In this sad age of convenience and mass-production, it's really refreshing to come across a real master craftsman. I tingle down to my bones when I stumble across one of these rare beasts, running a great cafe or bakery or restaurant. I once tingled in a bicycle repair shop, when the owner, who was grafting a new tire onto my bike, told me that he'd owned the shop and been in the same spot for 30 years. He was leathery of skin, and his hands were like six times the size of mine, rough, dirty under the fingernails, and I manfully resisted the urge to give him a teary-eyed hug before I left. I mean, you don't see stuff like that anymore, do you? People who love to do something, and work at it for decades, and are masters of that craft, and still keep doing it for the pleasure that is in it? I feel like a doddering old fool when I realize how sentimental these feelings are, but I am neither old nor doddering, though crazy might not be an imprecise adjective. It's not as though I can remember a golden age where mom and pop ran diners and drugstores and ye olde ice cream shoppes, being too young by about thirty years, but damned if I don't long for those days as if I did.
Even on that ridiculous Food Network show, 'Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives', where Guy Fieri drives across the country and eats himself into an early massive coronary, he always stumbles across people from all walks of life who, finding themselves to be dissatisfied accountants, bankers, lawyers, Hell's Angels, etc., upped and decided to spend their days slaving behind a greasy counter, serving up dishes their mothers used to make- and find themselves satisfied and fulfilled, and bringing communities together by virtue of their passionately perfected green chile pork stew, or whatever. I think it's really great, really inspirational. When I was a kid, I always aspired to a grandiose future, to the kind of high-profile achievements that would really make an impact on the world and grant me some small measure of immortality (not that I was deluded, pretentious or Goth enough to think of it in those terms), and while I can't say that the dream is totally dead, I can just as well imagine myself opening a bakery somewhere down the line, and serving up delicious cupcakes and interacting cheerfully with a small community of regulars, and being totally fulfilled. Who's to say I couldn't be a baker/novelist/master gardener/whatever?
Another part of this longing for things that I've never known is this nagging urge to pull a Thoreau and seclude myself in a far-off forest somewhere, and live by myself, off the land, with the land. The sterility of city life rubs up against my brain like chicken wire- certainly not the cleanliness of it, not here in L.A., buddy, but the separation from nature. From nature like I've never really known, having grown up in L.A. My shangri-la is a small town full of poets and writers and painters and bakers and master chefs, secluded somewhere in a vast tract of wilderness, hidden by thousand year old trees, totally self-sufficient. Which is not to say that I'm some rugged, l.l. bean-wearing nature girl, because I can just about shatter glass when a spider finds its way into my bathroom, but being so far removed from spiders and dirt and rivers and stuff really does take a psychological toll on a person, be he aware of it or no.
I dislike technological isolation- haha, she writes in her blog, alone, at one in the morning- and I dislike the imposed sterility of relationships carried out over the internet, the phone, occasionally the postal service. I'll take the phone over instant messenger any time, but phone talk doesn't begin to compare to 2-in-the-morning-electric-blanket-on-the-couch-in-the-yard talk, not by half. I'm a little afraid of people who smell not at all like people but instead like perfume inserts in glossy magazines. On a semi-related note, I had short ribs for breakfast this morning, and it was glorious, and I felt down to my cell nuclei how closely related I, in my humanity, am to a tibetan rat terrier, which creature also loves to and cannot help but occasionally gnaw a juicy bone.
When I think of bones, I also think of dancing, and of fire, and of chocolate, which makes me think of blood, and black dirt, and sex, which makes me think of oranges, and frangipani, and salt-encrusted pebbles on a black shore. None of which makes less valuable the soapy smell of a freshly washed someone and the dingy warmth of an aparment kitchen on a cold night by a tame shoreline, or the sanctity of chaste kisses and old charlie brown holiday specials. All of which is to say what? That people should be able to spend time alone, and spend time together, and spend time in nature, and that everyone should find one thing to be devoted to, even if it's just cupcakes or bike tires or plain old nostalgic ramblings, and that these are traditions very much worth preserving. In my ever so humble opinion, that is.
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