Ground Cherry Jam I: Today We Cook With Danger

Ground cherries are a humbling fruit, because they fall off the plant when they ripen, so you get to harvest them by scrabbling around on the ground like a peasant child clawing at coins thrown from a carriage by 17th century Parisian aristocrats.

Off we go…

I spend a lot of time talking to myself.  I am shy and have jobs that keep my hands busy but give me too much time to think.  I used to work with a fellow student who could write term papers in his head while shelving books, but I don’t have that kind of mental discipline.  So I usually end up daydreaming noir novels about getting caught up in a gang turf war with dead First Ladies*, or casting my coworkers in extravagant but technically uneven musicals, or making imaginary conversation with imaginary friends, or simple, devastating, classic brooding.  I feel that all this mental energy needs to be channeled into something more interesting and more productive.  [Okay, I admit this part doesn’t totally make sense, since I can’t write this at work, but the long story short is that my mind and my heart need work to do or they will eat themselves.  ]

On a more earnest, existential note, however, I am also creating this blog today in order to fight my deep anxiety about writing and otherwise asserting myself.  I want to take a more active role in the world, and this year I am going to do it by building and clarifying my ideas, and then kicking those ideas out of my head and onto the internet.  I am going use the net to sharpen my critical thinking skills, and not as an escape or a drug.   I am going to develop my obsessions, in the hope that they will add some shape and focus to my life.  Right now, I am interested in food, politics, art, nature, and history, so expect posts to cluster around those subjects.  Maybe.

And so, to anyone reading this, hello! and please bear with me while I figure out what’s going to happen around here.  Or skip ahead, maybe I’ll have it together by the time you arrive.

*The rumble was over, and I was tonight’s cash prize winner, by which I mean loser.  The Treasury Building loomed over us all, as Mamie stood over me with the broken bottle.  I was shooting off a smartass remark about Mamie’s penmanship, prior to being scarlet lettered with a six-inch ‘I Like Ike’ across my chest, when I heard three sets of footsteps, one with a little syncopation, coming over the cold, flat concrete.  It was Los Cuatro Cuchillas, aka the two Mrs. Wilsons and Bess Truman.  We don’t invite Grace Coolidge to these shindigs anymore, not after what she did to Pat Nixon.  Las Cuchillas are known all over the city to be hard as nails, afraid only of a poorly catered diplomatic reception, but even they had to turn away that night.  

Wish me luck.