It has been roughly a year since the murmurings and whispers and news of folks stuck on a cruise ship unable to come to shore happened.
Its been roughly a year since people got really scary-sick a couple weeks after attending a conference in Seattle.
Its been roughly a year since the lights went out on Broadway and everyone around the planet put on masks – well those of us who believe in science did anyway – shut down schools, worked from home if you could, stressed about dying either from the virus or, honestly, starvation if the virus didn’t get you, and did our best not to die while exhausted nurses tried desperately not to lose their shit because another one needed to have a tube unglamourously shoved down their throats to help one try to breathe around gobs of fibrous snot, and as the virus did its best to throw clots and inflammation in random combinations, trying to kill you.
…and to try to maintain a positive outlook, stay connected, sane, and maybe think about doing some of those projects you’ve always meant to do when you have time, because if nothing else in 2020, most of us had an abundance of time.
One of my hobbies is gardening – fighting with poor soil, little bugs, random wildlife etc, while trying to grow something edible, beautiful, or both.
I befriended squirrels and fed the lady-squirrels in hopes that they would chase off the random male squirrels who seemed less inclined toward eating, and more inclined toward digging random holes in my planter beds, taking bites of things, deciding they didn’t like them, and then digging up the next thing in the row, which was the same kind of vegetable and repeating the exercise.
I fed birds. I put out a solar powered fountain that made soothing water sounds when the sun shined and the pump worked. The birds often stop by to take a drink, and sometimes bath in it.
Birds are a bit dirty and vile at times, so the fountain needed a scrubbing at least once a week to prevent it from turning into unnamed soup.
My dogs like the yard, as much as a dog can like its bathroom and hunting ground with a strange human forever cursing and moving plants around in it, and cursing and turning the compost, and cursing and running from the carpenter bees that zoom at your face and are harmless, and the wasps that sun themselves in places where you were just getting ready to put your hand.
There was a lot I didn’t do this year, but I didn’t get sick and become a burden on our medical care professionals. I didn’t get rich, but between some kind clients and generous friends, I didn’t starve, and was even able, occasionally, to send people little treats to brighten their day.
I painted a picture of my niece that looks like her, and she loves it. I might do more of them and collaborate with my brother in law on a book with me as the illustrator? We shall see.
I learned a lot and realize I know nothing, and that I have a whole lot more to learn about gardens, but sometimes luck and circumstance get together and over time, and with lots of carried water to keep them alive, sometimes beauty happens from soil, and sometimes food happens.
Here are some pictures from the garden.
I hope you survived 2020 with your sanity and your body in some semblance of health, and that if you weren’t able to do much of anything, again, at least you survived one of the worst years this planet has seen in recent memory.
Usually, when people want the country to sing kumbaya, ignore trespasses and injustice, and not hold racist White folks accountable, they pull a random quote from Martin Luther King Jr. and weaponize his words for their convenience, much like oppressors have been doing when pulling Bible quotes pretty much since the birth of this country.
Martin Luther King Jr. organized peaceful protests, but people have misconstrued passive resistance to mean that we should not and must not resort to violence to attain a necessary goal, and while doing so, credit Martin Luther King Jr with single-handedly pushing Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Civil Rights act of 1964.
…which completely discounts the work of others who have not been recognized with a National Holiday on their birthdays, such as Malcolm X, The Black Panthers and others.
Peaceful protest was effective, but the fear of destruction of the Republic also was an influence that added urgency to the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the hope that doing so would be enough to lull the people back to complacency.
There were many ideas that contributed to the urgency toward progress in this country; the idea that Black people could arm and defend themselves from police, the fact that the families of the lynched would hold open casket funerals to show what the angry mobs did to a child, falsely accused of whistling at a White woman, or the fact that a Black woman refused to go to the back of the bus before Rosa Parks did, but wasn’t the “right sort of Black woman” and her less than perfect background would be weaponized as justification not to allow her to be seen as an equal human being.
All of this tends to get overlooked and overshadowed by “I Have a Dream,” and the cherry picking of a legacy.
Progress was made because organized strikes threatened the acquisition of wealth in this country, and Civil Rights was the salve they hoped would put the matter back to rest.
Many of our leaders who died were targeted for death or exile when Civil Rights as law proved only to be the beginning. I say this because so many people killed, either publicly or privately lynched, or threatened, or financially ruined or blackmailed, does not happen in this country without either the complicity or the permission of people in seats of power.
We look at Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday as a holiday and as the commemoration of a leader for change in this country, who happened to be Black, but wanted change for all of us.
Still, there is the persistent perception that Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is a “Black” holiday, and many companies feel free not to acknowledge the day and have their employees work as if it were any other day.
This is disrespectful and a continuing vestige of the soft-racism that runs in this country, even in places not deemed to be seen as “racist.”
People conveniently forget when blaming racism on Democrats, that elements within our society could not countenance being no better than Black people, which caused Dixiecrats, southern Democrats, to abandon their party and become Republicans, all because of racism.
Elements of our society could not deal with the next idea on Martin Luther King’s agenda, which is the poison underlying racism which provides it with its power – poverty.
Racism has always been used as a tool by the wealthy to keep the White people in poverty fighting with the Black people in poverty, using the poor Whites as enforcers and slave-catchers, the root of policing structures in this country, against the poor Blacks, and while the poor of all races were oppressed and distracted, extracting labor, stealing wealth and generally continuing to steal the whole cake while their victims fought amongst themselves for the crumbs.
Martin Luther King’s next mission was to march with unions – specifically Black men who worked in sanitation, a job people tend to look down upon, but without their valuable service, we would quickly be waist deep in trash, rats, and disease. They were striking because they were being paid less than a person could survive on to do a necessary job.
“I AM A MAN” was the precursor to “Black Lives Matter” in this country. It was painted on signs and carried by protesters fighting to receive a living wage equal to White men for the same work.
This was the final straw, and it resulted in the death of Martin Luther King Jr, shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, and within a few years, Malcolm X was killed, the Black Panthers were jailed, and voices went into exile in Paris, as their lives were threatened for simply wanting to be no better than White people, and to have the right to be paid a living wage for work.
After JFK and RFK were killed, White leaders became afraid to stand up. After Black leaders were killed or jailed or institutionalized, or exiled, Black leaders became afraid to speak, and while the Voting Rights act and the Civil Rights Act became law, the laws were slowly undermined and dismantled over time by power structures within this country that wish to not be any better than Black people, and who know what happens in this country when enough people forget to be racist for a moment, start to see themselves in us, and begin to see the real problem – poverty and the extraction of labor and wealth by the wealthy and powerful.
The new Jim Crow was a construction designed to load Black bodies into an unjust “Justice System,” and to use the loophole in the 13th Amendment in the Constitution designed to salve the anger of aggrieved Whites who saw the freed enslaved as a government mandated loss of property, to create a machine to extract free labor from Black bodies via corporate owned and run prison system.
Three Strikes rules and higher penalties for essentially the same drug only differentiated by an economic barrier targeted Black bodies for prison in communities intentionally left under-served, and then lured into the drug trade with videos and movies glamorizing “Thug Life.”
Bodies dehumanized by labeling them as “super-predators” were thrown into cells, since racism and bigotry is not the exclusive provenance of the GOP and its minions. Both faces of the coin build the machine.
All through this era, Black people were jailed at higher rates than poor Whites, and killed by police with impunity and without consequence at higher rates than poor Whites and while we screamed and cried and protested, our voices were not heard until the dark day when a smirking officer placed his over 200 pound body on the handcuffed person beneath him, and smirked as the light died in George Floyd’s eyes and he called out for his mother as his brain slowly died from lack of air.
In 2020, the work people began to do together to have a voice came to fruition.
People of all colors marched for years to say no to racism, to say yes to trying to work together, this time to get us out of an economic crater and then out of a pandemic.
…and a small section of the wealthy and powerful saw this as a threat to their power.
They used a credibility gap to sow doubt in the Democratic process, to propagate conspiracy theory, and to whip up those who, even though every deck in this country is stacked in their favor, have not been able to attain the wealth they’ve felt they were owed.
They funded masked men with long hammers and firestarters in their backpacks to set things on fire during protests.
They paid for skids of bricks to be conveniently left handy for the aggrieved and recently pepper sprayed to react with violence and put though windows of stores they do not own, and to burn buildings they did not build.
These temptations were largely unsuccessful as 93-95% of all protests were peaceful.
The 5% of protests that weren’t were filmed from all angles and put on a loud loop on a drum beat on right wing media to scare the White people in their suburban enclaves, terrified that the riots they were led to believe were happening everywhere would eventually burn their beloved homes and businesses, not realizing that in many cases, it was their radicalized sons and daughters, fed lies through social media and via the coms on their video games, gone wild-ing in the big cities, convinced that they were helping BLM, who set most of the fires and did most of the looting.
BLM witnessed this happening repeatedly and counseled the misguided.
BLM let the folks know that burning would not be helpful – that Black people lived in these communities and needed these stores. We needed our places to live. We would be blamed for burning while the White kids would return to their homes, thinking they did something good, but in reality their “wild-ing” may have taken out the only supermarket in a food desert, and may have done the work of demolition of established communities, making the way for real estate developers to renew, displace and gentrify neighborhoods they had targeted for years but had been unable to crack.
The Poor and distressed middle classes were rarely allowed time from distraction to see the truth – the deck is stacked specifically so that wealthiest of wealthy people can retain their wealth and power, and the system requires restructuring.
The White poor and the distressed mostly White middle classes believed the lies. They believed that they were “patriots” charged with saving their country, but in fact, they were no better than the Confederate army, lied into a conflict that was fought specifically to keep kidnapped Africans who had been enslaved for centuries enslaved, and in doing so, to keep the means of generation of wealth in the hands of the rich White few.
The insurrectionists, armed, invaded the Capitol on the day the Electoral College votes were to be read, the day the Vice President refused a direct request from the President to overstep his authority, to disenfranchise electors, and to hand power over to a wanna-be authoritarian, desperate to avoid the long line of the aggrieved and victimized, ready to hold him to account once the legal shield he believed his Presidency provided, was prized away from his stubby orange foundation and blood-stained finger.
He has lived a life around the idea of “what can I get away with?” – the direct opposite of the “Noble Obligation” that was once a pillar of American life – once you attained success, it was your obligation to pay your taxes, to use your wealth to improve the lot of others, to build museums and schools and churches out of your benevolence, and out of duty.
He lived opposite to that. Wealth to him, is a tool used to acquire pleasure and power, to avoid accountability for crimes that less wealthy people would be jailed, to lure women and who would not otherwise be attracted to him, to allegedly partake in illegal activity such as the rape of children, and to discard them once he grew bored or tired of them, to misdirect blame when things went wrong, to use the system to sue his enemies and his creditors into submission and to game the system to avoid paying taxes and to hoard wealth.
When his wealth was allegedly threatened by sanctions against his primary source of income, money kept in a small Russian bank, passed through Deutchebank by his private bankers, and used to purchase overpriced properties in order to launder ill-gotten gains from stolen oil, sex-trafficking, drug sales, and other proceeds from organized crime, he decided to run for President, in hopes that at a minimum, he would gain enough power to lobby to have the sanctions lifted, but unexpectedly, he won.
The Insurrection E vent on January 6, 2021 was to silence the voice of 81 million Americans who worked together during a pandemic to remove a liar, conman, and racist from office.
The liar called people within the Senate as they fled from armed insurrectionists, trying to convince them to support him. His supporters within the House and Senate refused to wear masks while in lock-down, infecting their colleagues, live-tweeted the location of key Representatives, allowing the people who had walked the building the day before on a “tour” which looked a lot like reconnaissance, to know that some of them were close to their goal of capturing, and potentially lynching people they saw as enemies to their cause.
The Insurrectionists had zip-ties and a hastily-constructed gallows on the plaza outside the Capitol Dome. They had weapons. They planted bombs. They stole secured laptops and ripped panic buttons out of the offices of targeted government officials.
Some of the insurrectionists defecated into their hands and smeared shit on the walls of Congress.
Let us only consider forgiveness after those who have trespassed have apologized, and only after they have atoned and done the work to repair what they tried to break. Let them accept that the work they must do is for them, not for us, and that, quite frankly, our forgiveness is not the expected reward, nor is it owed. This is the minimum they need to do, to attempt to make whole what was broken.
There are some trespasses that are unforgivable and will have forever broken a trust that cannot be repaired, and for some of us, they will have to accept this and we’ll have to agree to walk our separate paths, united only by country.
No longer can we trust them to be united in purpose, and that they must find their own way from the moment they crossed the threshold into the Capitol and were prepared to hand our democracy over to a man who wants everything and values nothing.
They posed for Instagram pictures while parading a Confederate Flag through the halls, a flag that had not even made it into the building during the worst of the Civil War. So, as we remember a leader on his birthday, and prepare to swear in a new President in hopes of taking the first steps out of the crater caused by an incompetent man who should never have been placed in the seat of power in this country, let us remember the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. but more importantly, let no-one twist his words into an excuse not to hold people accountable for crimes against democracy and against our fellow citizens. …and let us remember King’s final action – to fly to lead a protest of sanitation workers, and to provide them with a voice and a path out of poverty – an action so terrifying to the powers that be in this country, they very well may have had him executed for daring to ask that people should be paid a living wage and provided dignity for their work.
Folks wind up in the emergency room on Thanksgiving, an US, harvest-oriented holiday based on the myth of a shared meal between Indigenous people and “colonizers” who “discovered America and then proceeded to annex land, intentionally sicken the indigenous folks, run them off their land, or murder them, or rape them, men and women.
It was decided in the early part of the twentieth century, in which a lot of the pretty vile things folks did to “found ” this country were whitewashed, edges smoothed, gore and blood spackled over, with the excuse that we needed to teach history, but not to expose the children to how awful our founding fathers actually were.
So much is done in this country in the name of “protecting children” which often, in reality is done to absolve people’s grandparents of atrocities that continue to this very day, but I digress. (Imagine me smiling and saying this in my best customer service-flight attendant – patient pearl-wearing voice, topped by a high, high bouffant.)
So a holiday was created in advance of Christmas, another strange mythical confection, so that families could sit down, eat to excess, attempt to ignore the slights and insults casually thrown back and forth in families and try to get along.
Fairly often on this holiday, usually because someone who doesn’t usually cook or doesn’t cook often, mishandled some tough-to-break-down food, like carrots that rolled on them, or butternut squash, or one of those big, yellow onions that decided to roll while being sliced.
Fairly often, kitchen accidents happen, resulting in blood, screaming and tears and a mad rush off to the emergency room to sit dolefully until it is your turn to be stitched back together, maybe given some drugs, and sent home many, many hours after your lapse in judgement landed you in our modern answer to what is usually referred to as purgatory. Home to a cold dinner, if anyone was around to finish cooking it, and an eventual bill from the hospital which will likely scare you away from ever touching a knife again.
It was because you weren’t working on a stable surface.
Please, put a kitchen towel under that cutting board so it doesn’t rock when you’re working.
The other reason folks wind up in that horrid purgatory, watching that kitchen towel get even redder and hoping you don’t bleed out before your turn arrives – a very real possibility in our over-stretched medical care system, currently taxed to its limits due to a raging pandemic, in large part due to an idiot in the White House who felt like it was a great idea to create credibility gaps about science during a pandemic.
Again, I digress.
The culprit: dull knives.
When did you last have yours sharpened?
Do you know how to do it yourself?
It will cost you about $12 for a double sided sharpening stone, coarse and fine grain. Another dollar or two for a towel, which will then always be the sharpening towel.
Rest the stone on the towel to stabilize the surface.
I sharpen mine with a whetstone and food safe mineral oil, but you could dry-sharpen them, or wet-sharpen, by soaking your whetstone in a sink full of water for a few minutes before you get to work.
Maybe spend another $5 for food safe mineral oil to oil your stone before you sharpen.
It takes about 7 strokes left, 7 strokes right – alternating so – left, right, left, right, etc. Hold the blade at about a 15 degree angle, about what you’d have if you rested your knife on a nickel and pushed the blade down toward the board. Then, push diagonally away from you, from the point to the handle, in an even stroke. Flip the stone over to the “fine grade” side and repeat the process – 7 left, 7 right alternating your stroke.
Carefully wash the oil and a bit of grit from the sharpening stone off your knife, dry with a cotton towel. If the handle is wood, take the opportunity to treat it to some oil a day or two before you intend to use it again so it gets fully absorbed.
Remind yourself that your knives are sharp next time you go to use them so you don’t nick yourself on the blade, particularly the Japanese steel style, as there usually is no guard near the tang, as that point near the handle is thirsty if you aren’t careful.
Some tips:
When you are using a knife, you aren’t doing anything else – not talking, not watching TV. Focus on the knife. If you are working with something that rolls, either fold up a kitchen towel and place it under the item as support, or look at the thing you are cutting and your first cut should be to make a flat surface to stabilize your product.Hold the food with your hand in a tucked/claw position, being careful to keep your fingers tucked under so that your knuckle is the most forward in your hand position.
Vegetables are cheap, flesh is not.
Don’t get brave trying to get that last slice of onion out. Just compost it and move on.
NEVER PUT A KNIFE IN THE SINK. When it has done it’s service, wash it immediately, dry it immediately and put it on a magnetic wall holder, back in its case, or holder.
A sharp knife in a warm, soapy tub of water is essentially a shark. You don’t reach your hand in a shark tank. You shouldn’t reach into a sink full of soapy water and knives.
NEVER PUT A KNIFE IN THE DISHWASHER – sure, they often are stamped “dishwasher safe,” but putting a knife in the dishwasher does two things – it loosens the handle from the blade, setting you up for an accident, and most dish washing detergents are VERY abrasive – all that not-directed abrasion will take that nice sharp edge you worked to put on there right off your knife.
The desire to create, to practice, to sharpen skills now, when we have been asked to hunker down, to protect each other in the face of a quarter of a million citizens of the US, dead from COVID-19 is difficult to sustain.
It means drawing when you don’t feel like it.
It means finding a way to keep creating as money gets tighter.
I ran a drawing group in DC for almost 6 years, now I join someone else’s Zoom drawing session, fighting with myself since it’s not run how I ran mine, gradually relaxing, listening to my music as my attention narrows down to the point of a pencil.
Two poses, one drawing.DetailStanding Erotic – seated
Many people are walking around on Twitter and Sunday morning talking-head shows, proclaiming that the reason why the race was so close, and that 67 million Americans voted for a known liar, alleged con-artist and rapist, and person largely responsible for the deaths of more than a quarter of a million Americans was due to racism.
Well…
Racism most certainly exists in this country, and the GOP seems to be under the impression that if they pull all the dirty tricks possible on Black people in Southern States, it generally results in voter suppression of Democrats, and victory for Republicans, so there is some truth in that.
However, there is another contributing factor to why people voted for Donald J. Trump.
That reason is Assholism.
Yes, its a made up word to describe a very real and distinctly American concept, although it does make its appearance in lots of other countries.
I say its distinctly American because our Founding Fathers pretty much stole an entire country from Indigenous people, kidnapped a bunch of Africans, dumped half of them to drown or be eaten by sharks in the ocean, and enslaved us, after erasing our names and heritage to build infrastructure, and then pretty much were assholes for centuries to the new folks until a new group came along to pick on, all while claiming to be “The Greatest Nation on Earth.”
Assholes.
You’ve gotten up in the morning, made yourself a lunch from leftovers from a fantastic meal the night before. You put it in a lunch bag. Your name was very clearly on it. You put your lunch in the company fridge and went off to read endless emails that could have been group instant messages and to attend meetings that could have been emails.
You come back at lunchtime, ready, taste already in your mouth for the delicious thing you prepared.
Its gone.
Someone has Columbus-ed your lunch.
Again.
Some asshole stole your lunch.
You’re in the car on the drive home, and you usually bump back two car lengths heading into where the lanes merge from two into one and you watch as your fellow drivers pull up two inches behind everyone else’s bumpers and solidly NOT LOOK at the people trapped on the shoulder, trying to get in.
Those assholes don’t know how to zipper merge.
You are waiting in line at a fast food place to get your coffee and a sandwich. You usually order the same thing, every time you go to this place because the thing you order is delicious. You are standing behind a person you’ve seen before and NOBODY wants to get in line behind them because THEY ALWAYS TAKE 20 MINUTES AND THEY ALWAYS WIND UP ORDERING THE SAME FUCKING THING ANYWAY.
Assholes.
They are everywhere.
They enjoy watching people who try to do the right thing lose their shit.
They are there to stick their dirty thumb in your very clean eye-socket, because they know, usually, you are usually too polite to smack the fuck out of them like that little girl in the meme who watched her friend smugly lean over and blow out the birthday candle on a cake that was not hers and then dared you to do something about it.
That little girl provided a beat-down of epic proportions to that smug little candle blower, and many of us cheered.
It was terrible, but yes, I cheered too, because you know that’s what we all would like to do when confronted by assholism, but most of us were raised to turn the other cheek, rise above it, “when they go low, we go high.”
When they go low, maybe we need to start offering a kick in the nuts?
We now have confirmation that we have about 67 million assholes on the loose here in the United States.
They will not wear a mask.
They will strap an AR-15 to their backs to got to fucking Panera to order a sandwich because they can.
They will shoot a Black person and claim they “feared for their lives,” even from behind a badge while wearing full body armor, a taser, a nightstick, and having all the training in the world on how to de-escalate conflict.
They will sit at their desk, and watch you come in 10 minutes late and instant message your boss.
Sure, I know we are all supposed to work together, to re-unite and unify, but here’s a question – how exactly do we go about doing that. when there are 67 million people in this country who are just waiting, like Lucy from Charlie Brown, to snatch the fucking football away and watch us fall and bust our collective asses?
Maybe we need to rethink the whole unity thing and start embracing the “either you join us, or get the fuck out of the way, because I’m going here and I will step through you, leaving a bloody hole to do it. Move.” mentality, because, you know, sometimes, just being that motherfucker is what you need to do to get shit done.
There was once a great nation called The United States of America, where people were proud to be American. It was a country of diverse cultures and communities that often kept their distance from each other, fought with each other, bickered…
…but in crisis, we came together.
We fought for each other.
We shared the burdens and sacrificed in time of conflict, in wars, and floods, and hurricanes, and when people used planes filled with people as missiles.
We aren’t that anymore.
We are now a country of mostly sane people, mostly smart people, having to reshape our lives, having to make room for the freedom of speech for quack medicine, and conspiracy theory. We have to make room for racism, and sexism. We have all become a little more cynical and a little less forgiving because we had to.
We had to protect ourselves from all the lies, and from the people who believe them. Maybe, someday we can begin again to aspire to be the America we were all taught about in Elementary School, because ultimately this countries greatness is not in its past.
It is in what we aspire to be.
We’re a country of strivers, dreamers, people always looking at the beacon on the hill and trying to inch toward it. Knowing that if we don’t reach the light, maybe our kids will.
Hopefully, we will all get through this alive and be ready to do the hard work that will get us back on course.
…and to be able to find the grace not to offer a fucking brick in the teeth to the people, our fellow Americans, who sneered and cavorted while people’s parents died. People’s children died.
…and our country teetered on the brink of its demise while they capered and danced, and made our flag the icon of racists across social media.
Hopefully, in our future, we will remember and honor the people and their small sacrifices and large battles they had to fight to keep us safe.
From the doctors and nurses, lacking PPE, who fought to keep us alive, to the folks working in the grocery stores and delivery services who made sure we didn’t starve, to the folks at the liquor store who made sure the alcoholics among us didn’t slip into detox and wind up in the hospital, to the folks tearing up bed sheets and table-cloths and any spare piece of fabric we were saving for something special, and sewing late into the night, unpaid, using our money to buy materials and supplies, to make sure care-givers, and drivers and other people who just didn’t have the money for PPE would have, at minimal, a mask to protect them from everyone else’s snot and spit, and those who thought up that idea, organized us, and helped us out when our machines jammed up, or when elastics ran low or we ran out of thread.
Hopefully, somewhere, once this is over, we’ll be able to move forward.
We don’t need to forgive.
Forgiveness is not owed, and, frankly, asking for it and expecting it to be granted is an unrealistic expectation. We are not obligated to be kind or generous to people who actively worked to kill us.
Costco and Bonne Mamman FINALLY offers a nice, big jar of their 4-fruits preserves, and a very impressive looking bottle of Aviator Gin, so it felt like a good time for a GinJam, a cocktail where you use jam or preserves as your flavoring.
The temperatures are beginning to drop in the evenings, and, for me, that means my cocktails start to move away from Tequila Anejo, Reposado, and Gin and into Rye, Bourbon and Whiskey as the base alcohol.
I rarely drink vodka – it usually winds up in pie crust, or if I am trying to infuse a tincture of Carolina reapers in a nitrogen siphon. Rarely in drinks, since it doesn’t bring flavor for me. All it brings to the party is more booze. That’s good in punches or fruit-heavy freezes, but I think rum does a better job of pairing with fruit than vodka.
I like brown liquor and broody, complex cocktails when the nights are cool, and the leaves are threatening to change, and the tomatoes suddenly burst into action, hoping to be harvested before the first frost comes and draws life back into the earth. Gin occasionally makes an appearance in a Negroni, but this time of year brings apples and harvest to mind.
Ingredients:
4.0 oz Izze Apple Soda 1.75 oz Calvados Fine (Apple brandy) 1.75 oz Bulleit Rye Whiskey .25 oz St. Germain Liqueur
Ice
As we drift further into Autumn, add .25 oz St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram in place of the St. Germain.
Stir the booze over ice and top with the soda in a highball or Collins glass.
Sip. I like a metal straw for this since it brings the cool to the lip.
In the finished attic, there is a room. There are shelves where fabric rests, folded neatly. Wools, and cotton, linings, and cheap cotton calico prints.
…and spandex.
There are yards of spandex that wait to wrap around the body, to accentuate and lift, to display, to make beautiful at the beach or under the clothes.
When I sew for myself, often, I sew underwear.
There is a separate tape measure that has only touched my skin, and it has measured every inch of me.
Measurements are important. They can mean the difference between being gently cupped and mercilessly squashed by the fabric.
I know the curve of my own ass.
I know how much extra bias I need to properly cup my balls, and how much ease to provide so my dick, soft or erect, is cradled.
I’ve been making underwear for about a year, and I’m beginning to feel comfortable enough to wear the things I make.
There’s something erotic about knowing under your clothes, you are wearing a unique design, made by you.
Sex. Politics. Art. Cuisine. 