Friday, January 21, 2011

To write this blog is to find new ways of describing how food is disgusting.

I hate cooking. Have I mentioned that? Also I want to do nothing but cook.

On the one hand, the need to eat is an obstacle to the rest of life. I don't want to have to eat. But I'm always eating to preempt hunger--not so much a a desire to eat as a visceral awareness that I need to eat. Hastily and begrudgingly I try to fill myself with adequate food so that I can get on with life. Can’t I get this over with?

Most mornings all I really want is tea. I want to have my time with tea, or I should say of tea: it is supposed to pull me out of time’s regular flow into tea time. Tea is in this way a kind of pastry. However tea is in reality never enjoyable by itself. One has to be enjoying something else--to be enveloped by, focused on, or occupied by something else for tea time to happen (or not happen) at all, if it does. Usually, lacking in some other enjoyment, tea time really is no time at all, in the wrong way. It passes quickly, bringing me almost immediately to tepid sloshings of acrid, camel liquid--then out of (in the sense of having run out) but very much in time and out of tea. So, dispassionataely, I cook breakfast out of necessity. This is how I hate cooking.

On the other hand I want the same impossible thing from cooking that I want from tea. I want to escape through cooking. I want the process to be involving enough that I forget everything else. I want a kind of productivity for which there is no need. The taste of the results, really, is not all that important.

Biscotti are dry, crumbly, tasteless things. Hunks of stuff to have with coffee. By themselves they are blah. Good coffee has a slight aroma of shit. This is an incomplete metaphor that doesn’t work; it doesn’t just leave a slight trace behind, it leaves whole swaths fallow.

One can’t not eat, and one can’t only cook--then one would be a cook, and would have to get one’s jollies elsewhere.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i want to hear about beet cake.

Mira said...

And hear about it you now will, *anonymous*.