Tag: food

Food is weird

Posted on by MT Cozzola

 

Breakfast, on the other hand, was much easier.
 
I’m sitting on the deck watching the horizon. Watching my pen mostly but sometimes I look up. Birds in flight. Green grasses. Gold and white beach. Silver blue water, some white mists coming off it. Dust probably, but to me it looks like evaporating salt. Beyond that is another strip of gold, the far side of the playa. And then gray green hills beyond, stretching in both peripheral directions. 

I shouldn’t mention any colors at all since each band is full of so many. By gold, for instance, I mean tan and brown and sage green and spring green and cream and velvet black and forest green.

I love the big sunglasses I got at the Paisley Mercantile. They shade my whole eyes, not like my small prescription shades. One of the two Yelp reviews for the Paisley Mercantile noted that no one says hi when you walk in, but I didn’t find that to be true. Also, I wouldn’t care if it was. The glasses were under ten bucks, and the guy voluntarily cut off the tag for me. The other reviewer was upset about not being allowed to throw out a coffee cup. 

Yesterday I had a hard time eating dinner. I’d had yogurt and granola for breakfast, and an apple and peanut butter for lunch, and at seven I still wasn’t hungry. But I told myself, it’s dinnertime, and you get to eat what you want here. No one is watching. You get to overeat. No one will know. There’s no dog begging for bites, and no human to have to share with.  really wanted to get the most out of this, except for I just wasn’t hungry. I reviewed again what I had eaten so far and concluded that I deserved minestrone and my leftover quesadillas from the Paisley Saloon.  

I sat and ate, and listened to Jackie Mitchard’s Still Summer, which I savored, and continued inserting spoonfuls, which I did not savor. I finished two mugfuls. The rest I poured into a piece of foil (I have no storage containers) to bring to the main house for Snickers. Snickers is Barbara the cook’s pig, and there’s a bin for scraps under the sink. 

I could have chosen to leave more for Snickers. But no, I ate as much as  possibly could. Then I had some chocolate chips and dried cranberries. I really don’t understand why I do this. Looked at on paper, it’s very odd. 

Outrageous fortune

Posted on by MT Cozzola
"Nurse, get me the remote and a dog biscuit, STAT."
“No time to focus, this is a dog Martian collar halter biscuit serious EMERGENCY!”

Yesterday Toots came over to watch “Lovejoy” but we ended up watching Slings & Arrows. The temperature in the room changed, as she said, when we learned she’d never seen it. Lovejoy is a fun thing to bond over—our mutual adoration of Ian MacShane, our affection for the Lovejoy world where everyone pretty much just cares about antiques, enough to kill for them, but mostly just enough to look menacing and almost kill until Lovejoy ambles along and saves the day—or, at any rate, when the day gets saved by some ramshackle coincidence. Then they all go to the pub for a pint.

I wanted to make a test batch of chili because contrary to Dana’s email I don’t actually like to make chili. I just thought it would be easy and I know I’ve made it before, and it was good. But I don’t know what recipe I used, and browning the turkey always stresses me out. So I picked a recipe and decided to stick with it exactly and I did mostly, but I always pick the easy version in my online search—Easy Turkey Chili! Easy Thanksgiving Stuffing!—and then scoff as I cook because it doesn’t have enough interesting ingredients. So I add some.

I made the chili and set it to slow cook and then drafted our proposal for a new freelance project and corresponded with the shuttle service who might get me from Redmond airport to the middle of rural Oregon for the residency next April. They are willing to stop at a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s for only fifteen extra bucks. I feel like I’m walking on bubbles, up on top of bubbles, because so many good things have happened lately and this is not where my heart is used to processing emotion. I’m trying to find a way to be calm and wise about it, so that when the many things are rejections and losses and just plain nothings, to which I am more accustomed, I can be just as calm and wise.

Taking a lunch break to read Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted put me on more familiar ground because it made me wonder, God am I just treading her ground with the small stories I’m sharing, only hers are about surviving an Alaskan mudslide whereas mine are about being afraid of ground turkey?

But I set that aside, because I can’t go down that road or I’ll never get to tell you how desperately important it was that Toots and possibly you, if you haven’t, see Slings and Arrows. Standing in the kitchen after she’d arrived, catching up from the week, having a slow drink before the chili, I can’t remember whether it was Dave or me who mentioned something Slings-and-Arrows-related and Toots said, “What’s that?”

And suddenly it was like an emergency operating theater. “What? You’ve never seen it? I think maybe I’ve heard of it. You. You have to. You can’t go another day. Lovejoy is out. But it’s not on Netflix anymore. We’ll find it. Where’s my phone? How do I? Oh, I’ll try the TV.” And then it was on Acorn, and we fixed our bowls, “Come on come on, we’ve got to fit as many episodes in as possible—there are only 18—does everyone have napkins? Okay, go.”

And this makes sense if you are the sort of person who can appreciate both the charm of one show which is really lovely even when it’s awful and the plot points only sort of connect, and the humor and utter seriousness of another that’s constructed of a thousand truthful details that build so cleverly to reveal what is wonderful and awful about loving something so much that it makes a fool and a hero of you, all at the same time.

Day 9: Already?

Posted on by MT Cozzola
Turn around and go back down.
At the top, you must turn around and go back down.

Yesterday I was finished with the play. I’d gotten to a point of hating it that felt complete. I sent it to a friend, thus making it her problem, and prepared myself for a new something.

First, I finished watching the Bergen DVD someone lent me. Then I took a scrap of paper with some notes scribbled on it from an old project, and ceremoniously carried it to the huge bonfire pile behind the house. Next, I changed clothes several times, looking for the right thing to wear for a walk to Lake Michigan. What IS the right thing? Packed a notebook because I planned to find a place to start writing the new something.

I walked to the lake, a mile or two away, trying to think of the new something, and then thinking about why there should or shouldn’t be a new something. All along the way were huge houses of the rich, surrounded by lots of space and long driveways and immense lawns. The only sounds were made by landscapers and their leaf blowers, and barking dogs.

When I got to the road leading down to the lake, I was met by a sign. “No pedestrians allowed on road.” Temporary fencing surrounded the park and walking path that led to the bluff about the water. I stepped around it and walked to the edge. I sent Georgia a text message, “having existential crisis. You busy?”

I stepped over another, flattened fence to walk down a long flight of concrete steps to the beach. When I got to the bottom there was another sign. “Entrance at top is CLOSED. Stairs may be used for exercise, but at the top you must turn around and go back down.”

The water was almost turquoise, joyous-looking, drinking in sunshine. Huge boulders, smoother than the ones on Chicago beaches, formed a neat, rounded cove. Everything was ready and waiting for another twenty degrees.

I walked along the beach and then found another way back up to the bluff, a long set of wooden ramps that were also closed, according to the sign. When I got to the top, the fence wasn’t broken, but I climbed over it and made my way out of the park.

Georgia called back and reported on people from her workday. The 22-year-old co-worker who’s done it all, including lucid dreaming. “I’m an expert at that,” she sniffed when Georgia mentioned that her young son had just gotten a book on it. Another co-worker who dispensed her usual portion of unhelpful tips. A customer who came in as she always does, playing Words with Friends on her phone and commenting on each move as if Georgia knows her friends. Another customer with a consistently bad smell who came for his lunch. She advised me to try my hand at a mystery.

I got to the library, sat at a table, took out my notebook which is bound with an old book cover, The Beginning Writer’s Handbook, and prepared to try my hand at a mystery. However, I had forgotten to pack a pen, so I read the latest issue of Fra Noi instead.

On the way home, I stopped at Walgreens and purchased a Signo 207 – in blue instead of black, for a treat, then popped into the Jewel, where I purchased toothpaste and candy. At dinner (vegan moussaka, greek salad, turkey roasted with carrots and celery), people were beginning to feel like people instead of residents.

After dinner I sat in the living room with my new pen and my old notebook. I started thinking there might be a different way through the play, and started writing some new scenes.

Day 3: Listing

Posted on by MT Cozzola
Warmer than it looks.
“For nothing in the past stays fixed forever; as we grow and change the past changes…” May Sarton

1.  A World of Light, by May Sarton.

2. A walk in the prairie, by me. Twelve noon. Napped on a log bench. Got lost and had to use Google Maps to find the house.

3. Two more one-minute plays.

4. A mind-expanding interview with another artist for one of the characters in my play.

5. Salmon with carrots and celery. Fried potatoes. Green beans with hazelnuts. Vegan cole slaw. Tiny, perfect squares of cheese cake in decorative parchment.

6. Another walk in the prairie, this time in the dark, with friends.

7. Cowboy bark.

8. One more try at a one-minute play.

9. Defeat.

10. More cowboy bark.