1/3 lb Center-cut pork chop (5/8″ will do)
Dust with seasoning salt
Rub on dollops of chili powder
Season with thyme, basil, oregano.
Pepper to taste.
Flip and repeat for second side.
Pan fry in olive oil; sear both sides of chop for 30 seconds before continuing to fry. Flip occasionally to prevent chop from curling.
Pull and serve with steamed turnips, salad, veggies, whatever. Prepare to be rocked somewhere around your face and/or mouth.
So I got shown up.
I had the strange fortune the other evening to share my table in a crowded coffeeshop with an interesting woman. She needed a place to sit, she asked, I offered the other half of my table. I noticed that her laptop was festooned with a menagerie of Drupal stickers, Drupal being a website creation framework that I’ve looked at for my own needs but turned down on its apparent complexity.
“Strange,” I thought. “She’s a girl, and she apparently likes Drupal!” The chauvinist in me short-circuited for a minute as he tried to reconcile the fact that technically-minded women do exist. This is the modern age, mind you. “Well, then. That’s kinda hot.”
I tried to pay her no attention and keep to my side of the table, being a “nice guy” and all, but the opportunity arose and I had to break the fourth wall. Turns out she’s a marketing girl (a marketing girl!) and she’s fanatical about Drupal. “Full retard,” she said. Worked at several consulting firms that did projects in Drupal, and is now an independent marketing consultant, building sites and blogs for clients, doing SEO and all that Web2.0 stuff. As it happens, we know mutual acquaintances. This town is small, small.
So I confessed to her that I tried looking at Drupal for one of my sites (Glass Door), and found it hard to work with, and that I balked at the need to get my hands greasy in PHP code to customize the site to my likings. She gaffed at that idea, said that it’s so easy to work with. You just install, select your options, and bam it’s customized; no need to write a single line.
I’m humbled. If a non-technical marketing and sales person can grok something that I cannot wrap my head around, I’m doing it wrong. Sounds like I need a major mental reset.
So I’ve come to an internal agreement. Actually, it’s more like an admission of defeat. Either that, or it’s a sudden ability to see that the easist path has been plainly in front of me the whole time. Call it what you want, but I ain’t happy about it.
See, for the past eleventy-thousand years, I’ve been trying to build a website to showcase my music. After spending countless hours drooling, shit-for-brains, while staring at my laptop hoping to spontaneously grok everything I needed to do and write all the code to my own fluidly-custom specifications, I’ve given up. I’m stupid. So stupid, I’m gullible. I managed to convince myself that I had enough mental energy left over at the end of my workday to set up to the task of building a website from the ground up. How foolish I am!
So, having gotten half of a notion last summer to give up coding a full Ruby On Rails website, I decided to try some pre-rolled frameworks. I looked at Drupal and WordPress, among a few others. Since I already had some modicum of “experience” with WP, and since Drupal has a steep learning curve, I went with WP. And what did I discover? WP version 3 unleashed a new feature where you could make your own custom post types, so you can create a Song and have it display along with your regular Posts, Pages, and Attachments. “Astounding!” I exclaimed. “Just add my Song code and build a template, and I’m home, sweet mother of god, HOME!”
Herein, we shall call this moment The Second Great Con of the Man On Himself.
The problem, you see, is that WP 3.0 has half-assed support for custom posts. It doesn’t pull posts made from different types into feeds, doesn’t include them into the front page, doesn’t support archives. For that, you need a WP plugin developer’s mind, and the free energy, street smarts, and tenacity to navigate the byzantine WP wiki in the hopes of finding the help you need to make this happen. As it turns out, custom post types just aren’t user-friendly.
Since my job requires me to be task-based and results-oriented all day, every day, I just can’t summon up the smarts or desire it takes to actually make this stupid little dream of mine into a reality. When I’m settling down for my evening coffee, trying to unwind my head and get into my projects for the night, you know what I really want to be doing? Absolutely nothing. Now I understand the attraction to clicking on the TV and turning yourself off. I can’t do this anymore.
I lost my love for the web. Giving up. And now my task is much simpler. There are plugins for WP that allow me to stream media and set up podcasts. They make things on the back end much easier, but they are neither custom nor completely intuitive to use. That’s the tradeoff. And right now, I’m trading in my programmer’s hat for a dunce cap. The internet has won.
Hurp a derp.
I think I’ve always had a touch of paranoia, even as a kid. What started as an open trust in the benevolence and altruism of humanity turned into a self-protective distrust of those who would seek to hurt me. Throwing myself into the religion of love did nothing to turn me right again. In fact, it fueled my paranoia until I burned in its self-fueling heat. Did not matter one iota that I was turning into an irascible asshole as long as I was doing the Good Work to shine the light on the demons in the shadows and call out the devils in the corner who seek to dominate, contort, and drag humanity down to Hell.
Now, as a sophomoric old man, I’ve dropped the pursuit of the invisible, yet I am still hunting the boogeymen lurking in the shadows. Instead of railing on about a spiritual war, I’m rattling on to any who would pay attention about the corporate war over consumer souls, digging deep and hypothesising about the snares set to dominate, twist, and drag us down into another level of control and profit.
I’ve become one of those old men who, after being confronted with a new thing on the market, will talk loudly about The Riggings Beneath It All, the puppetry, smoke and mirrors designed to soothe, confuse, and ensnare us. Can’t stop myself from pointing out the rig. And part of me hates this about my nature, about the fact that I cannot put my trust into much in this world.
In my younger life, I could pray for guidance, love, and release (knowing full-well that my mission was to illuminate), but now, there’s no prayer except to my fellow man, begging for him to see what’s going on. There really is no difference between the two; one is praying to the nonexistent, yielding nothing, and two is praying to the immovable, yielding nothing. One voice cannot move the masses. Not in this culture, not ever. And there is no Deus Ex Machina who will step in and put it all right when it all goes horribly wrong. The older I get, the more I understand this.
I assume the feeling of powerlessness is natural.
Spread a little thin tonight. Finally did laundry, which I’ve been meaning to do for days but put off because 1) I hate doing laundry and 2) I’ve been feeling a little ill (just a little) all week (not sure if it’s the cedar, the weather, or just my time of the year for a cold). My problem with laundry night is that I have to change into older (read: tighter) clothing, and then devote several hours of my night to the boring, unsettling task of going to the laundromat. Chores suck. During that time, I get way too many inspirations and desires to do something else, desires that never manifest any other night. Pity, that.
While packing up my clothes and supplies, I had an inspiration, a melody, a phrase of song. Ran to my keyboard and pecked it out. Luckily, I remember a little of where I put my fingers, but the sound of the inspiration is gone. Disappeared like a vapor, like a cloud of breath on a cold day. You breathe it out, watch the cloud shift, and then it’s gone forever. Best you can hope for is to remember what it looked like.
Since I was feeling a little inspired musically, I took my drum machine with me to the laundromat. Had high intentions. The problem with hammering out a rhythm on this machine is one of mechanics: in order to record a drum track, I need to find an empty slot for the pattern and select from a dizzying range of drum kits before I can even lay down a loop that sounds something like my idea. With practice, this dance would become easier, but until then, it’s an obstacle of frustration. Most musicians develop habits and methods to move through these problems, but not me. Not yet.
It’s as though I need a studio engineer on retainer, ready whenever I am inspired to record something. In this regard, I’m jealous of the artist known as Prince, who is rumored to have his entire mansion wired for recording, and has a staff on-hand to press “record”. If only we could all have the help we need when we need it. Or our own laundry appliances.
After pecking on the drum machine, I got tired, fatigued really, and my will to thump beats dissappeared like a vapor. Eyes glazed over. Just too ill, I guess, to create my own stuff. I hate that feeling. So I pulled out “Cryptonomicon” and picked up my reading. I should’ve done that from the outset; would’ve gotten farther just focusing on one thing than timesharing between urges.
My battle in life is one of focus and attention, the fact that to actually get anywhere in my life, I need to cultivate the dogged determination to see a task through to its goal. To win by crossing the finish line in due time. A marathon is not run in chunks, with breaks for distraction; it is run by one foot in front of the other for 26.2KM, no matter how much acid builds up in your veins. It is run by determined rhythm. It is run by measured breathing. It is run until you cross the line.
