night after night after night,
and the days seem to keep getting even longer,
weeks past midsummer,
how can we stay alert, and upbeat,
in the face of restless wakeful wastelands of hard times and long nights?
some folks would recommend more exercise, or warm (soy)milk,
or meditation, or melatonin, or some other sort of soporific scene-
me,
well,
i'm a bit more practical.
bad dreams and tossably turned-up nights are indicators that your brain
needs to work on solutions to unresolved remnants of the days doings.
that's real.
so,
i let the nights stay rough, in the earnest hope that a solution
is more apparent to my intuitive mind,
and that my rational one will see it for what it is in the a.m..
then,
i just do what i can to temper the morning's exhaustion.
in this case,
i made muffins.
what?
look, neighbors-
i'm just doing what i do;
when the nights are showing me nothing but problems,
the days aren't illuminating any solutions,
and my skeptical, cynical, pessimistic sh!t-colored glasses are besmirched
with the slung mud and tense tempers of other folks,
i default back to the place where i can create and sustain myself:
y'know- the kitchen.
i'm making treats, i'm following a path, i'm doing it live, by eye,
and i'm reaping rewards for my efforts.
here's my most recent effort:
blueberry expertism is right here.
spelt flour makes 'em extra hearty,
tapioca powder keeps 'em springy,
blueberries and a little lemon zest have allll the best flavor,
and a gentle little smooch of cinnamon,super subtly takes the taste to eleven.
i used the following, roughly, to make it happen:
-
8 T (1stick) butterish
.5 tsp salt
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup plain soy yogurt
1 cup ap flour
1.5 cups spelt flour
1/3 cup tapioca starch
1 tsp ea. baking kapowder and soda
half a lemon zest
1 cup lemon-juiced soymilk
2 cups whole fresh blueberries
1.5 tsp vanilla
.5 tsp cinnamon
-
creamed butter and sugar, whisked yogurt, dry ingredients, bloobz, and so on,
in order, stirred into a big blarpity blop of blueberry batter,
and dropped into greased pans.
clearly,
i used squares AND miniature muffins,
because too much is the right amount,
and making MORE kinds of shapes can't be a bad thing.
before they got baked for 30 minutes at 350F,
i took some coconut oil, powdered sugar, vanilla,
medium unsweetened flake coconut, and a touch of spelt,
and made that exxxtra-sexxxy crackle coconut crumble streusel on top.
honestly, i eyeballed all of it, but it happily worked out,
and took the taste of those bouncy babies up and out
into untold expanses of previously uncharted hottness.
i mean it.
they're good. i ate waaaaay too many,
hoping for a vision quest that'd give me a new perspective on my objectives.
i got a happy bellyhole for all that eating up of treats,
but no answers.
*
three nights with little sleep,
and what meager winks i've gotten have been a hostile scene.
my Folk Life & Liberty Fortress is where i spend most of my time-
but,
outside of these walls,
it's all increasingly more foreign land.
i don't know if i belong here,
and i'm loathe to relinquish this house i've spent years working on retaining.
that's a tough one-
and the answer hasn't blown in yet,
despite nearly every damned day being windy.
where do i belong?
that's a question that is too often beset upon by a dominant determinant:
where do i want to be?
when they're not the same,
the shisms and schist fractures start to spiderweb out from the root,
and before long,
the answer to both becomes NOWHERE.
awwwwwwwww, man.
what now?
i guess it's time to look closer,
seeing forests for the trees,
and seeing each tree for what it is.
the details of both are interdependent,
and the big picture is somewhere in the places in between.
i've got things going on that aren't as easy as baking,
but i'm sure that hunkering down, squaring these bony shoulders,
and enduring more of all it will reveal some new path at the end of the road.
yikes.
it's all really happening,
and that's the whole point;
never quiet, never soft.....
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