Cell Phone Sunday #2

Moderate success getting up at a reasonable hour. Awoke at 8, fell back asleep and dreamed of a loving family during times of political persecution, and I was out of bed at 9. 

I've prepared a pork shoulder and am braising it in the oven. As I let the puppies outside for the 4th time and plunked down on the couch to watch outtakes of Conan O'brien, I remembered that I meant to write early on weekend mornings, when I'm closest to what I call "The Ego-less Dreamtime of Existential Terror Time of Timelessness" aka the Golden Hour. 

Now my pork butt is in the oven at 450 degrees with the lid off for the next twenty minutes, after which I will reduce the heat to 250 for some number of hours; I forget. I'm no cook; I just make things. 

The puppies would like to come inside now. 

pictured above: my couch usurped by dogs (not pictured: my bed, usurped by dogs)

pictured above: me, democratically-elected ambassador to Dreamland. Not pictured: Night Terrorton, my constant companion.

The braised pork is now covered and braising properly. I've reduced the oven temperature to 250 (Fahrenheit) and now all I must do is wait. Some recipes say I should turn it at some point... but I wasn't really paying attention. I've seasoned the meat with sea salt, pepper, a little worcestershire sauce, and a bottle of Kilt-lifter from Four Peaks Brewery. The beer is the braise, see?

When I took the picture above, I had to navigate away from the blogger app and when I came back it had restarted. I felt that old sinking feeling from the earliest days of blogging because I assumed the auto-save function was on the app too like it was on the desktop version but did I know for certain, really? And did I just lose everything I had written?

But no, there it was in the drafts. Back in ye olden times of manual saving, even that wouldn't always work and a whole post could be lost. For those of you from back in ye even older tymes, this was like having your fellow prankster cavemen running up and pissing on your cave painting while you were adding the final touches to the mighty brontosaurus that Jesus rides into battle against the Elder Gods. (You call him Bro-basaur and you relate to him because he's the only one in the conflict who really has anything to lose; at the end of the day Jesus just ressurects and the Elder Gods can't even die at all and it's like the whole point of these things is to make anyone who can feel miserable feel as much of it as possible because they have nothing better to do.)

Losing my writing feels bad. Even though when I go back and re-read the inanities I've guttered on to the page it seems less likely that it was not for the better.

On the other tentacled horror that has grown from the stump of my missing hand, there is no reason to feel that writing needs to capture some version of myself that I want to believe I am. Bad writing reveals just as much as good writing. Probably need a better way to describe art. Intentionality. That sounds good. And it needs to be like a score. I intended to write a joke, and I did write mostly a joke, so that's a 9 out of 10. Now the joke being funny or not isn't part of this score. 

Maybe it's easier to forget all that and just consider the artist and art as existing in kind of a superposition where they are both One and the observer and the art are also One. And they can be all three as One, that holy trinity we find ourselves in these days where we can learn everything about the author including whatever terrible things they've Twittered and it collapses us into the single position forever. 

I'm also rendering some fat on the stove to use for making gravy; please excuse me.