My 11-year-old has taken a keen interest in cooking and one day announced he wanted to make fettuccini alfredo (these pronouncements have come often of late..always something new.) So we did. What we didn’t expect was how incredibly delicious it would be. It is, by far, the best I have ever had and this coming from someone who in younger years actively sought out a better and better source of fettuccini alfredo…some search for ribs, for me it’s flat pasta in cheesy cream sauce.
And it’s finally here. At last we can get that silence which comes with the main stream media looking around and asking themselves, “what now?” And as you watch the returns or if you are reading this after things have been written in stone, I have something for you. It is a symphony for your tongue, a celebration of flavor, a soothing of the soul. If your man won, this will add that much more, or if your man didn’t quite pull it out, this will make you feel better.
Because, food is a powerful thing. To deny ourselves the pleasure of eating is to deny one of the very things that makes us human. Some eat for health, some eat to dull the pain and the rest are somewhere in between. Since the dawn of time, coming together and sharing food has always been at the heart of family and a constant in human’s lives.
I have heard it said that if it’s good to you, it ain’t good for you and with this we’re in a whole lotta big bad trouble here. So if you’re looking for something for dinner tonight, give this one a try. But if you’re looking for something healthy, maybe try scrambled eggs whites with Gimme Lean mixed in because you won’t find that here.
Here’s our (actually, my son’s) little contribution to any gathering you might have, whether a party of one or a group of many. (full disclosure: this is our own remastering of a recipe at recipezaar.com. Never leave a recipe un-touched. Take nothing at face value. Question everything. Void the warranty.)
INGREDIENTS:
6 Tbls sweet unsalted butter
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups heavy cream (see? good to ya, not so good for ya)
1/4 tsp white pepper
1 1/2 cups shredded parmasean cheese
2 cups shredded five italian cheese blend
1 or 2 boxes of whole grain pasta (any kind, it doesn’t have to be fettuccini and at least there is this to cancel out some of the that above)
Put some water on to boil for the pasta.
Melt the butter in a medum sauce pan over medium to low heat.
Add garlic, cream, white pepper and bring it all to a simmer. Not a boil, a simmer. Stir often.
Add the parmesan cheese and simmer sauce for 8-10 minutes or until sauce has thickened. *don’t let it get too hot* it will get too thick and clumpy and that’s no good. Think smooth. Think silk. Think aaaaaah.
Add the mozzarella cheese and stir this until also smooth, stir frequently and, I can’t stress this enough, don’t let it get too hot.
While the sauce cooks a little longer on medium to low (You’re erring on the side of low, right?) boil the pasta for 3-5 minutes.
Now, dish it up, park yourself on the couch and feel good no matter what happens. Want something health, toos some spices and parmesan cheese with broccoli. Or just go with the garlic bread (you can never have enough garlic). And then tomorrow hit the gym and be happy with the world or that the world didn’t end.
With the election coming up, there is a lot that’s going on and a lot of people getting all frothed up wanting you to vote their way. But by now I think most have made up their mind. Ballots are now arriving in the post and if you’ve made up your mind and perhaps already mailed your ballot, great. However, if you have yet to vote and are going to vote for someone because
- they went to a high priced college
- they graduated at the bottom of their class
- a woman is on the ticket
- a woman is not on the ticket
- he is of African American descent
- he is of Caucasian descent
- he is old
- he is young
- his VP candidate is attractive
- his VP candidate had hair plugs
- his VP candidate comes from a working class neighborhood
- he is very rich
- he’s more articulate than the other guy
- he has a net worth that is a little closer to yours
- you think “he seems really nice”
- your uncle’s secretary’s brother told you he might be involved with a group you find offensive
- you heard on TV that the other candidate is a bad, bad man
- you believe the commercials
- he’s not the other guy
- he looks like someone you knew in high school
- he’s really funny
- he’s really tall
- he’s short like you
- that’s the way you always have voted
- your husband/boyfriend said you should vote for him
- your wife/girlfriend said you should vote for him
- to get back at someone
- to cancel your vote out from a past election
- voting for one over the other makes you think you’re more of a patriot…just because
- just because (and you can’t explain why)
- you have some reason that has absolutely nothing to do with this person’s credentials, plan and vision for running the most powerful country in the world
then, please, stay home. By casting your vote on such vapid premises, you do a disservice to the process, the country and those people who have come before you to give you that right and keep it in your hands. Using your right to vote in frivolous, disrespectful and silly ways just demeans us all.
I brush my teeth with my right hand. I eat with my right hand. I shave with my right hand. I am considering writing with my right hand and I am left-handed.
In Buddhism, part of the belief system centers around the precept of the present. They speak about being in the moment, focusing on the present, being present. The present is all there is since the future hasn’t come and the past has been left behind.
In the movie Momento, the protagonist has no long term memory due to an accident, but knows his wife was killed. His entire existence is focused on finding who took his wife from him. The only way he can remember the facts he finds is to tattoo them on his body (presumably he couldn’t remember where he put that piece of paper he’d written them on and at some point came up with another…erm…option) and continually he is piecing his life’s narrative together, reviewing the tattoos all over his body, to tease out the next clue that might lead him to the killer.
I am not certain that those who speak of living in the moment literally mean from the perspective of one’s own timeline. I believe it’s more about enjoying each moment as fully as the human mind, body and spirit can. Savoring each passing minute or hour and each sensory experience. Because once they pass, they are gone. It’s been spoken about enough that it is almost cliche, and of course, the marketers have beat it to death.
But suppose, like the character in Momento, you didn’t have the choice? What if memories were fading on their own and you couldn’t stop that process? What if you really started to lose your memory? How would it feel? What would that be like?
I am afraid of very little. But someone close to me has Alzheimer’s Disease and as I watch her slowly fade, it hurts to the core and frightens the daylights out of me that a beast looms just around the corner for me, as well. I may never get it. But there’s a chance. A better chance for me. As with anything I see others go through, I very much want to understand what they are experiencing. How it feels. So I understand them better. Like knowing a room in the house, so when you call while away, you can picture where the person you’re talking to is sitting. She doesn’t know what’s happening and if you bring it up, the conversation is soon gone. What would that be like? Would I know? The lasting long term memories becoming like books on a shelf. Not really memories, just vignettes of what once was because they are no longer connected to what is happening now..
I watch as she covers for her lapses wondering if it’s some primordial survival mechanism. An artifact from long ago, once needed to prevent predators from seeing the vulnerability. I imagine it’s a similar experience to when you’re sleeping and someone calls, or comes into the room. Often the immediate instinct is to say “no, it’s OK, I wasn’t sleeping” and I have always thought that a little strange – even though I have done that myself. I have pondered if it’s indeed an instinctual reaction…you know, “never let them see you sweat.”
There is a certain innocence to being with someone who can’t remember things from one moment to the next. The focus, by nature, becomes the present because that’s what seems more readily handled, it’s real and there. But that too begins to get sliced up and disjointed. Like little time-lettes that aren’t connected or if they are by only the slightest of gossamer threads. Easily broken.
As the conversation expands beyond the present a little, every so often the confusion descends. It’s almost a thing you can see. A shadow cast by a high cloud or that darkening of a room as a nearby cloud covers only part of the sun. I watch as the vibrant personality of the person who could carry the world on her shoulders while running slowly fades and changes. It’s heartbreaking.
So I care and respect and honor. Because regardless of anyone’s infirmities they are still a human being and deserve all the respect due that station.
But too, I worry. The worry steals over me as I travel back here to Colorado. Will I be next? Could this also happen to me? What will it feel like? Will it feel like anything at all. I am not filled with dread. Just curious wonder that has one edge that’s a little darker than the rest. An edge you see but can’t really tell all of what’s there. And as I read, everything I find out about that could prevent me from getting Alzheimer’s (true or not) I try. To bring light to that darker edge. Knowing for sure monsters are there is often better than not knowing but wondering if there are.
So I exercise for all I’m worth. I take EFA’s and vitamins. I eat well and clean. I see my doctor regularly and get things straight. I read voraciously, I am constantly learning, I brush my teeth with my right hand. I eat with my right hand. I shave with my right hand. I am considering writing with my right hand and I am left-handed.
In the end, it’s all about either making yourself better or stronger or more fit or just more of something than you were. All that means is staying around a little or a lot longer because when it come down to it, we’re here to either make more of us, survive or both. All the rest is just window dressing. And don’t be fooled. It’s not the person who dies with the most toys who wins, it’s the person who dies last.
So we join health clubs, buy home gyms, make buckets of money for those morons who stick two aluminum poles together, rivet a braided steel cable to it and call it “the greatest weight loss machine eva.” To what end? Lighter bank accounts and larger bellies. But sometimes a person will hit upon something that works, something they can both feel the passion for and actually manage to get fit, stay fit and be stronger. When passion exceeds logic, you get damage.
Such was the case with martial arts. I had met someone smart, beautiful, strong and independent. She was her own person and I loved that about her. She didn’t do the usual softball games after work (I’d met her when I myself was on an after work indoor soccer team). Having recently gone through a time where the carpet, or more aptly the world, was yanked out from underneath me resulting in my landing very hard on my head, I was feeling like I wasn’t all that up for being in crowds either, nor following, so different was good and different was what we did.
And it worked. Through martial arts, we found something we could get excited about. But after a time, with anything involving humans, there is at least one person who wants more power than they can get and politics started rearing an ugly head in the school. As we saw the life begin to drain out of our passion, we knew it was time to depart.
After a few years, we gave it another shot. It was Tae Kwon Do as before and it was better, it was doing for us what we needed it to do. But, alas, despite a consuming passion for the martial arts and a commitment and dedication to the school, the politics and internal bickering amongst the leaders and the small skirmishes for power amongst the high ranks finally took a toll as well. It became like that relationship in college you cling to over the summer, hanging on to it because it’s all you’ve got. Then someone shows you the pipe dream you’re living, and the poor treatment you’re enduring. The bubble bursts leaving behind nothing but the air it held which is quick carried away on the wind. It was goodbye again but what had revealed the pipe dream was something altogether different. The same world, but vastly different environment of Kung Fu.
Kung Fu is a hard, exhausting art. It was one of the best ways we had found to move our bodies, make them do what we needed and get the benefit of becoming much stronger and much more healthy. Mentally and physically it changed us and made us better people. We gave as much passion to it as anything we’d ever done. But if you’re passionate about something long enough, sometimes you miss the signs that you’re getting in too deep. Miss those and there will be damage.
It was an honor being asked to begin training in Iron Palm. It became every day, day in and day out, for what turned out, in that fisrt part, to be 6 months. Grueling, mind numbing training that was both physical but also mental. There were deprivations in order to keep my chi full and clear. Training exercises to build more chi, chi gong meditations for building even more. I had all that chi and no place to put it.
Anything that requires the striking of a body part against an unforgiving surface, requires that skin and bone be conditioned to take the impact. Done properly it neither hurts nor causes any damage. But there is change, or what some might consider damage. Because the skin thickens and there are micro fractures in the bone that make bone more dense when they heal, filling in any holes that could make it weak during high velocity strikes.
After months of thousands of full force strikes against a leather pillow filled with copper BBs, after enduring the mental anguish of wanting that which I needed to deprive myself of in order to reach that level of mental strength, I broke two cement landscaping cap stones with each of my bare hands. The accompanying rush was astounding.
When you jump out of an airplane, take a class 5 rapids in a kayak, or maybe take a sport bike around a turn and actually touch your knee puck to the pavement, the rush of adrenaline is, by all accounts, like nothing else. I can say that the rush of adrenaline one feels after snapping two inches of concrete with a body part probably comes pretty close. And the buzz lasts for a couple of hours.
But that buzz is dangerous. Like anything else that makes a person feel more alive than they had before, they sometimes want more. They go further for it. They demand more of themselves before they are ready or have done enough mental preparation in order to ensure they will do what they endeavor. It was in that zone when I was doing a more difficult break with a right knife edge. I wanted so badly to make it I lost my edge. At the moment of impact, my wrist came down on the edge of the stone between the knobby wrist bone and the fleshy part of the edge of my palm. The blocks broke, but I would never break with that hand again.
Toward the end of my breaking “career” I was too driven, holding on too tight and not paying attention to what my body was telling me. The liniment I used for conditioning was drying out my skin. It was starting to crack and with the thousands of training hits I was doing each week, the crack grew. Finally, having paid it no mind, I ended up with a hole in my left wrist a quarter inch deep. It hurt a lot and bled each time I trained. What was this insanity? Just what exactly was I trying to prove? It may have been at that point I realized it was too much. There was too much going on for me to be focused enough to control my desire to excel. And I realized I was cutting corners to get to that buzz quicker, see the crumbled concrete between the cinder block stand. One last break, three blocks this time and it was over. I watched the video over and over, seeing the less than perfect form, seeing that it was more brute force than the finesse and focus it should have been. The bricks broke, it didn’t hurt and the roar of the audience sucked me into that vortex of adrenaline just the same, but that wasn’t what it was all about. It had to be about me, the chi, the focus, the art. But that was slipping.
And in the end, as I stepped back further from what had become my obsession, I saw another result of my practice in Iron Palm. The last two fingers on my left hand were starting to spontaneously go numb. Depending on how I slept, I would wake up and the outsides of my hands would be numb and cool. This couldn’t be right and doubt had me wondering if I had done something wrong in training or the training itself was not as benign as I had originally thought. I was at the end, and it became easier and easier to walk away. I realized that damage was done. And while it was a beautiful thing while I was in it, I had turned away knowing I couldn’t go back. It might have been that I was not mentally as strong as I had hoped. Or maybe I was fooling myself into thinking I was doing everything I needed to do properly, not cutting any corners. Like the rider who’s dragged his knee puck but nearly high sided and gone off a cliff, I was glad to have done it, but I wouldn’t be doing it again.
Imagine this! You’re walking North on Wilcox heading to dinner at the Castle Cafe, or maybe breakfast at B&B. About half way down the block a new business is setting up shop. They have boxes and equipment outside up against the front of their store. It’s mostly moved out of the way, but there’s a lot there so it’s kind of crowded. Because the sidewalk is not very wide and there are parking meters at the curb, the path to get by has become just wide enough for one person. The pedestrian traffic is not all that heavy, but there are a few people on the walkway.
As you approach the narrowing of the sidewalk you move to your left to pass the store front and avoid running into their stuff, you suddenly sense a presence off your left shoulder and before you can think, someone has cut in front of you and is quickly making his way through the narrowed walkway. You have to slow your pace to avoid now running into him lest you veer and crash into the boxes strewn about.
How about this? You’re waiting on a street corner for the light to change. Just as it changes you drop the book you were holding in your hand. The crowd around you begins to move as you stoop to pick it up but the person behind you has to wait briefly before he can proceed across the street.
“Come on, buddy, move it,” he says behind you as you stand again. Stepping out into the street, you notice the man behind you suddenly pick up the pace and jostle you to get by. He passes and waves just a single finger at you. Hopefully, in this instance, although the urge to respond might be high, you hold your tongue and your temper and continue one your way.
One more. Again walking down the street, this time there is light foot traffic and you are moving along nicely with them. A guy turns in front of you so you have to slow a little quickly to let him pass. From behind you you hear a “whoa!” as the person who was following you too close pulls up short and has to stop himself from knocking you down.
Next thing you know, he has sped around you but instead of continuing on he stops dead in his tracks and you crash into him.
I would think any of these events, especially on a busy city street, would lead to additional physical contact or at least the exchange of harsh words. I don’t think anone reading this could imagine actually doing that.
So what gives? People do these very same things in cars…every day. Something that might significantly increase the chance of getting the living snot beat outta someone on the street, is practiced every day as if the cloak of a car is enough to make you anonymous.
They give you angry looks, flip you the bird, zoom around you and slam on the breaks and whatever else they can do to let you know they are the “king of the road”, you are in “their house” and you’d better get out of the way, because what they have to do and where they are going is far more important than anything you might be up to.
Just after college, I lived in Annandale, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C. One weekend evening, on the way to Georgetown, a friend and I were driving on I-325 through Alexandria. Already amped up at the prospects for the evening, we “got into it” with some fool (or at least at the time, we thought him the fool) who eventually did end up zooming in front of us and slamming on the breaks.
Being an inexperienced and overzealous 23-year-old behind the wheel, I hit the breaks a little too hard and in the middle of a 6-lane highway did a complete 180, complete with smoking rubber and squealing tires.
When it was over a few seconds later, I was facing a phalanx of oncoming headlights, the acrid smell of burnt rubber was in my nose and all I could says was “far out.” As nonchalantly as you might expect an inexperienced 23-year-old hopped up on testosterone might say it. These days, with the wisdom of time, I ask myself, who was the fool.
At the time, it was “cool”. We had a great night and I think my roommate even met a beautiful red-haired flight attendant. But it could have turned out very differently. I could be dead and you wouldn’t be reading this.
I don’t do that any more. I and my wife like it that way. So, when the guy in the trailer won’t let me merge and then has the nerve to point his fat finger at me like a gun and “pull the trigger”, I just let him go by. He has to live with himself, not me. When the silly lady speeding up the road weaving in and out of traffic appears in my rear view, I make room. She’s going to screw up one day and end up seeing how quickly two tons of steel can come apart at 70 miles an hour. But I’m not going to be the one she takes with her. And yesterday, when I watch a guy in a pickup swerves from the hammer lane, across two lanes of traffic, to the far right lane and then back just missing my front bumper (I was in the center lane), only to waggle that single fingered hello with vigor at the horse trailer that was impeding his progress, I just shake my head and give a sad smile.
I guess in a way, we all try to hammer out our own space in the world. We try to feel like we have ownership of something. And so we try to buy the bigger house, plant the greener expanse of lawn, own the biggest car or truck and take ownership of the hundred or so feet of road around us. But if we’re all doing that, it leaves no room for anyone so I will never be sure of the logic in it. I just know it grows tiresome and uses more energy than I want to give to such trivial and unproductive endeavors.
There seems to be a lot of negative emotion in the world these days. Some days it feels like it’s poisoning the air and choking out reason. There is animosity and fear. Many people are fighting over power, oil, land, territory, money or whatever. In some cases it has consumed them. Even if they have already lost, they won’t give up until there is “victory” as if that will make any real difference.
All human emotion is there for a reason. We are built the way we’re built and there’s not all that much we can do about it. But as we coexist with the varied and diverse other humans that walk the planet, those emotions that bring us together are always the ones that take the most work to build. Compassion, respect, honesty and loving kindness are luckily not in short supply (they never really are), but through the storms in the news, they are sometimes hard to find.
So the next time you’re trying to hammer out more space for yourself, see if you can stop and ask yourself what you’re doing it for. Is the reason really that important? Wouldn’t it be better to just let him merge in front of you, take a moment to hold the door for someone at the post office, let the young, uniquely-pierced teen laden with items go ahead of you in the grocery line?
It may be human nature to try to gather to yourself all you can. A survival mechanism that kicks in when things get a little wonky in our world. Whether it’s the intangibles of power or respect, or the solid physical presence of material items or money, it sometimes feels that the more we have, the more we can cloak and protect ourselves from the fear that makes us feel so out of control.
In the end, we’re all part of the same thing. As Carl Sagen once said, ” that’s here, that’s home, that’s us”. I firmly believe It is less important to be a part of a collection of things as it is to be a part of humanity. Besides, you really don’t own anything, anyway. You’re just borrowing it while you here.