Unsolicited Pro Tip #1: Learn to Cook Vegan

Last year, just before Covid confinement descended, I decided I should finally learn how to cook, and bought a giant bundle of vegan cookbooks. 

I am not vegan. I bought the books because there was cheap deal on Humble Bundle, and also out of some vague idea that vegans who write cookbooks are people who enjoy eating, and, given the constraints of veganism, likely have interesting and creative strategies for making tasty but also nutritionally-balanced everyday meals.

I did not regret this choice. One of my favourite things about learning how to cook vegan is how much more diverse your meal options become. To start, I know how to do tons of stuff with vegetables now, and don't just have this vague, depressing idea that all vegetables are basically just salad. Veggies can be savoury, lush, textured, juicy, fleshy. Learning to cook them seasonally has become one of my greatest pleasures.

Vegan cooking is insanely creative. There are replacements for all kinds of stuff that frequently goes missing in the kitchen, like eggs or milk. If you want macaroni and cheese but are having a bad dairy week, some nutritional yeast will sort you out. Missing milk? Oat milk is a 20-minute make, and most of that is soaking. This is especially helpful in lockdown times, when your ability to shop is limited. 

It's also just nice to have this skill on-hand. If you can cook vegan, you don't worry about most guests with eating preferences. You can quickly prep something nice for them, instead of just serving side greens or extra leftover rice, and people are really grateful for that.

Today I had a hankering to make oatmeal raisin cookies, but had no eggs. Not a problem! Who doesn't have an overripe banana, or some cornstarch and water? I used an overripe banana, was pretty goddamn proud of myself, and my resulting cookies were not only pillowy but also softly banana-bread sweet.

So yeah. Learn to cook vegan. You won't believe how much you learn, and how much more possibility you'll see when others just see the need for a shopping trip. Plus, meat is expensive.

Yup. That's the post. 

Always, Never

"Always and Never are countries that don't exist," someone said recently, probably in a podcast. And yet they are the countries that so often compose the language of early love. I will always. I will never. Always, never, always, never. So too for love at the end of its rope. You always, you never. I always, I never... 

A swing of promise, then reproach. 

Rules for the Immediate Term

• Be indulgent with friends, who are fighting demons of existential neuroses, even if they're fronting like it's all good. That's a coping strategy, like manic baking and oversleeping. (I know, because it's mine.) Some people have never been alone with themselves this long.
• Be patient with colleagues and clients; it's hard to take the concept of "bottom lines" seriously right now, even if it defines survival for most of us. No one knows what'll matter when this ends, or how the levers of civilisation will alter. "Base reality" is literally under construction. We won't get another grace period like this in our lives.
• Forgive yourself. If it's all taking a toll, make your standard no higher than One Big Thing to do each day. Everything else can be cream on top. You'll advance, slow but sure. It'll keep the creeping strangeness at bay.
• Be real with people. Don't lead them on, or ghost them if you've made a commitment: Don't create more chaos. If you did, give them peace.

Cooperation is our superpower. If the best you can do right now is mind yourself and your mental health, help others by not adding to their neurotic demon echo chamber.

I hug you all, but only figuratively.

A meditation on seeds

It's apt that my last post featured Madeline Miller's Circe because I happen to be re-reading it as part of a social campaign, the #CirceReadalong by Little, Brown & Co. for the book's paperback release.

This week I've read chapters 1-5, and it feels good to be back in this world. My eyes slide down the story like water over stone, and small synchronicities are leaping out, things I didn't see before, because I've changed and the world's changed, too.

This marks France's sixth week in enforced confinement. Between my last post and now, I left Facebook (then returned), then all the social networks (just for a break, then returned). I left operations at Hurrah, days before confinement dropped. I quit smoking. I learned to cook. (It's fun! Who knew?)

And spring began.

I'm digging the introspection available in this strange snow globe, the opportunity it's provided to burrow and tease out the particulars of what I want to become at this point in my life. I've got all the time in the world, it seems, holed up in my office with its soft yellow light, a frankincense diffusion going and tea brewing and my fingers kissing the keyboard until the black outside goes deep electric blue, a world briefly submerged, it seems, by water—my favourite part.

Here are two quotes from those early chapters of Circe that've leapt out, for me, in relation to the confinement I'm living.

That's my life right now. As we all know, I'm also mortal. So part of me feels a little dangerous, like getting really spendy on the Croisette when you know it's all on credit. 

It's such a gorgeous way to encapsulate the immortal conception of time. I thought about how, in the narrative, many generations pass between Circe meeting Prometheus and meeting Glaucus. She doesn't feel that time pass, and we don't either. Most of it passes in idleness, boredom, small pleasures in the home she's always known: A childhood.

Six weeks have gone by. The world outside my window is a timelapse of the springtime sun rising and setting, and the moon traversing her phases in between. I feel the ways I've gotten strange, rewilded. I am already so far from the person I've been for the last five years that thinking about it gives me vertigo. It's frightening.

This feels like the compelling, unavoidable conflict happening in all our conversations right now. Per a YouGov poll in the U.K., just 9% of polled Brits want their lives to return to how they were. A Sociétés poll in France found similar results for one French person in two: When all this "ends"—and I'm sceptical we see an end the way we assume things end, neatly and on time, a train ride from one place to the next—people want to seriously revisit the rhythms of their lives and how they consume.

It takes, what, 60-odd days to change a habit? We'll all have been in some context of confinement that length and longer still. We are changing whether we want to or not. 

Yet when you look at how certain governments are trying to strong-arm a return to economic "normalcy" into the too-near future, there's palpable concern that all of this will have been for naught. Can they enforce a return to mindless consumption, a new iPhone every year, double the plane-trips to compensate for all the networking events and conferences missed... maybe just with masks and elbow-bumps?

Idiocy.

I think they'll try, but the reality we knew is gone, whether we like it or not. "Normalcy" packed her gone-for-good suitcase and didn't look back. 

Pandemics have a way of ending a chapter that everyone mistook for reality itself. The Bubonic Plague ended feudalism—reality as most Westerners knew it for an unbelievably long time. The Plague of Athens corroded Athenian democracy. The Spanish Flu struck the match that would become the fire that would sever the formal colonial bond between Great Britain and India. (Among other things.)

"But," some guy somewhere on Twitter whines, "you're talking about times when we had less scientific know-how and technology."

Shut up. It is blind confidence in the dogma of our current reality that makes it so hard to learn, not only from our own history, but from what these new rhythms we've taken on are already telling us. I'm not saying I don't believe in science or tech; of course I do. I'm saying our models are currently unsustainable, which is something we all hopefully know by now. I'm saying we get this free crash-course in how much our kids actually eat in a day, what consumables matter most, which food is actually local to our areas, who our neighbours are, what we care about, and for whom we matter.

Our systems are more fragile than we believe. Nothing is a monolith. And if we are so married to something that's gone, we will be poorly equipped for the progress we can make in the brave new world flowering before us. Mourn if you like; that's healthy. But don't drag the corpse around and force people to interact with it.

Personally, I look forward to the day this changed world, and this changed me, meet. I haven't any idea what we'll create between us, but the timing is right. Nothing I've already been seems to fit anymore. 

Inklust #24: Lessons from Circe

Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung. Even after all that, it can fail, as gods do not. If my herbs are not fresh enough, if my attention falters, if my will is weak, the draughts go stale and rancid in my hands.

—Circe, Madeline Miller

I have been studying witchcraft for a year. It's creative and interesting, learning to use herbs, draw sigils, design spells suited for the purpose, memorise incantations, choose the moment, focus. Focus, focus. All this requires understanding your own intent, honing it to a sharp point.

...the draughts go stale and rancid in my hands.

This past year I learnt how little we actually know of what we want—past what we're asked to want, past what's appropriate, past what makes money, past a stagnated dream we've probably outgrown. What do we want when all the jockeying and the incentives to parrot a well-learnt response go away?

Strong will, the capacity to bend reality to your desire by magic or otherwise, requires an intimate connection with oneself. Everything, everyone, works to keep us from achieving that. (Our systems are fragile. We don't know this, don't think of it, but they rely entirely on our self-doubt—our bottomless need to find some solution outside ourselves, coupled with the suspicion that we are never quite doing enough, never quite good right here.)

I also realised how much of our shared reality is magic: Our belief in the stability of money. Our unquestioned treatment of corporations as people. The misguided assumption that consumption of the right things will yield preservation of the planet at large.

Consumption is always the hero. Magical thinking. The wrong kind, though. It's the kind that fuels addiction.

Think on Circe: What it means to make magic with the earth, with space, with yourself, this moment; to sharpen the deepest part of you into a subtle knife. Don't let the draught go stale and rancid in your hands.

Photo Credit: "Circe Invidiosa" by John William Waterhouse. The title means "Jealous Circe"; she's pouring the draught that will turn Scylla, "her rival," into a monster. In other words: Just another "inspired" man capturing a woman mid-catfight. Sigh. But I like it because of that tilt in her head, the furrow in her brow: She's concentrating. Even after the potion-making's over, one must still do the work of intent and execution. Circe works hard. She does not fuck around.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

On the Spin #3

Current mood: Witchy. Also: Gangster of the Oregon Trail.

Listening:

• Dolly Parton's America, a 9-part podcast series about our very own pop goddess of the (political) crossroads. If you thought of her as a punchline, there's a reason for it. Did you know she wrote "I Will Always Love You"? Some of her oldest "sad-ass songs" have a mythic backstory: They hail from grisly murder ballads she heard as a little girl in the country, themselves evolutions of murder ballads that traversed centuries and the ocean. Even if you love Dolly, you have nothing close to a full picture of what we inherit from her culturally.

• The Missing Cryptoqueen. An 8-part podcast series about Ruja Ignatova, who masterminded OneCoin, the biggest ongoing crypto-scam in cryptocurrency's short life. On this quest to learn what became of her (she vanished into thin air!), we learn how she leveraged cult tactics and MLM motivation—not to mention piles of princess dresses—to mount a scam so epic it makes me feel... well, unambitious, frankly. This bitch is Frank Ocean.

• Clipping's music is a modern example of storytelling as medicine, a shamanic tradition as old as community.

There's this song Clipping did called The Deep that recounts the history of an undersea people who hail from the pregnant women on slave ships who were flung overboard.

It won a Hugo Award and has been transformed into a novel by Rivers Solomon. Read all about it.

Reading:

• Pharmako/Gnosis by Dale Pendell, the last of a trilogy on poisons/plant allies, and not just the usual suspects; nicotine, alcohol, caffeine and chocolate count among them. (Surprised? Learn how they came to dominate our cultures, and in some cases not be seen as drugs at all, or at least be seen as the least of the evils, which isn't remotely true.) It is poetry, chemistry, botany, politics, folklore. It is our story through eyes shared with silent manipulators. Here's a passage from the second book, Pharmako/Dynamis, about our culture's addiction to fossil fuels: "Every speed junkie uses until it is gone. That’s what we’ll do, I’m afraid.”
• L'homme qui savait la langue des serpents (The Man Who Spoke Snakish) by Andrus Kivirahk is a translation of an Estonian bestseller, where it draws from cultural lore. On its face it's about how a country becomes industrialised—what is gained and lost. Mostly, it's about what is lost: A sacred connectedness to people, land and animals in exchange for overwork, nifty gadgets and prestige. Also, if you were born able to speak Snakish and fear you're evil because of Harry Potter, this book will tell you you're not a creeper; you've just inherited a mythic talent that'll ensure you never go hungry, unlike the dummies around you. Well, provided you live in the forest.
• Honoring Your Ancestors: A Guide to Ancestral Veneration, by Mallorie Vaudoise. I developed an ancestor veneration practice this summer and am stunned by how it's changed my mind, daily movements, and relationship to family or local history. There's a school of thought that posits our lack of cultural space for ancestor veneration, which is anomalous in the story of civilization, is central to why we are neurotic about death and have, to boot, yielded toxic-AF systems. I don't know if I believe that wholesale, but I believe it's at least a contributor.

Something I'd read if someone wrote it: 

• A comparative essay on the work of Billie Eilish and JPEGMafia. They are both of our time, approaching its Ionescan absurdity in ways more similar than different. Don't @ me.

Studying: 

• Modern Hekatean Witchcraft. It's fucking hard, but not how you'd expect. I feel like Hermione without a Time-Turner, and boy am I going through a lot of candles and sea salt!

• Babaylan. The modern approach to reclaiming the pre-colonial Filipinx community "witch" is intellectually satisfying and meaningful: kapwa (a word for "me," but also "us") is used as a compass to approach decolonization, and also animism. Babaylan is also broken down into the dynamic embodiment of five community roles: Visionary. Teacher. Healer. Warrior. Priestess. I love all of this, every last drop. Some Babaylan reclaimers are intellectuals; others are healers with gorgeous planty Instagrams; others, tribal tattooers; others, practitioners of Arnis Kali Eskrima (which I still practice... sometimes). Babaylan moves through us and blooms kaleidoscopically. Everyone is cross-pollinating to strengthen themselves and the whole.

Playing:

• Oregon Trail! Because this. Also: I RUN THE WILLAMETTE VALLEY.

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Just beat #OregonTrail in less than 40 minutes after over TWO DECADES of celibacy, without being a banker, and despite briefly losing my last and most useless child, Harold, early in the game. Everyone can go home. There is no victory left for you. #gaming #oldschoolgames #IRUNWILLAMETTEVALLEYYOUFUCKS #pleaseforgivemeimexcited #alsoexhaustednow

A post shared by Angela Natividad (@luckthelady) on Oct 23, 2019 at 9:32am PDT

Something I wish:

• I become a Twitch streamer who plays old-ass vintage games, mumbles my strategies, curses my stupid youngest son Harold for getting lost again, and ruminates over the future of the planet. People love it, and I make all the monies. You know that shit ain't happening, though.

Looking forward to: 

•  Justice for His Dark Materials.