this is an onion meditation

To practice patience, I caramelize onions.

Caramelized onions are a delicacy well worth the wait. Not like standing outside a supposedly "amazing" brunch spot on a Saturday afternoon for two hours, only to be served soggy hash browns and half-assed rubbery eggs. Not like sitting on the SF muni for three times as long as you thought you would be and getting punched in the face and yelled at by some crazies before getting to your final destination. You see, learning patience is a work in progress.

(Don't get me wrong I do still have a soft spot for the SF muni, but I hate waiting in line for brunch.)

Luckily, those ambrosial, browned, and perfectly unctuous onions always taste as good as I remember.

The raw material you begin with, a round onion with crackly and peeling skin, keeps expectations low. An onion is a homely-looking thing, always a little dirty and rough. Very common. Used for soups and peasant stews. Sauteeing an onion is the beginning of a good stir-fry, but it's not an act that requires much thought or expertise. It's practically perfunctory.

On the other hand, caramelizing onions is a luxury, of both time and of the senses, a meditative act in the kitchen. By meditative, I mean it brings you into the consciousness of the onion, the slow gradations of its appearance and aroma as it makes contact with slow, relentless heat. Those slivers, little sunbathers basking in a shallow pan of oil. 

From the beginning, the onion awakens your senses. Begin slicing the onion, and do not turn your eyes away. Wear goggles, hold a lemon in your mouth, or confront the onion head-on, welcoming the sharp and turning odor that it diffuses into the air.

Scoop up the onion slices and drop into a heated pan of oil. Turn the heat down low.

At first contact, the onion jumps and sizzles. The hot oil pricks, a tingling surprise. The onion soaks up the oil, causing its flesh to loosen up. Soon its translucence will render softness. Then it begins to sweat, releasing water, the second round of onion tears. Its aroma is now the product of tears, rather than its cause. That familiar scent, the faint sweetness of onion sweat, cues you to turn on the kitchen fan.

You will be tempted to leave the onions momentarily and attend to some less important matters, distractions. Do as you must, but beware of the onion's fragility when it is left on the stovetop unattended.

You'll return to find dark edges on your onion slices, the fire's fray, perhaps darker than what is ideal, but continue on, gently nudging the onion slivers around the pan with your spatula, pushing them from one side to another. Let your spatula tread delicately, avoiding abrupt scraping. Shriveled slivers, previously unnoticed, stick to the side of the pan.

Let the day pass by, knowing you are invested in making your kitchen a hallowed place. Turn off the kitchen lights for a moment. It is okay to let the onions caramelize silently in dark. At least see what it feels like.

You'll know when your onion slivers have browned sufficiently. They will stick together, adhered by a brown syrupy glaze. This glaze is your reward. Savor it. You began with so much and you've reduced it, from light to dark, from raw and untamed, to soft and wilty and sweet. But don't be fooled by the mere handful of caramelized onions you now have. Caramelized onions are like caviar, to be doled out in small portions, to be known and proclaimed as special. In your mouth, the taste will confirm this as true.

You've been here awhile, and now it's time to move on. Open a window, drink some water. Let the caramelized onions cool, and enjoy the steady peace that the act of caramelizing onions has washed over your entire being. It may not last for long.

this is bread breadth breath

*On this Sunday afternoon, I am standing in my kitchen, which is collecting heat like a greenhouse on this unusually hot day in San Francisco. September is the beginning of an Indian summer. There are piles of books on the kitchen table, a dusty bin full of ski goggles and headlamps and other outdoor contraptions that now seem more nostalgic than utilitarian, and trails of breadcrumbs everywhere, the memento minutiae of yesterday's kitchen craftwork.

*Like most things in life, the work of cooking ends up having little permanence, but food is glaringly ephemeral because we confront its disintegration and disappearance everyday, biding time as food rots in our refrigerator or as it is passes through our mouths in mere seconds. We fight its transience by preserving, canning, and freezing. I fight its transience by photographing. And hoarding. And collecting. And writing it all down. I struggle to accept ephemera. I'm an archivist.

*I sweep away the breadcrumbs, even though I'm tempted to eat them.

*The stove is unusually crowded today. There's the cast iron skillet that's been sitting around for a week, in cleaning limbo (mostly clean, but not completely due to my compulsion to google "cast iron cleaning" every time I use and clean the skillet, just in case I'm doing something wrong) and the kettle that I never seem to take off the stove. Half of the stove is occupied by my laziness. On the other half: a pot of boiling salted water and a pan on low heat, filled with glistening slices of onion. The oven is heated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I crack open the window so that I can breathe better.

*"Breathe" is on my to-do list.

*The year has passed by breathlessly. A friend once told me, quite literally, you only inhale; you never seem to exhale. He was commenting on the way I breathe, or the way I don't. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to discover, for the umpteenth time, that how I approach my need for air and food is just about how I approach everything. Inhale everything I possibly can; forget to exhale because there's no time.

*"Remember to exhale," I tell myself.

*Breathing doesn't work like that. It doesn't run on reminders.

this is shitty writing

*I think about writing everyday. Yet at this very moment my greatest paralysis is thinking about writing, like how reading about productivity is my greatest impediment to productivity. The belief that underlies these distracting activities is that I don’t know how to write or how to be productive, that other people who have mastered the arts I lack somehow have the definitive answers to my problems.

*Increasingly I realize that the pieces of writing I most enjoy and admire (this tends to be memoirs, long-form journalism, opinionated and insightful blog entries) require both breadth and depth of either knowledge or experience. The problem with being twenty-two is that I lack both breadth and depth of both knowledge and experience. When I read other people’s writing, I am simultaneously fascinated and humbled. Desirous of the perfect expression and articulation, I make excuses to myself about not having anything to write about or not having anything of value to write about. Yet the end result of those excuses is nothing. I don’t even have shitty writing to show for it. So the cycle continues, of hungering for more of my own action, resenting myself for lack of action, and seeking relief in the words of others. In times of sadness, pain, and confusion, it’s as, if not more satisfying to find empathy (or miraculous synchronicity) in the words of others.

*I could have written this article myself. Ben Dolnick, we must be soulmates. Reading Paris Review interviews has always been my way of burrowing into a writer’s head while trying to adopt writerly habits, quirks, and skills that I hope will work miracles in my writing life. Again, another distraction from action. After reading an interview with Louise Erdrich, I was convinced that I had to physically tie myself down to a chair with scarves in order to quell my restlessness. I’ve considered taking up smoking many times not to construct a writerly image but to build up a rhythm in which writing sessions would be punctuated by smoking breaks. If this sounds illogical, it’s because it is. And smoking wouldn’t be a functional habit anyway, because I don’t want to smell like cigarettes nor do I want lung cancer. But I do want to write. That last statement has taken me far too long to admit.

*At work I am surrounded by very few writers, and by writers I mean people who hunger to write, not just people who can write competently. I am blessed to share an office with a man who is both an editor and a writer, whose understanding of style and grammar hails from the school of Strunk and White, and who urges me to read George Saunders when my outlook on life is particularly bleak (though he says Saunders will not necessarily make my outlook better). To have someone who can commiserate with the gnaw of self-expression or self-articulation or world-articulation helps me to believe I’m not totally insane for wanting to write but not writing, for only talking about writing and reading about writing but not actually writing. Now I’m writing about not writing but wanting to write, and I’m hoping that in doing so, I’m getting all of these shitty feelings out of me and all of this shitty writing out of me like a friend told me I would need to do before I can produce anything I am proud of. So here’s to days and days of shitty writing, the writing that must be done now and everyday until someday in the future. Bear with me in the meantime.