Hi hi all y’all, this is a weekly recap of my nonsense and Items Of Note. Fast and loose writing, no grand designs, good fun all around.
This update encompasses several weeks which featured much-needed rest. I wrote a blessing for y’all last week to aid in refilling and rejuvenating this winter, then spent subsequent weeks agonizing in frustration over my body insisting on rest.
spending fast
I started January with a weeklong media fast, and resolved to attempt a different fast per week. For the second week, I focused on unnecessary spending. No cafes, no restaurants, no thrift stores. I could eat anything I want, but all food had to come from grocery stores and under my typical budget.
On an even-measured morning, I penciled the day’s meals in my planner. I’m not a meal-prepper. Just thinking about consciously partitioning out days of tupperware throughout the week gives my executive functioning hives. Maybe one day I will reform and manage my time efficiently. In the meantime, I will accidentally make more servings than I thought possible (statistically lentils) and Frankenstein the leftovers into different cuisines. (my very last newsletter will be a recipe for lentil sloppy joes, retroactively making this entire substack a very long online recipe.) All I know is that when I permit myself time to cook, I’m happy, and when I think about what I’ll get to eat later, I end up doing a small dance in anticipation.
Four days into the fast, I had a deep yearning for White Castle. It’s never my first choice, but I have coupons burning a hole in the dashboard of my (Kia) Soul. Like any craving, it’s not about the actual food. What did I actually want? The basics of receiving hot food prepared by someone else, even if prepped out of complete indifference and on the behalf of the comingling cogs of industrial horrors, feels nice. There’s also a hidden bonus of eating this food secretly, as clandestine as one can be in the fishbowl of a parked car. How common is the experience of eating fast food in a parked car? That particular fish bowl space?
I want an immediate remedy for my hunger. After a few moments of longing, I made a quesadilla with a fajita mix I made in (unforeseen) vast quantities.
I had a lapse. This one was my own search for technicalities. Technically, I was in a grocery store. I caved to Jewel chicken tenders and a questionable $1 hot dog. I didn’t want to eat it all out in the car, but I was at least gonna have a nibble. That’s when I discovered that the car parked in front of me also had someone else eating in their car.
Face to face. Eating in cars.
I do not know the etiquette for eating alone with a stranger in public across from each other in our respective fish bowls. I can’t keep my eyes moving enough to somehow play it off that I didn’t know this guy was also housing some food in the parking lot.
Is this karmic punishment?
I chose chaos and did not move — reflective of how starved I felt. No higher moral principle here.
the agony of not writing
My original plan to follow my spending fast with writing fast hit a snag. I had an opportunity to audition for a performance ensemble I like, which writing pieces in the theater’s sensibility in addition to an original audition piece.
Somewhere in this process, I found myself stuck between trying to honor both sides of me: the one who needs rest and the one who seeks constant expansion.
Instead, I spent my week writing little and wishing I wrote more: the spiritual opposite of a writing fast. I enjoyed devising for the audition (read: putting on music, dancing around, speaking to invisible persons, then documenting what I like about it) but I found that my need to rest outweighed my ability to make work I would like to share. I withdrew from the audition and then promptly got a sinus infection.
sinus infection time, or “hey em, whatcha reading?”
Despite wanting to do travel and nature writing as a mean to sustain travel, I’ve read very little of either genre.
On a used bookstore whim, I picked up A Walk In The Wood by Bill Bryson. It’s a humorous account about hiking the Appalachian Trail from the late 90s by an older gent who decided to go on the journey before researching the reality of walking the 2,200 mile path. Fortunately, he makes up for the initial lack of research with deep dives into the Trail’s history along with our cultural disrespect for nature. What begins as a comedic odd-couple journey through the AT (he cold-called an old college friend who is startlingly ill-equipped for the journey,) evolves into a stark picture of America’s conservation efforts.
The kicker: there is not one single mention of climate science or global warming. The book predates the wider cultural awareness of our dying planet.
As for the humor, it hits more than it misses. It’s for a wide audience though skews intellectual. Bryson’s love for the trail and his gratitude for witnessing its small miracles are joined with intermittent fat jokes and casual misogyny. Yay 90s comedy. Bryson typically takes the high trail, making the low-hanging puzzling. It’s not pervasive. There is a tradition in a picaresque tale like this to document the eccentrics along the way and Bryson’s portraits skew compassionate, save for a few that stop just short of cruelty. Overall, I liked that A Walk In The Woods dipped into some bawdry comedy. It’s not risky, but a fine comedic comfort food paired with deep (if sometimes excessive) information dumps.
Currently, I’m bouncing around Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India by Lee Siegel. Part academic cultural analysis, part India travelogue. He ties the evolution of India’s comedic sensibilities to its shifting reverence towards religion.
Stumbling on this book is a thrill of synchronicity, to say the least. It is an audacious dive, gigantic in scope, and reads like a labor of love. Hindu has been a blindspot for me in my studies. Lee Siegle is my current optician, and his eye chart is a religious cosmology I’ve considered perpetually blurry.
looking at both books
I’d love to write something like these books. Clown Camp Chronicles continues to be baby steps and proof-of-concept.
I’m fascinated with the folkways of comedy. What is American laughter outside of comedy/entertainment industries? What ancient wisdom have we lost in the laughter of capitalism?
back to recovery
I’m gonna let my sinuses drain and try not to do anything. The writing fast and that guest post will be shared. Any travel or nature books I should read next? Are there any travel Substackers I should know about!?
Long TATWU reader, first time caller.
Some travel writing (kind of?) Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust), Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage -- Kind of?), I feel like THE SONGLINES by Bruce Chatwin gets tossed around a lot? Underland
Book by Robert Macfarlane is also a big favorite.
Hi Em! Travel book that I liked a lot: "A Trip to the Light Fantastic" is a love letter to Mexico written by a woman who travels with a very small circus for a season.
Would "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" count as a travel and meta-clown revolution book, and also what Americans have lost in our relentless fall into the capitalist abyss? But also how far we have come, in other social aspects... This book seems especially up your alley...
Feel better!!!