THE DEPUTY

12

In 1998, the Island Marble (Euchloe ausonides insulanus), thought to be extinct since 1908, was discovered during a prairie butterfly survey at American Camp. The only known specimens had previously been found on Vancouver Island and Gabriola Island in British Columbia. Scientists now believe American Camp, along with scattered locations on San Juan and Lopez islands, to be the only viable population in the world. This finding is based on multiple studies and monitoring over a number of years since 2008.

In writing about myself on the internet I feel the need to deputize some proxy—i.e. the Western imperial death march, THC gummies, self immolation, a dead cat, some clams; all previous candidates, seen here, through which I was able to subversively regale you, dear reader, about myself and my marvelous man-opinions—and in this installment of rentkontroll dot substack dot com I had fully intended to place that little cowboy hat with its charming tin star on top of our friend Euchloe ausonides insulanus here. To my chagrin however I haven’t even finished reading the full article linked above, but I feel the need to POST all too deeply to dilly-dally. I have lapsed on this glorified personal blog, ideas bottlenecking in my notebook and notes app and so on. Thus, here I am going to be getting regurgitative, all ‘Dear Diary’ if you will, as explanation, as recompense, and probably most significantly as an attempt to leverage the pain I feel when I start to believe I’m not being “creative enough” to my interiority despite the outside incursions of life itself.

First off, ‘recompense’ is a word I am using seriously. I recently added a paid tier to this substack, and a surprising number of digital coin purses opened to support me. I’m immensely thankful for this. That money went to food, to replacing the ruptured vacuum hose in my truck that I needed to keep my brakes functioning. That money saved lives thank God. But said lifesaving timing turned out to be unfortunate. As initial subscribers likely understood, I decided to move across the country (vertically, not horizontally) in the same set of proclamations as I committed to beginning a physical mailing list. Typically overextending myself, I failed rapidly. I drove into an archipelago. I lived in a trailer with neither running water nor a convenient way to set up all my art/production shit. Uprooting is hard work and amidst that work I ended up owing many of you mail. What I’m saying here is that I promise I will make it up to anyone whose mailbox in in deficit. This month. I have a list. A day late and a dollar short, that’s me, but if I do not show up at all it’s because I died (I didn’t).

In the meantime let me tell you these things: I’m somewhere near to the Island Marble. The shocking discovery. Having sidestepped a cop + hotwife pair of landlords (so funny) as well as a boggy tweaker compound (also funny) while on the residence hunt, I am now rooted, and the local butterfly specimen is something I am determined to see with my own eyes because my word just look at it! A rare beauty! The serendipity of its reemergence coinciding with my arrival makes it seem unthinkable not to pursue it. Other recent news in my new locale includes the demise of Bill Anders, who spectacularly wrecked himself into the shoreline. Anders was one of three men who circumnavigated the moon in 1968 and radio’d the word of God back to the terrestrial while doing so, an act that is so fucking insane to me I am hoping to find the brainpower to carve out an essay on that topic alone. This is to say nothing of his famous “Earthrise” photograph, which I’d suggest reading about in this piece, as it is much better than anything I could ever hope to put together.

Anders:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And now that God and darkness and the face of the deep have all arisen, it seems prudent to add that I’ve taken up work as “the other guy in the kitchen” with my dear friend, the imitable Jay Blackinton. I cook well enough for a houseguest or two, but I am having my Bill Buford’s Heat moment, Yes Chef-ing at the end of the world in Jay’s many award-winning kitchen.

First blanch a couple hundred of snap peas. Don’t forget to salt the water. Bath them in ice. Split them open but not too open. Store cool. Each order receives nine full peapods. Walking in three. Sear twenty-seven pods in a four hundred degree cast iron pan. Finish cooking them off in a wood fire oven. There’s a moment to work on another dish, but probably no more than thirty seconds—you want the green to pop, not charcoal. A coating of hot honey is what comes next (the honey was separated earlier in the day with apple cider vinegar, seasoned with cayenne), smoked Salish Sea salt. Three plates receive an individual dollop of goat cheese whipped green with tarragon oil, the plate patted from the bottom to pool it into a mossy pond. Dot with basil oil. Now the peas, those receive thyme oil, vinegar infused with elderflower. Arrange each serving rapidly but beautifully. Nasturtium petals, lemon thyme, a cobweb of fennel. One more pinch of salt to make it glimmer. Hands please. One to bar four, two table two.

I love craft. I love my friend for trusting a novice like me to work with him on something that he has spent his life trying to perfect, to achieve some invisible heavenly standard. It is a parallel that anyone passionate for making I think shares (I have my own), and in the instances when I send out a plate that I feel looks truly superb, the dopamine hits like a smack and I can almost float. But I still hate service culture. I hate the smell of the bank accounts clutched by half the impatient fucks asking when their dish is coming out but have never once in their lives tried to create a damn thing like it. I hate my aching joints at the end of the night and I hate that I carry the scents from every oil and acid I just listed in the previous paragraph into the next morning with me because I am too tired to shower once I am home. And worst of all I hate how much it doesn’t have to be like this. Jay tells me one night of a French (I believe) chef he admired who once said something like, “I have never encountered a service that doesn’t end.” but then follows up by telling me that the chef in question hung himself in the dining room of his own restaurant, and now, each night when I am dappling myself in burning oil or battling the iSi because the mozzarella mousse coming out of it isn’t fluffing just right, I think What if this is the one? The one that doesn’t end. So much of what I am tasked to cook I have never tasted in its final prepared form.

A couple of weeks ago a drowned mouse was found in a large clear plastic container full of water that I had left outside of the restaurant. The previous afternoon I’d been washing vegetables in it, but had forgotten to properly clean and store it as a mounting number of other duties pulled me elsewhere. The mouse bobbed at the water’s surface, bits of lettuce that has surely lured it in the first place eddying around its tiny head and paws. We laughed, shocked but not amused. Mice are pests and carry disease, so this is not a tragedy in any sense so much as a mousetrap in every sense. Still, I thought about it too long. Would the mouse have made the same mistake in any other shallow pool? How does the nonhuman world process the human world? Do mice fall in rivers and streams and process in terms of “Oh fuck I have made a mistake” at all? I thought of how it must have tried to climb the smooth plastic sides of the bin that it died in. I thought of the panic I see in my dog’s eyes when I have to walk away from her when she does not want that. I thought of the footage that I have seen of dying polar bears treading water, filmed with an overhead drone, and imagined the overdub. A calculated Attenborough plea for us to stop what we are doing, that we may not need same-day delivery or decentralized currency, because this poor animal is wondering where all the food and ground went. In Rebecca Giggs’ essay, Loggerheads, she describes the experience of sea turtles—so alien to us they cannot sweat or pant—burning infernally in superheated, climate changed sand as belonging “on a list of the ways hell is dreamt and suffered.” Whole meals I prepared that night were reposted on Instagram. I thought about taking a picture of the mouse but did not.

I maybe (definitely) miss Los Angeles, San Francisco. I certainly miss a lot of people. I also feel a certain shame in leaving California. CA, with its powers and techs and cults and militaries, contains in so many ways the apotheosis of North American failure, and it is also my one true home. I’ve spent three quarters of my life internalizing its dynamism and vastness. Leaving gives me a sense of something humiliation-adjacent. It’s as if I’ve abandoned something that I am somehow responsible for. Not that there is any supposition, like California is my fault, nor that I was obligated to repairs… I guess I’m not sure what I am saying. It is merely strange to divorce myself from the machine I know best, and I am still milling the detritus leftover from the decision. In the meantime though, I can truthfully say that I have not been as happy in the last couple years as I have been in the last couple of months. A more rural life, for now, is doing me good. I haven’t had the inclination to go out chasing butterflies for some time and that must be a sign. I can decide what maddens me more, NVIDIA or B-2s in Qatar, in calm. It is without question that some poor soul is screaming their lungs out beneath my old Wilshire Blvd studio window right, but I’m not there to be sure they are making a sound.

Current and recommended reading:
Kafka: Diaries 1910-1923 by none other than; ed. Max Brod
Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms
Essays 1 & 2 by Lydia Davis
Murder in the Age of Enlightenment by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch (finally finishing this one—I put it down halfway in ‘22)

New projects to be announced soon, subscriber mail and friendly correspondence incoming, and hopefully more regular updates here for the foreseeable future.

TLDR: me me me me me me me me