Wovon man nicht sprechen kann . . .

darüber muß man schweigen.

In English: What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence. (Or: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.) The philosophers among you--and perhaps Larry, given his background in semantics--might recognize that as the last line of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. (I'd originally thought to open with some quote from T. S. Eliot, who, despite his anti-Semitism and Catholocism, wrote poetry that has always resonated with me. Given that I don't really like poetry, or religion, or anti-Semitism, that just seems weird to me, but there it is.)

Larry's comment to the last post made me recall the ways in which I avoid words, when I do that. As you might imagine, given my (b)logorrhea, I don't mean that I don't talk about things. It also doesn't mean, as Larry speculated it might, that I somehow exist on feelings (the very thought of that gives me hives AND shivers). I think what I mean is that I try things on, verbally, with a very few people I trust, even more often only with myself, and I see what starts to sound right. By that I mean something like: Does this accurately capture, name, or describe the reality(ies) in which I'm enmeshed at the moment? Have I included enough perspectives? Is there enough color and light? Is the point of view tenable, or does it fall away like an Escher drawing? (And I find it interesting that I'm turning to visual analogies here . . .) What I often discover, especially when a situation is complicated, messy, drawn-out, fraught, uncertain, still in progress, mutable, etc., is that, even when I think I might have the occasional piece of it right, even when some phrases resonate in that deep way that lets me know I've probably hit something real, even when something becomes clear to me (perhaps in part because I've found the right words for it), I know I still don't have enough of the picture, or the story. Interestingly enough, that's fine with me.

When I wrote my dissertation, I really didn't know how it was going to turn out. Some people set out to do a certain kind of statistical analysis, say, and they run the numbers and report them. (I'm not criticizing that kind of work, at least not right now.) In part because of the multiple layers of the work I was doing, I really didn't know what I was going to find, or what I would or could say about it, until I was done writing it. Nevertheless, I did manage to write it--that is, I'm not made completely uncomfortable by not knowing how something is going to Turn Out. I like the uncertainty, sometimes, if you can believe that--I can immerse myself in it, if things aren't TOO crazy, and just kind of marvel at it, and maybe even enjoy some parts of it. Go figure. (It's probably why I like watching sports so much: nearly everything else we watch--most movies or television shows or whatever, and even a large part of the "news"--well, if you can't figure out in the first few minutes what's going to happen in the subsequent minutes, you're not paying attention. But when two people or teams enter a playing field or arena of some kind, there's no telling what's going to happen. I usually can't stand the announcers, though.)

One Ride Only

If I had ever been here before
I would probably know just what to do

Despite David Crosby's claims to the contrary at the end of that song ("We have all been here before"), and even if his claim is true, this is the life I'm living now, and I'm not always so much with the knowing just what to do. I keep trying to focus on the immediate necessities, because that's what I do: make croissants, manage our resources so we don't get backed into any more corners than necessary, do the mundane task(s) in front of me. Because, when you come down to it, the croissants won't make themselves. But I'm coming up hard against the realization that the things toward which I've been working may not be possible after all. Leave aside for a moment the interpersonal drama (yeah, go ahead and avoid the herd of elephants in the living room . . .): even if one has a good business plan, and reasonable financing, and even a moderately successful business to start (which is extremely unusual), this is still a very low-margin business, and there's not much profit to be had. At least for a few years, you really can't expect to make very much money; it's really more about the losing money in the first years. So I need a Plan B, as well as more detailed work on Plan A (all while shoveling elephant shit), even more than before. And, today at least, I don't have much energy. My brain has been deciding I don't need much sleep (I'm trying to convince myself that it's hormonal, which could be true, as that causal chain does work with me), which also doesn't help. And I need more exercise, except, wait, no handball--even now that the season is over, because S blew out his arm in the all-the-marbles-and-a-new-jacket championship match the other day, which totally sucks. (It might be a torn triceps, and, really, you don't want to be tearing any muscles if you can help it.) I need to do more yoga, I suppose.

I'm sorry; I've been short on details here, for two reasons. One is the privacy of others--I don't much care what people know about me, at least up to a point, but putting someone else's stuff out here has its limits for me, and I've probably even said more than I really wanted to say. The other, more important reason is that, even though words are one of my favorite media, words contain things, they fix things in an order, they shape what we think happened, what we think will happen next, what we think is going on. Sometimes that's useful--necessary, even--but sometimes it's better to let things kind of settle, let the words shape themselves, see what emerges rather than try to impose a structure. I don't know what the fuck will happen next, I often don't know what's happening now, and it's easier to make the croissants and do the side jobs and try not to think. Today, this morning--and yesterday, for that matter--the thinking is happening anyway. I suppose I should put it to good use and start developing a business plan or a database or something.

Plus I've apparently lost my wonderful, soft, colorful, polka-dotted, angora and wool scarf that one of my best friends sent me for Christmas. And it's still cold here. (Yeah, okay, that was just whining--unlike, say, the rest of this post, you say?--but still. I really liked the scarf a lot.)

Pastry Chefs Gone Wild

Last night I got to see not one but two of my ex-classmates, one of whom is an intern at the school and the other of whom is working as a pastry chef in a fine-dining restaurant. The intern and I had some dinner down near my place and then headed out to the burbs to see the pastry chef; of course we ended up with both three comp desserts after dinner (because it's the Asian place where Craw and I always go and we got our favorite server) and four desserts at the fine dining place, so I think I've had my fill of dessert for awhile. The latter were really quite nice: almond beignets with almond ice milk (that one was kind of eh; the beignets didn't quite work, and neither did the ice, but it wasn't terrible); a chocolate cake with sauce and ice cream thing that apparently our fellow student came up with and that was quite good; ice cream made from organic cream and strawberries, which was cosmic; and a three-cheese (mascarpone, cream, and fromage blanc) mousse with a graham cracker tuile and rhubarb (which I ignored) that was also cosmic. The only problems I had were that, first, yesterday morning my brain decided that 3:00 am was a FINE time to awaken (I have to disagree, but there wasn't much I could do about it), so I was so tired I was about to tip over, and, second, I found myself drinking massive amounts of water as we ate our desserts; I have no clue why I was so thirsty. It was kind of strange, really.

The intern is very happy with the internship, in many, many ways--how could she not be, given that she's spending so much more time with the chefs from the school, who will be even more willing to help her do whatever she wants to do next? But. As she will tell you, she doesn't get to make much stuff (though I'm really, really hoping that will improve for her, and it might), and one of the pickier chefs comes up with tasks for the interns like "rearrange the storeroom THIS way." It's an entertaining contrast to my situation, where several concepts--like having all of the recipes in one place, or labeling all containers in the walk-in, or knowing how many of what are being sold on a given day, or organic anything (though I think we have some organic flour for a couple of the breads)--are really quite foreign. On the flip side, however, I don't just GET to make stuff, it's my JOB to make stuff, in mass quantities. I think, quite honestly, if I'd gotten the internship I'd be regretting it right about now (not least because the lack of money involved would be seriously problematic for us). I've hesitated to say that, because I really don't want it to sound like sour grapes, but, given the problems I've got going on right now, it would have been extremely difficult to sustain. In addition, of course, my boss is great (despite his politics, which we assiduously avoid discussing), he's extremely good at what he does, and he's very generous with his knowledge--he knows I want to open my own place, and I suspect, when the time is closer, he'll help me in whatever ways he can.

The other grad, the one who's a pastry chef, is both happy with the experience and a little disgruntled. (Hell, his personality is such that he's ALWAYS a little disgruntled; he makes me seem positively Pollyanna-like.) He doesn't much like service (i.e., the plating of desserts for restaurant service), and my guess is that the pay and the hours aren't what he would prefer (he's probably making less than I am--certainly no more--and he probably doesn't get home until after 1:00 am). I knew that I wanted nothing to do with working in a restaurant, even though, if you get into a good hotel restaurant, you can make decent money (one other grad started at $13/hour with very little experience on his resume) and, because they're unionized, you get health benefits. (Most places do not offer benefits, including my place.) I suppose I'd do it if I had to, but I'd really hate it. I don't like the rush of service (at the bakery, what's happening up front has nothing to do with what's happening in the back); I don't like the fact that the pastry people are always the last to finish (because everyone ends the meal with dessert); I don't like the drug-and-alcohol-related craziness that's rampant in the industry (read Anthony Bourdain's books if you don't know what I mean--I'm way too old for that shit); I would absolutely hate the hours (I do not want to finish work at 2:00 am); and I would not put up with the abuse that's rampant in the fine-dining portion of the program. (For example, one local and very famous restaurant is notorious for Wal-Mart-type abuses, i.e., you punch out--and then clean for four hours. At many places, you're paid a certain amount of dollars for a "shift"--and if the shift were actually eight hours, it would be decent pay. However, you're expected to work about 12 hours for that pay, so the hourly rate drops pretty significantly. At other famous places, people are literally on a waiting list to work there for free, because then they can put it on their resumes. I get paid for every minute I work, plus overtime.)

So, all in all, I realized again that I've really fallen into a great place--for me. It wouldn't work for everyone--if you really want to become a famous pastry chef, for example, it would not be a useful place for you, and it wouldn't work for anyone who really needed to make more money, though, if that were true, then you're in the wrong damned industry.

I couldn't stay out too late last night, though--by 11:00 I was practically falling asleep at the bar. The Intern drove me home (she had her dad's vehicle last night), which was extremely nice of her (I'd come prepared with a book so I could take public transportation), and I was asleep within ten minutes of walking in the door. Now, though, I have to clean this place up a bit and get some copyediting done--maybe get most of it done today, which would be useful in several dimensions.

Lunch

When you make a big (60-pound) batch of something, you rarely end up with exactly the right amount. Ideally, you want to be a little bit over; for example, when I make the funeral cakes, I shoot for 25, and I usually end up with 25.5 or so. I put the extra in a smaller pan and we cut it up for samples. For other things, though, the extra bit gets made into something that the guys call "lunch," i.e., a unit that's too small to sell, but just the right size for eating. So far this week, I've scored a small loaf of cinnamon raisin brioche (it's in the freezer, but will eventually be made into French toast), a hunk of the California bread (a wheat dough with apricots, cranberries, nuts, and something else) that was sitting around this morning, and, in what turned out to really be my lunch, a small loaf of walnut-roasted onion bread that was truly fab. I cut it in half while it was still warm and threw some of the Swiss cheese for the croissants in the middle and it was extremely quite good. You're never gonna go hungry if you work in a bakery.

Poetry

Yes, campers, poetry, even though it's not something in which I generally engage. Nevertheless, here are my two favorite spring poems. The first one is from an old coworker, who heard someone stand up in a Greenwich Village coffee shop and recite it on the vernal equinox and who thereafter would call his wife on the first day of spring to recite it to her. Feel free to share it with whomever you like:

It's spring
It's spring
It's spring
Let's fuck

The other one I first saw on a bus; the local public transportation system had a "poetry in motion" thing for awhile. I especially like the last two lines, because they remind me to lighten the fuck up.

Spring Watching Pavilion

A gentle spring evening arrives
Airily, unclouded by worldly dust.
Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave.
We see heaven upside down in sad puddles.
Love's vast sea cannot be emptied.
And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.
Where is nirvana?
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.

- from the Vietnamese of Ho Xuan Huong

Food . . . yes, must make some . . .

A zillion years ago, when I was a broke graduate student, I brought my lunch to campus nearly every day. I had a teeny refrigerator--it was one of those under-the-sink kinds--and a miniscule freezer, so I have no clue what I did when I made things in bulk, but I know I did that. When I was unemployed, well, I've blocked out as much of that year as I can (denial is not ALWAYS a bad thing), but I had a full-size refrigerator and freezer, so my guess is that I continued to make batches of things and freeze portions. When I finally got a job, I also brought my lunch most days. All along, I'd occasionally treat myself, of course, but bringing my lunch was so much cheaper than buying my lunch that I couldn't really justify it. When I got the biotech job, I still brought my lunch often enough, but I started getting lazier, not least because there were a couple of places nearby that had pretty cheap lunches (tasty soup plus a hunk of good bread for about $3.25, for example), but also because I could afford it, as could the coworkers with whom I ate. About a year ago, though, you may remember that Craw and I started committing to bringing our lunches to work again--not every single day, because a little treat once in awhile is a good thing, in my case, and, in his case, because he had lunch with coworkers whom he liked a lot, and they usually went out. School made it easier, not least because there was so much stuff to take with me, I wasn't in danger of going hungry even if I didn't get around to making my lunch. The same is sort of true for work now, but I still would like to have something some days.

So what's on today's menu, you ask? Well, I bought some cracked wheat a couple of weeks ago and haven't done anything with it, so today I got some kale and some spinach and I'm going to do a greens-and-cracked wheat thing. No idea how well it'll freeze, so I might just not freeze that one. Second, in part because I love barley, I'm going to make another batch of the golden-split-pea-and-barley stew, except use sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes, because I like the former better. Finally, I'm going to make some black-bean-and-sweet-potato burrito filling, which can be eaten in tortillas or over rice, and we certainly have enough kinds of rice sitting around the apartment. All of the recipes are from the Moosewood Low-Fat Cookbook, which is a completely awesome cookbook; I have made so much stuff from it, and nearly everything has been good, and several things have been great. (Two of the three recipes I just mentioned I've made multiple times before.)

Because we're about 95% positive we're moving (into what arrangement remains to be seen), we're trying to use up things (like the aforementioned rice) and we're trying not to stock up on things that are a pain to move, but the pasta we eat was on sale at Whole Paycheck today, as it was last time we were there, so we . . . stocked up. On the other hand, both the Kid and I love us some pasta, so we'll eat a bunch before the end of July (when the lease is up), and it's not as bad to move as, say, canned beans or canned tomatoes, up on which we've been known to stock before. I know that it's way too early to be thinking about these things, sort of, but I've moved way too many times before. On one hand, you don't want to move 40 cans of tomatoes if you don't have to do that--or, worse yet, something that doesn't pack or stack as easily as canned tomatoes do, like frozen foods--but, on the other hand, you want to have food around, else you're more tempted to go out, which completely defeats the purpose of saving money.

As you can tell, I'm procrastinating like nobody's business right now, but, hey, it's my other day off. I spent yesterday afternoon going over the budget, and that kind of sucked. I hate being this close to the edge--we're probably fine, but we can't be spendthrifts. What I hate more is not knowing where I am, though; it's much less painful for me to sit down and wrestle with the numbers repeatedly, or weekly, or whatever, than it is to stick my fingers in my ears and close my eyes and hope/pretend that everything will be fine. We'll know more once Craw starts getting paid from the new company (who is paying him every other week rather than twice a month, for I have no clue what reason); I've been deliberately conservative in my estimates. There are a few things that have to be settled--make sure that the health insurance payments stop coming out of his severance and start coming out of his new paychecks, with neither a gap nor an overlap; make sure the child support payments get transferred with neither a gap nor an overlap; get reimbursed, by both the old and new companies, for travel expenses--and the old company isn't known for taking care of business in any kind of responsible way. To put it mildly.

Clothes, anyone?

Okay, yes, I know, I'm ranting again, but the only food that should have no calories is water. Got that? A full can of soda, for example, should have more than a calorie in it. Yes, we could argue that it doesn't have to have quite so much high-fructose corn syrup, or that cane sugar would be preferable, or any of a number of other things, but a can that is full of carbonated chemicals is not designed to be consumed.

In other news, I'm trying to figure out what to do with my clothes. Way back when, I used to (a) work in offices and/or (b) go out to dinner. Now, however, I wear a uniform: chef pants (my checked ones came in, finally, and, as predicted, the size small actually fits me; the mediums that Brad insisted on ordering looked like clown pants on me), a chef jacket (I have three from the bakery and two from school; I'm trying to keep a third one from school stain-free), socks, underwear, and a white t-shirt under the chef jacket. I braid and pin my hair, and then put a wide spandex band around it (they're called "Buff" and I get them from Sahalie) to keep the hair out of the croissants. Sometimes I wear this to work and bring a change of clothes, in case my jacket and/or pants are sufficiently clean to wear a second day. Otherwise, I wear jeans and a sweater or sweatshirt of some kind over the t-shirt. As it warms up, I suppose I can wear something cooler, but not yet. So what should I do with the skirts? (Two black velvet, calf-length; two wool, one black, one grey, just above the knee; a couple of others I can't recall at the moment.) The dresses? (A bunch, in various lengths and colors, including one that i bought on sale two years ago and have not yet worn.) The suits? (I want to keep one, because eventually I'll need to impress bankers and the like, but even that one is at least a size too big and will need major alterations.) The shoes, fer chrissakes? (All those little Born flats, for example--yeah, I'll wear some of them some time, I suppose, but in general, probably not.) I don't even get to wear my cowboy boots, which I love, nearly as often as I'd like. Some stuff doesn't even fit me that well any more, given the substantial weight loss of a year ago.

So if any of you need clothes (for s/m/l stuff, all size medium; otherwise, generally size 12; some size 10, though I'm keeping some of that stuff because it fits me), or shoes (size 8), drop me an email. I'll be happy to send you photos and ship things off to you. I want to get rid of some of this stuff before we move (when our lease is up at the end of July)--I really hate moving things I'm not going to use. Really--email me.

Manly Manliness, Plus the Ambassador

So Friday night, Craw and the Kid and I went out for some Eye-talian food. On the way home, we were walking past the exit of a parking garage as a group of 20-somethings were walking there, and some guy comes RACING to the exit and all of us turned on him and were like, yo, asshole, WTF? As he turned out of the exit, he could hear us all calling him a jackass and the like, and he started driving slowly, glaring at us, which prompted me to point out his Manly Demeanor (which probably didn't help). The two groups of us, plus the guy, made it to the corner, where he caught the red light and we all crossed the street, not quite together. I don't see Craw, though, and I turn around and find that the guy has GOTTEN OUT OF HIS CAR and is standing there confronting Craw (yelling, puzzlingly enough, "Are you pissed off? Are you pissed off?"). Craw is just standing there in front of him, hands in his pockets, and he notes the alcohol on the guy's breath and says, "You're drunk, aren't you." Whereupon I suggest we find a police officer (because I figure, if nothing else, this guy will be screwed upon getting behind the wheel while that drunk, and Craw hasn't had anything stronger than San Pelligrino). Drunk guy goes back to his car at this point, and we turn around to find out that at least two of the people from the other group have sort of milled around in the background, and one of them, a tall black guy, says to Craw, "Hey man, I had your back." We chatted long enough to agree that if you're going to get drunk, don't drive a car, and then we all went our separate ways. But it was sort of interesting, not least because I suspect Drunk Driver sensed that Craw wasn't alone, or alone with the Kid, and therefore would be less easy to take on somehow, and also because this group of strangers really was making sure that Craw was okay.

Meanwhile, my arm, wrist, and hand hurt, and I have no fucking clue why. I suppose it could (and probably is) work-related, but I wish it would go away. It feels like a sprain, but I can't think when I would have done that. I'm hoping that this weekend's croissant production will be sufficient--I keep finding out about this or that order that I didn't know about, which meant there weren't enough of the plain croissants and Johnnie had to make some, which I really don't want to happen.

Johnnie has an interesting position in the bakery--he's basically the ambassador, in some ways. His English is enough better than the other three guys such that he'll translate if necessary, but I sense it's more than that. The guy who bakes the cakes--the whistler--does, indeed, as the owner said, "know what he knows." But he doesn't know much more than that. He does know a lot, and he works his ass off, so I'm not criticizing, but I do see his limitations. The guy who runs the ovens and makes some of the breads, he'll get into conversation with Brad or with Johnnie, but, again, will not be asked to do anything beyond the (considerable) range of things he already does. Johnnie, though, can fill in anywhere, and he's the one of the three of them most likely to be working late. I also noticed him translating/explaining something to the dishwasher guy the other day. It's always difficult to tell about these things--there's no way to know how literate someone is in their first language, or how much education they had in that language, for example--but the fact that Johnnie is kind of ambassador-like tells me something. Johnnie is also the one who's most likely to make a joke, sometimes in my direction. The other guys don't have any interest in entertaining me (or anyone else); work is work is work, I think. And Johnnie sees more of the dynamic of the bakery, too--the other day, as they were on the make-up line doing some kind of coffee cakes (I forget what I was doing, but I get put on the line, too, when I'm needed), the whistler must have said something to Johnnie to hurry up, and Johnnie said, in English, "You see my hands? I have two of them." Last week, after the whistler and the Baker had left, a timer went off for something in the oven, and Johnnie calls out, "It's okay, [Baker], I've got it." I just looked at him and grinned. He's also an incredible flirt--not so much with me, which is fine with me, thank you very much, but he's quite cute, and something of a player, I suspect; it's more that he likes to have an audience, and, since I'm willing to be entertained, he'll entertain me occasionally. When it's just the two of us, though, I try to get him to teach me some words in Spanish. Which I really must learn for real.

What do you REALLY do all day?

So how DO I spend my days? I've given you lists, but things have actually changed somewhat, in that I now have all of the croissant production in my hands. Well, I punch in a little before 7:00 am; I like to get there a little early, but the boss doesn't really care that much--the second day of work he told me that I could be a few minutes late and it wouldn't matter. (Before I punch in I put on my kitchen clothes, braid my hair and put a spandexy band around my head, and put on an apron.) I grab five sheet pans, position the scale, and flour the table. I drag the 60 pounds of croissant dough out of the walk-in and over to the work table; the dough is in a big plastic storage-type bin. I get whoever is walking by to help me dump it on the table, and then I spread it out. I cut it into six-pound pieces, putting two rectangular pieces on each floured sheet pan. I cover each pair of dough pieces with a plastic garbage bag (the light plastic bags, with the bottoms cut off so they're stretch-out-able, not the big green things) and put the sheet pans in the freezer. (Sometimes I have to rummage around to find space in the freezer.) I get out 15 pounds of butter, a rolling pin, and a big piece of plastic, and I cut up the butter into 1.5-pound chunks. I pound each chunk into a rectangle that's about half the area of a piece of dough and then put all the butter into the walk-in. Today I also moved two pieces of already-laminated dough from yesterday from the freezer to the walk-in to thaw out; I didn't feel like doing them yesterday, but that means more croissants to shape today.

At this point, I have about an hour to an hour and a half to do something else. I had to fill an order for 45 "Irish potatoes," which are our chocolate rum ball mix shaped into something that looks like a dog turd and then covered with marzipan and dusted with cocoa powder--they really do look like potatoes, so it's pretty entertaining. Johnnie had made the mix and I'd shaped the potatoes yesterday, so I rolled out the marzipan and covered the potatoes today.

By now it's about 9:30 and time to laminate my dough. I take each sheet pan out of the freezer, take the dough and run it through the sheeter a little bit, position the butter, cut the dough so it's a butter-and-dough "sandwich," roll it out and put a single fold into the dough (which means I fold it in thirds; a double, or "book" fold means you fold each end toward the middle and then fold the whole thing in half). This starts creating layers of butter and dough. I have to trim the edges and such so it fits properly, which takes a little time; after that, I put the pan back in the freezer. After I've laminated all ten pieces, I start with the first piece again, rolling it out on the sheeter and putting a double fold into each piece. (Four of the pieces, the ones slated for plain croissants, get two double folds; the others get a single fold and a double fold.)

By now it's probably about 10:45. Today I shaped more potatoes from a new batch of mix from Johnnie and put marzipan and cocoa on another ten so they could be sold in the store; I'll do the rest tomorrow before the laminating. When I finished with that and put everything away, I moved the sheet pans with the croissant dough from the freezer to the walk-in; frozen dough doesn't roll out very well. I took a break around noon for about 20 minutes, then came back and started with the croissants.

In preparation for that, I made some egg wash (eggs and a little salt, in our case; in school we added some cream, too, and extra yolks), stacked a bunch of sheet pans lined with paper, and got out the almond filling. I made some almond ones first, then some ham and cheese. At this point, the guys were on the make-up line, making some kind of coffee cakes; this line is back-to-back with the sheeter I need to roll out my dough, so I made my croissant dough for tomorrow in the meantime. (This involves lugging a 50-pound sack of flour up from the basement; because I use about 34.5 pounds of flour, it's easier to bring up a sack and remove the 15 pounds than to scale out the 35 pounds.) That takes about 20 minutes or so, then the dough gets put into one of the bins, I check the temperature (78 degrees F is the preferred temp), and put a timer on top of it for 30 minutes, after which I drag the thing into the walk-in for tomorrow. I helped out briefly with the coffee cakes, then went back to my croissants.

I made four more pieces of dough into chocolate croissants. I put the chocolate, ham and cheese, and almond on a rolling rack (and put the extras in the freezer), and then made six pieces of dough into plain croissants. I get about 36 plain croissants and about 24 filled croissants from a given piece of dough; each croissant gets egg-washed after making, and some get egg wash during the construction to help seal something. After putting the plain croissants for tomorrow on the rack, I put the whole rack into the walk-in, where it will sit until the guy who does the baking comes in. I froze the rest of the plain croissants, cleaned up, shrink-wrapped five small pans of brownies for Brad (who had to leave before the shrink-wrap tunnel was hot), and that was it. I punched out a little after 4:00.

There really isn't much opportunity for slacking, unlike with desk jobs (where you can almost always do a little web-surfing, or make a personal call, or exchange emails, or whatever). There isn't much privacy, either, in the sense that everything's happening in one big room--at one point today, the spiral, the 40-quart, and the 80-quart mixers were all going, and I was using the dough sheeter, which makes its own noises. On the other hand, everyone's busy doing his or her tasks, so there's not a lot of conversation most days--which affords privacy of a different kind.

I also asked my boss about what it costs to buy a bakery--and he doesn't think it will cost much at all, which is interesting. And encouraging. Not that I'm ready to do that yet, but it doesn't hurt to gather information.

"I hear . . . drunk people."

BigCity's St. Patrick's Day parade was apparently yesterday (I was making croissants, and wouldn't have gone anyway), and it was unseasonably warm last night, so my neighborhood, which, because of the large number of bars in a small area, is often full of drunks early on a Saturday or Sunday morning, has been even drunker than usual. Craw had to get up at 4 to head to a conference (where he meets all of his new bosses and such), so we heard them then, and I hear them outside even now. (Usually most of them are home by 5 on a Sunday.) I would have enjoyed some additional sleep, especially since it's been in shorter supply lately, but I guess not.

I had some body work done yesterday--some Zen shiatsu, as a matter of fact, just like kStyle's work--and have decided I need to find a way to afford more of it. It's not cheap (and it shouldn't be), but that makes it beyond the range of my budget these days, at least on a regular basis. I'm pretty good with the delayed-gratification thing (you kind of have to be, if you're going to write a dissertation, say), but sometimes I think I'm a little TOO good at it.

The other thing I've delayed is cleaning the pit that is this apartment. Craw did some of it yesterday--cleaned the bathroom, for one thing, which had become one of the circles of hell, and did laundry, including the laundry of mine he found in my laundry basket (which wasn't a lot, but I truly appreciated the thought)--and I'm contemplating doing some cleaning now, even though it's 5 am on a Sunday morning. But I won't be going back to sleep any time soon, and I don't have to leave for yoga for three hours, so I might as well do something useful. Besides, I don't want to come home to a pit every day this week, you know?

Rattle and Hum

That title is actually a reference to my thermos-that-isn't-a-Thermos: I once again dropped my teaspoon into it this morning while putting in my honey, so the spoon rattles around when the ttiaT is empty.

I've decided that either I'm already a bodhisattva and just don't know it, or else I really fucked up bigtime in some previous lives and am working off some seriously bad karma in this life.

I'm not sure where to begin; I haven't yet put this all into any kind of order, so the linearity, the way we tell a story when we know what happened next, simply isn't there. The first thing to tell you is that, for the past two months, I went to my new job, stood on my feet all day (you regular readers know what I've been doing) for $8.50 an hour, in pursuit of my dreams--and then came home to have someone vomit on my shoes. Every fucking day. There were moments of respite, of course, when I saw a friend or Craw was out of town (or both), but even those moments could be interrupted any time by Craw, calling me on the phone and vomiting long-distance.

I offered up the blogspace to him yesterday (though he can't post independent of me), and I will continue to offer him the opportunity to say stuff, if only because it might be helpful for someone else in his situation.

The second thing to tell you is that Craw violated my privacy about three weeks ago, pretty dramatically. He confessed immediately (after yet more dramatic phone calls), so, of course, he wants bonus points for telling a truth that I might not have discovered. Since he used what he found in the course of the violation as a verbal weapon in one of our recent "discussions," I suspect I would have guessed sooner or later anyway, but there you have it.

The third thing to tell you will take a little longer. When Craw and I met, as you might already have figured out from his tale, he was married to the Kid's mother. Since Craw and I met under rather, um, casual circumstances that I will not detail here, it was not immediately relevant that I know that he was married; he spoke of his wife as his "girlfriend." (Truthfully, he could have told me he was married and it wouldn't have mattered much.) It became apparent that Craw liked me, a lot, and, truth be told, I liked him, too. He's smart, and funny, for two things, and he told me right up front that he's a recovering alcoholic, so I figured he was probably honest, too; I knew from my work with the junkies and alcoholics that honesty was the most important aspect of sobriety, so someone who had seven years of sobriety was probably pretty good at the honesty thing.

Yeah, right.

Anyway, after about six weeks of increasingly intense interactions, it became clear that something was happening between us--but then he called me at work one day, right after a very intense conversation the night before about how we could maybe get serious, to tell me his supposedly ex-girlfriend was pregnant. We continued to talk--I wondered why they thought a kid was going to save their obviously troubled relationship; I wondered how he and she felt about abortion. He told me he'd gone to the doctor with her, seen the ultrasound (I believe he told me it was a girl, but I might be misremembering that one), etc. He went off to a nearby city where his mother and sister live, and he came to my place on the way home to break up with me. He couldn't leave his pregnant girlfriend, he said. Given what he'd said about how bad their relationship had gotten, I didn't think that was a smart move, and I said that, but there wasn't much else I could do. Nevertheless, we continued to talk, all through the Christmas holidays. I won't bore you with what I was going through, but it wasn't all that much fun. We planned to meet in early January, one Sunday. He knew I left at about 7:45, and he called me before that to cancel--because his girlfriend had had a miscarriage. She was hospitalized, etc., but would probably be fine. Days later, she came back to his/their place, which puzzled me, but whatever.

About two weeks after that, we went out to dinner, at his insistence. When we got back to my place, he told me that his girlfriend was actually his wife. And that he had a son. Readers, I should have dumped his sorry ass right then. Why didn't I? Well, as noted, we had met under casual circumstances where the truth wasn't necessarily relevant (or so I thought), and then things happened very quickly. We moved on, blah blah blah. (There were more lies about these things--the vacation to Florida, for example--that I found out over the years.)

Fast forward (through many things) to this week. When Craw informs me that he broke up with me because he wanted some space/time to think about what he wanted to do. His wife had mentioned that she'd missed her period, but she was extremely irregular, so that wasn't so unusual. There was no ultrasound. There was no doctor's appointment. He broke up with me so he could figure out what he wanted--without bothering to involve any of the other people's wants in that equation, which is typical alcoholic behavior. She had a heavy period, one that might very well have been a miscarriage, but I doubt there was a hospitalization in there. In other words, when he supposedly came clean all those years ago, he was still fucking lying to me.

The fourth thing is that you all know my position on religion, in general. If other people want it, fine, but it's not for me. The Kid goes to Catholic school--which is also fine, because I'm not paying for it. Or so I thought. For the past year and a half, Craw has been paying the Kid's tuition, without telling me. While I drained my savings paying for a wedding, paying rent, paying for the car repairs (i.e., joint expenses). In other words, in addition to all those lies he told me before (and I haven't bothered to list them all), and despite all of the issues we've had over money (which I won't detail here), he's been lying to me, about a significant chunk of money, for a year and a half.

Furious doesn't begin to describe what I'm feeling.

I can't let myself dwell on it, however: I make $8.50 an hour and I've drained my savings (did I mention that?), so moving out isn't something I could do. I have two other concerns in that realm, as well. First, I want to spare the Kid as much as possible--for example, he was apparently extremely happy that we'd all get to eat dinner together tonight (Craw and I have him for three nights before Craw goes out of town). He'll have to know something sooner or later, but I see no reason to dump it on him now. If we're going to continue to live together for the time being, the Kid doesn't have to know the details now. Second, and this is the one that is the challenge for me now, I'm trying to find the compassion that Craw needs. I know--because I've been living it--that he's in a bad (though improving) place right now. The thing with addicts is that it's always all about them--but, especially in the beginning of recovery, it kind of has to be.

So I go to work, make my croissants, talk to my friends, try to find ways to be kind to Craw without letting him continue to vomit on me. And the Divine Miss M was right--you DO gotta have friends, and I have some damned good ones. Which is extremely helpful right now.

"Hi, my name is Crawdaddy, and I'm an alcoholic."

Some of you know there's been quite a bit of drama in my life lately. I've hesitated to talk about it here, but, in the past week, it has exploded pretty seriously, as has my marriage with Crawdaddy. We've talked (and talked, and talked, and talked), but I haven't told you all what's going on. I offered Craw the opportunity to tell the story, and he took it. Herewith is what he wrote.

Hello readers, it’s me, the Crawdaddy himself, comin’ at you from beautiful downtown BigCity. Emma asked me this morning if I wanted to write a guest post to talk about where I’m at and what I’m dealing with, and I graciously accept.

Today’s topic is alcoholism.

My name is Craw, and I’m an alcoholic.

(“Hi Craw”)

I had my first taste of alcohol when I was about five or six. My parents were heavy drinkers (truth is, my father was a mean alcoholic himself) and we lived in a two-flat above my aunt and uncle, also heavy drinkers. There would be summer parties, and people would leave half-finished drinks all over the place. It was only natural that I would pick up these drinks and see what all the fuss was about. My love affair with alcohol was immediate. Fortunately, by the age of eight we moved into a single-family house and other than Thanksgiving and Christmas, the party was over. When I was thirteen, I started to experiment with alcohol again. I found out immediately that I had a much higher tolerance than any of my friends. I could drink a six-pack of half-quarts and not pass out or puke all over myself (though, I did a lot of that later on).

I was never comfortable in my own skin, and alcohol took the edge off, however it’s not easy to get alcohol on a daily basis when you’re a teenager. Going to the BigCity Public Schools made it possible and affordable to get almost any other drug, and so pot became my drug of choice for many years to come. New Year’s Eve 1977 came and there was no pot to be found, but one of our dealers had some acid, so my friends and I did acid that night and it was the beginning of a new love affair for me. I did so much acid after that it’s a miracle I’m not completely insane, in a sad, Sid Barrett kind of way.

When I turned twenty-one, I went back to alcohol because it was more socially acceptable. I still continued to take massive quantities of drugs, and I had a serious pill addiction by then as well. My father died when I was twenty-three and there are bits of his passing that I just don’t remember. Valium erased those memories forever. When my supply finally ran out, I went through three days on intense physical withdrawal, and I decided that I had a problem with pills and I stayed away from them.

I got married soon after to a nice Jewish girl, K (I was raised Catholic). Anger and resentment ruled my life, and I was viciously mean to her. I blamed K for everything that was wrong with my life, and it wasn’t long before I began to have an affair with a woman named R. R came from a family of alcoholics and enablers, so being around me must have seemed perfectly natural to her. It was mostly a sexual relationship, but I have to admit that beyond the sex there was a profound connection that even the fog of alcoholism couldn’t hide.

I lost my job in November of 1990, possibly the worst time in recent history to be looking for employment. It did, however, give me a lot of free time to indulge my favorite activity, drinking. I became a 24-hour a day drunk at that point. Any idea of boundaries I had up until then completely vanished. I had always drank to get drunk, and now I wanted to be drunk all of the time. I would drink before job interviews. I would drink before showering in the morning. I would drink instead of eating. I just drank.

K and I had divorced in June of 1990. There wasn’t a no-fault option in my state at the time, so we agreed to use mental cruelty as grounds. When we went before the judge and her lawyer asked me the standard questions (did you ever intentionally hurt her, did you ever stay out all night and not tell her where you were, etc.) I answered yes to all of them. It occurred to me at the time that I was not committing perjury, that I really was guilty of those things. It was a shameful experience.

We had been seeing a marriage counselor, and as often happens when the marriage is not saved, I continued to see the therapist on my own. I came to the conclusion in December of 1990 that I was an alcoholic. R had since dumped my sorry ass. The final straw was when I told her I would be at her house in an hour, and three days later she called me to find out what the Hell had happened. I had no memory of those three days, but I don’t think she believed me.

I decided that I would quit drinking on January 1, 1991, and I did. I never told anyone that I had quit, I just stopped. It was about a month later that I looked down at my hand and was surprised to see that I was holding an open beer. My drinking wasn’t as bad as it was before I had stopped, it was worse. In desperation, I decided to quit again, maybe a month later. This time it lasted a week, and once again my drinking was worse. A month later came my final attempt, and it lasted all of a day. Again, my drinking was worse.

I was terrified to stop at that point. I think I made an unconscious decision to drink myself to death. Clearly I had no willpower when it came to alcohol, so there was no hope I’d ever give it up. I might as well finish the story.

Around late June I have some idea that I called Alcoholics Anonymous. They apparently told me to sit by the phone and that someone would call me back. I waited for almost an hour, and then I went out and got drunk. When I came home I had a message from a Marty C, with his phone number. I threw the scrap of paper on a pile of other papers and forgot all about it.

My final drunk was the most terrifying ordeal of my life. I won’t go into detail, but it came three days before my 29th birthday and it scared me so bad that I actually stopped drinking to get drunk. On my birthday, my sister gave me a six-pack of Sam Adams (aren’t enablers wonderful people?). I drank probably one that night, and a few over the course of the next few days. On July 11, 1991, I had a phone conversation with R that sent me over the edge. Reflexively, I grabbed the last Sam Adams out of the refrigerator and was about to open it when I had what is described in AA as a moment of clarity. My whole life flashed before my eyes, and it was an ugly sight. I put the bottle opener down and said a simple prayer, “God, I don’t know if you even exist, but if you do I need help, I can’t do this on my own.”

(Emma is surely wincing here, but so be it).

Immediately, a voice in my head said, “Call AA, call Marty.” I did, and he answered the phone at 11:30 in the morning. He wasn’t even supposed to be home, he usually worked Thursdays, but on that particular Thursday he was not only home, he was sitting right next to the phone when it rang.

I went to my first AA meeting that night, scared to fucking death. I had no idea what to expect, but it wasn’t this. I saw happy, smiling people. There’s no way I’m in the right place, I thought to myself. Then a girl my age began to tell her story, and I swear it was my story. I could instantly relate, even to things that hadn’t happened to me. I have not had a drink of alcohol since that night, almost fifteen years ago. AA did for me what I was unable to do for myself. It gave me a simple program to live a good life. It taught me the value of honesty, of doing the next right thing no matter what the consequences.

If only I had listened. After being sober for a year and a half, I turned my back on AA, on the program and the people who had literally saved my life. I stopped working the AA program and began working Craw’s program. Craw’s program allowed me the luxury of fudging the truth a little, here and there. No harm, no foul, I told myself. I pointed to the fact that I wasn’t drinking as proof that I was living a good life.

I got remarried, and for a while things were mostly happy, the occasional violent outburst notwithstanding. In August of 1997, my son was born, and I was at the end of my rope. I blamed my wife for it all, and when she walked out with my son I pointed to that and said it was now okay for me to do whatever I wanted. I became self-will run rampant, a selfish person. I met Emma around this time, and somehow she saw enough good in me to include me in her life, even though early on I hurt her terribly, and owned up to a terrible lie. Truth is, I only owned up to the lie because I knew it would eventually come out, and if I wanted to be with her I had to. I kept several other lies to myself, though. In spite of repeated difficulties, we were married last year. Only she can say why she even wanted to marry me, surely she had to have some inkling that I was not where I needed to be to make a marriage work, certainly not the kind of open marriage we had decided on.

She has alluded to an outside relationship that developed earlier this year. She has also alluded to a certain amount of drama and pain. I’m here to tell you that her references were barely the tip of the iceberg. My head exploded so violently that it spilled out all over the people in my life, in a ruinous way. I was terrified that she was going to leave me, despite her assurances that she was not. Emma, simply put, does not lie. But deep down inside of me, I was afraid that she would catch a whiff of what I was really all about, and that in contrast to this truly wonderful guy she was seeing on the side that I would be unlovable. I did so many crazy things that our marriage was already crashing upon the rocks.

I started going to AA meetings again, because I knew that AA had screwed my head on once, and I was hoping it could do it again. I found that going to meetings made me feel worse, not better, but I kept going. I started to have so many epiphanies about myself that I began to name them (E1, E2, etc.). I’ve since lost track; there have been so many of them. Among them is the fact that I’ve been extremely dishonest, and that I violated the trust of one of the most important people in my life, Emma. I also realized that I still blamed myself for my terrible relationship with my father (the mean drunk that he was). I realized that I have an extremely unhealthy attitude towards sex. I decided that I needed to get right with that last one, so I asked Emma if we could “take sex off the table,” not make it an option for us, to give me the space to find my way back there.

AA meetings were still making me feel worse, though. I knew I had to get a sponsor, if for no other reason than to give me someone to talk to. I had met someone at a meeting on Saturday, and I knew he would be at a meeting Sunday night so I went there. He didn’t show up at first, but when he did I didn’t get the opportunity to talk to him. I was so out of my fucking mind at that point that I had to get outside. I was standing on the curb, in the Northwest suburbs, and I turned to face north because the breeze felt good on my face. It was snowing, but I didn’t care. All I knew was that I was in a world of pain, and I was right back where I started from only this time I wasn’t getting the sense of immediate release that AA did for me the first time around. I was desperate, and I prayed a desperate prayer, “I need a sign to show me where to go from here, something to tell me that I’m on the right path.” At that exact moment I focused my eyes on what was in front of me, and it was, quite literally, a sign. The sign said North Star (it was a sign for an auto repair shop, but that’s irrelevant). Immediately I felt the release I had sought. The words “north star” have always been important to me, a sort of reference to navigating through life.

I knew I had to own up to the lies I had been telling the people in my life. I met my ex-wife for lunch the next day, and I confessed to a horrible thing I had done to her to make her hate me enough to just leave me. It felt good to get it off my chest, and she hugged me and forgave me. Then I went to my noon meeting downtown.

AA meetings last for an hour. An hour is a long time to sit and listen to people, and about fifty minutes into the meeting my mind began to wander. I was thinking about the night before, and I had just about convinced myself that it was my imagination when I heard the guy who was talking say, “And my higher power has always been like a north star to me, a way to navigate through my life.”

I about fell out of my chair. I have never in my life ever heard anyone say that at an AA meeting. I cannot believe it was coincidence that I was standing on that spot Sunday night, facing the sign, asking for a sign, and then seeing the sign. I cannot believe it was coincidence that a man who has the same first name as I (believe it or not, my name isn’t really Craw, a shock, I know) would actually say the words north star in my very next AA meeting.

I didn’t go home that night because Emma was out and I couldn’t bear to sit at home and wait for her to return, if she did at all (I’ve rented a small studio to use as a office for my new job). She called me when she got home and I asked her if I could drive her to work the next day. I had a conversation in mind, but when I woke up yesterday morning I knew that the conversation I really needed to have with her was completely different. I owned up to the lies that I never told her about early on. I cannot tell you what those lies were, if she ever decided to share them that is her business. They were pretty terrible lies, though, if such a thing could be even quantified.

She is furious with me. Our marriage is completely on hold right now, and it’s not clear whether we will ever have a real husband/wife relationship ever again. Financially, we have to stick together. She’s basically stuck living with me, a man who violated her trust to the core, because we cannot afford to split. I can’t even pretend to understand how that must feel.

While I desperately want things to be right with us again some day, I have to accept the fact that I have no control over the outcome. The first step of AA goes, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, and that our lives had become unmanageable.” While I wasn’t drinking for thirteen years of my sobriety, my alcoholism was rampant, and I am coming to terms with the fact that I’m also powerless over people, places, and things, and that my life is unmanageable as a result of trying to control them.

I got a sponsor yesterday, and I’m meeting him for lunch today to talk about me and the program. I went to a meeting last night at the same place where I had seen the sign, and an old Irishman I have known since my very first AA meeting asked me if I had a sponsor. I told him I did, a guy I met at a meeting downtown. He asked me who it was, and when I told him he laughed and said he’d known this guy since he was a little kid, they used to be neighbors. Another coincidence….? I don’t know.

I’ve got a lot of work to do right now. I need to work the program of AA from the very beginning. I’m starting all over again. I have a new job, and I cannot fuck it up because Emma and I would be financially ruined. I also need to make amends, every day, to the people I have hurt. For Emma, those amends are financial, so the job part is even more important.

I’m at the beginning of a great, spiritual journey here. It’s painful, and scary, and my first instinct is to run away. But we can never really run away. Whatever the future holds, I want to be able to face it as the man I know I can be. Whether or not Emma is by my side as my wife, partner, or even just as a friend, is truly irrelevant. What counts most is what’s inside of me, who I am at my very core.

Readers, wish me well.

Work Stuff

Things about my coworkers that are entertaining:

• they like to imitate the sounds of various mechanical things (timers especially)
• they're a pretty friendly bunch, despite the language barrier

Things that are less entertaining:

• One of them always and all the time has the radio on, which wouldn't be so terrible, except that it plays this syrupy spanish music all the time; it gets on my last nerve some days.
• One of the native-english speakers comments on how dumb the dishwasher is, quite frequently. This may be true (I really have no way to tell), but the guy is a 50-something-year-old (I think) dishwasher, who is probably barely literate in his native language and whose english is nearly non-existent. Just how smart do you think he'd be? Not everyone can be a fucking genius, you know?
• The one with the music also takes up a lot of space. He works hard, and quickly, but dude, the kitchen ain't that big; you gotta share.

I'm sure there's more, but I'm tired.

Oh--our bakery was featured briefly on a local TV show. The owner was talking about the various things (like king cakes and this Polish thing that I don't remember how to spell or pronounce) we made for Fat Tuesday. This cute 20-something came in and filmed stuff and tried a beignet (which we don't normally make, but when TV stations want you to make a beignet, you say you make them) and so on. While wandering around, she filmed bits of this and that--and my hands, of all things, made it into the segment. I was rolling out croissant dough at the time, so it's fitting.