John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

I’m missing the days when I was missing home.¹

1. With Honor : This Is Our Revenge : Closets↩

Since one of the major search strings leading to my site this month has been the words “Karma Kafe complaints”, I would like to note right now that I do not have one single complaint about the Karma Kafe. It is, quite simply, my favorite restaurant in the world and I encourage everyone and anyone to go to eat there. My health and happiness is founded upon regularly consuming as much Chana Palak as possible.

Virtue consists less in how one handles the situations one is in than in the situations one knows to avoid getting into.

When a relationship is meant to be, love comes to fill the void that the departure of infatuation and the excitement of constantly newfound discoveries about the other person leaves behind.

But this sort of love’s arrival can hurt, because there is in it an absence of the intensity that was present earlier in the days of first infatuation. There are fewer sleepless nights. There are fewer moments of utter enthrallment over small details. One is willing to pass up on far fewer things for the other person. One regains much of one’s sense of self.

But there is a counterbalancing new sense of perpetuity to the relationship to accompany the loss of passion. One reaches a point where the world becomes incomprehensible without the other person. And this is the sort of love that truly makes life valuable, even though it is easily valued less than the feeling of infatuation.

You are not a real drummer until your playing sounds better than a drum machine’s; you are not a real drummer until your timing, groove and dynamics are consistently more musically appropriate than a machine’s performance could ever be.

Until you are a real drummer, a band is better off just using a drum machine than having you play.

Today, I am not sick. I woke up today at 6 AM and I have stayed awake since then as I wasn’t tired enough at that hour to go back to bed after having had a long sleep since 10 PM, even if one punctuated by frequently waking up in the middle of the night to relieve my bladder of the weight of the Gatorade and half-melted Häagen Dazs I’d been drinking. To be honest, waking up here on the East Coast of the United States at an hour when in Madrid I would still be hoping to go to sleep is beautiful.

But far more beautiful is feeling healthy. On Wednesday, I started to feel less sick for the first time in several weeks. Both my schedule being automatically recalibrated by the shift of timezone and the reintroduction of large quantities of curry, General Tso’s tofu and eggnog into my diet seem to have done the trick of getting me back to health. (As I suspected the changes might.)

And, on top of all that, my wisdom teeth were taken out yesterday: all four at once. Having them removed was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. My face is sore today and I’ll be focusing on soft foods for a few days, but there’s no real pain to speak of — and if you see the one tooth that had been infected and the cavity that was ruining it far faster than in my worst fears — all of which damage had been done almost entirely invisibly since the hole had been covered by the flap of gum into which the tooth had impacted –, you’d realize how large an improvement this bodes for my body.

So, I am happy. I feel meaningfully awake for the first time this year. I feel energized as I normally do and should always.

Onto my work, then. There’s still more eggnog is this world that needs a-drinking.

When we meet someone who clearly conceals their feelings and themselves, we can see them and their feelings all too easily.

The world is most beautiful after a long storm.

Mike Depinto: All these years we’ve been overlooking a great restaurant just a block from your house.
Manny Ferndandez: (Confused.) The bagel shop?
Mike Depinto: Ali Baba’s, dude.¹

1. Mike Depinto, Manny Ferndanez : A Conversation Recounted To Me : January 17th, 2005↩

One learns a great deal about a character by his reactions to art: one learns how much he gives himself over to things. And this is the major factor in how much he can then give.