As the title suggests, I will be publishing an unambitious essays here, on Medium, one a month on absolutely anything under the sun. Inspired from Maggie Slepian’s “Unpublishable” substack, these essays will be a channel for me to write and for you, potentially, to read, with less ambition, less seriousness, less formal restriction, less expectation.
To write in a way that feels, again, like play.
It’s fun to think of writing like cooking (but not like baking, not ever).
I am like a chef in culinary school. I’m learning with a bunch of other sick-ass chefs about ingredients and techniques to make those ingredients come alive together. We taste each other’s food, and food from authors we admire. What makes them work?
We are busy mixing, broiling, sifting, eeating, slow-cooking, sauteeing, smashing, killing, ripping, tearing.
In this culinary school, I am eating food cooked from other chefs we like, and each other (who we don’t like), then give feedback on the meals.
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.
This is the work. And the work, while it can be exciting and fun and boring and shitty and amazing and make you want to just punch a hole in the wall of your apartment kitchen, is still work. It’s serious. Or at the very least, it’s sincere. We’re out here in aprons and shit, starting fires, flame-broiling doves and exotic meats with spices from the furthest recesses of our inner gardens and pudding around in the Wyoming Winter obsessing about it all.
Even though I take it very seriously, I’m still wondering about things like, “What would it be like to mix unsweetened applesauce with Texas Pete, apple cider vinegar, and whiskey? What would it taste like?”
Deep down, I’m still a kid at the lunch table, mixing his chocolate fucking 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 (or an enemy). Or anyone who’s like, yeah, I’ll try this fucked up dish knowing full well that it might taste absolutely wretched, that it would never end up on a laminated menu.
I miss this way of making art. Not that I’m here to ask you to eat green sherbert mixed with refried beans and strawberry milk, but a way of making art that comes, solely, out of curiosity. A desire to find out, to try.
To essay is to try, from the French word essayer.
I want these essays to be the equivalent of school lunch concoctions. Projects of curiosity. No professional aspirations or serious ambitions attached.
I know I’m selling this really well.
But that’s kind of the point.
I don’t want to sell anything here. I don’t want to impress. I don’t want to be good.
I just want to make a meal with whatever’s been sitting in the freezer and rotting in the fridge, cut it up, throw it on the stove, and eat it with you.
