Category Archives: smoke

On steak

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“Are we having steak for dinner tonight?” The answer was “yes.” Sometimes I eat steak with a little salt and pepper, and I’m unapologetic about that–no ketchup though, then I would be apologetic. Sometimes I don’t eat steak, but I do hate tofu and can’t figure why anyone would eat it on purpose. The texture is otherworldly and the taste is disappointing, to say the least–it tastes like something dead. On the other hand, there is something which is creepily primitive,but totally satisfying, about eating the flesh of other animals. I think this may be one of my blind-spots, which is goofy, but I’m not sure. Raw oysters really blow my hair back. I like my steak rare, leaning to very rare, burned on the outside and ruby red on the inside, salty. As an omnivore, I like to eat a little bit of everything, although lately I’m for setting the chickens free since the modern industrial chicken tastes like chemicals and not chicken. I don’t eat chicken. Fish, I love fish–tuna, cod, walleye. I’ll eat the six ounce steak on the menu (or I’ll even cook it myself), but I would turn down almost anything larger than that. Digesting animal flesh is hard work, although the payoff if very high. You don’t want to have steak at every meal–the experience would get old really quickly. I like the cut to be either a T-bone or a ribeye. I like nice marbling and juicy meat. There is nothing like putting a nice big steak on the grill, well-seasoned, and sharing it with the other omnivores. I had a big, leafy, green salad last night, and I still feel a bit hungover from that. Oh, one might be a vegetarian, which is a more ethical position, certainly a more defensible one than killing animals for their meat, but I like to eat a little bit of everything.

On steak

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“Are we having steak for dinner tonight?” The answer was “yes.” Sometimes I eat steak with a little salt and pepper, and I’m unapologetic about that–no ketchup though, then I would be apologetic. Sometimes I don’t eat steak, but I do hate tofu and can’t figure why anyone would eat it on purpose. The texture is otherworldly and the taste is disappointing, to say the least–it tastes like something dead. On the other hand, there is something which is creepily primitive,but totally satisfying, about eating the flesh of other animals. I think this may be one of my blind-spots, which is goofy, but I’m not sure. Raw oysters really blow my hair back. I like my steak rare, leaning to very rare, burned on the outside and ruby red on the inside, salty. As an omnivore, I like to eat a little bit of everything, although lately I’m for setting the chickens free since the modern industrial chicken tastes like chemicals and not chicken. I don’t eat chicken. Fish, I love fish–tuna, cod, walleye. I’ll eat the six ounce steak on the menu (or I’ll even cook it myself), but I would turn down almost anything larger than that. Digesting animal flesh is hard work, although the payoff if very high. You don’t want to have steak at every meal–the experience would get old really quickly. I like the cut to be either a T-bone or a ribeye. I like nice marbling and juicy meat. There is nothing like putting a nice big steak on the grill, well-seasoned, and sharing it with the other omnivores. I had a big, leafy, green salad last night, and I still feel a bit hungover from that. Oh, one might be a vegetarian, which is a more ethical position, certainly a more defensible one than killing animals for their meat, but I like to eat a little bit of everything.

On invisible

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The very idea of “invisible” is a little hard to grasp. I’m not just talking about something that is really, really tiny such as an atom or an individual molecule of water, which are pretty much invisible to the human eye. What I want to talk about is something you should be able to see, but for some reason you don’t, and no, I’m not talking about stealth technology, or am I? I am not entirely sure what “invisible” means at all. The Predator can make himself “invisible” by turning on his high-tec camouflage, but that is stealthy technology that makes him hard to see, but he’s not really invisible. I think one needs to ask the hard question, can anything really be invisible that has mass? We know that a magnetic field is invisible, but it also has no mass. Light is visible and invisible according to its wavelength and the ability of the human eye to detect certain wavelengths. Again, for the Predator, other wavelengths are also visible, not invisible. Smells are invisible because the detectable parts per million are so small, we can’t see them with naked eye. If ghosts were real, they would be both visible and invisible at the same time. Certain bombers are invisible in the dark and even radar cannot seem them, but they aren’t really invisible either. Sound is invisible, and the wind is invisible, sort of. I think that it is both frightening and ironic that there are series of horror movies about men who have made themselves invisible, that the invisibility causes insanity and false grandeur. Even the tiniest bugs, amoeba, diatoms, and the like are only invisible because they are tiny and the human eye cannot distinguish anything at the atomic level. Love, or hate, are invisible, but then again, wild emotional abstractions don’t exist in the physical world other than as ideas, not as concrete realities. The closest thing to invisible in our world is the fictional cloaking device that exists in the world of Star Trek, which alters something at the sub-atomic level, changing the time phase of the object, rendering it invisible within its current physical frame and/or context. So I not only don’t know what invisible is, I also have no way of really describing it either. The actual physics of light reflecting off of an object so that said object appears invisible has yet to be truly defeated, except for the world of science fiction. None of this means, however, that we still aren’t working on it, albeit, clandestinely.

On invisible

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The very idea of “invisible” is a little hard to grasp. I’m not just talking about something that is really, really tiny such as an atom or an individual molecule of water, which are pretty much invisible to the human eye. What I want to talk about is something you should be able to see, but for some reason you don’t, and no, I’m not talking about stealth technology, or am I? I am not entirely sure what “invisible” means at all. The Predator can make himself “invisible” by turning on his high-tec camouflage, but that is stealthy technology that makes him hard to see, but he’s not really invisible. I think one needs to ask the hard question, can anything really be invisible that has mass? We know that a magnetic field is invisible, but it also has no mass. Light is visible and invisible according to its wavelength and the ability of the human eye to detect certain wavelengths. Again, for the Predator, other wavelengths are also visible, not invisible. Smells are invisible because the detectable parts per million are so small, we can’t see them with naked eye. If ghosts were real, they would be both visible and invisible at the same time. Certain bombers are invisible in the dark and even radar cannot seem them, but they aren’t really invisible either. Sound is invisible, and the wind is invisible, sort of. I think that it is both frightening and ironic that there are series of horror movies about men who have made themselves invisible, that the invisibility causes insanity and false grandeur. Even the tiniest bugs, amoeba, diatoms, and the like are only invisible because they are tiny and the human eye cannot distinguish anything at the atomic level. Love, or hate, are invisible, but then again, wild emotional abstractions don’t exist in the physical world other than as ideas, not as concrete realities. The closest thing to invisible in our world is the fictional cloaking device that exists in the world of Star Trek, which alters something at the sub-atomic level, changing the time phase of the object, rendering it invisible within its current physical frame and/or context. So I not only don’t know what invisible is, I also have no way of really describing it either. The actual physics of light reflecting off of an object so that said object appears invisible has yet to be truly defeated, except for the world of science fiction. None of this means, however, that we still aren’t working on it, albeit, clandestinely.

On the smell of burning leaves

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This is a nostalgia piece, and normally I hate nostalgia because it conjures a false image of the past that never existed, but this topic might be a little different because it has to do the master of memories, a strong evocative smell. When I was a kid, we had huge trees around our house, so we also had a lot of leaves on the ground in October and November. We raked the brown and yellow and red leaves into enormous piles which at some point we would burn. Today, of course, you can’t burn your leaves without the police and fire department showing up to raise hell with you, and to be honest, it is air pollution. Having an open fire on your property or in the street is totally illegal. Back in the day, if my memory serves me right, back in the sixties, we would burn our leaves each fall, and an almost magic smoke would fill the air. Both acrid and sweet, the smoke had an incredibly rich smell which evokes for me other times and other places, people, seasons, short days, crisp nights, bare trees, incipient winter. The fallen leaves, the burning leaves, were announcing the changing season. I was so much younger then, younger than anyone really has a right to be. When I accidentally smell that smell today, the memories just wash over me like a huge unexpected wave. That nostalgia plumbs the depths of innocence as you warm your cold hands over the flames of memory. Sparks fly up and away in the darkness, children smile and watch the flames, chatting about nothing, but the bonds of those times are strong even though all of that–the burning leaves–is gone, up in smoke, a mirage lost in the past of another lifetime, another country. They say the past is a place to which we will never return, but the memories conjured by those potent and pungent smells assail us in ways we cannot ignore. The burning leaves of our pasts are still there, still burning, and the poetry that we wrote then, inspired by those people, places and events, will always return us to the past when we catch just the slightest wisp of smoke.

On the smell of burning leaves

Posted on by

This is a nostalgia piece, and normally I hate nostalgia because it conjures a false image of the past that never existed, but this topic might be a little different because it has to do the master of memories, a strong evocative smell. When I was a kid, we had huge trees around our house, so we also had a lot of leaves on the ground in October and November. We raked the brown and yellow and red leaves into enormous piles which at some point we would burn. Today, of course, you can’t burn your leaves without the police and fire department showing up to raise hell with you, and to be honest, it is air pollution. Having an open fire on your property or in the street is totally illegal. Back in the day, if my memory serves me right, back in the sixties, we would burn our leaves each fall, and an almost magic smoke would fill the air. Both acrid and sweet, the smoke had an incredibly rich smell which evokes for me other times and other places, people, seasons, short days, crisp nights, bare trees, incipient winter. The fallen leaves, the burning leaves, were announcing the changing season. I was so much younger then, younger than anyone really has a right to be. When I accidentally smell that smell today, the memories just wash over me like a huge unexpected wave. That nostalgia plumbs the depths of innocence as you warm your cold hands over the flames of memory. Sparks fly up and away in the darkness, children smile and watch the flames, chatting about nothing, but the bonds of those times are strong even though all of that–the burning leaves–is gone, up in smoke, a mirage lost in the past of another lifetime, another country. They say the past is a place to which we will never return, but the memories conjured by those potent and pungent smells assail us in ways we cannot ignore. The burning leaves of our pasts are still there, still burning, and the poetry that we wrote then, inspired by those people, places and events, will always return us to the past when we catch just the slightest wisp of smoke.