As the title suggests, my most unambitious essays are found here on Medium, whenever I want on absolutely whatever I want. Inspired from Maggie Slepian’s “Unpublishable” substack, these essays will be a channel for me to write and share with more consistency and less expectation.
If writing is like cooking, I am a chef in culinary school. I’m learning with a bunch of other chefs about ingredients and techniques to make those ingredients come alive. We taste each other’s food and food from authors we admire, attempting to create Michelin star meals.
It is easy to take it seriously. I want to cook meals that look, taste, and feel right, that just feel good. Meals that I needed to eat at one point in time but didn’t have. And I want to cook them for people in real restaurants, to serve an appetite that is not my own. More than that, I want to like, get paid, dude.
And yet, I’m still experimenting. I’m still wondering about things like, “What would it be like to mix unsweetened applesauce with Texas Pete, apple cider vinegar, and whiskey?”
Deep down, I’m still a kid at the lunch table, mixing his chocolate milk with his partially frozen pizza, and egging my friend on to try it.
I wouldn’t make that for a restaurant. I wouldn’t make it to improve as a cook. But I would make it for fun, for a friend.
I miss this way of making art. Not that I’m here to ask you to eat green sherbet mixed with refried beans and strawberry milk — something just wretched to read — but a way of making art that comes, solely, out of curiosity.
Afterall, the essay, as every essayist will tell you, comes from the French word essayer, meaning “to try.”
I want to try to concoct some seriously messed up food, and try it with you.
