Brooding (or How to balance Work, Art, Life, and Eating Food)
(Excerpt from the Winter on Cape Ann and Other Stories / Go West.)
They was brooding. It had to be about food, all of it, and where to begin was always a question.
What did good people do all day? Worked. Nobody wanted to work and the bills had to be paid, or rather: There had to be money available to pay for things. One could work for oneself more than another and need less money if one was capable and compelled. The amount of money one made was inline with the things a man asked of the world to provide.
Having spent what would be a year in twenty days only thinking and doing what I felt compelled to, with increasing reliance on no one but myself for advice, I found myself in a most depressed state. I couldn’t find anything which felt good to do for very long. Many new skills and perspectives had been acquired and unclear still was what aspects of my self were best to give to the world. (Food, yes. I had acquired many perspectives on food and I didn’t want to fall victim to the syndrome where I assume my food choices and opinions are universal. I make sacrifices — some of which I don’t remember that I make and some I don’t remember to make — for what I consume, and these are my own.)
Respect was important, and self-respect was paramount. Without their own approval, a human was never free. Quickly approaching was the time for me to test the sustainability of this freedom. Hard work was never a problem for me; sustained effort and interest kept me from producing outside of what I required, which was only the comestibles and art. In following my mind exclusively for so long I was only spending time producing and consuming food and art — sure I was living somewhere, had clothes to wear, a computer to use, and a car to take me anywhere in America, and I could still survive with all I had already acquired in these other regards. I grew to respect the grains right around the time I started to write it all down, and it gives me confidence to realize a fortnight and a half shy of a year later these are still important to me. On my best days, writing and food are close to all there is — wine and music also playing a large role, and these are still food and writing in my perspective. What to do to sustain, placing these approved topics of focus in front of all else — possibly in place of all else, a grand statement, now it was and I had to buckle down. Now was the time to show of what one human is capable, again. It had been this time before, for other humans and now it was mine.
