of real food is a minor miracle. (Not that I'm knocking fried baloney sandwiches. There is an art to them.I get a lot of goddamn pleasure from them.)

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Not that you give a fuck, but here is a Jack Gilbert poem that just about sums it up:

Going Wrong

The fish are dreadful. They are brought up

the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful

and alien and cold from night under the sea,

the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.

Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,

washing them. "What can you know of my machinery!"

demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly

and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,

getting to the muck of something terrible.

The Lord insists: "You are the one who chooses

to live this way.  I build cities where things

are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live

with rock and silence." The man washes away

the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.

Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts

in peppers. "You have lived all year without women."

He takes out everything and puts in the fish.

"No one knows where you are. People forget you.

You are vain and stubborn." The man slices

tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish

and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,

laying all of it out on the table in the courtyard

full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying

on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.

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I don't know what it means to live the right way, but I am coming to an idea of how to live in a way that means something to me.

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Namaste.

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